FTL: Advanced Edition

Last week apparently saw the release of a free expansion for the game FTL. It brought in a new race, some new ships (including a C version of all previous ships), some new events, and a ton of new ship parts. It has some balance fixes for some of the truly terribly or overpowered parts in the original game. And it has a third difficulty setting for the really hardcore player. Apparently they also released the game on iOS at the same time. This game is awesome and totally worth picking up if you're someone with one of those devices.

I found out all this stuff not through Steam or email or anything, which seems a little poor. This seems like the sort of thing that Steam should be able to tell me about in some way. Instead I found out when I was looking for a Final Fantasy speedrun stream to watch on the weekend and saw someone streaming the new FTL. Tuning in to watch one of the experts at the game play was quite the eye opener. He was doing things like knowing the attack patterns of enemy ships just by seeing what the weapons on the ship looked like. He knew the timings of the attacks so he was able to use his shield drone thing to block missiles instead of laser shots by toggling it on after the lasers and before the missiles. He also ran short on reactor power because he was able to turn down his base shields when he knew he didn't need all of them based on what weapons the enemy ship had. Plus he had every event memorized so he knew what the possible outcomes were going to be.

That all seemed pretty crazy, but then he talked a bit about a balance mod that he made for the original game and how a lot of the balance changes in the expansion were pulled from his mod. I guess it makes sense that someone who has actually hacked the game to make it fairer would know what the events and stuff are, but it was still really impressive. And goes to show just how bad I am at the game! I only buy things when I can power them on, and I autofire most of my weapons, and I was never big in boarding the enemy ship.

One of the changes (and I think central to all of the new ships) is they added a different healing bay. Instead of being a room you could go to in order to get healed it's a room that passively heals your entire crew each time you jump, but can't heal more than that. Oh, and if any of your guys die they respawn in the cloning bay at full health but with a loss of skill points. This includes if they die by being on an enemy ship when it explodes, or in melee combat over there, or by GIANT SPIDERS in the stupid evil giant spiders event.

The new race also doesn't need oxygen to survive, and actually drains rooms they're in of oxygen. So I've taken to beaming two of them over to the enemy ship to attack the oxygen generator. They quickly empty the room of oxygen just by being in it which means they'll win any 2v2 fight unless the enemy has a bunch of extra guys to rotate in or an excessive number of mantis or robots or something. It's fun! I finally got the achievement for completely draining the oxygen out of an enemy ship.

I heartily recommend checking out the expansion if you liked the original game. Steam will auto download it for you and you just need to toggle on 'advanced edition' when you pick a ship in your hangar. And if you haven't played FTL yet... You should! Get it on iOS or through Steam or whatever. It's great! And you'll lose a lot!

More FTL

Yesterday I bought a new game on Steam (DMC, which was on sale) and this morning I wanted to play it, but it hadn't downloaded. I looked at my list of Steam games and decided to give FTL another kick at the can. I played a game with the Engi ship in an attempt to unlock some achievements. There's an achievement for stunning 4 of the enemy systems at once (the Engi ship starts with a weapon that can stun a system, but it can only keep two systems stunned at a time) and the first store I went to had another copy of my starting weapon for sale. Do it up! I played for a bit after that and sunk pretty much all my experience into weapon power in order to get them both running at once. Eventually I had enough power to use them both and got the achievement pretty easily. Woo!

I kept playing, of course, and it turns out having two copies of that weapon is actually pretty awesome. It let me stun down the shields of an enemy pretty much no matter how many shields it had, letting my other weapons start doing damage and shutting down real systems like guns. It worked so well I actually took no damage at all during a particularly hard fight near the end of the game! And then I won! Woo!

I don't know if it was winning that did it, or the achievement, but now I have a couple more ship types I can play. On the one hand I've beaten the game so maybe I'm done with it? But the game is fun, and now I can play a slightly different variant by having a new starting ship. And there are more crazy achievements to earn. DMC is downloaded now, but I think I'm going to start a new FTL game instead.

In an odd coincidence Jeff sent me a message this afternoon asking about FTL. It turns out FTL is also on sale this weekend and he wanted to know if I'd played it and what I thought about it. Looking at the store now it's only $5 this weekend and I think it's definitely worth that much. I've played it for about 12 hours so far, and am going to keep playing. Robb has almost topped the 100 hour mark! I'd say 5 cents an hour is a pretty good price to pay for a game. If you like leveling up, tactical combat, crazy achievements, and space you should give this one a try.

FTL Anti-Cheating

The other day I was playing FTL and had a chance to buy a transporter device. This would let me send a couple members of my crew to board an enemy ship. I had some spare dudes so I figured I'd give it a shot. It didn't work out very well and my guys died. I killed the ship with normal weapons and considered my options. Even though I didn't need those guys I didn't like the idea of losing them. I'd just started playing for the day and had save/quit the night before right before buying the transporter so I figured I'd just quit without saving, restart the game, and reload my old save. Maybe it's a sketchy plan to save/reload when you get an outcome you don't like? But that's what I've been doing in Final Fantasy Tactics in order to keep from permanently losing some of my guys so it seems like I think it's a reasonable enough thing to do...

The guy who made FTL, on the other hand, disagrees. In fact, I didn't even have a saved game to reload. There is no save/reload in this game. You can save when you're done for the day and load to pick up where you left off, but doing so deletes your old saved game. Just like in old roguelike games! If you die to bad play or bad luck, well, guess you get to restart from the beginning.

I unlocked a second ship type and have been playing games with it, but it seems weaker than the first one. Or maybe I'm just playing it wrong, but I can't seem to make it very far at all. I find when things go downhill with the Engi ship they go downhill fast. I think the difference is the Human ship starts with missiles to keep fights from getting out of control right at the start (can take out enemy weapons with the first volley) while the Engi ship has to ionize the shields first before it can ionize the weapons which seems to buy the enemies enough time to land a hit or two on me. Damage the right systems and I'm boned. I wasn't dying every fight or anything like that, but every now and then I'd just lose. And in a game with permanent loss, well, that's a bad plan.

I think I'm going to play one more with the Engi ship and try to get an achievement and then move on to some other ship type. Without trying to cheat!

FTL

I'd heard some pretty good things about the game FTL: Faster Than Light in general and Sceadeau had recommended it on Vent while playing Blood Bowl at some point so when it went on sale a couple weeks ago I picked it up. I'd heard it was a roguelike in space and I like both space and ZAngband so maybe I'd like this too? I finally got around to giving it a go this morning (I woke up early with a sharp pain in my eye and couldn't get back to sleep).

Now, after playing it a bit, I'm not sure it's really a roguelike game. But it's definitely a fun game. The basic idea is you own a ship with a small crew and you fly around space blowing up bad guys for loot. You use that loot to upgrade different pieces of your ship, or to buy new modules for your ship, or to repair the permanent damage your ship takes. Your crew gains experience with different tasks (shooting the weapons, repairing things, punching boarding parties, etc...) as they perform them. So it is very much roguelike in that way. You kill things, eat them, and take their stuff.

The difference, to me at least, is in how combat presents itself. My idea of a roguelike has you opening doors in a dungeon and fighting gobs of enemies at a time. In FTL it seems like you only fight one thing at a time, and combat is more strategic. You choose where your guys stand, you choose where to aim your guns, and fights last a while. There's no standing behind a doorway chopping kobold after kobold. There's no shooting fireballs into a crowd of orcs. FTL seems more like a series of encounters than a full on dungeon crawl, and I'm ok with that. It actually reminds me a little of an old Win 3.1 Star Trek game I used to play way back in the day but I can't remember the name of it. Whatever.

At any rate, FTL seems pretty good on the surface, and I'm looking forward to sinking some more hours into it. I discovered an interesting aspect of Steam today, too, where it's willing to show you how much time all of your friends have spent playing a game. I have a friend with 97 hours of FTL played, and 4 more with over 30 hours played. If you consider I only have 11 Steam friends (Ziggyny is my name there) that's pretty impressive. Clearly FTL is a reasonable fun game according to my friends. It's no Civ V (398 hours, 388 hours, 267 hours...) but it's got a lot of playability.