Is "Instant Death" a Common Part of the Game?

[Iranon]

FTL borrows heavily from the Roguelike tradition - high randomness, little regard for "fairness", permadeath, mechanics that encourage hilarious disaster chains... but giving you all the tools to deal with almost everything.

So... "nothing I could have done" is rare. "I don't know what I could have done, and I thought long and hard about it" isn't. It's part of the appeal to many. Sometimes, the most obvious thing that'd have guaranteed survival is ugly. For example, it's better to lose your mantis boarders to suffocation than to be torn apart by drones from an autoship that you know you can't deal with.

[5thHorseman]

Sometimes the RNG just decides you have lived long enough and need to die. Quickly. And possibly humiliatingly. If that's even a word.

We have all had moments like that.

Spare a thought for this poor soul who got trounced when he really should have lived. Pity his engines were crap but he must have made a good effort since reached the last stand...
From full HP + 4 shields and an army of drones, to dooooom in under 2 minutes: http://www.twitch.tv/khaiine/c/2931710

Completely unsuprisingly it was a Rebel Rigger that got him.

Actually I'm surprised he made it that far with 4 weapon power for his BL3 and total lack of interest in fixing the important systems, focusing on oxygen when his shields and engines were damaged. And don't get me started on abandoning the pilot seat to fix the MEDBAY.

I'd say that wasn't an unlucky battle. Instead he had the luckiest run ever up to that point

[Perfect Faro]

BKT:

From the way you told it, it sounds to me like you lack reading comprehension skills:

0 - I didn't "Underestimate the enemy:" I had no choice about engaging, I was simply thrown into battle. Had I been given a chance to fight or not, this argument might have some merit, but there was never a chance for me to decide whether I wanted to engage or not.
1 - "Getting shot at an important system rooms, something you didn't expect." I had gotten shot at in important system rooms, and full expected it. What I didn't expect was to have each room taken out with each volley.
2 - "Have no prior experience to properly deal with it or have a plans to deal with it in place beforehand" This is the problem in its entirety: there was NOTHING I could do to deal with it, and no amount of prior planning would have changed the outcome. Apparently, you either didn't understand what I wrote, or don't believe that it actually happened that way. Either way, you're wasting my time.
3 - "Getting shell shock / panic and couldn't think properly— many ended up getting so confuse that they forget the pause button altogether..." I didn't forget the pause button: I used it to give myself time to send the crew members to deal with the damage. Unfortunately, while they were doing that, I was completely unable to attack or defend myself. There was no confusion: I knew exactly what was happening, but there was nothing I could do about it.
4 - "Dazed, you stare helplessly at the screen watching bullet flies left and right and and got blown to pieces" This is just insulting: I wasn't dazed, and I was actively working to deal with the situation. As I've already said numerous times, I took damage with every shot and was dead after a small number of volleys.

When I posted this, I knew there were going to be trolls who would weigh in with their moronic "Dude, you just don't know how to play right" nonsense. If you can't explain exactly what you would have done differently, then you're just wasting my time and being an insulting troll. If you don't believe what I've written here, fine; I know what happened, and it was surprising enough that I felt I needed to find out if that was a conscious design decision. That's all I really need to know; I don't need someone who can't even understand written English telling me I don't know what I'm doing.

[5thHorseman]

Not to defend BKT but we can't tell you what we'd do differently because we don't know the situation.

I'm sure there is something that could have been done, because when I look back on my losses (or even just my situations where I didn't lose, but took far more damage than I wanted to or lost crew) from my videos I see them all the time. We all make mistakes in every single playthrough, whether we know it or not.

Without knowing what you had (and I'm talking crew, power levels, weapons, augments, and scrap, in addition to the shield and hull levels you told us) and without knowing what the enemy had (all that, assuming you had the scanners to tell us but at least the weapon loadout) there is no way at all to tell what you could have done in that battle. Without knowing all the situations in the dozen or so jumps you had in the first sector and the up-to-a-dozen jumps you had in the second sector before this encounter, we can't say what else you may have done there. But it's altogether possible that there were a dozen or more little things that would have gotten you a bit more dodge chance, or bought a weapon in a store instead of repairing, or skipping that shop when you didn't really have scrap anyway, or the crew member you would have had had you not tried to fight those spiders...

You likely had 15 to 20 jumps between the start of the game and this encounter. That's 15 to 20 chances to make a mistake, not counting the multitude opportunities to make more than one mistake per jump. I know in my play I rarely go that long without doing SOMETHING wrong and from the videos I've watched on YouTube, the average number of HUGE mistakes in that number of jumps is probably around 10. It's not really all that unwarranted for us to assume, without any information at all, that there was something you could have done that you don't even know was possible.

That's part of the depth of the game that people told you about, and it's a huge part of why I'm still playing it daily 10 months after I bought it.

[UltraMantis]

Questioning your fellows comprehension skills isn't really friendly. Even if you feel that way, there's other ways to put it.

And in defense of the Twitch guy, he's a livestreamer, not a Let's Player. Livestreaming and playing well is usually boring, and noob players should be allowed to suffer for our entertainment. It may even be a part of the Twitch ToS.
What i'm trying to say is that overanalysing someone's failures is almost entirely missing the point. And i'm not just saying that because i play like shi

[IConquer]

Sometimes the RNG just decides you have lived long enough and need to die. Quickly. And possibly humiliatingly. If that's even a word.

We have all had moments like that.

Spare a thought for this poor soul who got trounced when he really should have lived. Pity his engines were crap but he must have made a good effort since reached the last stand...
From full HP + 4 shields and an army of drones, to dooooom in under 2 minutes: http://www.twitch.tv/khaiine/c/2931710

Completely unsuprisingly it was a Rebel Rigger that got him.

And this, my friends, is why you make vigorous use of the pause button.

The guy was making so many mistakes... he ignored the cardinal rule: "If something is tearing you apart, disable that something."

... he just kept shooting at the shields... He never turned on his pegasus missile when he had 3 power in weapons, he turned off his second anti-ship drone when his target had only 2 hull and they were his only hope at dps'ing... aargh!

It hurt my soul to watch

[zeek]

It's not really possible to say what went wrong on your run. We'd need a lot more detail to give a good analysis.

Now to kind of answer your question about instant death, it does happen from time to time. The reason why is that a lot of the decisions we make in the game have a risk to reward ratio to them. For instance you're at a store and you could buy a drone control system if you sell your ion blast. Maybe you'll get a defense drone with that drone control system and then you'll be able to survive an encounter against an enemy with powerful missile weapons. However, you don't know at the time that you'll face such an enemy and you could end up facing an enemy where the ion blast would allow you to disable their weapons before you take some critical damage. You don't have perfect information. So, you have to take a risk. It very well could lead to a situation where there is nothing you can do at that point. However, there was something you could have done earlier. So, is it unwinnable? From my point of view, no. You could have won if you had made different decisions earlier in your run. You may feel differently though.

[Perfect Faro]

zeek:

Your answer makes perfect sense. The fact that there was nothing I could have done in the moment doesn't mean that there wasn't something I could have done in the past that might have made the encounter go differently (a point that other people have made in this thread). I'm okay with that: as you pointed out, we don't have perfect information, and if we make choices that result in disaster, well, that's just the way it goes. That's actually what I needed to know: that the game doesn't randomly throw up scenarios that result in instant death. Thanks for taking the time to respond; it was very helpful.

[IntolerantApe]

Sorry for the necro... I didn't want to create a new thread to post my whinge.

My only beef with the "fairness" in this game is that the AI opponents don't follow the same rules as you do. I just warped into the third sector doing really well: level 2 shields, cloak, teleporter, scrap recovery arm, good crew, had a defense drone mark II (just waiting for drone control), etc. I was stocked for how set up I would be in the later sectors, all I needed was to find a worthwhile weapon at a trading post to add to my initial Kestrel armament. But then I encountered a Mantis ship about three jumps in that instantly teleported 5 Mantis soldiers onto my ship. I tried to force them to fight in the medbay by flushing the oxygen from everywhere else but the then the Mantis ship managed to destroy my O2 with their first volley. Needless to say my crew was slaughtered.

It's cool to die and all that, I'm fine with it. But why were they able to teleport over 5 of their crew instantly when their teleporter room is only large enough to hold two? Is this normal, or was it a fluke? I haven't noticed such large large boarding crews in the past... It was especially lame because their ship was enough to pose a huge threat by itself, with two shields and an array 3 or 4 weapons, including missiles and hull beams.It would have been a great fight - had the AI been constrained by the game's basic rules.

I guess my point is that difficulty by cheese is not a fun and constructive way to balance a game.This is a great game, I just wish that the AI was restricted by the same universal laws as I am.

[shadowcrust]

This was likely a "a boarding party from a nearby station teleports onto your ship" event (3 boarders), followed by the normal teleporting from the Mantis ship (2 boarders). So it's tough luck stumbling over this event and then having your defense strategy destroyed along with the life support room, although it might still have been winnable.

At least with the narrative of the event no game mechanics were broken. A worse offender is the "you don't know how the boarders could pass the Zoltan shield" events in my opinion.