What do you wish was in FTL?

[The Captain]

Teleporting anywhere on your own ship. E.g., sending wounded crew directly to the Medbay, so they don't have to go through a breached/ no O2 section. Or sending Rocks to a fire/invasion faster.

The ability to assign targets for drones.

[Dirka]

Teleporting anywhere on your own ship.

This. Enemy boarding party? *bam* chew on my rock fists!

Also not having to hike through an airless / fiery hell to repair vital systems.

[jjs026]

Man, this is a really awesome thread! I'm loving how creative everyone is
I wish a few things were in FTL:

1. An Armory - where leveling it up would give your crew stat bonuses like -10/20/30% incoming damage and +10/20/30% outgoing damage. It would be like equipping your crew members with better body armor and weapons. I would treat this like a ship subsystem. The icon could be a chest plate or a pistol.

2. I wish the Drone Control room was a manned station, where leveling a crewman there would increase the attack speed or movement speed or repair speed of your drones (depending on which drone you used).

3. Some of the enemy ships in the game are friggin sweet! I wish you could play as some of them, or could start as a smaller ship and work your way to a larger one.

4. Shell Weapons - All of the basic weapons are lasers. I wish there were friggin cannons that launched huge shells. The shells could ignore shields, but would cost a different ammo resource other than missiles. The tradeoff from missiles would be that they have a better chance to hit, have a high breach chance, but would do moderate hull damage and very little system damage.

5. Hull Armor - The counter to shell weapons, where improving the armor on your ship would decrease or negate shell weapon damage.

6. Food - gotta feed the troops yo.

[yomer123123]

1. more gamemodes like a huge universe that never end, kinda like minecraft world, and the galalxy will change even if already where there...

2. the option to build your own ship!!!!

3. cheat mode (ye, thats it)

4. better final boss

5. more races!!! i got no idea but there need to be more!

6. the option to make your own armada, cmon, who doesnt want that?!

[ExoticBottleOpener]

Personally, once I've created a bio and story for my entire crew it's rather depressing to watch them all burn to death when my entire ship lights on fire, or be left knowing they're floating corpses lost in space once my ship has broken apart.

I wish there were escape pods. You could bring your crew to them and jettison them before your ship explodes.
Once you return to the hanger, your crew members would be returned with there skills and names/race or whatnot.

Yep.

Escape Pod.

[glassofwater]

Personally, I think a longer game would be cool.
Also, a true "hardcore" mode. No pause.
Food/hunger would be cool.
Custom ships, though difficult to code would be very very cool.
More lore ingame. - Seriously, this is a big one.
Teleporting on your own ship, as I know someone has suggested.
Picking what rooms go where.
Ranged weapons of sorts maybe?
A way to write bios for characters ingame.
Allow for more RP elements, such as character interaction. Maybe some minor dialog.
Landing on planets for supplies?
More races - This I know was already suggested as well.
Allow dedicated players access to the dev patch? That'd be fun. Get the pre-pre patches.
Larger systems in general, make it take more to get across.
More events through each system. There's been times I've been across entire systems with only store events.
More customization to the starting characters.
Escape pods as someone suggested? Would kind of break the idea of the game though. So meh on that one.
Space suits, so specialized characters could go into the vacuum and be fine. Maybe even board like that?
More visuals. Such as debris from a missile. Sun glare.. small things. Small things REALLY make the game.
Larger teleporters in general. 2 slots isn't really enough. I'm aware some (One?) have 4.. but most have 2.
As someone stated, ability to set targets for individual drones.

Once again stated, more events. If you guys really dedicated some more time into making events, quality events, people couldn't dream of losing interest. Think of more character interaction.. more planetary stuff.. Maybe a pirate finds one of the female humans attractive and demands her as tribute or something.. crap like that. Think outside the box..

That's all I got for now.

[niacin]

Defeat of boss has to be less difficult. I know it is designed into the game, but wait.
Games of any kind are for entertainment and not for making frustration and a feeling as you wasted your time. In FTL you get these latter feelings. Believe or not, I won the game at first play (on easy level of course). I liked the whole idea, and it is really a fun to play. It is fun to get to the last stand, and yes, you may die earlier. But you spend 10 or such minutes for a really bad game instance and that's all. But if you did 1 or more hours of gameplay, then it is extremely frustrating to see 3-4 rockets/missiles simultaneously to ruin the whole ship in just 20 seconds. So then I just quit the whole game and started to play something else. Because that is not a fun any more. It became pointless and even the washing up is more worth to do as a recreation or fun. Not the difficulty is the problem, but the extreme difficulty step upwards at the end.

[5thHorseman]

Defeat of boss has to be less difficult. I know it is designed into the game, but wait.
Games of any kind are for entertainment and not for making frustration and a feeling as you wasted your time. In FTL you get these latter feelings. Believe or not, I won the game at first play (on easy level of course). I liked the whole idea, and it is really a fun to play. It is fun to get to the last stand, and yes, you may die earlier. But you spend 10 or such minutes for a really bad game instance and that's all. But if you did 1 or more hours of gameplay, then it is extremely frustrating to see 3-4 rockets/missiles simultaneously to ruin the whole ship in just 20 seconds. So then I just quit the whole game and started to play something else. Because that is not a fun any more. It became pointless and even the washing up is more worth to do as a recreation or fun. Not the difficulty is the problem, but the extreme difficulty step upwards at the end.

I respectfully but wholeheartedly disagree with this sentiment. We have been mollified in video games that it's always possible to win. Every puzzle has a solution. Every boss has a strategy. One of the things I LOVE about FTL is that sometimes, you simply cannot win. You get beaten not because you didn't have the best strategy or the best tactics, but just because the game doesn't care that your feelings are going to get hurt.

That said, the final boss is EXTREMELY predictable and anybody who has beaten it a dozen times or more should lose to it only on VERY rare occasions. I personally would prefer a more randomized (and yes, harder) final boss, to more closely match the feel of the rest of the game.

[niacin]

I understand your points but have some things to point out.

Those games have any reasonable chance to reach any success which have something in their concept connected to basic human instincts. This can be collecting things, agression, aesthetics, puzzles and random events inducing curiosity, etc. So, games that cannot reach these instincts get boring after a short while, games doing it with success causes you to get the game more seriously and invoke coupled feelings for the primer instincts. There you get frustration of loss and so on.

To the extreme, I may create an RPG game based on dialogs and at some point if you chose answer B instead of answer A nothing happens except after 2 days of play you simply loose the game instantly because you answered B (and the game says so only at the end) - I think this would be simply pointless. If the game was an average boring one, then you simply don't care and you had a poorer joy to play. If the game was a bright, wonderful one (except the end), then you get the frustration. You may say that it is an indicator of a good game. Yes, it is. Partly. The whole purpose on one side is lost (to entertain yourself, since it is a game) in wonderfulness of other sides of the game. This is the feeling of being beaten by the boss in FTL. And this is not a good game any more at this point, but a 95% good, and 5% pointless/bad (matter of taste) one instead. Of course, you may recognise the patterns and math out things to the optimum, but the first solution needs much time for a casual player, the second is more of a work than a game. Yes, one could treat the whole game without the end as the real play (with all intermediate fails), but then why the whole pushing to the east. Let me build a ship and just battle random other ships without all the story (actually, there is no story like in Star Control II) - and indeed, it would be a good game mode for FTL.

"but just because the game doesn't care that your feelings are going to get hurt"

That is correct, but then I may not play the game any more and doesn't care that the writer's feelings are going to get hurt. It is just a game and I may rather go out and drink 6+ beers in a pub instead of playing such games. The argument that you wrote can be the proof of the intent for the game to be taken more seriously than it should be. The game difficulty should make the difference: easy for casuals, and hard for hard-core gamers, who like to spend much time to build complex tactics and math out the optimum for an actual situation.

But returning to the topic, one thing came to my mind. I really enjoyed the (possibly indie) game Transcendence. It would be really nice to mix the concepts of both games. In Transcendence, you may travel freely in a fairly big universe without pressure (and can still simply die in a fight!), making business, conducting missions, but with a space fight of a really poor quality. FTL has a really wonderful battle system, but a fairly empty, small and boring universe (comparing to the other game).

[5thHorseman]

Those games have any reasonable chance to reach any success which have something in their concept connected to basic human instincts. This can be collecting things, agression, aesthetics, puzzles and random events inducing curiosity, etc. So, games that cannot reach these instincts get boring after a short while, games doing it with success causes you to get the game more seriously and invoke coupled feelings for the primer instincts. There you get frustration of loss and so on.

To the extreme, I may create an RPG game based on dialogs and at some point if you chose answer B instead of answer A nothing happens except after 2 days of play you simply loose the game instantly because you answered B (and the game says so only at the end) - I think this would be simply pointless. If the game was an average boring one, then you simply don't care and you had a poorer joy to play. If the game was a bright, wonderful one (except the end), then you get the frustration. You may say that it is an indicator of a good game. Yes, it is. Partly. The whole purpose on one side is lost (to entertain yourself, since it is a game) in wonderfulness of other sides of the game. This is the feeling of being beaten by the boss in FTL. And this is not a good game any more at this point, but a 95% good, and 5% pointless/bad (matter of taste) one instead. Of course, you may recognise the patterns and math out things to the optimum, but the first solution needs much time for a casual player, the second is more of a work than a game. Yes, one could treat the whole game without the end as the real play (with all intermediate fails), but then why the whole pushing to the east. Let me build a ship and just battle random other ships without all the story (actually, there is no story like in Star Control II) - and indeed, it would be a good game mode for FTL.

The big problem with your argument is that this game is advertised as a Roguelike so you are suggesting they quite literally CHANGE THE BASIC CONCEPT OF THE GAME. As a Roguelike, it's actually far too EASY to win, which I personally like. I get bored with "true" roguelikes because they are SO dependent on the RNG that you are essentially playing a convoluted slot machine. Your example is invalid because that doesn't happen in FTL. First off, most FTL games don't last 2 hours little alone 2 days!

I (and I suspect many others) think that FTL caught that perfect balance between RNG screwover and ability to survive seemingly impossible encounters. Your example of the "choose the wrong option, lose way down the line" is as different from the way FTL works as your proposed solution is, just on opposite sides of the spectrum.

For the record, I played 16 times before I even saw the final boss, and another 10 times before I beat him. That's 26 plays, probably averaging an hour each time. Nowadays, I beat the final boss probably 90% of the games I play, and the other 10% I lose (usually in the first sector or two) due to one of these impossible situations. I had MUCH more fun playing the first 26 games (where I was learning how to excel) than I do now, though, because the game seems too easy. Making the final boss easier would just make the game that much less palatable.

And the first time I beat him? It was on Normal mode. By accident. I started the game, forgot to select "easy" and figured I'd just go for it because why not?