(October 8th, 2014, 13:30)Gustaran Wrote: I agree. It's obviously a design decision, but when you have to depower your oxygen system for 10 seconds to get that one extra power bar, it is a bit too much for me. I am also not a great fan of having to use the "pause" function every two seconds, I feel it takes away from the flow of the game. That is down to personal taste of course, but I sometimes wonder if the game would be even better with less micromanagement to allow for a more "real time" combat system
These comments are all about the original game, not specifically the expansion. That power micromanagement is entirely intended, of course. It's meant to replicate that Star Trek feel of desperately rerouting power around the ship while under fire.
I'm pointing out that much of the expansion content increases micromanagement to no real strategic payoff. It's throwing stuff in for the sake of throwing stuff in. I can add the Cloning Bay to that list of complaints now that I've played a game with one. I see where the desire came from: the game had too little crew death if played well, so cloning reintroduces death as a real occurrence. Except you have to micromanage the bay and crew and power even more than with a plain old medbay. And it gives rise to one rather dumb mechanic: when a crewman ends a fight at low health, go intentionally suffocate him to death so you can get a freshly healed clone.
Overall the expansion suffers from a syndrome that many game expansions do, throwing in splashy stuff to get attention at the cost of marginalizing the original mechanics. FTL's Hacking is the equivalent of Civ 4 BTS's Corporations. I'll still play it, but it's a shade short of the beautiful elegance of the original version.
As for pausing, if you think FTL is a real-time game, you're doing it wrong. It's turn based with turns incrementing as often as you want them to. I love how it hybridizes the genres, simulating real-time combat between the ships but without the real-world constraints of reaction speed and input actions per minute.