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Roguelikes

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I do love roguelikes. The first ones I ever tried were Nethack and ADOM. More recently I've played a bunch of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup.

My interest with roguelikes follow a pretty predictable path:

1) Get an urge to play a roguelike

2) Play through a bunch of characters just for fun

3) Get more serious about actually beating the game

4) Eventually reach the point where I read guides, create a million characters just to get the one with good enough stats, savescum if possible

5) Fail sooner or later despite my efforts and lose interest for a while

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I really like Desktop Dungeons and Doom Roquelike.

One of the first pc games I played on my first own computer was Nethack. Sweet, sweet times.

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FTL is out today for just $9! I just picked it up on their website and activated it on Steam, which was very easy. Now I just have to fight the urge to play it until after work.

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FTL is out today for just $9! I just picked it up on their website and activated it on Steam, which was very easy. Now I just have to fight the urge to play it until after work.

This game is terribly punishing when you make a mistake. The early game is so slow I get lulled into sleep. Fire.... wait for it... fire... wait... and then suddenly there are giant bugs killing your pilot and destroying your bridge and for some reason your medic bay and only your medic bay has no oxygen so those dudes are dead and missiles are hitting your hull and causing fires that you can't see because your sensors were ion'd and just like that in about five second it's game over man game over.

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I've been playing FTL since Kickstarter customers got the beta. It's one of those things... Of course I'm dying because I'm making bad choices, but I never see what I could have done differently. At some point the game just throws encounters at me I can't survive and running away just means you're so weak you'll die very soon anyway. I don't know how I'm supposed to gain from the encounters without just finding the non-combat ones that give you stuff through sheer luck.

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You should treat every jump less like a move towards your goal, and more like a leap towards your grave.

Also, I found Remo pimping himself in a store. Not enough cash to put him working in the engine rooms though:(

Edit: prize for dying on my first jump?:) solar flares and a pirate ship.

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Welcome to the wonderful world of roguelike-likes! Enjoy your stay until you die.

The farthest I got in Nethack was the room with the unicorn (floor five?). My cat had rabies and attacked the unicorn and that was the end of that game for me.

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Playing FTL the past few hours, the Zoltan cruiser has rapidly become my hands-down favorite. You start out with the Halberd, a disgustingly effective beam weapon, and a light missile launcher. Get a better launcher to knock out the shields of bigger ships later on and you'll carve a bloody path of death from day one. I only started upgrading shields and engines as an afterthought, since most enemies weren't even getting one shot off. I can't even imagine what would've happened if I'd had a pre-ignition charger...

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What do you need to do to get the Zoltan cruiser? So far I've unlocked the Engi ship and the stealth ship.

The stealth ship is actually kind of great but is also sort of hard mode because you literally start with no shield module.

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What do you need to do to get the Zoltan cruiser? So far I've unlocked the Engi ship and the stealth ship.

The stealth ship is actually kind of great but is also sort of hard mode because you literally start with no shield module.

You'll get a quest in the Zoltan homeworld sector, provided you have a Zoltan aboard. You have to chase this Rebel ship, which is really aggravating to catch, and then choose to negotiate instead. You start out with the great weapon setup and the fancy "super" shield thing that has to be depleted before anything can be hit. The only drawback is that you don't have enough power to run everything from the start, but that's fixed after maybe one fight.

I will be humble and admit that it took me three jumps and fifty percent hull damage to realize that the stealth ship didn't start with shields. It's a cool ship in some ways, but it doesn't suit my playstyle at all. Neither do the Engi or Rock cruisers, really. Finite weapons systems like drones and missiles make me nervous. The game makes me nervous.

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I've had a minor itch to get FTL after hearing a lot about it on the podcast, and seeing my friends on Steam play it.

I realized I have an extra copy of Terraria sitting in my Steam account, so I'm proposing to trade it for a copy of FTL for anyone willing. I can heartily recommend Terraria. To say it's "Minecraft in 2D" is somewhat fair, although Terraria is a lot more focused on exploration and hunting for gear and artifacts (and less on building stuff). Tons of weapons, armor, accessories to find, loads of monsters to kill and several bosses to slay. My steam account is: http://steamcommunity.com/id/retales

Pardon for the slightly off-topic post, I'll edit in stories about failures in FTL after I get it.

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Yeah, but easy mode also gives you the opportunity to try things out and find good synergies, which is the only way you can hope to succeed in FTL. Two questions: has anyone had a positive outcome of fighting the giant spiders, and if so, what was the reward? It's always disastrous for me. Also, has anyone here finished the game on normal?

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I'm unlocking as many of the ships and layouts as I can on Easy first. Jumping into a sun with a Mantis ship lying in wait is hard enough without having all the tools available and a clear mind to boot.

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I just beat the boss's first form (on easy), but then lost the game because I jumped to the wrong place and he reached the base before I could get to him again. So that kind of sucked. I also found a mysterious damaged stasis pod somewhere in the Rock homeworlds, but I never managed to figure out what to do with it.

Regarding the giant spiders encounter, I'm pretty sure I fought them successfully, but I don't think the reward was anything special. Probably just some combination of fuel, missiles, drone parts, and scrap.

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I just beat the boss's first form (on easy), but then lost the game because I jumped to the wrong place and he reached the base before I could get to him again. So that kind of sucked. I also found a mysterious damaged stasis pod somewhere in the Rock homeworlds, but I never managed to figure out what to do with it.

Regarding the giant spiders encounter, I'm pretty sure I fought them successfully, but I don't think the reward was anything special. Probably just some combination of fuel, missiles, drone parts, and scrap.

Ooh, I think the mysterious crystal pod has a chance of starting a quest to unlock the last and rarest ship. I passed that up stupidly the one time I encountered it, thinking it was just another crewman.

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Well crap. I found it when I was right near the end of that area and didn't have time to explore more and try to find whatever I'm supposed to do with it.

I haven't managed to unlock any ships besides the Engi one yet.

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All the racial ships are found by quests at their respective homeworlds (I think. I've yet to encounter a friendly slug-person). Each one of them plays totally different, which gives the game a lot of variety I was deathly afraid it'd be missing.

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Oh man, I found the stasis pod again (for what it's worth, it wasn't in the Rock homeworlds this time, just a Rock-controlled sector -- so I guess I need to take it to the homeworlds?), and also stumbled onto the stealth ship while I was at it! This game is really good.

(It's kind of a shame that the "roguelikes" thread has basically become the FTL thread, but whatever.)

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I got through the first phase of the boss on easy, but in the process I lost half my crew. A stray shot hit my teleporter but it looked like I was going to repair it just in time and rescue my veteran boarding party before they died. Instead, I hit the wrong button and teleported the repair crew on to the boss ship and all four dudes died. As if that wasn't bad enough, I overextend myself getting to the boss, so much so that I was too far from the repair crews. In the end my ship was blown up by an elite rebel ship in two volleys of extremely accurate laser fire.

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Oh man, I found the stasis pod again (for what it's worth, it wasn't in the Rock homeworlds this time, just a Rock-controlled sector -- so I guess I need to take it to the homeworlds?), and also stumbled onto the stealth ship while I was at it! This game is really good.

(It's kind of a shame that the "roguelikes" thread has basically become the FTL thread, but whatever.)

I ran across it again myself and totally blew it. Looks like you have a chance to find the pod in a Rock sector, with the Rock Homeworld giving a 100% chance; take it to a science center in a Zoltan sector, or maybe just the Zoltan Homeworld, to get a Crystal dude out of it; then finally take it to another Rock sector, presumably so that he can find you his fancy ship (this is conjecture, the only sector between the Zoltan Homeworld and The Last Stand was a Rock sector). Of course, I missed that last stage. Looking on the half-completed wiki, it seems like a pretty nice ship.

And yeah, right now FTL has hijacked everything, but it'll blow over once Torchlight 2 comes out, for me at least.

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