Rob Zacny

Episode 187: Faster Than Light, Slower Than Death

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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.

The one thing about many roguelikes (and Spelunky and Isaac qualify, though maybe not for this point) is that there is always the problem of the road not traveled. How many times have you passed on going to a store because you wanted a little more scrap before you went shopping? And then when you turned around to leap back, it was too late? Or went to a store and had to either buy that pike beam or patch your hull - you couldn't do both. Maybe the game could have been won if you looked in one store and not the other. But you choose. You always choose. And there's no way to no one way or another.

Unless you want to always have enough money and always know that you can get what you want at a store, then games like this will sometimes put you in a really crap situation. Like facing a boss in Titan Quest and realizing you sold all your lightning resistant armour. Or equipping an artifact sword in ADOM and learning it is cursed, but you have an illiterate character that can't read spells and has to find a priest to fix that.

This game can be frustrating and annoying, but I never get so annoyed that I just stop, like I do with Dungeons of Dredmor - also quite an unfair game at times, but with more room for you to customize your character and break the system a little. I think this is why they keep changing it in updates. FTL games are short, certainly too short to get too annoyed by. And I've only hit the final battle a couple of times.

Yeah, the AI sometimes does some weird things, but I think the ion bombs in a room (or sometimes off the starboard bow) are a way to make the AI 'miss' from time to time.

Is it a slot machine? A little, but so is Diablo and Torchlight, but they are longer games and can't afford to have you crap out in level 1. But people DO improve while playing this game.

Is FTL simple? Absolutely. This is a not a game full of depth and amazement. It could be just another story generating system. Some people will burnout or scum save or whatever.

I think that it is an elegant game that says a lot about design, user interface, importance of information and how to keep recurring "adventure" bits interesting. I won't persuade you like it or tell you that you are having fun when you're not. After 50 hours in a game you don't like much, you know how you feel.

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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.

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I mostly agree with what Problem Machine has said. Yesterday, after loosing a game in sector seven due to a lack of decent ordnance, I searched my memory for weapons and offensive droids offered to me for sale. I determined that it was possible to win the game, but only if I had purchased some very expensive equipment in the first two sectors; equipment that I wouldn't have been able to use until much later, paid for with arguably the most crucial scrap in the game, the first 200 you collect. Random is good, but not this kind of random. Why are top tier items in sector one, and long term-oriented augments in sector seven? Would it ruin the game if it were programmed such that, in the situation where you weren't buying the same nine items the stores kept showing you, it would show you another nine?

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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.

Comparing it to Baldur's Gate... okay you win. I'll bite.

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I mostly agree with what Problem Machine has said. Yesterday, after loosing a game in sector seven due to a lack of decent ordnance, I searched my memory for weapons and offensive droids offered to me for sale. I determined that it was possible to win the game, but only if I had purchased some very expensive equipment in the first two sectors; equipment that I wouldn't have been able to use until much later, paid for with arguably the most crucial scrap in the game, the first 200 you collect. Random is good, but not this kind of random. Why are top tier items in sector one, and long term-oriented augments in sector seven? Would it ruin the game if it were programmed such that, in the situation where you weren't buying the same nine items the stores kept showing you, it would show you another nine?

I think there's a lot to be said about the design gulf between a game that offers you all possible choices and a game that offers you only useful choices. I've seen vocal advocates for both, though I tend towards the latter.

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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.

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Remember that "solving" the game probably involves winning often (whatever that means), but not winning all the time. I don't think anyone can argue that you can learn the game well enough to win every time. Every game might be winnable if you play it a certain way, but there's no way to know that unless you save + reload.

What you can do is make educated decisions that maximize your chance of victory (if you look at a sufficiently large number of games at a time). It's a shame that they don't expose the specific information in the game, but it is exactly the same every time. For example, each encounter has a fixed probability distribution of outcomes, based on your high-level equipment and crew types. Each store has a fixed probability distribution of items. Each universe is procedurally generated (with a procedure that admittedly needs refinement). If it was random, then choice would be irrelevant and people wouldn't improve as they keep playing.

It reminds me of Civ-like games which still rely on strategy despite random tribal village events, random maps, random combat, and random chance of punishment/reward for choosing to spend resources on X instead of Y. It's a fact that this kind of luck completely ruins many matches, and there are games that are completely impossible to win versus a competent opponent. But this randomness comes with irreplaceable benefits. My favorite is suspense. No game has been able to match that feeling in civ4 when the enemy is going for my city and I have no idea whether my force is enough to defend it. All I can do is watch as the turn timer winds down. I swear I get 120 beats per minute during those turns. it's probably not healthy...

Anyways, FTL (with some basic balance + UI + information enhancements) would be quite awesome because it's so rare for a game's difficulty to depend entirely on making tough choices about how to spend resources. Luck is part of the system, but it isn't responsible for your overall skill. Your average score improves over time because you make smarter decisions and get a better idea of risk vs reward (through quest knowledge and game experience), not because you're getting better dice rolls as you play more and more.

It's also nice that the game is easy to learn and that the process of improving is so enjoyable and rewarding and fast-paced. It's one of the few strategy games where you get better simply by playing the game the way it's mean to be played instead of by micromanaging excessively or by learning complicated rules and subsystems or by figuring out the quirks of some cheating AI.

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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.

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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.

You know you'll certainly be running into 3 shield scouts long before you actually run into them. If all you have is a glaive at that point in the game then that was a long term mistake. At some point in the earlier sectors you could have purchased an ion/bomb/missile/burst/boarding drone/antiship drone/etc. I'm not sure I've ever not found at least a teleporter, and anyone with level 2 tele can survive taking out the shields, or Rock/Crystal even at level 1 can do it.

The closest thing to unwinnable situations I run into are the ion storms, especially if you beam into one already damaged fleeing a fight. And they've really taught me how drastically you can cut power and still make it by constantly shuffling, and there's more to the skill ceiling than you might realize at first. When two weapons are coming your way, one laser, one missile, you can unpower your weapons/shields, power sheilds, absorb the lasers, then immediately depower shields to maximize dodge chances for the missile attack, power weapon just long enough for one flurry, back to shields, and so on. Pausing at some point to recharge to air.

I think teleporters smooth out the item availability a bit too, simply because you find so many more items when capturing ships intact. I think I've won every game where I got an early teleporter + the aug that lets you go back to any previously visited jump.

I do agree the game is not 100% winnable every time you play though. Especially with something weird like the stealth ship you can get pretty boned by not finding the right thing. But there is quite a lot of room for skilled players to up their odds dramatically. This is probably obvious to anyone but when you choose your route through the system, you want to plan a route that touches as many adjacent nodes as you can to maximize your chances of finding a store. I can't imagine getting all the way to level 3 shields without at least running into a few, even with the worst possible luck.

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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?

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I'm not sure how exactly enemy shield strength scales with sectors... it feels like every ship gets a fixed number of points randomly distributed, which when applied to crewless ships, results in slightly higher caps for weapons and shields since there is no o2 or medbays. But even so running into 3 shields in sector 2 still seems like an a outlier -- did that ship have just one weapon point? Why not jump away from that battle, use the glaive on the rest of the easier prey in sectors 2 and 3?

125 for the teleporter is a better investment... if you don't have another way to deal 3 shields, because otherwise later sectors will be a brick wall. I suppose you could say choices like are dependent on whether you want to maximize how far you get in an average playthrough vs your odds of getting a victory that game. Shields seems better if you luck out and find a way to deal with shields later. Though boarding pays for itself soon enough (and more crew as loot) so teleporter may be better in either case.

TWO defense drones and a med bay, and I only have missiles and boarding party? JUMP. A rare combo even in the later sectors.

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This is getting a few days ago now, but it had enough to completely shred my ship before I could charge my jump or my glaive. Possibly a beam heavy config, such as a beam drone and/or a pike beam.

You really think that 125 for teleporter is a better investment than shields? You can't do much damage to an enemy ship until you disable their med bay if they have one, and in that entire time (minus cloak time) their weapons are free to wreak havoc on your shieldless ship. Simply, crew teleporters are super effective, but only when you can force a stalemate for long enough for them to go to work.

edit: It's actually entirely possible that a lot of what bothers me is that missiles are fucking stupid. They take 6 scrap a shot and are easily neutralized by a single defense drone. They're an absolute joke compared to bombs.

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Yes, missiles are probably the most useless weapon in the game. I rarely bother with beams either and just stick with bombs and lasers. I just roughed up the boss on Easy with four laser weapons equipped. He didn't stand a chance.

I have to disagree with a sentiment aired on the podcast that the game would be better if it had better (and more) feedback. I don't want the game to specifically tell me that my oxygen is not on or that I've left a door open. The whole game, not just the interface but the ship as well, serves as an overview on which you can elegantly read all the information you need. I like that you learn to spot things quickly, that you are forced to look as opposed to just do what is suggested. It's really not that hard, but it's very satisfying.

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I don't think it needs an alert klaxon or anything, since that would be super annoying if you intentionally powered down your oxygen for a few points of evasion during a wave of attacks or something, but I'd like to see the icons actually darked out on the ship or something. That would be consistent with other design decisions, such as showing you which systems are damaged and destroyed-- which themselves create the expectation that one would be able to see something like a system being unpowered.

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When you start a game of FTL you are in a weak and vulnerable ship with an inadequate crew. The path in front of you is long, dark, mysterious, and deadly. Every jump is a leap into the unknown. There is no guarantee that you are going to win. There is no guarantee that your best efforts will be rewarded.

I love that about this game. You Are Probably Going To Lose, And It Might (Or Might Not) Be Your Fault. That's a huge part of the thrill. I think too often we lose sight of the fact that the choices that are made in life are only made on the information at hand, and sometimes the optimal choice leads to failure, while sub-optimal choices somehow work out. In war, sports, and business, this is the way of things. But too often people analyze these things (in hindsight and with full information) with no recognition of this basic fact. So it pleases me to play a game that doesn''t give a damn about whether I win. The universe does not care about my feelings.

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Well, if one takes it as given that there's always a statistically optimal choice, then the end result once one begins making statistically optimal choices is the game becomes a pure slot machine. Thus, when one is playing the game, it's an extremely fun and exciting experience for as long as the game provides experiences which the player has not learned to optimize. However, and this is where being a relatively simple game comes to shoot it in the foot, the space of available experiences to encounter is relatively small, and depending on how quickly one learns system optimization the map of optimal strategies can be built relatively quickly after encountering each of these. After encountering all of them and deciphering the optimal move, there's no work left for the mind to do, and it becomes a slot machine.

Up until that point, the randomness is awesome, since it greatly increases the possibility space of novel encounters.

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I feel like FTL, with its randomness, presents to you many different paths for the optimal choice. For example, a good base strategy is to improve engines and shields, then work on increasing firepower. But if you somehow find yourself with mantises and rock men in your crew, then it might make sense to grab a teleporter before doing some of your basic upgrades. Or if you find yourself with a high-power/long recharge weapon, investing in stealth makes a lot of sense (while if you find yourself with four low-power/rapid fire lasers then stealth is often wasted).

I don't mean to suggest that there are not some paths that are better on average than others. I also don't mean to suggest that FTL is a game of infinite choice or variety. But it is hardly a game of roulette, either.

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Though I agree with the sentiment, Problem Machine, I think FTL is complex enough that it takes a long time before you have explored every option. Just consider the quite wide array of different ships (9 base ships each with an alternative scheme): factoring in those variables alone will take you dozens of hours. It's true that you start to encounter the same scenarios again and again, but after 34 hours of play I am far from experiencing this as a slot machine. I've only really mastered two cruisers, the rest is still unknown and exciting territory.

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Just because the space of viable choices you can make is circumscribed by the chances the game affords you doesn't mean there isn't, 99% of the time, an obvious best choice. The choice of whether or not to grab a teleporter is based mostly on whether you have enough defense and crew to make it worthwhile. If you do, buy it, if not you can wait for the next store. Basically, at any given moment there's a few things you can grab which will make your ship viable, and once you know what they are it's mostly just a matter of which you encounter first. Cloaking device is nearly always worth it if you can spare the scrap, since for just one power you can flash it to avoid an entire volley. Learning new ships is fun, but the game is CLEARLY balanced around the Kestrel so the others are all kind of caveat emptor.

I may try picking it up again and see if I still feel this way, though. My roommate has unlocked the slug ship and I haven't, and this simply cannot stand.

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I thought I should update after playing the game. First of all, I got primed on the game by watching (not super focused, it was in the background while I worked) someone play through the game 8 times on youtube. It really helped understand how all the systems worked and what the basic strategy was. It did not spoil very much, except for showing me the boss battle and what gear is necessary to stand a chance.

I have only been playing on Easy, so the extra scrap makes the game more fun. You get to fully upgrade your ship, buy most of the cool goodies you see, and experience the full battle potential of your ship if you make it to the end. I managed to beat the game on my first go, and I have a 50% success rate out of 4 games. If you consider getting to the boss a success, which I sort of do, then 75%!

The game is very fun, but only if you have a good combination of gear that works. If you don't have a way to deal with enemy missiles or a way to pierce heavy shields, the battles are frustrating. Occasionally you can get stuck against a powerful enemy that rips you apart before you have a chance to escape, but that is thankfully pretty rare. It is much more satisfying when you get slowly beaten down by consecutive battles and die before you get to a repair point, in my opinion.

As I expected, playing as the Stealth ship was the most fun for me, though once I got the hang of the Engi's Ion + Drones strategy is was kind of fun. I was lucky that I unlocked several of the ships quickly, and without needing a walkthrough (which I plan to use for the most difficult unlocks). Stealth makes the game very easy, as does the ion bombs. A little re-balancing might be needed.

I guess the nicest thing about the game is that I don't really have a strong urge to save/reload like I do in most games. Everything is expendable, I even stopped naming my crewmen and ship (though thats partially because you can't rename new recruits). Yeah it sucks if you lose someone with experience but since your ship systems can't get permanently damaged most of your progress is secure. Compared to roguelikes where your awesome magic items regularly get damaged or destroyed by monsters, its very easy to swallow. Sorry crewmen!

The combat is very hectic and requires intensive multitasking to both keep your ship in order and wreak chaos upon the enemy. I found myself not using the pause feature enough and letting my guys die from negligence or forgetting to shoot my weapons. I think I was accurate in saying that it is an optimization puzzle, but the atmosphere and extra mechanics make it a fun puzzle, at least for the first few hours. I have pretty much gotten down the timings of enemy attacks as well as how to cripple an enemy ship in the least amount of time, as well as when/where to send a boarding party. There are so many combinations of crew/equipment though so you have to relearn these things several times, so that will keep things fresh for a good while.

As for why the game is good? The shield system. It seems kind of weird but it is the key to the games complexity and tactical diversity. Because it is difficult to pierce through shields, and shields can absorb potentially an infinite amount of damage, it really recreates those classic star trek moments. I always wondered in some battles the shields would hold for a dozen shots and once it failed unimportant stuff got damaged, but when its convenient for the writer the shields or weapons could be taken offline in the initial volley from the enemy.

The way the shields work in this game it actually makes sense, and the whole "divert all power to shields" paradigm also works well. I guess the only hiccup is that you almost never invest in upgrading your systems BEFORE you upgrade your power, because power is cheaper and can be used until you afford both better shields AND 2 more bars of power. So I wish that the game made it more frequent that you have to choose where to funnel your power, especially since ion weapons disable your systems and free up power to use in other areas.

Thanks for recommending it, though its almost an inevitability with all the popularity it got. Yay for successful indie games!

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