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Angry Diplomat posted:It's less RNG and more Sierra-style dead-man-walking failure states wearing RNG masks and conning people at dice games. You have to know the game, and you have to know how to consistently play the odds. I'm not sure if I can seriously level the complaint that getting to that point requires you to either wiki a shitload or play a shitload, since, well, that's game mastery in theory. But something about the way FTL goes about it rubs me the wrong way. Could be simply that I hate FTL's early game as much as I do Crawls 
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Jan 12, 2016 18:35
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victrix posted:I'm not sure if I can seriously level the complaint that getting to that point requires you to either wiki a shitload or play a shitload, since, well, that's game mastery in theory. Clarity of feedback is related to game mastery but it isn't the same thing. RNG and dead-man-walking states both obscure that clarity, which makes mastery harder to develop without making the actual decisions any more interesting or deep. That's not as bad as compromising mastery, but it still sucks.
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Jan 12, 2016 19:05
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Pladdicus posted:Are there good floors to stop and grind for a bit for things you need? I always find myself getting decimated in fights, and while I know I'm supposed to steer clear of certain enemies I've never quitwe sure if I just haven't got my numbers big enough or I'm picking bad fights? I assume this falls to just play more and figure it out but any advice is appreciated. The only floor I feel the need to grind on is the second last one, other than that you're being forced to kinda dive by a timer anyways. If you're going for a combat build, keeping melee and evasion up and making sure you run when you need to is mostly all that you need to do.
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Jan 12, 2016 19:31
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victrix posted:But something about the way FTL goes about it rubs me the wrong way. Nah, I love FTL and I largely agree with you. I think it's a really good game, all told, but drawn-out, slow-death failure states are really frustrating and unfun, and the ease (and frequency) with which you can stumble into one without realizing you've done anything wrong is probably FTL's biggest weakness. It's a hard as gently caress problem to fix, and it doesn't ruin the game (for me, anyway), but it's definitely worth acknowledging.
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Jan 12, 2016 20:15
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If there were some way to boil the player's current power level down to a number and then say "hey you're behind the curve", that'd be something. I've also occasionally thought it'd be a good idea if there were a boss at the end of each sector, just to kill you faster if you aren't managing to keep up. Of course, that'd kind of do in the "don't fire a shot until sector 5" achievement, but a lot of the FTL achievements are stupidly self-destructive in terms of actually winning the game so who cares.
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Jan 12, 2016 20:18
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:The only floor I feel the need to grind on is the second last one, other than that you're being forced to kinda dive by a timer anyways. If you're going for a combat build, keeping melee and evasion up and making sure you run when you need to is mostly all that you need to do. In this vein, I read a guideline somewhere that suggested that combat builds should aim to add at least one skill point in Evasion and their attack skill (melee/archery) per dungeon level to keep up with the monsters. I can't claim any measure of authority to them (frankly, if you're aiming for a specific combat build with abilities that work together in synergy you may end up adding more than this to your skills purely by default) but it's worked well enough for me so far - my issue has been mostly "not knowing when to run" and, in one memorable recent case, "forgetting that staffs of light scare off packs of orcs, dying after getting flanked by a pack of orcs with twelve charges worth of light in inventory".
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Jan 12, 2016 20:19
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FTL should have been the perfect game for me given the theme and fun gameplay, but the dead man walking flaw and that godawful final boss killed it for me. Finding out that Invisible Inc used that final boss as an inspiration nearly killed my interest in that game as well, up until I got into Endless Mode. I don't mind the RNG being able to screw you over that much, but sudden difficulty spikes that are orders of magnitude above the rest of the game are not fun for me.
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Jan 12, 2016 20:35
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I'm doing really terribly in deathstate and flamebreak. They're both really fun, so thanks for the recommendations, but I rarely ever get past the 3rd world in either game.
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Jan 12, 2016 20:37
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Angry Diplomat posted:FTL almost never generates truly unwinnable situations on its own; the problem is that players need to apply a lot of forethought and game knowledge to be properly prepared for the various perils they can encounter, and a player who doesn't is rarely left with any idea what the hell they did wrong. This is one of the more ridiculous FTL defenses I've read. "No, it's not bullshit RNG, you just have to sniff the oracular fumes and pray to Ares for prescience!"
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Jan 12, 2016 20:46
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StrixNebulosa posted:Finding out that Invisible Inc used that final boss as an inspiration nearly killed my interest in that game as well, up until I got into Endless Mode. Do what now?
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Jan 12, 2016 20:56
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Zombie Samurai posted:Do what now? I watched this talk by the Invisible Inc devs on how they designed Invisible Inc, and they cited FTL's final boss as an inspiration: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021919/Designing-Procedural-Stealth-for-Invisible
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Jan 12, 2016 21:00
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packetmantis posted:This is one of the more ridiculous FTL defenses I've read. "No, it's not bullshit RNG, you just have to sniff the oracular fumes and pray to Ares for prescience!" It's not bullshit RNG, witness the players that can reliably (like, 100 times in a row) win on Hard. If you could show skilled players a game you played, without telling them whether you won or lost, they could point out mistakes you made -- incorrect prioritization of upgrades, bad encounter decisions, etc. Those would be mistakes even if you went on to win your game, or if they ended up not directly contributing to how you lost. In other words, you can a priori say that a given decision is bad, or at the very least a bad gamble. The problem is that the game doesn't immediately punish these bad decisions, hence the dead-man-walking situation. You "lose" in the sense of achieving a game state that is realistically unwinnable well before the game actually presents you with an encounter that leads to a Game Over screen. What the hell was your Engi ship doing in sector 6 with just its starting weapon layout? Why didn't your Mantis ship ever get any options for dealing hull damage? Why don't you have any defensive systems beyond your shields?
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Jan 12, 2016 21:00
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Demiurge4 posted:Does Tharsis count as a roguelike? It came out today and from watching Quill18's playthrough it's a very dice heavy FTL-lite. I might pick it up since it's just $10 but I'm not sure if it has a lot of replay value. I'd say it's more like a solitaire board game than a rogue-lite, but I suppose it fits the vague definitions of the genre. I'm enjoying it so far. You can certainly get screwed over by dice, but there's also a good bit of strategy on what you need to prioritize. You don't have to fix every event that comes up every turn. You can let some of them slide in order to focus on character/module abilities and research if it'll help more on the next turn.
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Jan 12, 2016 21:27
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I feel like Renowned Explorers is the best FTL-like because the game's events are weighted in such a way that you can know roughly what checks are coming up and specifically plan for them to mitigate bad RNG to a greater degree than 'I sure hope I find a shop' FTL problems. That said, I'm currently at the point where I'm trying to get the last few treasures by doing specific runs (e.g. Aggressive + Renown, Devious + Gold, etc) and it's really, really highlighting how bad some of the design decisions are. Why can you not choose your first expedition? The first expeditions have the strongest treasures (and the only ones that have significantly lasting effect throughout the rest of the game) and each of them are weighted strongly towards one resource type and set of skills. If I'm looking to go Science and bring in a science-focused party there's a 2/3rds chance I'm hosed from the get go, even before you get into the RNG that says 'do you get a strong treasure or a weaker one'. It's nice that they included a quick restart button but it's not quick at all, why does it restart the entire engine from the ground up? Why not just let us pick our first expedition rather than make us scum for it? aaaargh
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Jan 12, 2016 22:13
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Stelas posted:I feel like Renowned Explorers is the best FTL-like because the game's events are weighted in such a way that you can know roughly what checks are coming up and specifically plan for them to mitigate bad RNG to a greater degree than 'I sure hope I find a shop' FTL problems. On that note the Curious Expedition had a good update a while ago and it's a very robust and enjoyable game.
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Jan 12, 2016 22:23
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:The only floor I feel the need to grind on is the second last one, other than that you're being forced to kinda dive by a timer anyways. If you're going for a combat build, keeping melee and evasion up and making sure you run when you need to is mostly all that you need to do. I try to keep well ahead of the timer, is this what might be leading me to being under prepared? How ahead of the dive clock should I be?
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Jan 12, 2016 23:41
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Stelas posted:Why not just let us pick our first expedition rather than make us scum for it? aaaargh
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Jan 12, 2016 23:47
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Pladdicus posted:I try to keep well ahead of the timer, is this what might be leading me to being under prepared? How ahead of the dive clock should I be? Depends on your build and the floor. If you're straight melee I like to dive quickly down to 350' to avoid archers and then similarly avoid the ~550'-650/700' range. If you're what I've been playing a lot of this week (grace archer) then I have no idea since I seem to spontaneously explode when I stay 100-150' ahead of the clock.
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Jan 13, 2016 00:09
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:It's not bullshit RNG, witness the players that can reliably (like, 100 times in a row) win on Hard.
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Jan 13, 2016 03:44
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As far as FTL goes I think it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. FTL definitely has weapons and tactics that are stronger than others, and if you know the game it's very easy to make yourself a little checklist of 'go find these' with which to fairly reliably take down the final boss regardless of which ship you use (most of which only matter for the first few systems until you start filling out your checklist, at which point they all trend towards being the same). Similarly, you can say that certain events are not worth engaging with unless you have specific crew members. At the same time you're not especially guaranteed that some of those options will come up, because there's no ability to particularly chart what you will or won't find on your course, and if you face a drought of resources you can very easily just get hosed for it.
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Jan 13, 2016 03:51
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Is there a weapon type with the opposite effect? Something that preserves fragile devices and processors, but doesn't generate as much matter? The majority of weapons that fall into this category are penetration-focused weapons like hypervelocity variants. And then there's one special tool which is the best at taking targets apart piece by piece, but I'm not sure anyone really uses them: Plasma Cutters  (Unfortunately slashing melee weapons, which actually slice parts off, aren't so good for this purpose because they're strong enough to usually completely destroy weaker parts in the process.)
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Jan 13, 2016 04:13
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I had a horrible time of FTL until I unlocked the alternate rock ship, then I won with zero trouble on my first try. If I'd been interested in continuing to play I'm sure I could've streaked a bunch of wins with it. Fire plus boarders breaks the enemy AI and causes them to wander aimlessly around the ship until you kill them. The final boss seemed cool at first but the way to kill it was so gamey it ruined it.
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Jan 13, 2016 04:20
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madjackmcmad posted:That's the sort of thing, if real, that would convince me. However, if the trick is to just start with the stremfiest unlockable ship gained from a handful of random wins, that changes things. I think most of my wins in FTL are with the basic ship, starting variant. It is an incredibly strong and flexible ship design, and the jack of all trades nature of it means that you can adjust really easily to whatever equipment the game gives you. It also can usually take on any type of ship you may encounter early on. A lot of the game comes from needing experience with the random encounters and what's worth gambling on/upgrading to improve your ability of getting free stuff instead of relying on finding shops.
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Jan 13, 2016 04:23
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madjackmcmad posted:That's the sort of thing, if real, that would convince me. However, if the trick is to just start with the stremfiest unlockable ship gained from a handful of random wins, that changes things. The specific guy I'm thinking of was apparently also playing with random ships. I admit I have not actually verified this feat; it's total hearsay from someone else on these forums.  But evidently he managed to keep a random-ship Hard mode win streak going for a preposterously long time until he ran into something like a superpowered ship that he had to run from and the next encounter was asolar flare with another superpowered ship. Or some bullshit like that, anyway. FTL can still dick you over with RNG! Just not as often as people complain it does.
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Jan 13, 2016 04:41
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Mister Bup posted:The final boss seemed cool at first but the way to kill it was so gamey it ruined it.
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Jan 13, 2016 04:46
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FTL could be made much better if you can do some sort of pre-order for items in the market or black market, and another sector to bridge the last two levels. Most of the time, I avoid every single encounter at the end since those ships might as well be smaller flag vessels and the rewards are not as good for the damage they can do. They chase you across the galaxy and now I am fighting a sub-boss. Four party teleport ships, represent.
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Jan 13, 2016 04:56
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Floodkiller posted:I think most of my wins in FTL are with the basic ship, starting variant. It is an incredibly strong and flexible ship design, and the jack of all trades nature of it means that you can adjust really easily to whatever equipment the game gives you. It also can usually take on any type of ship you may encounter early on. i actually remember really struggling with FTL when it launched until i unlocked kestrel B, the four wimpy lasers setup on that thing is actually really goddamn good for the first few sectors and gives you a bit of breathing room.
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Jan 13, 2016 05:09
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Is there a mod for FTL that tells you the % outcome for your choices? I put it down when the game was a few months old and I recall all that stuff was on the wiki, if I wanted to play again I'd have to re-learn my intuition about them or look them up each time.
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Jan 13, 2016 05:29
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It might be because it lets you do away with some of the stuff of the genre, but man do I love me some Renowned Explorers. Just finished up with an all-science run (Anna, Agatha, and Emila) and kicked rear end off the sheer value of the research tokens I was able to attain. Soundly defeated the Rival without even going to Shangrila. Does anyone have any other interesting parties to run?
MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jan 13, 2016 |
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Jan 13, 2016 05:46
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Anna is basically the most broken character in the game, and getting the Skull of Cernossus will allow her to post scores of about 10k and up if she really tries to leverage it with the rest of her party in tow. Charles is kind of runner up with the way he does the same thing with Renown tokens, but I feverishly hate him because he fails every single 70% roll I give him. (Fire Emblem syndrome.) At the moment I'm generally charting what scenarios I'll want to go through and then building my party around that, because I'm trying to engineer certain runs. Really, really loving sucks having to make sure I get a decent first expedition, though.
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Jan 13, 2016 06:47
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Stelas posted:Really, really loving sucks having to make sure I get a decent first expedition, though. i made a post on their steam forum saying i wanted to be able to select the opening expedition. my words are powerful. it will happen friend.
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Jan 13, 2016 06:59
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FirstPersonShitter posted:I'm doing really terribly in deathstate and flamebreak. They're both really fun, so thanks for the recommendations, but I rarely ever get past the 3rd world in either game. No Deathstate (unless someone wants to give me one), but, Flamebreak? That makes two of us. Howdy, Flamebreak Failure Buddy!
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Jan 13, 2016 07:15
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Awesome! posted:i made a post on their steam forum saying i wanted to be able to select the opening expedition. my words are powerful. it will happen friend. I already tried and they gave me the Restart Expedition button, which sort of helps with the problem but sort of made it just as annoying all at once
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Jan 13, 2016 07:37
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Stelas posted:I feverishly hate him because he fails every single 70% roll I give him. I realize this is sacriledge here in the rougelike thread, but any roll that isn't 100% is 100% if you're doing it right. You're the Player, you have CHIM. (I love RE because it literally gives me the option to ignore some of the traits of rougelikes)
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Jan 13, 2016 07:38
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You say that but that British fucker fails diplomacy rolls in the very first expedition even as a speaker with the skill He is cursed (Alternatively Renown is strictly the weakest of the three resources to focus on by both circumstance and effect)
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Jan 13, 2016 07:42
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Hey, so i've been playing DOOM RPG quite a bit and have just found out that its apparently also Multiplayer Compatible. would any of you want to give it a go?
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Jan 13, 2016 08:09
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 I hate fog of war
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Jan 13, 2016 18:58
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Chakan posted:Is there a mod for FTL that tells you the % outcome for your choices? I put it down when the game was a few months old and I recall all that stuff was on the wiki, if I wanted to play again I'd have to re-learn my intuition about them or look them up each time. FTL Event Assistant There's some unpolished-looking formatting, and a few events where the added text is a bit misleading, but this handles most cases really well (in particular, as a reminder of which of the seventy different "abandoned space station" events are safe to explore, and which will kill your crew instead). I understand that most crew-losing events are there in order to reward the player for having diverse crew, for upgrading their medbay, etc. but it's still kind of lousy that you have to memorize them in order to keep all your crewmen in the early game (or keep the game going at all, for Engi B).
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Jan 13, 2016 19:34
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victrix posted:
1) Unexplored, unrevealed areas being dark. You can't see what's in tiles you haven't seen before without some sort of magical foreknowledge. 2) Total darkness in tiles currently out of line of sight. Even if you've already been in the area, if a given game space is out of your vision, you see only darkness on the screen. 3) Greyed/partial darkness in tiles out of line of sight. Areas you've been to before are visible as they were when you were there last, you can see the floor, door, walls, etc, but if things have changed in the tile you can't tell. 4) Absence of FOW, the entire battlefield and all participants are visible from the get go, ala Disgaea / Tactics games.
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Jan 13, 2016 22:30
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#2 is absolutely unforgivable*, everything else is a matter of taste and whether the mechanics highlight or detract from the skills the game is trying to test. * unless it's got scrolling level design a la Mario or Galaga or something, if you're never going to visit or interact with that territory again it doesn't matter if the information is hidden.
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Jan 13, 2016 22:33
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