FTL release in two days!
Scythe
Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 46NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation, Reinforced - Silver
Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 46NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation, Reinforced - Silver
<div class="IPBDescription">Spaceship roguelike</div>So the sweet-looking <a href="http://www.ftlgame.com/" target="_blank">FTL</a> is coming out in a few days. You play as the captain of a spaceship fleeing an encroaching galactic threat. You jump into starsystems with no information on what you'll find there, and do battle with foes whilst dealing with environmental dangers. You command your dudes around your ship, repairing systems, venting oxygen to put out fires, teleporting boarding parties to the enemy ship, all that star trekky stuff. Different races are better at different things. One race gives your ship extra energy by being onboard due to being made of pure energy, or something. It's all very exciting.
Trailer here: <a href="http://vimeo.com/47066972" target="_blank">http://vimeo.com/47066972</a>
It's $10, on steam, GOG or from their website. The latter also gets you a steam key.
--Scythe--
Trailer here: <a href="http://vimeo.com/47066972" target="_blank">http://vimeo.com/47066972</a>
It's $10, on steam, GOG or from their website. The latter also gets you a steam key.
--Scythe--
Comments
It was a good time.
(It's a roguelike-like)
There are lots of videos of people playing for anyone who has been living in a cave long enough to have not heard about FTL. I like Idle Thumbs so I will <a href="http://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/b/328263672" target="_blank">link to their video</a>.
--Scythe--
--Scythe--<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Score! Getting it now
In the last two hours of gameplay I have encountered plot moments from half a dozen episodes of Star Trek. I'm following a "WWJLPD" philiosophy; helping anyone who asks and always making the honourable decision. However one time I had to sacrifice a crew member to save the ship, :(
For the asking price of $10 ($9 now) this game is absolutely worth the money if you have a passing interest in spaceshippery. The combat is a carefully calculated balancing act. You've gotta weigh up your power distribution amongst your subsystems (If I cut life support, I can bring that extra beam cannon online!), with which subsystems your enemy has online (Ohgod, they're sending more mantis men aboard! Gotta kill that teleporter), with your budget (I can't afford to buy any more missiles).
Back to it!
--Scythe--
As long as he was wearing a red shirt you are still in prime Star Trek country.
I think I'm going to put it on easy mode so I can unlock some other ships and actually get somewhere in this game.
I'm not sure whether I should keep playing with this ship, or try to unlock the Human ship variant. :f
--Scythe--
The most reliable way of losing crewmembers is when boarding enemy ships. The enemy ship could FTL away, taking your boarding party with it, or it could blow up due to too much fire damage or if you keep shooting it and then of course your boarding party might take too much damage in a fight and die. It's incredibly risky, but the rewards *are* better than just blowing a ship up, but I haven't been able to figure out exactly how much better.
-Shields are your A-#1 best friend. Max them ASAP, at least tier 3 by early in the third zone, even at the expense of leaving damage on your hull. Tier 4 before zone 6. And a shield recharge booster if you find/can possibly buy one.
-If you start with a 3-shot pulse laser, target the enemy weapons and leave it locked there. You should be (mostly) fine through the third zone.
-<span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'>The Osprey is OP if you max the special cannon, shields, engines and get a defense drone. Even more-so with a Breacher Bomb II to quick-kill enemy shields. I did the first boss ship phase on Normal taking ZERO hull damage, prioritizing the missile system with my breacher.</span>
What's excellent is the music, great 8-bit soundtrack. The sound effects are good - appropriate without being annoying. The combat mechanics are surprisingly deep, I kept finding ways to improve my strategies after many hours. It is somewhat let down by the lack of variety of random events, especially since they're 99% text driven. After a couple of hours you will have tried most options on most events, assuming you didn't bypass that whole step by reading the FTL wiki. The problem is that you find which options have the best yield and then the decision making becomes algorithmic at worst and situational at best (eg: if you know a certain option risks a crew member for a better yield, you will only do that if you have crew to spare).
It has a fair amount of replayability *if* you can manage to unlock the extra ship types/variants. Again, a lot of that is very luck based which boils down to a function of how much time you're prepared to sink in to it. I would recommend to my past-self to just switch to easy difficulty for the purposes of unlocking stuff.
I found the following two points particularly frustrating
<span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'><ul><li>You must get access to shield busting weapons, either missile based or a sufficient number of multi-shot lasers. If you don't happen to get those weapons through events or from shops - you lose. The longer it takes, the more scrap you'll spend on repairs.</li><li>To beat the end boss it seems you need to have either repair drones or the scrap repair augmentation because after the first battle the boss seems to make a bee line for the home base, so you can't divert to a shop or repair base to do repairs.</li></ul></span>
Here are a couple of tips...
<ul><li>The first 50 scrap goes towards shields, the next 20 towards energy. Shields 2 is particularly important because it blocks out almost all beam weapons. This saves you loads of scrap which would otherwise go on repairs. I'll usually finish the game on shields 3.</li><li>On the sector map, plan out your route a bit. You want to farm as many points as possible without revisiting places you've already been to. Check to see if you're not being boxed in by the rebel fleet - sometimes the exit node can only be reached from a chain of nodes starting much further on the left than you're used to.</li><li>Divert power from the med bay to any other system unless it's in use. This is an obvious tip but something you can take advantage of right at the start of the game. Of course, it also extends to other non-vital systems, like cloak, drone, teleporter...</li><li>Divert power from life support to engines the moment an enemy shoots and switch back after the shots have passed.</li><li>Often you can deactivate defensive drones to free up power without losing the drone itself. It only uses another drone scrap if the previous drone drifted away too far and defensive drones hardly drift away at all.</li><li>Once you've got shields 2, missiles are your Achilles heel for most of the game. Defensive drones are the only surefire countermeasure. Defensive drone I is way better than II because it uses half as much power and will only shoot missiles. IIs shoot at laser blasts which sounds awesome but the AI seems very clever about smuggling missiles in under laser cover. The laser blasts would normally just be soaked up by your shields anyway, so the missile remains the biggest problem.</li><li>You can really squeeze a lot out of evasion by leveling up your pilot and engine room guy. Given that they earn experience for each successful dodge, you can only level them up quickly by investing in engines and making sure they're powered. I try to keep my engines level with shield, but always go for shield upgrades first. 4 points in to engine with a level 2 pilot and level 2 engine room guy will net you 45% dodge. That's about where i finish most games.</li><li>Sometimes its worth upgrading system capability because it provides some redundancy. An unpowered, unused system slot means you can withstand system damage with no operational impact. Handy for light damage, fires & boarding parties. That's one reason I'll sometimes spend 80 on the second-last shield upgrade, as opposed to ~240 for both plus power. Keep this in mind if you change the order of your weapons - the ones you're most prepared to have go offline should be placed further to the right. Long charge time might be an important factor, but there's no point having only a Glaive laser charging if you can't punch through the shields some other way...</li><li>Don't jump to a shop unless you need repairs or you have scrap to spend! Have in mind what you want to buy before you go and don't buy things if you can better spend the scrap on unlocking power, shields etc. Any time spent going to shops is a turn spent not getting income, and you might get what you need from an event anyway. Eg: Don't buy a crew transporter because "it'll be useful one day!". You wouldn't buy it unless a) you have ample crew and b) it's an integral part of your strategy (you'd probably be leveraging bombs for that). You need to spend carefully to survive the mid game, and the better you do that, the more scrap you'll have saved for unlocks.</li><li>For targeting, it's usually weapons or shield system. In priority order: shields if I'm barely able to overcome their shields, weapons if I'm concerned about the damage they can do or shields again if I'm completely safe from damage (just to speed up combat).</li><li>Synchronise firing! If you're having trouble breaking through enemy shields, turn off autofire. Wait for your guns to charge up and then unleash a staggered, rapid volley. "Waste" crappy damage shots on shield, save your beams and heavy lasers for moments after those shields go down. Missiles and bombs are great shield busters but you can run out of ammo, or be thwarted by enemy defensive drones, so try not to become completely reliant on them.</li><li>Capitalise on your crew's strengths and minimise their weaknesses. Use rockmen to put out fires, station them somewhere central so they don't have to walk far. Put Zoltans in shield or weapon rooms, somewhere that always needs power. Don't use Engi as pilots, gunners, shield or engine operators since you'll want them to run about repairing stuff. Similarly with Mantis, you'll want them to intercept boarding parties.</li><li>When crew members are fighting, don't wait until the last minute to retreat them to the med-bay - a stray shot might land in their compartment which could easily kill them.</li><li>Force invaders to fight you in the medbay by opening airlocks. Make that decision early though because it takes time to depressurise and the boarding parties will attack systems as long as they're not losing health form a lack of oxygen.</li><li>When you start playing with depressurising compartments, keep a close eye on the status of your medbay, life support and door control. Always try and keep as many compartments pressurised as possible. Pressurised compartments can be opened up to feed atmosphere in to depressurised compartments.</li></ul>
I like space, because space looks awesome and has tons of potential with things to see and do, and has lots of creative wiggle-room for sweet events and such. One of my favorite games is Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, because it involves ships in ######' environments maneuvering in 3D space, trading blows. Homeworld 2 might be my alltime favorite space game, thought it was vaguely a 2D game (the ships would - without mods - always align themselves on a 2D plane and most of the missions / maps were on this plane as well - though it wasn't hard-locked to it). The point of fighting in spaceships is because it's 3D naval combat.
Wake me when someone releases <i>that</i> game. Then we can actually call it a space combat game.