Increase the difficulty?

[Dralax]

Lowering scrap simply puts more weight on RNG giving the player good equipment as opposed to being able to buy it. AI actually aiming for critical systems would make the game unplayable for anything short of Mantis B.

I think what's needed to improve difficulty are minor changes to AI. Things like firing a beam only if it will do damage, not using bombs on systemless rooms, not depowering half-charge weapons when weapons system gets repaired, smart retreat/surrender system as opposed to simple damage thresholds, etc.

[Dontmindme]

The thing is this...
I believe that FTL difficulty levels are perfect. Why? Because you have a sizable minority of people complaining that the game is too hard and a small number of people saying its a little too easy once mastered. Seems the sweet spot is somewhere between those extremes.

As to those individuals making up their own challenges, for the most part, these are very situational. They often follow through on existing achievements or similar types of challenges. These also tend not to necessarily be achievable with every ship. I'm not sure there is a whole lot of room for a "Hard" level, as Normal with just a small bit of bad-luck can be a "white knuckle" experience as it is. Maybe there is room to crank the game up to 10.5, but is there room to crank it all the way up to 11?

[LazyMonk]

Well, you can always pick The Stormwalker (Slug Cruiser B) if you are looking for a challenge.
At least it is a challenge for me...

Edit: Ops! Just noticed that UltraMantis said it all before

[UltraMantis]

Yeah, well we could both be wrong. BKT reported he was dissapointed that it wasn't so tough once the medbay issue was taken care of.

[BKT]

It's a Telepad-ed ship with a freaking Artemis! ... How challenging can it be? 

Oh, and 4 weapon slots, too!

[Weltall Zero]

Less scrap and possibly a limit on the amount of pause time you have? (i.e. 15 seconds total pause time, I guess a whole minute for the boss battle)

I think I'll mod a repair arm to not repair the hull and still take 15% of the scrap to try these limits out.

You may be onto something with the limited pause time! It's not just making the gamer harder, but making it into a new experience, which is exactly what truly great hard modes do.

The one other thing that I think would make the game not just harder, but also much more interesting, is having different bosses. Part of the reason the game becomes more manageable over time is the way you start tailoring your ship to take down the flagship. This is evident in the fact that the first few times you reach sector 8, the flagship murders you, but much later on, it's not unusual to have more trouble with some of the sector 7-8 encounters than the flagship itself (especially on Normal). Being able to choose a different boss would mean changing your game play a lot. Finally, having a boss randomly selected from a pool would force you to make a much more "general purpose" build, which would need to be stronger across the board to be able to take down any boss.

Other than that, I've thought about it at length, and my conclusion (as mentioned above) was that Normal is so perfectly tuned that any sway in either direction would break it. Indeed, lower scrap rewards just makes the game more RNG-dependant, which is Bad.