>Decide to play some FTL again
>Start run as Rock Cruiser A since I got it via the random ship button
>First jump has me fight against an automated ship, lose 15 hull points against it because it dodges 6 missiles in a row, blows my shields, weapons, and piloting
>Down to 17 missiles now
>Literally no shop in the first two sectors carries weapons except for one, from which I pick up a heavy laser out of desperation
>Sector 3 has the Vulcan from a reward, breathe a sigh of relief since at least now I have a chance to kill things if I can live long enough
>Two jumps later wind up exploding against another automated ship which hits my guns with a missile repeatedly until I'm dead

Fun game

I hate how this game just fucks you in the ass and ruins your runs with bullshit but I love the soundtrack and overall atmosphere

Mantis B is the best ship in the game by a mile, you don't really need anything other than what you start with to win. Just dump Mantises on enemy ships and kill everything before they can even fire a shot off.

SKILL ISSUE

Watching people beat this game without pausing made me realize that I'm dogshit at the game.
And that's okay.

>>714748664 (OP)
Damn you suck. I have a 50% win rate on hard, around 90% on normal.

>>714749589
Depends on the ship on hard, but for some I have around a 90% win rate (Kestrel A/B, Engi B) and some I have like a 20% win rate (Stealth B, Fed C). On normal though I basically never lose, the enemy ships you encounter are just far easier.

The final boss is way way way way too difficult. It completely betrays the entire games skill expression and positive reinforcement. It forces you to turn every single ship into the same homogeneous do it all build with almost no exceptions. It's just poorly designed.

>>714751546
The only problem I have with the final boss is like you said, all ship design converges on a few single points. You have to be able to deal enough damage to blow through the ship in phase 1 despite the flagship's cloaking, you have to be able to bypass the defense drone in phase 2, and you have to have fairly high DPS to kill the ship in phase 3 before it saturates your defenses with sustained laser fire or regenerates its barrier.

You have a few options for all of this, but there's some that really stand out. A 1 point cloaking system lets you dodge a lot of attacks, be it the missile attacks in all phases or the overcharge in phase 2 and 3. Strong boarding support lets you kill the entire crew and because AI ships can't repair systems that have a breach or fire in them, you can kill all the crew in phase 1 and then just teleport a breach bomb to a system to permanently disable it for the rest of the fight. Hacking is just as strong against the flagship as most other ships if you can get past the defense drone in phase 2. So pretty much all "clever" methods for ship killing like asphyxiating the crew, setting the enemy ship on fire, low ion stacking, all of it isn't very useful against the flagship.

I think you could make the flagship have randomized attributes in all three phases (So perhaps Phase 1 could be a strong cloak, level 4 or 5 hacking, or maybe an overcharge that mind controls multiple crew members at once) but then instead of being able to prepare to kill the ship, you just hope whatever build you had this run will have the tools to do the job. I'd say if the game had an alternate win condition or two, it'd be really stellar--you could try and take on the flagship with a very strong combat ship or maybe travel to a distant sector to call reinforcements, or maybe active a superweapon that would beat the rebels into submission.

>>714753720
i think flagship should be random but reasonably beatable with any build that isnt outright poor

>>714748664 (OP)
>vulcan in sector 3
Classic trap. Needs too long against normal ships and should probably only be activated early if they can't hurt you anyways, but considering how much power it needs, you were probably missing shields and engine upgrades.

>>714751445
>not even close

>>714754745
I got it for free from a kill not from a shop. There was literally only a single shop with an anti-bio beam, heavy laser, and heal burst for sale out of the five I visited, so I wound up with level 3 shield layers and 4 power in engines and the Vulcan was the best option after I ran low on missiles.

I think it probably could've worked fine if I had picked up a drone system with a defense drone, but there was no way I could know that I wouldn't be buying guns from a shop and could splurge for a drone system early on. L3 shields+Defense Drone is pretty hard to crack until later sectors.

>>714755812
3 shields at sector 3 is actually pretty damn good. The only other option to survive the missile auto ship was probably to jump away from the fight then. I always forget that you can just bail from clearly losing battles as long as your engines and piloting stay up.
In general trying to make an early vulance work did probably more damage to my runs than it did good.

>>714756112
Come to think of it, I probably could've just escaped. I didn't think I'd continually take Artemis missiles to the weapons bay before the Vulcan charged, but after having it interrupted twice I should've bailed.

With Rock A, I wind up going with a teleporter a lot because using the starting Artemis with it is fairly reliable. Dunk the medbay if they have one, weapons if they don't, then start teleporting rockmen into the broken room. I don't really like the teleporter though because it's slow and I take a little damage from most missile ships before I manage to kill everyone on board.

>>714748664 (OP)
>First jump has me fight against an automated ship, lose 15 hull points against it because it dodges 6 missiles in a row, blows my shields, weapons, and piloting

You're supposed to restart at this point.

>>714756562
If you like boarding or even just the idea of it, check out Void War, since it's makes boarding more interesting in my opinion.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2853590/Void_War/
It's one of the only FTL clones I've played that's actually pretty fun, if you're not opposed to the very obvious 40k inspiration. It's pricey, but devs made clear that they're going to have some post launch support, which they already started delivering on.

Personally I also liked the multiverse mod for FTL and I can easily forgive inconsistent writing and sometimes questionable balance for how much cool stuff it adds.

>>714757030
I thought about picking up Void War since I've played FTL to death since release (I have roughly 1600 hours in it), but I was thinking about playing some of the mods as well. I know there was captain's edition and multiverse, but are there any other mods?

>>714755812
Defense drones never work the way you want them to

>>714757291
Tell me about it
>Get out of a hard fight with about 8 hull
>Land on a shop, have a choice between a drone subsystem with defense drone or repairs and an Ion II
>Decide to get the defense drone since my shields are already pretty high and that should prevent most damage anyway
>Next jump, fight a Rock Fighter, it fires a breach missile at me
>Defense drone just looks at it and watches as it strikes my drone bay
>Next missile comes and finishes me off

I don't know what the fuck is up with defense drone AI, but it seems like the more critical it is they intercept a missile, the less likely they are to do it.

>Flak I is absurdly strong, overpowered even
>"Flak II must be REALLY good then!"
>it's shit
Dang

>>714757240
There probably are, but those are the only two I've played. Played captain's edition ages ago and it was mostly a FTL+, while multiverse feels like an overhaul expansion.
Base FTL will always be great and after putting a lot of time into it, I really liked having things shaken up a lot, but some anons fucking despise it. You can't deny that a lot of effort was put into it, but how you respond and if it resonates with you is going to depend.

>>714757505
Turns out majority of the ships have very big blind spots for D-drones. What's that site by one guy with all the FTL ship info? You probably should look up that site before using D-drones, but it's a hassle so I usually skip them now.

>>714748664 (OP)
I agree the game feels like it's just up to RNG, whether or not you find a good weapon, if your missiles miss, if their weapons happen to target vital systems, etc.
... but there's a guy who has won 124 games in Hardmode in a row (97.2% winrate over 500 games), who plays by cycling through every single ship loadout (even the "bad" ones).

So maybe we're all just shit and playing the game wrong.

>>714758040
Captain's Edition is pretty gimmicky, bordering on going full retard - lots of stuff added good and bad, like it's hideously unbalanced meaning you get wild swings from you finding some god tier item that instawins to you getting shit stomped by something you've never seen before out of nowhere

Multiverse had a lot more work put into it, it's a pretty genuinely fun alternative last time I played it

>>714749094
>And then you get into automated ship.

>>714757886
Flak II is pretty lackluster, but it does have one major advantage of being a weapon that can singlehandedly go through any amount of shields to damage something underneath. It's not likely to do it against high shield, high evasion ships or small ships like automated ones, but against most targets it will reliably saturate shields and evasion and eventually bring things down. Plus it pairs really well with a heavy laser or two. At three power, it's not absurdly overcosted for seven effective shots.

>>714758145
Unironically, think of it like playing cards. There's randomness, but you can learn all the games tics to minimize it and push things towards optimal outcomes

>>714758609
From what I gathered, teleporting is this game's metafag strategy. I think he uses that most games.
Boarding is difficult to get into (for me anyway), but can be broken I guess. Enemies are no longer able to repair or operate rooms, and most encounters end in wins by crew death (for extra scrap rewards).

>>714758870
Even with boarding you need back up plans for automated ships

...how many consecutive no-pause Hard runs did that dude win?

>>714759147
Yeah that was a problem for me when starting off with boarding ships. Automated (zero oxygen) ships are a real cunt to deal with until you upgrade teleporters

>>714759434
124

>>714758870
The thing with boarding is it's reliable for most ships. You can make it work early with decent enough firepower to wound enemy crewmates and sending over humans or better. To start boarding, you only need to find a shop selling a teleporter, sold in at worst 60% of shops. You get extra scrap for killing crew on average, along with a higher chance of getting weapons or additional crewmen.

I don't think boarding is all that great compared to a ship with good weapons, but you need multiple good weapons to make a gunship work best while you just need the crew teleporter and some crew for boarding to work. For ships with terrible weapons like most rock ships, the federation cruisers, slugs, etc you can usually count on boarding being at least a somewhat viable strategy.

>>714759147
You do have to have a way to deal a point of damage to enemy ships, but with boarding level 2 you can teleport crew onto an airless ship and destroy things and bring them back before they die. You just can't finish off the ship with them. In some ways, it's kind of reliable because two humans will do two damage to a system within the 15 seconds they have. If it's early and the ship only has a little power in weapons, you can usually disable one of them before they fire, and unlike lasers you don't have any shields to cut through.

>>714748664 (OP)
I want to make a FTL clone, but I need to know what part of the game makes your brain tick.
Tell me about your most memorable memory of FTL.

>>714759958
idk if I actually want FTL clones. Like, I'd probably play overhaul mods if want more FTL.

>>714759958
FTL has a lot of magic going for it.

>Each playthrough is about an hour or so at most, so you don't have to have a huge commitment over several days to finish.
>Starting ships have a lot of variety and most avoid being egregiously better than others with a few exceptions; there's reasons to select every ship on the list to have fun with.
>No two playthroughs are the same. The equipment you find on each run is different and it affects how you play. Contrasted to Into the Breach where your starting equipment rarely changes radically since it's mostly self-sufficient with upgrades.
>Crew are fragile if you throw them at problems but easy to preserve if you're willing to sacrifice ship integrity. You pretty much never run in to a scenario where the enemy can kill a crewmen with no counterplay in combat, and learning which events can potentially lose you crew avoids problems there too. This lets you get attached to crewmen every run and makes you think how to preserve them.
>Events have multiple outcomes and how you approach them is decided by what equipment you have and what you want from them, along with how much risk you wish to take.

It's got this sort of magic where you rarely feel completely helpless when you lose and you can play the game in several ways.

>>714761728
>Each playthrough is about an hour or so at most
haha...yeah