FTL

mr_n00b wrote:

Had more people over last night for some FTL role play. We cooked up a fun new drinking rule for the game: you pause, you drink. No exceptions.

You sir, are a genius and a bastard!

What would you guys think about a game much like FTL but where all the crew members are different people.

Sort of a multiplayer version almost like artimis?

I really like the Red-tail. I called mine Bebop.

Delerat wrote:
mr_n00b wrote:

Had more people over last night for some FTL role play. We cooked up a fun new drinking rule for the game: you pause, you drink. No exceptions.

You sir, are a genius and a bastard!

+1

Kier wrote:

What would you guys think about a game much like FTL but where all the crew members are different people.

Sort of a multiplayer version almost like artimis?

I want an FTL-style campaign mod for Artemis, where you have to reach the end station, but you can stop by the other stations along the way and grab upgrades. Of course you have to fight your way there, and if you dawdle, the endless fleet catches up to you. I'll add it to my backlog of freetime projects, which is daresay rivals my game backlog.

mr_n00b wrote:

Had more people over last night for some FTL role play. We cooked up a fun new drinking rule for the game: you pause, you drink. No exceptions.

I would be drunk before leaving the first sector.

mr_n00b wrote:

Had more people over last night for some FTL role play. We cooked up a fun new drinking rule for the game: you pause, you drink. No exceptions.

Thanks, I will be doing this tonight.

OK, I'm finally starting to burn out on this thing a little, since I think I've seen most of the random events now, but wow, have I gotten a lot of gaming hours for nine crummy dollars. Don't know how many, as I bought it on GOG instead of Steam... and that's probably for the best,

Bah, made it to the final sector and got wasted on the second jump.

I did unlock a new ship though!

Malor wrote:

OK, I'm finally starting to burn out on this thing a little, since I think I've seen most of the random events now, but wow, have I gotten a lot of gaming hours for nine crummy dollars. Don't know how many, as I bought it on GOG instead of Steam... and that's probably for the best,

I don't know if you feel the same, but this is one of those games that I'll come back and visit every couple months when I'm between games for many years to come. Most rogue likes do that for me.

Too bad there is no steam cloud. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Wow, best game to date. Not only did I easily handle all stages of the boss, I also unlocked Slug and Zoltan ships.

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/939256065852793995/19D9421C94B77B84256E2EB202B04B78FE13F427/)

P.S.

Spoiler:

This was my first true win without savescumming.

Red-Tail is awesome.

Try out my FTL tetris simulator? The game doesn't support room shapes beyond a 1X2 or 2x2. This greatly limits the size of the internal space you can construct. So I made this to allow you to make a ship with proper corridors or larger rooms.

How to use it:
1. Load up in Paint or other basic editing program
2. Copy and paste desired room shapes, make sure you set it to paste the background as transparent. Line them up with the grid so that the green dots match. The grids follow the exact same room layout used by the default ship, you don't have to follow it. The red tail has a room running down the spine of the ship, the kestrel has a wall there, this affects the orientation of the room grid.
3. Add doors (again using the grid), then add some room symbols to show which room is which. I added a couple extra just for fun.
4. Crop the picture and share!

Here is the Kestral and Red Tail. Someone on the other forum asked me to do the Torus next.

IMAGE(http://imageshack.us/a/img837/7399/creatakestrel.png)
IMAGE(http://imageshack.us/a/img26/6729/creataredtail.png)

I played a couple games with the Rock ship today, having unlocked it last night. I'm finding it extremely tough. In principle the missile weapons you start out with are powerful, but they actually hit pretty slowly, and they run out of ammo fast.

In my last game I ran out of ammo somewhere in Sector 2, and I didn't have any other weapons. I eventually limped to a store where I sold all my starting kit -- both missile launchers, and even the Rock Plating augment -- to buy a Burst Laser III, which I couldn't afford to power. I had to keep going with no working weapons, no teleporter or drones, until I lucked into enough scrap to upgrade my ship to power the laser.

I went through several jumps and one combat encounter with just 1 hull point. But I was able to get to a store and repair, and my luck started turning around. I picked up some more weapons, and a Crew Teleporter, and it was then that I started to feel like using the Rock ship was an advantage, cuz I started out with three Rock crew, and I still had one or two left to beam onto enemy ships. There were other setbacks, but I actually managed to get up to the Boss and win!

Spoiler:

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/596982494156112261/03B605DBA184A3693D1BC44D14F47D7C4796457B/)

grobstein wrote:

I played a couple games with the Rock ship today, having unlocked it last night. I'm finding it extremely tough. In principle the missile weapons you start out with are powerful, but they actually hit pretty slowly, and they run out of ammo fast.

In my last game I ran out of ammo somewhere in Sector 2, and I didn't have any other weapons. I eventually limped to a store where I sold all my starting kit -- both missile launchers, and even the Rock Plating augment -- to buy a Burst Laser III, which I couldn't afford to power. I had to keep going with no working weapons, no teleporter or drones, until I lucked into enough scrap to upgrade my ship to power the laser.

I went through several jumps and one combat encounter with just 1 hull point. But I was able to get to a store and repair, and my luck started turning around. I picked up some more weapons, and a Crew Teleporter, and it was then that I started to feel like using the Rock ship was an advantage, cuz I started out with three Rock crew, and I still had one or two left to beam onto enemy ships. There were other setbacks, but I actually managed to get up to the Boss and win!

Wow awesome job turning that game around Grobstein! It took me many, many tries to finally win with the Type A rock ship. I don't care much for the ships the start with only missile weapons. Now the alternate rock ship is a freaking beast.

Were you playing on normal? When I tried the rock ship on easy I never ran out of missiles until the final boss and they were very effective. I just got used to cleaning out every store I found for missile stock. I even swapped the hull missile for a breach missile at one point.

A cautionary tale that might save others some grief: the other night I loaded up a save game, then something came up immediately and I couldn't play so I just closed the program thinking I could pick it up later. When I came back later my save was gone. I understand that's to prevent save scumming, but I wasn't thinking about it at the time and it caught me off guard. Consider yourselves warned.

/sigh My best run ever was undone by my not switching my halberd laser for a second burst laser. The halberd was completely useless against ships with 3 shields.

Agent 86 wrote:

/sigh My best run ever was undone by my not switching my halberd laser for a second burst laser. The halberd was completely useless against ships with 3 shields.

Well, presumably you had a FIRST burst laser, meaning you wanted to take yourself off autofire, and wait for both your burst and your halberd to be ready to fire. Then you wanted to do a burst shot against any system, and knocking their shields down a way, maybe all the way. You wouldn't do any damage, but it would weaken the shields. Then use the halberd beam the instant the last shot hits or misses, aiming first at the shield subsystem. You want to shoot at the shield first, because any damage you do will weaken it for the later rooms along the beam.

Beams that do at least 2 damage will lose 1 point per layer of shield, so a 2 damage beam can cut through one layer of shield. I believe the Halberd does 3 damage, so you can punch through 2 layers, and still get some damage off.

Halberd only does 2, its the Glaive that does 3 and the Pike that does 1 if I remember correctly.

Ahh I was wondering why some beams got through shields and some didn't.

Agent 86 wrote:

/sigh My best run ever was undone by my not switching my halberd laser for a second burst laser. The halberd was completely useless against ships with 3 shields.

I'm finding the Halberd incredibly tricky. My preferred start ship (and indeed the only one that's gotten me all the way to the final sector so far) is Zoltan which starts with the Halberd. It's hugely powerful early game, but it *must* be paired with a solid shield disabling weapon before you get too far, or it's simply game over (the stupid pea shooter missile launcher Zoltan starts with is completely useless).

I've had otherwise good runs where I die because I didn't find a decent missile launcher or ion cannon in time, and I couldn't do anything against guys with 2+ shields. That can be a really frustrating way to lose.

I had really good results with an Ion Cannon 3 and a beam weapon. Point the ion cannon at the weapon system, the beam where it'll do the most damage, and ride auto-fire to explosion town. I usually prefer managing my weapons manually, but not the ion cannon. The better ion cannons shoot faster; they don't actually do more system suppression per shot. So if you're not shooting every time the 4-second cooldown is up you're just wasting it. The rapid shots will suppress the shields regardless of where you point them, and that lets the beam do its thing.

Tamren wrote:

Were you playing on normal? When I tried the rock ship on easy I never ran out of missiles until the final boss and they were very effective. I just got used to cleaning out every store I found for missile stock. I even swapped the hull missile for a breach missile at one point.

Yeah I haven't really played any on Easy. My experience on Normal has been that missiles are too expensive to use as the staple damage-dealer throughout a game. It's much more viable to use missiles for special effects -- Ion Bomb and Fire Bomb are great, and launching them once or twice is sufficient for most battles. In general I like the bombs a lot better than the missiles -- they cost less power to use and they can't be interrupted by Defense Drones. But using a missile to punch through shields early in a fight obviously works well too.

EriktheRed wrote:

Wow awesome job turning that game around Grobstein! It took me many, many tries to finally win with the Type A rock ship. I don't care much for the ships the start with only missile weapons. Now the alternate rock ship is a freaking beast.

Thanks dude, I was basically shocked. Still haven't unlocked the Type B.

Gorramit, you filthy enabling Itsatrap! You are evil and do not match the carpet for this. I've got it, but I'll have to wait to install it until after I finish this stupid process for work.

Apparently, there are dead ends in space. I just lost a game because the path I took through the sector never linked up with the exit. I had to double back, but by that point the rebel fleet had overtaken most of the sector. I made it two jumps before the fleet just ground me into dust.

Malor wrote:
Agent 86 wrote:

/sigh My best run ever was undone by my not switching my halberd laser for a second burst laser. The halberd was completely useless against ships with 3 shields.

Well, presumably you had a FIRST burst laser, meaning you wanted to take yourself off autofire, and wait for both your burst and your halberd to be ready to fire. Then you wanted to do a burst shot against any system, and knocking their shields down a way, maybe all the way. You wouldn't do any damage, but it would weaken the shields. Then use the halberd beam the instant the last shot hits or misses, aiming first at the shield subsystem. You want to shoot at the shield first, because any damage you do will weaken it for the later rooms along the beam.

Beams that do at least 2 damage will lose 1 point per layer of shield, so a 2 damage beam can cut through one layer of shield. I believe the Halberd does 3 damage, so you can punch through 2 layers, and still get some damage off.

I was trying that but I never got the timing of the shots down.

Wembley wrote:

Apparently, there are dead ends in space. I just lost a game because the path I took through the sector never linked up with the exit. I had to double back, but by that point the rebel fleet had overtaken most of the sector. I made it two jumps before the fleet just ground me into dust.

Yeeaaah, it sucks. Be careful.

Just won with the Engi Cruiser Type B (Vortex). Managed to scrounge up enough crew to man every station and put together a Mantis boarding party, which seem more and more vital to winning against the last fight. No savescumming.

Just as I was getting to the point where I had encountered all the random events and was gonna switch to Torchlight 2, I managed to win on normal. I made no mistakes, all the stars aligned and then I shot rainbows out my hands like burst lasers. Best game ever, 10 out of 10.

Nice.

Started to do some more boarding. But didn't know how to get my dieing crew back (O2 destroyed).
Good thing Quintin could tell me

Unlocked a few achievements again. Have the stealth ship as well, but think it sucks.
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