FTL

Crimeny wrote:
padriec wrote:

I just bought the soundtrack on Steam (where I bought the base game from) and I can't figure out how to actually play the soundtrack to save my life. Help, please?

Go into the FTL game folder in your Steamapps folder and you should see the soundtrack in there.

Thanks. Seems like they could make that a little easier to find. Oh well, added to Spotify.

padriec wrote:

Thanks. Seems like they could make that a little easier to find. Oh well, added to Spotify.

I think this is the easiest way for Steam to add it since the Soundtrack is officially labeled as DLC. The only way they could feasibly add it is to modify the base folder that the game's files reside in.

One thing that has been nagging me about the implied narrative of FTL: you can occasionally stop to help federation people fight the rebels, but at the end of every sector, the rebels control the entire map.

This basically means that every federation group you help, in every sector, is still gonna get killed/captured/whatever by the rebel fleet regardless of your actions.

Bummer.

Actually yesterday I was thinking about the narrative. Like, what are the rebels fighting for? What if they're right? Is the federation an oppressive autocracy?

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Actually yesterday I was thinking about the narrative. Like, what are the rebels fighting for? What if they're right? Is the federation an oppressive autocracy?

DLC!

gore wrote:

One thing that has been nagging me about the implied narrative of FTL: you can occasionally stop to help federation people fight the rebels, but at the end of every sector, the rebels control the entire map.

This basically means that every federation group you help, in every sector, is still gonna get killed/captured/whatever by the rebel fleet regardless of your actions.

Bummer.

I like to think that it only represents sectors that the Rebel fleet has scouted and determined that you are not there and moved on. Maybe they've left some kind of detector in case you make it back. Not that they're destroying everything in their path in some sort of scorched earth tactic.

Aren't I naively cute?

The rebel fleet is advancing on the Federation base, and they're specifically looking out for you because of the data you're carrying.

I could envision a DLC/mod where you're an independent privateer; no boss fight or rebel fleet, but you need to get to sector 8 with X amount of *unspent* scrap.

The game was developed in China, right? Maybe they were afraid of making Rebel's the good guys

I beat the boss on my sixth playthrough (all on easy). Go me!

I hit that sweet spot of getting an early crew teleporter and having two extra rock guys to send over on invasions to capture ships and get mega scrap. Also, I had finally learned how to not destroy ships that I was invading, or to avoid shooting the room with my dudes in it.

I was in the Kestrel, and it was a monster by the end. Two Burst laser IIs (6 lasers son), and a pegasus missile were all firing at once. Also had three shield bubbles and a fully upgraded cloak system. I still needed to find a clutch repair station between boss stages 2 and 3 though. Dang that guy is a beast.

Of course now I need to fly around and beat the game with the fed cruiser, get all the ships, and beat it on normal. Fantastic game still. A great solo counterpart to all the Torchlight 2 co-op I've been playing.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Actually yesterday I was thinking about the narrative. Like, what are the rebels fighting for? What if they're right? Is the federation an oppressive autocracy?

There is a quest that sheds some light on this

Spoiler:

(it's unlocking the Zolton ship).

If you answer incorrectly, the rebels discuss their motives.

Basically The Federation represents something similar to Star Trek where humans try their best to coexist with other races while the Rebels are racist and want nothing to do with alien species (xenophobic?). They can't see eye-to-eye on a peaceful option with The Federation thinking they're just going to give the Rebels the worst part of the galaxy to occupy.

The Rebels are space-racists.
Spracists.

checkm-8 wrote:

They can't see eye-to-eye on a peaceful option with The Federation thinking they're just going to give the Rebels the worst part of the galaxy to occupy.

Immediately made me think of The Alliance vs outer planets in Firefly.

Regarding boarding parties, I never weakened the enemy before boarding or upgraded the teleporter, but I always had two mantises and micro'd the hell out of them. I found it was best to make my ship's weapons focus on the system I wanted to take out(usually weapons) because my boarding party would be too busy dealing with the enemy crew to get to it. They're mostly their to mess with the crew. If I had any weapons to spare I'd fire on any rooms with crew sitting in them, or the medbay if it's occupied. Make sure that your boarding party fights in a room that only has space for each member of your crew so that it will be 2v2 instead of you getting outnumbered.

muttonchop wrote:

The Rebels are space-racists.
Spracists.

Relevant video:

Ok so took a quick lunch break with FTL and on my first jump it kicked me in the nuts and killed two of my crew. Second jump and the third died trying to fight a massive fire. So time to rethink my strategy. lol

Jumping (puns!) into the thread. The first ship unlock was great. Drones really seemed to chew up enemies much faster than regular weapons. Really enjoying it now. The first two attempts, not so much.

The worst encounter I've had so far was when 4 pirates invaded my ship when I jumped right next to a star. The pirates beamed straight into the engine room, and immediately disabled my engines so I couldn't jump away. The first solar flare set a fire in the oxygen room. Pretty soon my entire crew was desperately fighting to reclaim and fix the engines, every single other room was on fire, and my oxygen was rapidly depleting. There's really no coming back from something like that.

Unlocked the Mantis ship during my lunch break today, then realized my saves don't really sync between OSX and Windows versions of Steam. Guess I'll just play on my laptop from now on.

I still haven't been able to get one of each race on the Kestrel. That's pretty much a blind luck unlock.

So I need to train my self to use the "Pause" button a little better. I keep paniking at the first sign of trouble and can't get throug more than 5-6 jumps before I am in dire circumstances. The little people just keep dying. I has sad.

Tried using the Mantis ship today, yikes! Small bomb, one tiny laser, no sensors, and only one power to the weapon-system at start. I got lucky on my first playthrough by getting a couple Zoltans but on that and the next few playthroughs it's been real tough to get enough weapons and shields and still keep the hull from busting.

Tip: upgrade teleported to level 2 so you can get whole crew onto enemy ship, and so you have a short enough recharge to beam out crew members who you send onto AI ships (just before they run out of air).

I listened to the Three Moves Ahead podcast about FTL on my commute today. Good stuff! It was great hearing Troy describe what happened when he teleported his crew to a drone shop and then found out that it had no air.

Also, trying to put out a fire in a nebula is interesting. I imagine it goes something like this:

Red Shirt 1: Is there a fire next door?

Red Shirt 2: I don't know, let me go check.

...

Red Shirt 2: AAAHHHH FIRE!!!

Repeat about a dozen times.

If you're in a nebula you can still hear the fire burning sound effect. And if a system is on fire there will be flames above its energy readout even if there isn't anybody in the room to reveal it.

I really like the deck plan B unlock achievements for the Zoltan cruiser. The "kill something before your Zoltan Shield falls" one will probably just happen sometime in the first sector since your starting Halberd Beam will one-shot a shield-less drone. It's 2 and 3 that intrigue me. You can either get to sector 5 without upgrading your reactor at all, or you can upgrade your ship so much that you have the reactor maxed out and 4 Zoltan crew members powering it all. I like how they pull you in 2 different directions and you can work on the one that's more appealing.

Just unlocked the Fed Cruiser B-Type last night; I haven't finished that run yet though. It was nice to see someone post that the Fed Cruiser can't even equip a Cloak; I spent every playthrough screaming at the Storekeepers "Where the %&^$ are the *&$@ing CLOAKING devices!!"

So far:
Kestrel: A only -- I'm having a hard time getting the Kestrel-B. The crew availability is so random.
Engi: A & B -- Got these pretty easily
Fed Cruiser -- A & (just last night!) B
Stealth: A (only tried it once, so far) -- My 1st time "unlocking" this ship was in the 2nd last sector, with the rebels hot on my heels, so it "failed"
Mantis -- Once found Kliptrix (whatever)... no Mantis crewmembers. Second time... Med bay was only L1. Failed.
Rock -- haven't had the event yet
Zoltan -- again, no event
Slug -- also, not yet

I've had the "Crystal" crewmwmber twice... he died due to my mismanagement of my guns while boarding once, and a ship FTL'd away while he was still on it the 2nd time. I've also had the "unopened pod" on the ship when I got blasted to bits another time.

Man, I am having a world of trouble with the rock cruiser.

The two missile launchers pack a huge punch early, but they also churn through missiles like there's no tomorrow. On several playthroughs now I've run out of ammo before finding another weapon. I'm also very reluctant to spend scrap on upgrades, because I have the limited missile supply looming over me and I want to be able to buy a weapon from a store if I find one, which leaves my ship more vulnerable.

In my most successful run so far I didn't find another weapon but I did find the teleporter, and boy howdy do Rocks rock. I actually lost that run because I got boarded by *four mantises* in a random event, when I only had 3 rocks and an Engi to fight back with. I suppose I could have survived with at least some crew members if I micro'd better, but I don't see how I could have done it without them shredding half the ship first.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

I've had the "Crystal" crewmwmber twice... he died due to my mismanagement of my guns while boarding once, and a ship FTL'd away while he was still on it the 2nd time. I've also had the "unopened pod" on the ship when I got blasted to bits another time.

I've had him a couple of times and got all the way to the boss without seeing the resolution of his quest line, you're not guaranteed for the sector you need to be in the path ahead of you if you get him.

It wouldn't have been too hard. You say you had 3 rocks and an engi? Retreat all 3 rocks into the medback, put the engie in the little room beside (the teleporter). Then open EVERY door on the ship except for the medbay. The oxygen on the ship will freefall down to 0% and force the boarders to head for the medbay. Don't do this if they are already attacking the O2 though!

Tamren wrote:

It wouldn't have been too hard. You say you had 3 rocks and an engi? Retreat all 3 rocks into the medback, put the engie in the little room beside (the teleporter). Then open EVERY door on the ship except for the medbay. The oxygen on the ship will freefall down to 0% and force the boarders to head for the medbay. Don't do this if they are already attacking the O2 though!

They actually killed my doors and O2 first They beamed into the top left rooms on the ship, and they'd destroyed the systems before I could even get there since rocks are so slow (and since mantises are so nasty).

Once every few attempts at a run somewhere near the end I'll warp to an asteroid field... and it totally wtf-obliterates my ship and the enemy ship nearly instantly, not all asteroid fields are like this just sometimes. It certainly seems like a bug where maybe the environment clock is set too fast or something but with this game I'm unsure if it's just poor randomization instead. It's certainly rather frustrating on either count.

Do you have vsync or the frame limiter turned on? I know a lot of people had funky issues with the game clock running out of control or too slowly.

krev82 wrote:

Once every few attempts at a run somewhere near the end I'll warp to an asteroid field... and it totally wtf-obliterates my ship and the enemy ship nearly instantly, not all asteroid fields are like this just sometimes. It certainly seems like a bug where maybe the environment clock is set too fast or something but with this game I'm unsure if it's just poor randomization instead. It's certainly rather frustrating on either count.

The asteroid fields have faster bombardment rates the further you get through the sectors.

DanB wrote:
krev82 wrote:

Once every few attempts at a run somewhere near the end I'll warp to an asteroid field... and it totally wtf-obliterates my ship and the enemy ship nearly instantly, not all asteroid fields are like this just sometimes. It certainly seems like a bug where maybe the environment clock is set too fast or something but with this game I'm unsure if it's just poor randomization instead. It's certainly rather frustrating on either count.

The asteroid fields have faster bombardment rates the further you get through the sectors.

Yeah, they're kind of shield level checks. If your shields are lagging behind where they should be these things can shred you.