This is one of the most perfectly balanced games I've ever played. I've come one shot from beating the end boss, but that final kill still evades me.
The great part about the game is that the beginning portion is actually quite strategic despite the battles being very easy. You really need to maximize your wins by either getting in as many battles as possible per sector or by killing opposing crews without destroying their ship. Your first 5 or so sectors really set the pace for the later game.
This is one of the most perfectly balanced games I've ever played.
Err what? I happened to play quite a few games where I advanced to sector 3 or 4, never found a good weapon in any shop. Then I was destroyed, because I couldn't kill enemies with 2 shields. And I fought as many battles as possible in each sector.
Since this happened in the majority of my games, I stopped playing.
I wouldn't say to stop playing. I was losing a lot of games because I had the wrong notion about how beams worked. It was fairly easy after that. And fun!
But you are exactly right that calling the game "perfectly balanced" is ridiculous. It's a roguelike. There are so many random elements and sometimes you just get a string of bad dice rolls. This topic is brought up explicitly in the DCSS faq (another hugely popular roguelike) and I think it applies here:
>The possibility of unavoidable deaths is a larger topic in computer games. Ideally, a game like this would be really challenging and have both random layout and random course of action, yet still be winnable with perfect play. This goal seems out of reach. Thus, computer games can be soft in the sense that optimal play ensures a win. Apart from puzzles, though, this means that the game is solved from the outset; this is where the lack of a human game-master is obvious. Alternatively, they can be hard in the sense that unavoidable deaths can occur. We feel that the latter choice provides much more fun in the long run.
The possibility of unavoidable deaths is a larger topic in computer games. Ideally, a game like this would be really challenging and have both random layout and random course of action, yet still be winnable with perfect play.
Just the very notion of perfect play somehow ensuring a win is rather silly in the context of imperfect information and games of chance. Look at the game of poker: even a heavy underdog can win if he catches perfect.
Not at all; it depends on how strong the effects of chance are. Poker is typically played in a way (ante amounts, etc.) that gives skilled players a meaningful but not overwhelming advantage.
Single-player games, even those with random elements, can be designed such that the odds of winning in perfect play can be 100% or (easier) extremely close to 100%.
> Not at all; it depends on how strong the effects of chance are.
A little off-topic, but I've been trying to come up with a way to quantify (or at least usefully bucket) the strength of the effects of chance on a game. Do you have any ideas for how do to that?
I've thought about how to quantify the effects of skill on a game. A first-order estimate would quantify luck as the inverse of skill.
In a completely symmetric multiplayer game, Player A is measurably more skilled than Player B if, over a large number of games, Player A's win rate is higher than 50% by a statistically significant margin. This definition can be extended to both single-player games, and to non-symmetric multiplayer games, by saying that after Player A and Player B have played the same scenario a large number of times, that Player A's win rate is higher than Player B's by a statistically significant margin. The "same scenario" meaning identical starting conditions for single-player, or the same opponents for multi-player. This can be extended again by saying "the same scenario" means drawing starting conditions or opponents from the same random distribution (by relying on the nature of statistical significance).
So that's how you would define pairwise player skill. From this, there are several ways to determine total rankings for a population of players, using Elo or linear algebra techniques. I'm eliding details here because this is the step where they matter the least.
Finally, in order to determine the impact of Luck vs Skill: Take two players at different skill levels. Say, Player X is at the median skill level, and Player Y is two standard deviations above that (top 5%). What is Player Y's win rate over Player X? The closer to 100%, the more skill-based the game is. The closer to 50%, the more luck-based the game is.
Note that in general this will depend heavily on which two skill levels you pick to compare. For example, Player X is median, Player Y is top 5%, Player Z is top 1%. Players Y & Z could have a 100% win rate over Player X, but Player Z only has a 51% win rate over Player Y. This game would probably be described as heavily skill-based, but with a low skill ceiling.
In a one-player game, you can write a competent, consistent computer player. Then use the standard deviation in performance of that bot over many runs as a measure of chance in the game.
In a multiplayer game, write a skilled/optimum player and a naive/basic player. The win-percentage of the weak bot can be a good measure of chance.
Many roguelikes (a category FTL is usually included in) have bots which facilitate this kind of analysis. But since competent bots are sometimes difficult to write well, some games also use "scummers" and/or stats modules which generate millions of randomly-generated levels and compute difficulty or reward heuristics for each, ensuring that the st. dev. is within desired ranges. If the heuristics are good, this can be sufficient.
Another option in a hosted game or one that can phone home is to have real-live players be the guinea pigs instead of the bots. Same basic principles apply.
It depends entirely how you define a particular game. My poker example is in reference to winning a single hand. In that case, one hand is a single game. This makes poker highly variable and effectively impossible to win every time despite perfect play. In real life poker, this is mitigated by playing many hands over a long period of time.
In the case of single-player games such as FTL, people really do mean one single game when they talk about winning or losing. Otherwise, your odds of winning no matter how bad you are begin to approach 100% if you play enough games.
Agreed. I was considering a "game" of poker to be a series of hands sufficient to determine a winner, for example, a freeze-out tournament, where hands are played until every player but one loses all their chips.
Reportedly, skilled FTL players can win nearly every game. Similar things have been reported about certain other roguelikes.
I have a friend that can beat that game every other time it seems. Me? I've beaten it twice with 60 tries. I've never felt accomplishment quite as great as when I finally beat the game for the first time after the 52nd try. I literally stood up and shouted! Don't think I've ever done that before...
How much damage were you taking in those battles? How much scrap were you spending on minor upgrades (doors, oxygen, medical, shields, etc) or repairs?
A good player can often get through the first sector without repairing at all, without spending a single point of scrap on minor upgrades and fighting as many battles as possible. This lets you buy a big ticket item such as a cloaking device, a teleporter or a powerful weapon right away. Big ticket items (especially the teleporter) have the ability to pay for themselves many times over.
The real beauty and elegance of FTL's design is that it makes opportunity costs a real factor in game play. Buying a lot of small upgrades makes you a lot more survivable early on but severely restricts your total scrap potential over the course of an entire game. The key to winning FTL is to coast along on as minimal a budget as possible until you land a big ticket item and then invest heavily into it so that you can earn more scrap and take a lot less damage going forward. Of course, none of this strategy works if you aren't playing battles very carefully and making optimal use of the pause button to coordinate your weapons.
I'm not sure I would call it "perfectly balanced" but remember "dying is fun".
If you die repetitively, you should try a change of strategy. Not finding any weapons? Try drones or crew transporters. Only finding wimpy weapons? Can you somehow combine their features and synchronize the attack to make them more powerful than they are alone?
But if you have a problem enjoying the irony of a suffocation death of your crew because you opened the airlocks to suffocate some intruders and the intruders took out your oxygen system with their last breaths, FTL might be too cruel for you.
The genius of the game is that it's really about deep strategy and tactical optimization, despite the appearance of random chance as a hugely deterministic factor. The more you play -- and it took me hundreds of failed runs through to grok this point -- the more you realize that chance has something to do with it, but not all that much. As in poker, you get the hands you're dealt -- but how you play them makes all the difference.
I recommend reading up on the prevailing FAQs for the game. They go into great detail about how to optimize your runs through the first few sectors to gather the resources and items you'll need to survive the last half. For the life of me, I've never been able to beat the boss at the end of the game. I've come close, but personal circumstances forced me to stop playing for awhile, so I never climbed all the way up the learning curve. Even still, it's remarkable how different a player I was at that point from what I was when I started.
(I still enjoyed "fucking-around" runs, where I just sort of let stuff happen and bounced around from adventure to adventure. But that's a very different style from the min-maxing one needs to do to win.)
But pause doesn't help me get through their shields if I have shitty weapons. I read some tips below and will try it again. Maybe I just bought the wrong stuff all the time.
To add to what others have said, one of the most important tactics is timing your weapon usage in combat.
For example, if you're using the Kestrel (Missile and Laser weapons), then you want to hit Shields with the missile first to disable them. Only if you actually downed the shields do you want to shoot the laser so that all three shots have a chance at doing damage (preferably on the Weapons subsystem). If everything hits (which happens very often in the first 4 sectors), then you've just disabled the enemy's shields AND weapons - they are now easy pickings.
In summary, never use autofire (unless you have Ion weapons) and time your shots so each weapon gets a maximum chance of doing damage.
The real trick to consistently beating this game is to always horde at least 75 scrap, and buy a Teleporter as soon as possible. Then, buy extra crew members. Preferably, these will be Mantis > Rock > Most Others > Engi & Zoltan. Then, near the start of every battle, fire a single volley to set things on fire / distract crews, and immediately send over your boarding party to begin harassing them. If there are too many, pick on them, or attack things while they try to put out fires. Often, this will cause them to give up on one repair, wasting time while they run around the ship. If they're a small crew, then just roll over them with Mantis / Rock strength. Just make sure you don't attack too much, or you may kill your boarders.
This is doubly effective, as if you kill all of a crew, then you (almost) always get the best reward possible, which often contains bonus equipment, and up to 50% more scrap.
By the end, you'll often have so much money that you'll be capped on energy, and just buying alternate max systems. Also, always destroy rebel ship Medbays, and the Fire Beam and Bio Beam are devastating for this strategy.
Finally, as noted in another person's comment, Teleporter makes the last boss remarkably easy. Just Teleport into each of the weapon rooms and kill the operator (starting with Missiles). Notably, don't kill every crew member, or the Super AI will take over for the final boss and it goes into crazy, Ultra-mode.
Hmmm, by sectors 3 or 4, you should definitely run across something on the offensive side. This could be another weapon (and these can also be picked up outside of shops, if you are lucky), a teleporter, or a drone control / offensive done.
Even failing that, the starting ship has some decent weaponry; the missile can go through shields (so if you time it together with your lasers), you should be able to completely disable a 2-level shield with your first salvo. You may want to go for their weapons first, though. Disabling their pilot / engines removes their ability to dodge, meaning that all 3 of your lasers will hit.
I'd also recommend reading through the various wikis that exist, e.g. ftlwiki has great tips / strategies for each player ship. Here's their take on the Kestrel (starting ship):
Other simple tips would be - always attack (and defeat) slavers, they usually offer a slave in exchange for mercy, which is a great deal. If they are non-human, you will get more "blue" options, which usually have (better) rewards. Later on, simply get to level 5 to unlock the engi ship, and play around with it to get an idea of how powerful drones can be.
In summary, the gameplay is actually very balanced, and pretty deep. With a lot of skill, you should be able to get to the final level on easy most of the time (and perhaps beat the boss half the time, depending on your strategy). But being a kind of roguelike (with all its randomness), sometimes you will just have bad luck...
If you can't defeat a particular enemy you absolutely should not be fighting them. Hunker down, bring up your jump as quick as possible and get out of there. Then concentrate on building your ship up until you are more formidable.
Missiles penetrate shields. Target their shields system with your missiles and then target their weapons system with your lasers and you should make short work of most enemies. With the starting ship (The Kestrel), this strategy can get you through sector 4 without any significant upgrade.
Another useful tip is to get those doors upgraded ASAP, then work on upgrading shields. Fully upgraded doors are lifesavers when fires break out or intruders beam in.
Oh yeah: if you haven't already, always get at least level 2 doors ASAP when heading into a Mantis sector. Almost every one of those mean motherfuckers carries a teleporter, and you do not want to get up close and personal with them.
If you've got a medbay upgrade (which I like because it offers many 'good' choices to events) then you can easily defend from Mantis boarders, just make sure that you fight in your medbay where you get healed all the time, they'll teleport out when they're almost dead, though - try to disable their teleporter for that moment if you can.
A lot has been written about combat and crew strategies, and I've benefitted a great deal from reading up on those topics. But when it comes to upgrade strategies, the jury seems to be mixed. I've tended to get the most bang for my buck from shields, then doors. But I've heard arguments in either direction. Have also heard arguments (in varying degrees of persuasiveness) for prioritizing the other systems.
Can someone who's consistently beaten the game chime in on his or he preferred upgrade path?
What? Noooooo. I don't upgrade the doors until I'm well into looking for luxury upgrades after my core build. Shields are another luxury as well. Definitely favour a teleporter or a good weapon, followed by weapon systems (just enough to use all your weapons except for your missiles) and engines. Always go engines before shields!
Intruders and fires are basically a non-factor once you learn to use the pause button promptly and often.
Venting the ship also helps with fire & boarders. Both will die in an oxygen-free environment (except for boarding drones), and since breathing boarders will try to avoid rooms without oxygen, you can almost control where the boarders go. If you can direct the boarders into the medbay and fight them there, it gives you a big advantage.
I usually prefer just venting the air of the rooms attacked until the boarders reach my medbay, where my guys have an advante. If you have rockmen, you can also try to fight on rooms on fire (since they are immune they have an advantage).
If you're waiting to get good weapons through the shops, you'll always fail. They'll drop the good stuff early on when you don't have any cash, or they'll have only all drone stuff, or whatever. You have to maximize your confrontations early on, hit as many shops as you can, and try to capture ships rather than blowing them up.
The trick to beating the final boss is to have maxed teleport and cloaking. This lets you avoid all missile volleys, by cloaking just before the first few would hit and boarding the missile weapon system to disable it. Also you should murder all but one of the crew during the first battle (this is tricky, but you can take your time), so you can disable systems quickly in the second and third battles without them being repaired.
Cloaking and teleporters are great early investments, too. Cloaking saves tons of resources that would have been spent on repairs, and killing the enemy crew gives better rewards compared to blowing up the ship.
Oddly enough, I only ever made it to the final boss twice. The first time was with the stealth cruiser, which had maxed stealth and teleporting, and I got annihilated by missile volleys and those combat boarding drones.
The second time was with the Engi cruiser, and I handily beat him. I had only EMP weapons, a level 2 defense drone, and a level 2 attack drone (probably also a repair drone). I just played damage control and set the EMP weapons to autofire at the shield room. When they eventually disable it, the level 2 attack drone shredded him.
Haven't played since then (figured I'd quit while I was ahead), but this may get me back in.
How did you get that far with the stealth cruiser? I love playing the ship but I never survive past sector 3. I have logged hundreds of hours on FTL and never once beaten it with my favorite ships :(
The stealth cruiser is definitely hard to work with, and requires very precision timing on the part of the player. It's a tough ship to win fights with if it doesn't have the ability to outright destroy or cripple it's enemy as it comes out of stealth, which is why I had trouble in the final encounter.
First and foremost, it is tempting to get shields working early on, but I actually had better luck upgrading stealth first and then shields - early encounters can be destroyed before they fire at you if your weapons loadout is good. But be sure to upgrade to full shielding before getting to the end.
Basic idea for me was to charge all my weapons to full, fire if I had an opportunity to before the biggest enemy weapon, and wait for the largest enemy weapon to fire (usually a missile). As it fired, engage stealth. This gives you a really absurdly high dodge chance, and the weapons fire almost always misses.
Immediately drop stealth and fire all weapons. If the ship has a lot of shields, target shields, otherwise target weapons (none or low shields means you will hurt bad if they fire back). Generally this can cripple the enemy ship, making it so they can't effectively engage you - this is pretty vital to keeping the stealth cruiser alive. If it starts to go bad for you, stealth away, and consider leaving the engagement.
For what it's worth, my best loadout consisted of a large missile system for punching through shields to disable the shield system, an EMP bomb system for disabling defensive drones (or other systems), and a fire beam weapon I used to try and hit shields and weapons at the same time, all on an alpha strike after coming out of stealth. I also had a teleportation rig set up with two of the insectoid crew that could take the fight to the enemy - this was really useful at keeping them busy, and keeping the ship alive. Also good for when I ran out of missiles - could send them in to disable shields and / or weapons and get out.
I still got torn up by the drones sent in by the final boss though, so a good drone defense system would have been invaluable - if you stealth, they just hover around until you come out of stealth, then breach. Good luck. :-D
I basically did the same thing except my volley out of stealth went for the weapons instead of shields since I wanted to make sure it couldn't hurt me after my cloak wears off. Perhaps I should start running from less than optimal fights, usually I stick out every fight because I want all the scrap.
Yeah, targeting weapons is a great idea if the enemy has low enough shields (based on your weapons load) that you can punch through them, disable weapons completely, and then do the same for the shield, while they sit there unable to shoot you, scrambling to repair.
The problem the stealth ship has is when the enemy ship has shields and weapons in abundance (those Zoltan ships are EVIL). In this case, you have to take the harder task (and almost always take damage) and knock out shields first. I loved the long beam weapons because I could drop shields for a moment and burn apart weapons and shields on most ships.
Another important thing I would always do is not fire missiles if shields were down unless weapons were still up - you will need every one of those missiles later.
Not my approach. Maxed engines for evasion, masses of lasers, and it goes down pretty quickly. Like others have said, there's more than one way to do it.
I beat the final boss the second time I met it, without teleport or cloaking. I had maxed shields, nearly maxed engines, and a fuckton of lasers. Cloak and teleport are fantastically useful, but despite what everyone says, there is no "required" kit to beat the boss.
Cloak can't be bought on some ships. Some ships have extremely bad crew for boarding and don't even get to get some better crew. There's certainly more than one way to win it.
There are a number of ways to carry out a similar strategy, ie: kill all crew except one and destroy subsystems before trying to damage the hull.
The only ship that can't equip Cloak it is the Federation Cruiser (and its variant) and this ship has the Artillery Beam to make up for it. As for crew, between Stores and Slavers it's entirely possible to get to Mantis or, even better, two Rock crew members before facing the boss. This, at the very least, will let you take out the boss's weapons.
If you're a sucker for balance, you cannot get better than Desktop Dungeon, which just launched on Steam. That game is balanced down to the last digit. I have won DD before with a single health point remaining, 0 magic points, and all potions used. It's intense.
If you like Rogue-likes, then try Rogue Legacy, which is sort of the FTL take on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
Your strategy for FTL is correct. I like to suck the marrow from early sectors, hoarding scrap and dough while routing early baddies. I've still never beaten it, though, and I've been playing since it was dropped on the IGF in 2011!
>The only weird thing I've found: There's an option to show the reachable systems on the map, so you can plan your route through a sector in advance.
>This is quite a gameplay change from the route guessing game you encounter with the default settings, making the game easier.
>I feel a little bit like cheating when enabling this...
They patched this in and it feels weird, yeah. I wish they would tie the upgrade into the sensor systems: see one level of nodes at level 2, and the whole map at level 3. I like feeling of jumping into the uknown but i can't turn off the minmax part of my brain enough to turn off a free option.
To clarify, by balanced I mean that the difficulty is just hard enough for me to not be able to beat the game, yet subsequent play throughs are still extremely fun. I will eventually beat this game, but it will take some time.
I consistently get to the end game battle, no matter what luck I have in random events. I could have won my last few end battles if I had just played things slightly differently.
Nothing is perfect, some things are just more perfect than others ;-)
A game that lulls players into a false sense of security and then obliterates them is not "balanced"... although it's disputable whether "balance" is even a meaningful concept in a single-player game. That's a terrible feedback loop for the player. FTL has a lot to like about it and it deserves its popularity, but the game has some massive flaws related to randomness and difficulty.
The great part about the game is that the beginning portion is actually quite strategic despite the battles being very easy. You really need to maximize your wins by either getting in as many battles as possible per sector or by killing opposing crews without destroying their ship. Your first 5 or so sectors really set the pace for the later game.