stylesrj wrote:Sometimes fake difficulty and a choice in whether or not you can risk your crew is what you need to make the game experience enjoyable.
You're talking about actual difficulty: making informed choices in which you have an effect on the outcome of the situation even when you are aware that you are selecting one of two or more chance-based scenarios.
I'm talking about how you have to know what the possible outcomes are, by trial and error, before you can make a reasonably informed judgement. The alien spiders is pretty clear to be a danger to your crew, but the Zoltan Eye is quite the opposite. There are plenty of other crew-deleting situations in which, if you don't have experience with that specific scenario already, there is no reason for you to suspect you are in any danger. Sometimes the game even goes out of its way to convince you that an option is safe, only to punish you for trusting.
The Mantis escape pod is an excellent example of FTL's in-game and text event disparity; when a newer player who has not yet realized just how much disparity there is finds this pod, they will probably check their crew to decide if it's safe to let the mantis out. The player may see no danger when they have a sizeable crew including mantis and rockmen, but that doesn't stop the text event from demolishing a crew member under a hand-waved explanation.
Even worse is the man of questionable mental state. He's assumably human, and yet is somehow able to insta-gib one of your crew at random.
Another unwarranted crew death comes in the plasma storm wrecks event, in which if you choose to search the wreckage, you can end up finding out you had sent crew out of the ship to do it. You weren't informed of this before you made the decision, and rather than take hull damage from the impact, you lose crew.
Another example of this handwaving comes with the Zoltan shield, and how it is supposed to defend against enemy boarders. Anyone with experience going through uncharted nebula sectors may believe a zoltan ship to be a great choice because you'll never get attacked by enemy boarders, which is one of the sector's biggest threats. But you come to find that if anything, the frequency of being boarded increases, as if the game is trying to say "you can't cheat the text events, now die for trying!" And that bit of flavor text they added in advanced edition to "explain" it is an absolute failure to explain because it misses explaining how these zoltan shield bypass units are so extremely common on enemy boarding ships you don't see, yet so very rare in stores or on enemy ships that you fight in combat.
There are other events in which you don't get any safe option, and I don't mind that so much as long as the explanation is reasonable. The rock mines event is fine as long as it doesn't happen too often (and it doesn't), but the mantis fugitive event is way too common and there's no safe way to handle this mantis who apparently has the ability to cause 5 hull damage to you from inside your ship before you can react. It makes no sense at all.
Events like these don't make the game more fun. They don't even add a significant amount of difficulty. Once you are familiar with the events and know what outcomes you can expect, making an informed decision is usually quite easy. For instance with spiders: do you risk crew for scrap? If yes, fight spiders. But it takes a lot of experience (or checking the wiki with each event) to even begin to make a reasonably informed decision.
That's FAKE DIFFICULTY and it is NOT fun.
