Rob Zacny

Episode 187: Faster Than Light, Slower Than Death

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Michael Hermes joins Rob, Troy, and Julian to talk about FTL. Why FTL understands why we like space, its lovely simplicity, and why unfairness is cool.

Read Troy on FTL, then read Rob on his rendezvous with death.

Listen here

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This game is a hoot. Getting a ship and crew to where it's REALLY going is so rewarding because it is so difficult and unlikely. When it happens, it's a thing of beauty. Until, of course, it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

Good episode!

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Entertaining podcast as usual!

Really enjoying my time with FTL, although I haven't plumbed the depths or made hardly any progress without being utterly slaughtered from out of the blue. It's got a hint of rogue-like about it, but that's just mainly tied in with the procedural generation and the perma-death I feel. The games biggest strengths are that you personally control a crew and they interact with (in a meaningful way) with the ships systems, which you can then tweak to your hearts content depending upon your success. So there's this coherence between the disparate mechanics, which a lot of other games just mismatch.

I've found playing FTL solo to be rewarding, but sometimes feels like your'e gaming the system, trial and error style, just to make it a bit farther than you did last time. However, a big difference which put a lot more emphasis on the narrative and the outcomes, and my personal enjoyment - was playing alongside another person. And having a discussion about the decisions made, or the path through the sector to take, and how many more jumps can we squeeze in - just made the playthrough come more alive. Like Kirk having Spock to confer with. It just felt a better experience.

Playing it, made me contrast the game with something more traditional like Nexus the Jupiter Incident, whereby you control your ships systems, but you have very little control over your crew. Obviously that game is mission based, and very visual - but ultimately it serves a similar need in the sci fi gamers lust to just boldly go where no man has gone before. Imagine the Nexus engine, with planning/crew controls of FTL, and a procedurely generated sandbox to go and explore. I'm going weak at the knees just at the thought of it :)

The simplistic combat reminded me very much of a game such as Smugglers 4, abstracted, but having a quick-fire recharge timer based mechanic that kept it interesting enough. Niels Bauer's game lacks the UI polish of FTL, and it's very clicky on the mouse to play, but it does have a lunchtime play aesthetic that I also get from FTL. Smugglers does more traditional stuff like trading and what not.

The discussion lead on to general rogue-likes, and I'm very love/hate with most of them. If they're too deep and steeped in their own self importance, it's difficult to break the barrier and enjoy the experience. I think it's to do with the amount of time and effort you have to invest to get anything out of them. I prefer much more immediate games, such as Cardinal Quest, or The Eye of Maj'Eyal (TOME). One of my all time favourite rogue-likes (more party based dungeon crawl) was a game called FastCrawl. It was very stylish, simple to pick up, but had enough depth to make a short burst of it satisfying. I get the same sort of buzz out of the combat in Winter Wolves' Loren: The Amazon Princess, but that has a lot of story and anime characterisation romance going on in the background too! Similar but less polished combat is also found in their earlier Poser modelled RPG card game Magic Stones. Anyway, I'm digressing big time here, from rogue-likes to more quick blast turn based strategy RPG's centered around combat.

The last game that come to mind as I was playing through FTL was Digital Eel's Strange Adventures in Digital Space and their Weird Worlds Return to Infinite Space. They are space exploration games that run about 20 minutes long, and have a rogue-like feel to your movements across the starmap. It's just a shame I didn't click with their combat components at all.

So fingers crossed the FTL guys get to enhance and further develop their game, expanding it with even more of your average sci fi gamers rewards. I'm sold on the concept and am in for the long haul. I just need to make sure I have Bruce at the tactical helm. Today I found out you can rename your crew members... now you too can pilot the starship 3MA, with Troy, Rob, Tom, Bruce and Julian manning their stations. With Hermes the Comms droid keeping everyone calm and coherent. ;)

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i finally beat this on my 47th game (playing on easy).

for me, the first 20 hours of playing this game has done "just 1 more game" much better than any standard strategy game has done "just 1 more turn"

I hate the lack of transparency and huge reliance on luck, but despite that it's the only singleplayer game I've stayed up til 6 AM playing.

the decisions are way more interesting than optimizing some routine against incompetent AIs in a typical 4X

Blindly boarding a drone without oxygen is a great surprise the first time, but trying choice A 10 times and getting a bad result every time is just game-ruining. There's a very strong case for just spelling out that it's a 90% chance of outcome A, 10% chance of outcome B and then letting the player weigh the risk against the reward. I think FTL is fun as a strategy game, but pretty poor as a narrative which makes me favor transparency. There simply isn't a large enough variety of interesting events to sustain a story after a few hours of playing it, especially when you are replaying the same encounters in the early levels over and over and over again.

Consulting wikia during the game in lieu of a reference manual (like the Civiliopedia) just to see what decisions you are making reduces some of the frustration. At its core, FTL is a resource management game, and knowing the specifications and costs of weapons / drones is important to that decision-making process. The game's simplicity is awesome because it lets you learn the rules very quickly, but I found it confusing to keep track of which weapons were worth having without having the tables open. The game does a very poor job of making the "upgrades" feel like upgrades because the damage per power consumption often goes down.

I think the game needs more customization / variety early on. Maybe randomizing the starting races of your crew or the starting weapons would be a nice mode. Right now you get that by playing different ships, but unlocking those is a very very very slow process. And some things are just too unbalanced. Getting bad luck or good luck shouldn't alter the game as much as it does.

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re: the boardgame-like quality of FTL - in addition to Battlestations, which Archinerd mentioned, the game designers cite Space Alert as an influence, and that will be pretty clear to anyone familiar with both games. Space Alert is also totally sweet for incorporating a lot of video game concepts into it's design: it's a real time cooperative game (totally great to play if you have friends with a serious analysis paralysis problem), and it also introduces game concepts and difficulty gradually rather than all at once. Both Space Alert and FTL deal with randomized enemies, and having a crew manage weapons, shields, power levels of the ship, etc. Where FTL differs from Space Alert is that it stretches out the whole concept into a campaign.

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A game I meant to mention, tying into the use of blast doors to force unwanted intruders to exit your space vessel, was the game Evacuation, a sort of puzzle game where you have to plan the jettison of nasty monsters in your spaceship by opening and closing different coloured blast doors. You can play it on the web for free, or you can get it for iOS too.

http://www.foddy.net/Evacuation.html

I tried to use this sort of tactic to rid myself of intruders in FTL last night, but it didn't go down all that well. I'd huddled my men into the medbay, and opened a doorway path to the outside, where the intruders where. But they made a bee-line for my O2 generator and they took it out. So we were all suffocating slowly regardless of my blast door shennanigans. I rushed my men to the O2 bay to try and fix it, but there were intruders waiting there to spank them. If the O2 was on, I'd have overpowered the invaders, but sadly, by the time my men had won the fight, they were also passing out and dying around the O2 generator. :(

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A game I meant to mention, tying into the use of blast doors to force unwanted intruders to exit your space vessel, was the game Evacuation, a sort of puzzle game where you have to plan the jettison of nasty monsters in your spaceship by opening and closing different coloured blast doors. You can play it on the web for free, or you can get it for iOS too.

http://www.foddy.net/Evacuation.html

I tried to use this sort of tactic to rid myself of intruders in FTL last night, but it didn't go down all that well. I'd huddled my men into the medbay, and opened a doorway path to the outside, where the intruders where. But they made a bee-line for my O2 generator and they took it out. So we were all suffocating slowly regardless of my blast door shennanigans. I rushed my men to the O2 bay to try and fix it, but there were intruders waiting there to spank them. If the O2 was on, I'd have overpowered the invaders, but sadly, by the time my men had won the fight, they were also passing out and dying around the O2 generator. :(

The trick is to open all of the doors the instant the teleport happens and then close the pilot and medbay doors and send your people in there before resuming play. If you do that the intruders won't have time to destroy anything they will have to run for the medbay if that's the closest system with air

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Nobody's mentioned "Psi 5 Trading Company" yet. It's a similar concept, in many ways, though less episodic. The contrast between the two games is illuminating, and both are lots of fun. It's worth hunting down a C64 emulator and trying Psi 5 if you like FTL.

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The game seems interesting but I don't think I will enjoy it. What I really want out of a spaceship simulator is to make tactical decisions like slingshot around that planet and use the momentum to exit the pull of the sun before it goes supernova. Simply choosing whether to target their weapons or their shields is too bland for me, especially since there is very little difference in most cases.

I generally hate games where it comes down to a simple optimization equation, especially with all the luck that disrupts that. I want to make difficult choices that a computer can't solve, engage in complex interactions with other ship captains (bluff, intimidate) and use advanced technology to get an edge (think Jango Fett vs Obi Wan in Episode 2)

Its a great concept for a game but a little to casual and simplistic I think. I'm sure I will pick it up eventually for a few hours of enjoyment.

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The game seems interesting but I don't think I will enjoy it. What I really want out of a spaceship simulator is to make tactical decisions like slingshot around that planet and use the momentum to exit the pull of the sun before it goes supernova. Simply choosing whether to target their weapons or their shields is too bland for me, especially since there is very little difference in most cases.

I generally hate games where it comes down to a simple optimization equation, especially with all the luck that disrupts that. I want to make difficult choices that a computer can't solve, engage in complex interactions with other ship captains (bluff, intimidate) and use advanced technology to get an edge (think Jango Fett vs Obi Wan in Episode 2)

Its a great concept for a game but a little to casual and simplistic I think. I'm sure I will pick it up eventually for a few hours of enjoyment.

I honestly can't take anyone that uses the prequel movies as evidence very seriously, I'm afraid. ;)

And if you want really epic battles of maneuver, then this is not the game for you. It's a matter of taste and opinion, of course, though I do think that FTL is a game that is affordable and significant enough in its purity that everyone should at least take a look at it, even if it's just in blog posts or on Youtube.

But it's too dismissive to just say this is an optimization equation, because it isn't. These are judgments you make on the fly, you can't optimize everything, and - as I said on the show - you sometimes have to decide to run even if that means losing the chance for extra scrap, having taken a beating for nothing. Yeah, there's luck. FTL may not be to your taste, but it's like a Baldur's Gate mage battle compared to the running and dodging you might see in Skyrim; both very different ways of doing medieval fantasy battles, but the the measure/counter measure stuff in FTL and BG has a rhythm and can get frantic even if you pause.

It's a simple game, but that's part of why it's so amazing. I can't count the number of devs in my twitter stream who are kicking themselves for not thinking of this first. It wouldn't be too hard to imagine a more complex and timing/reflex dependent FTL, but it would be a quite different game.

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I honestly can't take anyone that uses the prequel movies as evidence very seriously, I'm afraid. ;)

And if you want really epic battles of maneuver, then this is not the game for you. It's a matter of taste and opinion, of course, though I do think that FTL is a game that is affordable and significant enough in its purity that everyone should at least take a look at it, even if it's just in blog posts or on Youtube.

But it's too dismissive to just say this is an optimization equation, because it isn't.

<snip>

Very well put Troy.

[Although, a space 4x, or rpg/tactics game which did simulate a newtonian galaxy/solar system would be great.]

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I've had a damned good time with FTL so far, but I'm also kind of intrigued with the sort of progress all of you have made. Granted, I did watch the IT livestream of FTL, so I had a slight edge compared with just playing the tutorial, but according to my Stats I've only played 18 games and I already beat it. On easy, mind you, I won't lie, but I did it pretty early on with a lucky acquisition of a Hull Bomb and two lasers as well as maxed out shields. I don't recall if I had drones or cloaking or both, I wish the high scores made notes of your final loadout.

Now that I've beat the game, I've found that the more interesting challenge is seeing how far I can get with each of the loadouts. The Engi Cruiser Type B is so far the most intriguing I've see, because it has no crew except for one single Engi. I have no idea how to make that work.

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But it's too dismissive to just say this is an optimization equation, because it isn't.

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.

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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.

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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. It seems like the more practice I put in, the more strictly battles are divided into the trivial and the impossible.

I've never had a battle that was "impossible"

not once

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When I found myself in truly impossible battles, it was often because I didn't farm earlier sectors aggressively enough. Or i just didn't have the brains to jump away when it became clear I could never keep their shields down long enough to cripple them. Although I definitely feel like I've jumped into systems where I just get clobbered and there is no way I could reasonably have been prepared to survive that encounter.

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Yep, some battles are unwinnable with whatever gear you've found and that's the luck of the draw. Some tough battles you can win with clever energy distribution or a solid plan of cycling your weapons and shields.

But sometimes you see a centaur hunter on level 2 of the dungeon and you are screwed. Roguelikes do not play fair. The fact you can farm systems pretty efficiently in FTL makes it much fairer than it could be.

DO NOT rush for the exit - spend as much time as you can in a zone before you have to leap out.

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I agree that FTL can be reduced to an optimization problem, just like every other strategy game.

the difference is that FTL will still provide a challenge, whereas a typical strategy game will just have you hitting the win button for a dozen hours once you "solve" it.

this is because FTL's threat model and risk reward equations work well, whereas every symmetrical strategy game is basically crippled by incompetent AI.

I do wish FTL had more strategic variety and less randomness, but those are almost mutually exclusive in a game like this. FTL's unpredictability is the reason why it works. Without that, finding the "right move" would be too easy.

I don't know if every game is winnable, but people improve as they keep playing it because experience is a crucial part of understanding the potential risks and the potential rewards. It's a welcome change from the typical "spend 50 hours learning the rules. then win every single match"

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But sometimes you see a centaur hunter on level 2 of the dungeon and you are screwed. Roguelikes do not play fair. The fact you can farm systems pretty efficiently in FTL makes it much fairer than it could be.

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.

this is because FTL's threat model and risk reward equations work well, whereas every symmetrical strategy game is basically crippled by incompetent AI.

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

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