Postby Dave » Thu Jan 31, 2013 8:34 am
So I've wanted to play FTL with a scout or other light ship for more of a challenge, and found some of your ships to be very fun. Others were not so fun, so I took some notes and figured I'd give them to you as feedback. I don't know exactly what your are planning FotF to be like, but I assume you will want it to have similar challenges to the base FTL, so here are my experiences.
Firstly, 5 Hull is too low. I would say 8 or 9 should be the lowest you go, since that's what the scouts normally have. Also, 5 doesn't allow you to explore asteroid fields, shield other ships with yours, dock and rescue survivors, side with fugitive mantises, or survive markers that are too close to class M suns. I found the 10 Hull of the Advocate to be a nice challenge. So far it's the only small ship I've been able to beat the whole game with. I've gotten the Wehl and the Moebius to the third stage of the boss, and can probably beat it with them if I have better luck with resources up to that point.
I was not able to test out the scouts themselves, because I am not a fan of rockets that do 1 damage each, and was not very impressed with the cannons. I like the idea of some sort of mass driver, but in their current form, I could not see any reason to use them over other guns as I went through the game.
In at least the Wehl and the Moebius, and probably a few more, the med bays only accept one person at a time, which is very annoying when you are trying to survive boarders with a small crew. Also, along those same lines, the Donut desperately needs door control. Perhaps you can split the weapons room in two. I also think you might want to start the small ships with two crew, or at least anti-personel and system repair drones on the Moebius.
I haven't tried the halo, because the weapons are the same as the Torus, so it doesn't seem intriguing at all. I'd give them some thing different for variety.
With many of the ships, you can still buy additional systems for them, even when there is no room for them to go in. There has to be a way to limit this, because you can't get cloaking on the Fed Cruiser.
I like the look if the Zoltan beam, but the only difference I found it had from the Halberd is that you can't use it for events where you could normally cut them out with a beam weapon.
Two small bombs on the bomber is funny, but they do no damage, so you wind up using all your missiles before you can actually kill anything.
You probably know this by now, but the graphic for the enemy bombers and the fed scouts are messed up in the game.
I hope this helped. I've had fun playing around with what you have so far, and I'll give the Mantis thing a go soon. I look forward to seeing what else you have for FotF.