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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 foun

• otikik 13y ago
  You must be playing without using pause. Spacebar is your friend on this game.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • WA 13y ago
    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.
    • danielbarla 13y ago
      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): http://ftlwiki.com/wiki/The_Kestrel http://ftlwiki.com/wiki/The_Kestrel 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...
    • blakeley 13y ago
      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.
    • lobotryas 13y ago
      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.
    • dalore 13y ago
      Don't use autofire.
      • jonny_eh 13y ago
        Unless you have an ion cannon with a 5 second cooldown.
    • menubar 13y ago
      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.
      • jonnathanson 13y ago
        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?
      • itsybitsycoder 13y ago
        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.
      • PhasmaFelis 13y ago
        A single level of door upgrades is often enough, I've found. The second level is iffier. But do keep in mind that door upgrades and a few others (I forget which) don't require extra power. That makes them much more attractive.
        • PhasmaFelis 13y ago
          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.
          • PeterisP 13y ago
    • InclinedPlane 13y ago
      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.
    • araes 13y ago
      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.
• bhaak 13y ago
  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.
• jere 13y ago
  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. http://crawl.develz.org/other/manual.html#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq http://crawl.develz.org/other/manual.html#n-philosophy-pas-d...
  • chongli 13y ago
    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.
    • aamar 13y ago
      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%.
      • chongli 13y ago
• chongli 13y ago
  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.
• jonnathanson 13y ago
  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.)
• dangayle 13y ago
  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.