The stealth cruiser seems designed to avoid combat, but the stars without ships tend to be so devoid of resources that you'll never be able to beat the end boss if you do so (and I could never afford enough fuel). It also sucks when you're trying for the make it to sector 8 without going through an environmental hazard achievement, but the map layout makes it literally impossible to do so. After reading this thread, it seems like I'm really bad at the game. I did make it to the boss on Easy on my first try and beat him on my second try, but after that it's been kind of brutal. 2 or 3 totally failed run with the stealth cruiser, one decent run where I made it to Sector 7 or so, 2 decent runs in the federation cruiser that ended before the boss (the preceding all on easy), and a fairly short normal run in the engineering cruiser. It's a fun little game, but it might be a bit random for my tastes.
This game got gifted to me yesterday and I've already dumped 10 hours into it. Good god how did something with such terrible graphics (seriously, they couldn't make those backgrounds just a little more... consistent?) grab a hold of my balls for so long. *loads up FTL*
Sorry, I just can't agree with your thoughts on the graphics - I find them utterly charming. Oh - and if you happen to come across a crewman named 'Schultze' take good care of him - (it's me) ;)
I'm with Pogo on this one. FTLs graphics are completely lacking in personality. Its still my Game of the Year though, which says something about how much I enjoy the gameplay.
Errr, counterpoint... they're not even scalable vectors, they're like bitmap images from Paint, which is weird since the resolution of the game seems to indicate that the devs pretty much ready to port to iPad. The space backgrounds are actually upscaled and you can see the graininess in them. So "charm" is exactly what it's lacking, they're a pretty sloppy afterthought compared to the ships which are just very dull and generic. It doesn't take away from the game, but it also adds nothing. I do like the text, though, very easy to read all the tooltips and UI elements.
I got this over Christmas and I'm enjoying it (sort of), but even on easy I can't win. Addictive, neat design, great randomness, fun gameplay. Except... The problem isn't getting to the end, the problem is the final boss (and getting to him). I get into the final sector and I end up on the far right-hand side of the map. The boss winds up on the far left-hand. If I wait for him, I'm beseiged by rebel ships before he ever gets there to the point that I'm already half dead. My supposed bases are either already taken or don't exist at all (this has happened twice - no repair bases, no shops). If I go to the boss I have the same problem - to get to him I have to fight through system after system of overpowered rebel ships that severely weaken me before I ever get to the boss. I'm kinda frustrated at this stage to tell you the truth. I've gotten 10 hours out of it so it's not a total waste, but my desire to try again is getting pretty dampened by the absurdity of the last system. Yeah, I know you're supposed to die in roguelike games, but I don't like "auto-lose" scenarios and that's what I'm feeling like I encounter in the last stage.
And this is why I save-scummed the final sector. Yeah, it might be cheating, but it was a darn sight more fun than the alternative.
The rebel ships at the end are kinda balanced to be destroyed by your ship at that point. If you can't get through their 3 shields with regularity and take them down without sustaining much damage, then you're kind of screwed against the big ship. I think there should be more repair points. On the other hand, fighting the final ship is more about knowing the tactics to use and having the right equipment than being repaired. I can't imagine getting through the last sector without a 5-shot AND a 3-shot laser, or two 3-shot lasers (burst II). Definitely read through the last couple pages of this thread to get a sense of what it takes to win. And sometimes you'll just get shit out of luck in terms of getting the effective equipment needed to do it. The first time I tried to take on the final boss I still had 2 single-shot lasers and some shitty missiles with no cloak, which meant I was screwed long before I ever got to him.
I got this a week ago and got totally sucked in. It's fantastic. Speaking as someone that's beaten the flagship a handful of times, here's some tips: Burst Laser II and Ion Blast II are the best weapons per power in the game Some kind of bomb/missile to take out shield generation Get good at taking out enemies without destroying the ship (more scrap, more potential loot/crew) A teleporter and decent boarding party to immediately take out the triple missile launcher in all 3 phases and to help with boarding drones in phase 2 Cloak is REALLY handy to dodge the first triple missile salvo (which should never get a second salvo) and to dodge during the drone storms in phase 2 and laser storms in phase 3 ("Power surge!") Always leave someone alive on their ship and ignore their o2, you do NOT want to fight the auto-repairing AI If you can swing a Defense Drone II, great, but the endgame is all about power management, and it costs 4 so manage wisely You can take out the flagship without repairing on Easy. Trying to talk myself into Normal, but even Easy is surprisingly brutal sometimes.
fwiw I agree; I've been playing this on and off for several months and while it's fun; the fact that the final boss almost requires certain builds which, in turn, depend on drop / vendor luck really turns into a giant minus against it. That's not to say the game is a net minus! It's still fucking fantastic; just that it's this whole huge pile of awesome with this giant blotch of crap at the end.
The final boss can be beaten in all sorts of ways. Any significant bomb will do for offense, as will lots of bursts, as will burst/ion + beams, (fire beam is super satisfying) and if you're using missiles, some way to disable the drone control for phase two. You also really want a defense drone for phase two, to deal with boarding, if possible. It's mostly about taking weapon upgrade opportunities when they arise, since there are a lot of stores. Try to carry 100 money with you whenever possible. The auto-repair isn't that bad, I find, particularly since you can drop your people into the ship to keep their systems down. I've never had a problem with the non-boss rebels in Last Stand, because by then I have enough burst to drop their weapons systems fast. Such an awesome game :-)
It's a great game, but I'm going to go ahead and strenuously disagree with you if you don't think there's a huge gap between what's appealing about the core gameplay of 95% of the experience and the flexibility it allows and what the final boss demands. In a game with ironman as its default setting, that kind of difficulty cliff is just bad design relative to the whole. I would never have beaten it the one time I did without online help and deliberately structuring a playthrough around the boss I knew was coming, and ultimately I ended up just writing off the final fight in subsequent attempts because that shit was stressing me out compared to how much I was enjoying the main game on normal up to that point. Even a simple Taipan-like "eventually the odds become insurmountable" curve would have been preferable to the half-assed solution the game ended up with.
I agree that the boss (in particular the drones fight) is significantly harder than the rest of the fights. My sense of how games go for me is that I win over half the time that I get to Last Stand, so I guess it's a matter of degree, I certainly don't think it's insurmountable. Giving the boss two points more shields than anything else in the game does mean you have to build specifically to it, which does reduce your flexibility, and having to fight it three times is kinda lame in that "FINAL FORM" anime way, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad design. Getting blown up by the flagship is a perfectly valid way for the story to end, and I don't mind when it happens.
I think you're kind of grasping at Burst Lasers here, Mike, because it's entirely possible to have a build that kicks all sorts of ass until the Flagship renders it HAW HAW HAW! The game doesn't train you for the boss fight, it doesn't build to the boss fight, the boss fight is a sort of an extradimensional fuck you. I love FTL, but the Flagship fight sucks compared to the the way the rest of the game flows.
What are you talking about? The boss has 4 shields. You can encounter enemies with 4 shields in sector 7, though it's unusual, and it's pretty usual to have encountered a bunch of 3-point shielded enemies at that point. Sometimes the rebels in the last stand have 3 points and sometimes they have 4.
*sigh* Last game - 6 sectors, zero weapons for sale. Not one goddamn weapon for sale or found in 6 fucking sectors. And only one shop with any people to hire. I got 12 hours out of it for $5, but I do believe that's it. That's just stupid. Most overrated game of the year IMO.
Blackadar, it's a roguealike. That means sometimes you'll get easy paths, and sometimes you'll get mercilessly hard ones. The solution isn't to quit playing, it's to try a different path. That's like quitting playing ADOM because you got bad starting stats one time. That's literally the very nature of the game!
Roguealike veterans have no tears left. All the moisture in our bodies has condensed into a single salt crystal. It has a million facets, and is only released upon our deaths.
I think what I love most about this game is that I'm so hilariously bad at it but still want to play more every time I die. In my last game tonight I found myself in a situation where I thought I could fairly easily get the achievement for repairing the Kestral to full with only one hull left. I was already pretty damaged and found a sector with an asteroid field and a store one jump away from it. So I killed the pirate in the asteroid field and dropped my shields. My ship gets down to one health and for reasons that completely escape me instead of jumping to the store I decided to put my shields back up first. As I'm clicking to put the power back to shields (unpaused of course) an asteroid flies in and blows me up. It was so terrible all I could do was laugh at my ineptitude.
Hahaha, oh, god, that's awful, 42. I think we all have similar stories of screwing ourselves over by a bad call or missing the obvious, though.
Man, I had 3 weapon pre-igniters show up in my last game (playing the Zoltan Adjudicator). 2 for sale in stores, and I actually got one in the last sector for defeating a ship (already being full on augmentations, I couldn't take it. And anyway, there was nothing I could do with it if I could). Pre-igniters own. Finished with the trusty Halberd, 2x Mk II blasters, and an Ion Blast. I was pretty vicious.
Pre-igniters are an amazing value, think of how many points of hull damage you won't have to repair throughout the game. On the other hand, your guys barely get trained in their stations because of how quickly battles are over. My Weapons and Shields guys were barely in level 2 by the end of the (easy) game I had won with a pre-igniter.
Yep, that can be an issue. I think there's enough combat that it probably won't happen, especially if you are using a lot of weapons (I was using 3 most of the game; 5 "shots" a combat - when conserving on ammo - really does add up). The shield guy always suffers the worst, because his skill goes up the slowest (and having the Zoltan shield doesn't help, I think my guy was in the low to mid level 1s on his shield skill).
You can always artificially raise your shield skill in a combat by turning it off and on, over and over and over again. Each time the shield is toggled, he should get some skill. Risky, obviously, but...
You can boost it by fighting all-beam guys who have no chance of penetrating your shield and letting them plink away. Tedious, but it works.
Surprisingly (at least, based on when I was only 10-15 hours of playtime), I found that level 2 shields isn't nearly as useful as I thought it would be. Overwhelming firepower really carries the day. The boss fight turns on your ability to mitigate/cripple his heaviest attacks, which you can do in a variety of ways (taking out the launcher with boarders, a defense drone to mitigate the missile attacks he does get off and also the boarder drones, cloaking to dodge the drone all out attack/missile volleys/the plasma volleys). Shielding helps, but I think the cooldowns are long enough that as long as you have 1 level, 3 points, and plenty of dodge you're probably set. I usually only get there with 1 level of shield skill.
Engines > shields. Shielding seems great at first because it can completely shut down some enemies' ability to damage you, but it becomes increasingly useless as you progress. You need some shields as beam weapon defense, but keeping the shield station staffed is generally my last priority.
But did you know that you can open an airlock to put out fires? Did you know that the Rockmen B ship has no airlocks, so you can't open an airlock to put out fires? If fires blow your components before your crew can stamp them out, it sucks to be you? Did you know that there are 206 bones in the human body?
I just got to the final sector for the first time, after playing through six times. On easy. And I still didn't make it to the flagship. I don't think I'm very good at this game.
I think that was how everybody started out. It took me a few tries before I managed to kill the flagship, and that was mainly because I had an Engi ship and an accidentally superb loadout.
I made it to the flagship on Normal for the first time, using a Kestrel. I put it down to making better use of my boarders than on previous runs, the extra scrap really made a difference. Naturally I, through careless use of autofire, lose my level two rockman/mantis boarding party in sector 7, realising what I had done the split-second before my burst laser hit the enemy vessel and killed everyone onboard. Oh, and I didn't find one single weapon for sale the entire run, so I had nothing but basic missiles that could pop the flagship's shields. When they ran out I died.
Winning on Normal for the first time is a great feeling. You're flying around scrounging pennies to pay for fuel and repairs. You just have to hope you hit the right shops at the right times, or get the right item drops. My first Normal win, again, was in a standard Engi ship. I was fortunate to get good weapons and items items through events so I didn't have to buy them. Free items on Normal are way more important than on Easy. I would even say they are critical to victory.
Does everyone accidentally kill their boarding parties in a variety of ways before finally getting it (sending them onto a drone, forgetting you have an artillery beam, leaving them too long and having your teleporter getting blown up, etc.)? Do you eventually manage to stop killing them? I'll still get careless and let them die every now and then.
