Why is ftl so good

For example: Exploring more beacons is a good thing? I should fire my weapons together at the same time? Leveling up your crew members is a good idea? Wow, thanks so much for that advice! I think that we can do a little bit better here. These are my thoughts on what generally works and what doesn't work for a successful mission.

Feel free to go check it out for more information. This is one of the most basic mistakes that newcomers to FTL will make. Someone who is learning the game might think that FTL is kind of like Star Trek, where the captain of your ship uses intelligence and diplomacy to make their way through the galaxy, fighting only as an absolute last resort.

And while that would make for an interesting game in its own right, FTL doesn't work that way. As the title above says, fighting is good in this game. You want to fight as much as possible. That's because fighting other ships is the only reliable way to accrue scrap, the most precious commodity in FTL. Scrap is used as currency to buy things from stores weapons, crewmembers, "augments" which function as extra bonuses of different sorts, etc.

However scrap ALSO functions as experience points as well, since scrap is used to ugprade your ship's systems and power reactor. Yes, in FTL your gold and experience are the same thing. This obviously makes scrap an incredibly valuable commodity. Get as much of it as you can. The strategic elements of FTL largely revolve around how to spend your scrap in the most optimal fashion to achieve victory. As opposed to the tactical gameplay of fighting battles, which we'll get to in a minute.

So you want to amass as much scrap as possible, no surprises there. It may be an obvious point, but I can't tell you how many newcomers I've seen playing FTL on Livestream who don't make the connection to the next logical step: you want to fight as much as possible, for that very reason of collecting scrap.

Destroying enemy ships will always result in a scrap payment of some kind. Even better is killing all of the crew on the enemy ship without destroying it, this results in a larger payout of scrap. Boarding the enemy ship with a crew teleporter and eliminating everyone is the method that typically results in the most scrap and highest scores in FTL. While it's true that sometimes you can pick up scrap from events without fighting in some fashion, this is not a reliable method for success.

Instead, you should be looking to fight as much as possible pretty much all of the time. This is the reason why the Long Range Scanners are the best augment in the game: they allow you to see where the fights are located, thereby securing more scrap and snowballing into a stronger ship over time. I'm always happy to jump into an asteroid field or next to a sun - those are guaranteed battles against enemy ships!

Don't avoid those areas out of fear of taking damage. The scrap is too valuable. Similarly, you should try to select the dialog options that lead to fights as much as possible. Sometimes the "blue" option isn't the best choice because it will allow your ship to escape without a fight. That's bad! You want a battle whenever possible, with the obvious exception of staying away from a situation that will destroy your own ship.

But that's something that should only happen rarely. It's nearly impossible to win in FTL by consistently running away. Remember, the enemy flagship will be sitting there in the last sector no matter what.

The whole rest of the game is a process of leveling up to face that final boss. There's a limited number of encounters in this game before reaching the rebel flagship - make the most of them!

Here's another mistake that I've commonly seen from newcomers to FTL. The tactical side of the gameplay fighting the ship versus ship space battles is largely based on three things: firing your weapons, moving your crew around, and managing the power in your systems. Most people seem to handle the first two areas quite well. They'll correctly fire their weapons in a burst to get through enemy shielding and target an important system on the other ship.

They will move their crew around to deal with boarders, repair broken system, and put out fires that spring up. That's why I find it puzzling that so often the third aspect of the tactical gameplay gets ignored, moving power around between different systems. This is fully as imporant as the others, and it's critical to mastering FTL as a game. Do not "fire and forget" the power on your systems!

I can summarize this idea in one piece of advice: Don't Upgrade the Reactor. When you have limited scrap to work with on the higher difficulties, it's imperative to spend it wisely. You do not need to power every system at every point in time, and in fact if you're doing it that way, you're not maximizing your scrap spending. The picture above is a typical example of this that I snapped off of someone's Livestream.

I have circled in yellow the "reactor bar of shame" at the bottom left. This poor fellow has every system powered and five unused power in the reactor.

Five bars! That's roughly scrap that could have gone to upgrading some systems instead, enough for level 6 shields or four more levels of engines, both of which would be very useful here. Note that this player also has power going to the medbay needlessly, and power going to a heavy laser that can't fire through the shields of the enemy ship, and power into the crew teleporter that isn't strictly necessary.

You can pull power out of a teleporter while it's not being used and divert it back in there as soon as you intend to use it. Having power sit there while the thing isn't being used is pointless. In other words, this player above is wasting hundreds of scrap due to poor power usage and way too many reactor upgrades.

If you're learning this game, try to see how far you can get without upgrading the reactor just for practice once or twice. The Zoltan ships are a good place to try this, they start with tiny reactors and force the player to move power around to utilize systems. In the hands of an experienced player, a typical FTL ship will have far more system upgrades than reactor upgrades, with power getting shifted around from one to the other at a dizzying pace in each battle.

You can customize what's being powered depending on the threat posed by each unique enemy. My general rule of thumb is that only shields and weapons should be powered at all times, and even that dictum can be violated in certain situations. Of course you do need to upgrade the reactor sometimes to have enough power, but don't make the mistake of putting too many upgrades there early on.

Avoid the reactor bar of shame! Strategy only works if the tools to work with that strategy are capable of being acquired. In any case, luck is good to have as part of the game, and it's a large part of why it's so much fun, so destroying that entirely is a bad idea. That element of chaos really is one of the larger parts that keeps players sticking around long term, and would entice them to continue pouring money into it were DLC available for things like extra ships or layout packs.

There's just too much luck is all, to the point that it's stopped being a "hard" game, and has just turned into being more a case of "throwing yourself at a brick wall until you eventually break it down by sheer attrition". For those who have not played the game before, it's great fun! Of this there is no doubt! It's addictive and entertaining! Guess which one I've played by far the most? It's definitely got the addictive qualities that made games like Tetris or Pac Man as epic as they are today.

Unfortunately, still for those who have not played the game yet, FTL is an absolute failure in it's implementation. It's an exercise in frustration wrought primarily from the fact that the vast majority of the games you play of it are doomed to failure from the absolute start, and nothing you could have done would have changed the outcome. It's not exactly great fun going all game and never once seeing a single missile or multi-shot weapon, and being physically incapable of even dropping the end boss's shields because you were fed nothing but beam weapons throughout the whole game.

Sadly, this is the one major failing in FTL, and it's not really forgivable. This is why it's simply going to piss most players off. Completionists and perfectionists will hate it due to there being such a high chance that they have only the most vague of control over whether they get various achievements or not. Those who value skill and winning by being clever will also be sorely disappointed. Those who want a challenge will find themselves running into an invisible brick wall with no way to break it or go around.

As such, FTL is playable, and fun, but will probably drive the vast majority of people who would enjoy it to near-murderous rage. Hopefully they'll patch it and narrow down the disproportionate amount of luck needed to enjoy the game fully.

Until that time, however, play it only with the understanding that it's a frustrating game where you'll die almost every game, and it won't be through any fault of your own most of the time assuming you're a competent captain. If you can handle that, feel free to play it! It's well worth the buy! If you can't tolerate completely retarded and arbitrary failure for no apparent reason, then you might want to look elsewhere. Showing 1 - 15 of 42 comments. As far as the devs are concerned FTL is complete there is no need to dumb anything down or make it easier or "forgiving".

I swear the devs must laugh at these kind of threads hoping for them to make it more forgiving etc etc. They made this game for a challenge and very unforgiving. Ever been gibbed in an ion storm vs a 4 man crew portal ship? I have once although very rare to have that scenario, it sucks but it is part of the unforgivingness of the game that makes it so great.

Whimper View Profile View Posts. Very well written review and analysis. But I think what you'll find is that Vigilius is right- the amount of sheer dumb luck that permeates this game was a design flaw by choice.

The developers wanted to make a "rogue-like-like" and part of that is making it random, unfair, and too hard. You can't remove the chance element, because it would be like playing Blackjack with all of the cards always face-up. It would be like playing chess, instead of some weird version of chess where randomly one of the pawns turns out to be a queen who gets a pre-emptive strike when you enter her square. Last edited by Whimper ; 30 Dec, pm. Roguelikes are, by their very nature, unforgiving.

Sometimes you can turn around a bad situation and sometimes there isn't a thing you can do. It happens. It isn't a bug or a flaw or even an oversight, it's just the way the game is. Maybe you don't like that or hate as some might say and that's fine, but in that case I'd recommend avoiding roguelikes in the future.

They are games of chance, after all. Last edited by Pontiac Jones ; 30 Dec, pm. I suppose I don't understand the concept of essentially wanting to intentionally fail. I actually don't want the game made easier, I'd rather it be made harder than it actually is.

The game's difficulty is a joke to me right now, as it's not hard in the slightest; it just arbitrarily fails to provide the tools necessary to win is all. If anything, it's lazy design in that it wouldn't be that much more difficult to give the players extra control, but in return for that control, make it so that they absolutely need to actually utilize that control to survive. Feature The best 20 Switch games you can play right now. Premium only Ask Eurogamer: News.

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Supporters only Letter from the Editor: Feast and famine The only thing worse than not enough games is too many of them. But it also allows players to customize their strategy, piling on additional skills and perks to make the next attempt just a little easier. More than anything, Into the Breach is less stingy with its unlocks. What frustrated me the most was that I barely unlocked any new content during dozens of hours of play, meaning that I had to beat my head against the same set of problems over and over without being given any new options to consider.

Into the Breach has more unlockables overall, and is more generous with how it doles them out over time. Players earn coins by unlocking squad achievements, and those coins are routinely earned by subtle modifications in how you play.

Knock a few more monsters into the water, use a newly acquired weapon once or twice, and Subset tosses you a few coins that you can then turn in to open up entirely new sets of mechs. You can get a satisfying session of play done in under a half hour, while a save system allows you to keep your progress and pick up where you left off.

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