I've seen him live stream it on Twitch. Haven't had time to watch it myself, but if you like his stuff then it should be worth checking out.
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FTL - Faster Than Light
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Wow, thanks for the pointer. Sullla recruits so much audience from other places these days that he doesn't need to clue in us small potatoes at RB when he's up to something interesting.
Quote:Number One: Fighting Is Good Absolutely true, and the #1 thing that newbies need to learn. I'm surprised that Sullla hasn't been using any teleporter based offense. Winning by crew capture pays off markedly more than destruction, at least in the original pre-expansion, and it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Just shoot the weapons bay enough to keep yourself safe, and ionize the med bay if necessary. BTW, the Scrap Recovery Arm bonus does not count towards the endgame scrap total or score.
I am still unlocking all ships on "easy".
 I noticed even on that setting an occasional streak of bad luck can end my run in the later sectors quite quickly.  A few unlucky missile hits to the shield and weapons coupled with a mantis invasion force that demolishes the oxygen supply sure makes for an interesting encounter. That being said, I think this game has amazing value, especially considering the free AE edition update. And with three difficulties to choose from every player should be happy now. BTW, can you guys identify the exact weapon setup of the enemy just by looking at the display of the enemy ship before any shots have been fired? (October 3rd, 2014, 10:09)Gustaran Wrote: BTW, can you guys identify the exact weapon setup of the enemy just by looking at the display of the enemy ship before any shots have been fired? Not exact, but fairly close. I'm usually not quite sure of which missile is which or the distinctions among the levels of heavy and hull lasers. But looking at the ship can definitely give you a good sense of the general threat level and plan, whether to deploy a missile defense drone or max the shields, whether to attack the weapons or shields first, and even whether the ship might be harmless enough to allow experience milking for your crew. 
This looked like a dead thread so I didn't see any reason to post when I started typing up FTL reports. I did enjoy reading through the community game when it took place last year, that was a nice writeup.
To answer the question about using the Teleporter for boarding tactics, there are three things working against it. Number one, the expansion reduced the scrap bonus for killing enemy crew while leaving the ship intact. From the old playthroughs I've seen on YouTube, it was something like a 50% bonus in the pre-expansion days, and now it's more like a 10-15% bonus. Obviously it's still preferable (and you have a higher chance of finding extra crew and weapons), but not quite so overwhelming. Number two, the teleporter gameplay involves a lot of micromanagement and it takes significantly longer in real-world time to play out the runs. Most of the runs that I've done on Livestream have been right around 2 hours, and the last one that featured the invading gameplay was double that, clocking in right at 4 hours. That's quite a bit longer. Number three, there are now more systems available in FTL in the expansion and no more additional system slots. Taking the Teleporter often means giving up Hacking, and I really like that system. In the pre-expansion days you would be able to grab Drone Control, Cloaking, and Teleporter, and there wasn't a need to pick and choose. Now it's a harder call. But the main reason is that I just don't like the Teleporter gameplay that much. It's mostly based around exploiting the weak enemy crew AI, and I don't find it to be that compelling. I think the AI management of crew is one of the weakest aspects of FTL - the designers clearly put a lot more work into the ship vs. ship battles. This was best demonstrated in the pre-expansion flagship battle, where people quickly worked out how to cheese the crew in those non-connected parts of the ship. (Demonstrated in this very thread last year!) Obviously a nice tactical play, but kind of disappointing from a challenge standpoint. I'm glad this has been fixed with the slightly altered flagship layout in the expansion. So that's the main reason: I like the ship vs. ship battles, I think that's what FTL's gameplay does the best, and it also tends to result in faster, more exciting runs. Mostly a personal preference. If anyone wants to read or watch a demonstration of the Teleporter gameplay in practice, I added the writeup for the Federation C ship on the website today. That ship is easily in contention for worst in the game in my opinion. The extra Hard difficulty in the expansion was a great addition too, just about right in terms of challenge level. I win somewhere around half the time, higher with the strong ships and much lower with the really weak ones. For a game that cost all of $5, FTL has been quite a value. 
Boarding in FTL is generally tedious, both on attack and defence. The healing really makes things drag out, maybe it'd have worked better with higher lethality personal combat and a cloning bay to replace losses after the fight.
I agree it's more fun to play with weapons. 
Just for fun, I gave the Federation C cruiser a quick try on "hard" but ran into a ship with medbay on my 4th jump.
How are you supposed to win this encounter? I have no weapons (aside from the "Flak"-Beam) and the enemy crew would always heal and rejoin the fight. Trying to destroy the medbay with my boarders would invariably lead to a fight inside the medbay, which was a futile attempt as well. I can see myself tackling "normal" diffculty with an average ship, but "hard" with some of the C-designs? No thanks (but I am glad somebody else is attempting it). 
So Sullla's adventures here finally pushed me to trying out the FTL expansion. Fortunately it was easy to copy over my old profile and keep all the unlocks. So I jumped straight into Hard difficulty.
Er, yes, it's hard indeed. Using Kestrel B as a starter, I lost my first four or five attempts. Those low scrap payouts are a TIGHT TIGHT TIGHT constraint. I just couldn't get ahead of the power curve. My biggest mistake was overbuying weapons that represented a marginal upgrade. A two-shot hull laser looks like a nice upgrade over one of the starting basic lasers, but you need to cover much more basic stuff in shields and power before you can sink 60 scrap into a minor weapon bump. Another mistake was trying a teleporter for offense. That didn't work because a two-man boarding force is too feeble unless it has lots of support from ion bombs and hacking, which also cost too much under the tight income constraint on Hard. Finally I came into a good run. The first sector yielded lots of battles, several with double payouts, to a total of 150 scrap and one free crewman. And the last fight in sector 1 turned out milkable for skill points, bearing just a single laser with all its reactor power in a useless Mk2 defense droid. So I milked it to max evade and shield skills. (Also weapon, but that comes easily anyway with the 4 basic lasers.) This is a meaningful boost up the snowball curve - 10% extra evasion for FREE that continues to reduce damage taken all game. Opinions on skill milking vary, but I say it's fully part of the game. The developers tweaked innumerable game aspects for the expansion but left that alone. Actually one bit of skilling was tweaked. Shield skill now increments from getting hit, not from intentionally depowering your own shields to recharge. This says the developers did consider the skill leveling system and were content with that small anti-milk nerf. So I'm using milking whenever the opportunity arises. Sector two yielded up a free Burst Laser 1! Not the glorious BL2 but I still happily bought a weapon level for it. Then a Charge Laser! Less efficient at 3x5 = 15 power-seconds per shot, but hugely bursty for later. And bought a Scrap Recovery Arm. To get it, had to sell a Defense Scrambler that came from somewhere... it looked neat but I didn't see any likelihood of using missiles. I bought Hacking in sector 3 to try out. I hadn't had that before and Sullla spoke well of it. Oh yeah, this thing is major dominant. Sullla talked about targeting shields, but I think my favorite target is the engines to null out enemy evade. Making your shots into guaranteed damage is a major boon. Instead of dealing 1 or 2 damage as half your salvo misses, killing the evade means you can punch a reliable 4-5 damage hole into either the weapon or shield systems. At the end of sector 3 came my one mistake. I looped around past the exit eastwards because I could clear three extra beacons on the far edge, then jump back to the now rebel-controlled exit. I didn't understand that new Anti-Ship Battery mechanic that accompanies the rebel fleet fights, where you continually take damage from the background ships, to prevent score milking. You're supposed to just run away from that... except my old score-milking ways clung too hard and I fought this fight to the death far longer than was necessary... taking a total of 15 hull damage in the process. Yuck. Well, my own fault. Folks seem to complain about ASB a lot, but it does seem fair to me. Sector 5 offered a damnably hard choice. A store offered both Cloaking and Drone Control (with a defense drone to go along with it), but I could only afford one. I had to say Cloaking, because drone part usage was already a constraining factor with heavy use of Hacking. Sector 6 fixed that when Drone Control + Defense Drone came my way anyway at another store. Glorious. And it also even provided Long-Ranged Scanners which I could just perfectly afford exactly down to zero scrap. Sector 7 saw my fortunes go from good to spectacular. I could pick my way with Long-Ranged Scanners through the nebula sector to find loads of enemy encounters, and carefully beat them with hacking and drone defense and cloaking as appropriate. With the Scrap Recovery Arm still operating, I accumulated somewhere over 600 scrap from this sector in all. And reached a store at the very last jump where I picked up a Reverse Ion Field which is handy against the flagship. My final weapon loadout was entirely uninspiring: the four-shot Charge Laser III, two Burst Laser Is, and one leftover starting Basic Laser. Still, that is a 9-shot barrage on 8 weapon power, workable enough. I beat the flagship without much trouble - no teleporter, but the rest of the standard tricks all still work, cloaking to dodge the big special attacks and so on. I'm not so sure I like the expansion content, though. It's massively micromanagey, even for me who likes micromanagement. The whole run took north of four hours. Enemy mind control is a particular headache, posing no real threat but you have to shuffle around crew to occupy the victim's spot and micromanage both their health totals. The backup battery is another; skip the micromanagement and just offer another couple reactor bars. Hacking takes a precise timing eye to work to full effectiveness, too. Not sure if I like Hard difficulty. Darrell's guess that Normal->Hard is about the same as Easy->Normal sounds about right. The balance feels honed razor sharp exactly where it should be. But playing this game is hard work to do everything so perfectly! |
