Problem Machine

I believe I started running into autoscouts with level 3 shields around the end of sector 2 or the beginning of sector 3. I can't recall if I'd passed any weapon shops or not-- it's entirely possible I'd passed on weapons since I was relying on the glaive beam for damage anyway and I needed shields to have a base level of survivability in case I couldn't kill the enemy ship in one shot. Statistically the correct decision, completely fucked me over. It takes about 125 scrap to get teleporters up and running at level 2. Would you argue that's a better investment than 150 for shields? Especially when one hasn't been lucky enough to get the extra crew to form an invasion force, just using the three starting crew, it's pretty hard to justify, particularly when, say I do beam a couple of dudes onto on auto-scout and have them trash the shields, there is a fairly decent chance that somewhere in there they will tag my teleporter bay and doom those two crew members to die. Oh yeah, and speaking of boarding tactics with the rock ship: They have two defense drones and a med bay. What do?

I agree with all of that, but you'll notice that the end of the skill curve results in a game of pure chance. What I find appealing about the roguelike style is the variation in difficulty, how it can randomly be incredibly difficult and put all of the skills you learn as a player through easier runs to the test-- and, once in a while, FTL does exactly that. However, what happens just as often is that those skills which it taught you are never used at all and you get blown up by an encounter without any ability to do anything else. That's the part I have a problem with. So, basically, I'd like to have more opportunity to exert skill of a greater depth, and have it so that there's always a path to victory up until you make at least a slight mistake. Perhaps this could be as simple as giving the player more information or ways to evade combat... and the benefit of this is if they did manage to hit this sweet spot, then they could include a hard mode and have it still be winnable.

I'm fine with all the useless choices in the world, as long as somewhere in there there's a path to victory. The problem I keep encountering is that now that I know the game the path is usually obvious, and by the same token it's obvious if it isn't there.

The road not traveled maybe starts to lose some relevance since there's no visible difference between stores. A choice made with no information isn't a choice, it's a coin flip. And saying that maybe the game could have been won if you'd done one indistinguishable choice instead of another is to liken it to Three Card Monte. Furthermore, regarding collecting more scrap before visiting a store, that's a decision that's made based on knowledge of how much the tools you need to succeed will cost even if they happen to be in the store. There is absolutely no reason to visit a store if, even if it does have the things you need, you won't be able to pay for them. Now, the pike beam/hull choice is a good example of where this game is strongest, and is a decision based off of the observed strength of the ships you're encountering in the current sector, the projected strength of ships in the next sector, and compatibility with your ship's current layout. If decisions like these came up more often I'd have fewer complaints, but as things stand if I'm taking enough hull damage that I need to make these decisions I'm probably fucking up. And FTL games aren't that short. Mine tend to run 1-2 hours. Regarding 'missing', do you mean misclicking? The bombs getting beamed outside of the ship are actual misses, them hitting the wrong room is just the AI being stupid-- assuming the AI operates on the same rules as we do, as it mostly seems to. At the very least, I've never observed one of my bombs hitting the wrong room. Also, incidentally, ion bombs are absurdly overpowered. Just sayin'. Diablo and Torchlight aren't a very good comparison, since experience systems provide a strong leveling factor. This isn't to say that providing leveling up is better, but one of the primary benefits of the experience system is that it always provides a clear path towards victory, even if that path is grueling. So many times in FTL I find myself sitting on scrap because none of the upgrades I can get at the time will provide a clear benefit, because the upgrade I actually need are hidden behind randomly generated storefronts. This is, incidentally, why as far as I can tell the Osprey is by far the best ship- Yeah, you might not get a cloaking device, and don't get me wrong the cloaking device is fantastic, but as long as you are able to survive there is NO FIGHT you cannot win. Which, by the same token, means that there's always an upgrade path which will give you a greater chance of victory just by increasing your survivability (whereas with other ships increasing survivability is only of marginal benefit past a certain point). Finally, though I thought I did clarify this with my earlier post (perhaps I wasn't communicating well), I do like the game. I wouldn't have played it nearly as much as I had if I didn't. The thing is, the more I play this game, the more I play any game, the better I get at them, the more clearly I can see where the design falls short. And this game is great and also has a lot of problems, which drives me crazy because a lot of them are not subtle problems. I don't understand why they didn't take a little bit of extra time, actually balance out the weapons, and maybe provide some routes to victory which provide as consistent results as vanilla bomb/beam/laser setups. Because, to clarify, I don't think the randomization is the problem, the problem is that the game doesn't provide us with the tools to persevere when it fucks us over.

The only other roguelike style games I've played were Spelunky (PC) and Isaac, and neither of those spring absolutely unwinnable scenarios on you. It's the difference between an absurdly challenging battle and an unwinnable battle. Even if you exploit the shit out of a system, if you go to five stores and none of them sell weapons (or, more likely, sell useful weapons) and you're using one of the alternate ships that doesn't have a burst laser 2 there's seriously not much you can do but run. When there's nothing you can do but run, that's slightly annoying but fine, but if the enemy then gets a shot off on your engines/helm you get to just die with nothing you can do. And that's the thing, is the only thing that makes these problems not more immediately apparent is that the AI is STUPID. The AI becomes just another random factor which allows or disallows your success. The amount of swing in a battle depending on whether the AI decides to use an Ion Bomb on your weapons room or an empty room is absurd, and there's NO REASON why any player who knows what an Ion Bomb is would ever use an Ion Bomb that way. The shittiness of the game's AI is, much of the time, the only thing that makes victory possible. So yeah, it's not spend 50 hours learning the rules and then win every time, it's spend 50 hours learning all the rules and then the game becomes a slot machine. Is that better? i should also mention, though, that despite being pretty well burned out on the game and frustrated with the ways it could be improved, I had a fucking blast when I was still learning the rules. I just wish it was better, and don't understand why it isn't considering the success of their kickstarter. Also, to anyone explaining basic gameplay concepts to me: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=100310519

If humans were just smarties we wouldn't have lasted long enough to make tools. We don't have the physical speed and strength of other animals, but we have several advantages which make up for it. The human design excels in the areas of efficiency and flexibility: We can walk/run for days, we can climb trees, we can swim, we can eat vegetables or fresh meat or carrion. Humans have a lot going for them, they just aren't going to win any arm wrestling competitions with the other great apes.

Really? Tell me how you propose to win a battle against an automated scout with 3 shields when all you've got is a glaive beam.

Honestly, because the resources you're given are so limited that rarely matters. Usually you have to go with whatever ship build the store/loot gods see fit to provide, and once you know how to play that kind of ship there's really not a lot of variation... Also, honestly, pretty much every weapon loadout is worse than bomb and beam or laser and beam, so it all comes down to hoping you can put that together because if you can't then you're going to start running into ships you simply won't be able to beat (among them certain stages of the boss). It seems like the more practice I put in, the more strictly battles are divided into the trivial and the impossible.

I wrote a bloog partially inspired by this discussion, the book, and my frustrations with myself and others reading books like puzzles. Reduction of Metaphor

I disagree. Just because things can go wrong even when you're playing optimally doesn't mean there isn't an optimal strategy. It's all a numbers game, there is absolutely an optimal path to victory-- even if the game is balanced/randomized such that even an optimal strategy will only achieve a 50% victory rate, that doesn't mean there isn't such a strategy.

I know, I'm spoiled because I bought tBoI for $5 and got 60

It's OCCASIONALLY more advantageous, if you're using missiles, which aren't worth using in the FIRST place if you have a choice since drones will shoot them down anyway. You're way better off using bombs, in which case you usually only need to land one per fight and can then ride that advantage to victory. In the end, what might be intended as incentive to accept surrender instead just becomes incentive to not use missiles. I don't know. At this point I'm getting pretty fucking sick of this game-- admittedly, after 40 hours of mostly really good times. It's oddly at its most fun when you're bad at it, because then there's things you can struggle against when you're failing. At this point, I feel like I've just mastered it to the point where the slot machine nature of the beast is stripped bare. Oh hey look, all I have is a glaive beam, I haven't encountered any stores, and you're sending ships with 3 shields against me. Awesome. It reminds me slightly of back when I was playing WoW. I started off playing Warrior, and I still think that was a really interesting class (no idea if it still is). I had relatively few skills, but managing my resources to use those skills, positioning myself optimally, and choosing the right skill at the time was a set of really interesting decisions. I tried out a bunch of other classes after that, and one that I played a fair amount was the Warlock. Playing Warlock involved using a whole lot more skills, managing minions, controlling range, etcetera. The end result was a class that was very challenging at first, when I was learning when to use each skill and getting a feel for the timing, but afterwards a whole bunch of battles which felt exactly the same. FTL is starting to feel that way to me, like I've understood everything there is to understand in the game and now it's just doing the same thing over and over and hoping the random number generator likes me this time. Bleh.

Yeah it's kind of weird that once you know the game well the first few sectors are the hardest. I've been trying to beat the game with the rock ship and the stealth B and it's super obvious the game isn't balanced around these because they're annoying as hell to play. Stealth B is a neat idea, but in practice it's a crapshoot: Because you don't have enough cloaking early on to guarantee yourself the first shot, a lot of the time it comes down to whether the enemy ship decides to target your weapons room. In fact, if the AI was smart at all it would be easily the worst ship in the game, because if the AI consistently targeted your weapons you would basically NEVER GET A SHOT OFF. Similarly, with the rock ship, I basically couldn't do much of anything against a ship that had both a defense drone and a med bay, since my tactic was to disable medbays with a missile and then beam guys in. It would be fine if that tactic didn't work if it hadn't been the only tactic available to me-- using 4-6 missiles a fight (and thus wasting 24-36 scrap PER FIGHT) is not a viable option, and I never encountered a weapon that could take down more than one shield at a time. The Kestral has basically everything it needs to succeed for the first 4 sectors or so to start with, but a lot of the other ships REALLY depend on finding something to punch through shields, and if they don't they really can't do a lot. I think the game would be improved if there was a stable upgrade path to bypassing shields- perhaps if your engines were more powerful than theirs you could move inside their shield bubble and attack directly. It would make Stealth A too good, but I don't know. The Osprey is a total breath of fresh air, though, since that's the one ship that you NEVER get fucked because you can't find a weapon to get past shields. There's no reason for missiles to be as expensive as they are. I mostly avoid buying them by using them carefully, but it's an unreasonable burden to put on the rock ship. Would they be overpowered if they cost 3 scrap? I doubt it.

An apt summation.

If it makes you feel any better I've run into some text that suggests that the Rebels are, in fact, rebelling against the Federation practice of giving alien species equality with humans. Also, cool (if not super surprising) to see another NL fan. I was surprised to not see any comments on it when he encountered scoops in a video, but I didn't look too deeply.

Balance is screwy for sure. Hull beam is okay I guess because it's a beam, but all of the other hull stuff is pretty questionable. There's no reason for them to not do the damage bonus to all rooms, regardless of systems-- they'd be pretty alright if they did. I think that just overall the devs overestimated the importance of direct hull damage, and as a result bomb-type weapons are almost universally better than traditional missiles. As long as you get their systems down, getting the hull damage with whatever weapons you have handy is usually pretty easy.

Down or not, he had to sooner or later come to terms with his scoops-- as must we all, someday, in our turn, come to terms with our own scoops. For some of us, our scoops is a shameful secret, for some of us our pride and joy. Many of us have tried to deny our scoops, but to deny these scoops is to deny ourselves, for in the end these are the scoops which define who and what we truly are. Scoops.

Played 30 hours or so, and I've started hitting about 50/50 success rate in my normal difficulty runs. 29 games, 9 victories, I think 6 on easy and 3 on normal. I'm having a hard time unlocking some of the more exotic ships, but hopefully that will start happening before I manage to beat it on normal with each ship layout I've got unlocked. Regarding the last boss: The missile turret (third one over) is BY FAR the most dangerous. It should be your first priority. If you have a teleporter, send your dudes in there and take a massive advantage early on: His other weapons will have a hard time penetrating shields of level 3 or higher. This goes for all stages of the boss. The only real exception is during the second stage it's an equally good idea to hit his drone bay-- it won't slow down his attack or defense drones, but it will stop him from using his boarding drone. If you have a cloak, sit on it until he either fires a volley of missiles, your shields go down, or he uses a super attack, then raise it. Actually, it's generally a good idea to get used to pausing whenever you hear the sound of a missile launching so that you can activate your cloak. If you DON'T have a cloak then try to get your engines maxed. Whenever he launches missiles or uses a super attack, deactivate all of your drones and non-essential systems to max your evasion. Have a strategy to deal with shields- preferably one that doesn't rely on missiles. Ion bombs are downright overpowered, so if you find one hang onto it. All of the bomb weapons are extremely good, but as far as I can tell Ion bombs are by far the best-- among other things, because ion weapons do double damage to super shields they will do EIGHT damage to the final stage's super shield And, not specifically related to the boss, but if you're using a beam weapon get used to hitting pause whenever you take the enemy's shields down so you can line your beam up. To use beams to their maximum potential takes pixel perfect precision, which is nearly impossible to do in real time. Used this way, they're absurdly powerful. Hope that helps those of you who are having a bit of a hard time!

It really depends on the story. I think this one would be challenging to tell well in another medium, since most of them don't handle ambiguity as well.

I'm curious what would happen if every newspaper in the world published a defamatory cartoon of Mohammed on the same day... would these people declare war on the world? I'd like to imagine that's the ideal behind these cartoons, but I can't speak for anyone else.

Well, exactly. These are things we're all doing, just part of reading and parsing a story, so it's kind of a matter of degree. Are we trying to understand a character's motivations in an empathetic way or are we just trying to 'solve' the book? That's also something I feel like maybe Tony doesn't get, the entire second half of the book he's treating all of this like it's some kind of adventure, like it's a problem to be solved, when for her it's her life. I do think, though, that there is some qualitative difference between trying to understand where a character in a novel is coming from when they say something and trying to distill a message that may or may not be intended from the novel itself. If a novel could be expressed as a message, or even as a puzzle, then there would be no good reason for it to be a novel-- it would be a word trick instead of a story.

I'm getting close to finishing my rereading now, and I'm struck by how, uh, far-fetched some of the theories I've seen on the forum are given the actual content of the text. I think there's a tendency of people who like games, in reading books, to look at an ambiguous narrative like this as some sort of puzzle to be solved, which is kind of a trap. It leads easily to a high-school-English-class style reading, where the emotion and life is drained out of a work in order to analyze it in a purely analytical and constructed fashion. At least, I found at certain points that my brain was trying to do this, to come up with The Key to the narrative, when that's not really at all what the book is about I think. Regarding Veronica's actions, I think what she wants is for Tony to see that the world isn't All About Him-- not in a selfish way, but he does see himself as the protagonist of whatever story he comes into, relates to everything as it relates to His Story. She gives him the letter, not to show him what a horrible person HE was, but to show him his tendency to view things entirely in terms of how they relate directly to him- IE, why he saw Veronica's and Adrian's letter as a calculated insult instead of basically emotional due diligence. Only when he starts asking her about things that don't have a direct bearing on his own personal story does she begin to warm up to him, only to close off again when they meet and she finds that he's still telling his own story to himself and the only reason he'd been asking is because of a false intimacy between them he had created rather than genuine outgoing interest in others. This is my interpretation, anyway. Still 20 pages from finishing again, so something else may occur to me, but I wanted to write it down before I forgot.

Man, bits of that cast got me right in the feels the same way the book did. It is super intense to think about some of the things we may have done to our own minds to shy away from things that are painful. I spent too much of my life trying to be fearless, and now I'm afraid my fears have gone underground and go in masks as shapeless aversions to things I should like. Do I not want to do something because I'm tired, or because I'm afraid of something? It is hard to tell. Now... a few times there, I think both Sean and Chris said something to the effect that everyone's said or written something like that letter, something horribly reckless and mean as retribution for being hurt. Even in my most honest retrospection, I don't believe I have, but-- I worry that this is because I've lead a safe, a 'peaceable' life. So the character of Tony got to me more personally in that way, though I'm so super sensitive of the effect that I have on people at all times that the letter bit was pretty agonizing. I don't know! I'm trying to interact with the world more, but I've constructed so much of my identity around a love for and fetishization of creativity and analysis that it's hard for me to interface with the world the way other people do. I worry about living a cold and lonely life, but I worry more about sacrificing my ambitions for a shallow and superficial happiness that will leave me even colder in the long run. All of this may seem like a digression, but the book and discussion of it brought up a lot of these thoughts again-- though, granted, they're never far below the surface of my thoughts anyway. Existence and identity... tricky stuff, yo. Thanks for book blasting. It is as excellent as I'd hoped it would be.

Thanks