Hurray! Another multiplayer clone project. :)

[Cog]

Politely, I completely disagree about the burst laser II problem comment.

I think that

A, all of the aliens I listed above can be balanced to be equally useful via advantages and disadvantages.
B, you could choose which alien race's space you want to head towards, so you could pick up aliens of that type, in that area.
C, burst laser II is a good weapon, but not always the best. It's not the long sword of DnD 2nd edition. Nearly all other weapons work well either situationally or in general. I always play with Captain's Edition and Endless Loot (non-infinite edition), so it may be a playstyle preference difference
D, probably not all of those, or even (whimper) most of those will be implemented (maybe I will mod them in myself)
E, FTL AE has like 7 races by default, 8 in captain's edition.
F, on a separate note, I'm still hoping other people will come up with suggestions, and all of mine, plus theirs will be implemented eventually. I'd like to see 20 alien races in the game. I'd like to see 20 alien races in FTL.

I really like lists, apparently.

...oh, I need to connect to a server.

Never mind!

You can run the server executable on your own machine at the same time the client is running, NarnKar, fyi.

[NarnKar]

Not much to say other than that I agree with Styles about weapons balancing.

Here are my thoughts: http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic. ... =20#p99078

[Cog]

Flak family:
-Flak I (shoots 3, like vanilla)
-Flak III (shoots 7, like the vanilla Flak II, but given a different name)
-Flak II (shoots 5, exists somewhere between Flak I and Flak III)

Vanilla seems too strong if Flak II shoots 7 projectiles. Even for 4 power that seems OP to me. Flak fires all at once. That's a total shield obliterate plus 1-3 damage (probably at least 1)

No ion flaks or stun flaks or plasma flaks or missile flaks or weird overly-gimmicky things (which I would save for custom ship mods, because at least I can set up a custom ship to make those weapons work more properly).

Hunh, one of my good runs recently used a missile flak because that's what I found. I sold it at some point, but actually regretted doing so; it made me less able to punch through shields.

Burst laser family:
-Burst I
-Burst II
-Burst III (3 power, 5 shots, like a faster/more efficient version of the Burst III from vanilla)
-Burst IV (4 power, 8 shot salvo)

Your Burst III would be OP imo and the Burst IV would be so powerful you wouldn't need other weapons or drones and you could still beat the flagship. Multi-shot weapons recharge while firing additional shots after the first, so it wouldn't even be that balanced by a long (24 seconds, for example) recharge time. When I evaluate a weapon I always imagine having more than one of them up to max power. So imagine two 8-shot salvos at once. Even if you gave them 30+ second charge times (an indication the weapon is imbalanced if it needs that) the player could cut that down to 5-10 second charge times via cloak to initial enemy volley, or with a weapon pre-igniter, they can fire instantly. 16 targeted damage is like saying "you don't get to have shields ever again, and next volley you will explode."

About the other comments, to some extent I agree with some of them. I felt like just about all the beams except for the glaive/naginata/adaptive focus/maybe maul are awkward and I wanted more beam variety, or maybe just remove some of the poorer quality beams. But all of them can be used effectively. Even without specialized designs.

I've used anti-crew lasers to good effect too. And their 1 to 2 shield layer piercing ability is quite nice.

Bombs are my least favorite because of the accuracy problem. I've never tried to use a fire bomb because if I find it early, I feel like I don't have enough missiles to support it, and if I find it late, I haven't ever done so when both of the following were true: 1. I had plenty of missiles, 2. I didn't have a functioning strategy to win battles otherwise/didn't have a strategy diametrically opposed to fire-bombing (I teleport a lot)

[The_Bear]

I made a new race

They are ice people.
-125/100 hp
-Takes double damage from fires
-Doesn't need Oxygen/half damage from no oxygen

This the abilities and disadvantages I think it should have. Use them if you think its good enough. They should use the crystal ships.

[Cog]

Just fyi Bear, you need a lot more sprites than that for the different animations of a race.

Why do they not require oxygen? (in-game reason I mean.)

+25 HP is a small advantage, and double damage from fires is a severe disadvantage. I don't think "half damage from suffocation" would make them balanced with default FTL races. They'd need larger advantages. Crystal crew are like that but they have a lockdown ability too, which is very strong.

[The_Bear]

Just fyi Bear, you need a lot more sprites than that for the different animations of a race.

I assume you mean this:

This is for ftl and its not done yet so I didn't remove the white background, I hope kcd.Spektor can convert it to how its in space team or give me the human sprites image so I can make it like that if he decides to use it.

Why do they not require oxygen? (in-game reason I mean.)

I really dont know.

+25 HP is a small advantage, and double damage from fires is a severe disadvantage. I don't think "half damage from suffocation" would make them balanced with default FTL races. They'd need larger advantages. Crystal crew are like that but they have a lockdown ability too, which is very strong.

I agree that it needs a bigger advantage but I don't know what it should be, do you have a suggestion?

And you forgot to mention that it looks horrible, what should I do to improve it?

[kcd.Spektor]

I've done spiders before!
...
Also I have these guys
...
I almost forgot, I did these concept gifs a while ago, too;
http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27831

This is realy cool.
Especially the flying mantises

There are 2 races that will surely be in the game: Humans and Spiders(kinda like mantis)
If you could draw those - that would be cool.

The sprites for my game are almost in the same format as they are in FTL
Only each animation is in a separate file.
You can unpack the client.jar(it's basicly a zip archive) file to have a look inside.

Also If you can give me the sprite files for these fire and ghost men I can check how they fit.

[kcd.Spektor]

-Based on how many jump nodes you have visited. (Probably most unforgiving)
-Based on how many enemy ships you have encountered. (a little less unforgiving)
-Based on how much scrap/money you have gained. (a little less still)
-Based on how many separate occasions you have gained scrap/money. (maybe a happy medium, but probably boring that difficulty climbs at a steady, continuous rate, like Oblivion and their level 20 cougars)
-Based on distance (via some distance formula) from home square. (probably balanced but boring)
-Based on the map generating a danger-level for different areas of the map and giving the player some kind of cues to indicate "this area is level 1 danger, this area is level 7 danger" etc. This could be accurate or sometimes inaccurate (off by 1 to 2 levels maybe, randomly.)

If the last suggestion, I would in particular suggest that different races not be stronger than others (like Rogue AI space is level 7 while Engi space is level 1, for instance) though maybe certain races (like aforementioned Rogue AI... I mean captain's edition AI Avatar ships, not Rebel Drone ships) might have a (potentially hidden) modifier to danger level.

Agree.

Will there be any kind of time limitation in the game? If not, the player could have something like a base of operations they return to. If so, we're drifting very far from FTL indeed, but the decisions so far have already moved us far from it, so maybe that's fine.

It will depend on the universe generator and the stories.
I think there can be both - time limited and non limited.

Some advantage ideas for races:
Gain skill experience faster
Move faster than normal
Do more combat damage
Repair faster than normal
Power rooms they are in - rather provide some power to ship's capacitor
Explode when they die for damage to all enemies
Have more HP than normal
Take no damage from fire
Take less/no suffocation damage (Crystal/Lanius)
Not require breathing (AI Avatar)
Be able to see into connected rooms without sensors - rather have sight buypass walls and doors, and see without sensors.
Be able to sense enemy crew aboard other ships - perhaps have an equivalent of a built in sensor of some level.
Remove oxygen/air from room
Heal crew that are nearby
Take less combat damage (different from more HP)
Local teleportation ability
Generate/Breathe oxygen/another atmosphere type in a room/convert oxygen to another atmosphere/vice versa - some of them might be radioactive, toxic to others.
Cause acid puddles when damaged/killed, eventually causes hull breaches (imagine this + clone-bay and teleporters)
Chance to stun enemies on combat damage
Be continually on fire and deal damage to those nearby, they can't put fires out and don't take fire damage
Be immune to stun/acid/combat damage/whatever
Have phoenix/clone-bay type ability where if they die, they respawn.
Explode causing hull damage when they die
Become invisible (activated/in response to taking combat damage/when in vacuum/other)

Perk ideas (these would be abilities a player could have their character start with or gain throughout the course of the game, to distinguish them from NPC crew as special)
Fast (+% to movement rate)
Tough (+% to HP)
Smart (+% to XP rate)
Strong (+% to melee damage, not very helpful to non-hand-to-hand fighting races)

Disadvantages:
(Already in FTL)

Cause less combat damage
Have lower HP
Move slower
Repair slower
Gain skill XP slower
move very slowly outside their ship environment
can't put out fires (thinking of fire race above)
Melee attacks slower than normal (but do normal/extra damage when it hits)

These are cool and look possible to implement.
I had to cut out some other cool ideas because they would take too long to implement.

[kcd.Spektor]

Can you explain how the image of the race is supposed to be, in ftl they look like this:
This is the CE version but its almost the same. Is it anything like this?

Almost the same only each animation/direction set is in a separate file.
You can extract the client.jar file to have a look at the images.

[Gencool]

Thankyou!

I have some stuff for the ghosts (they're AI, actually; hard light holograms) but they're kind of unfished. The fire sprite is just a pose as proof of concept.


I was thinking about putting humans in space suits, so that you don't have to re-use FTL's assets, and had a thought;

Maybe increase the sprite resolution a tad? to, say, 50x50? That way we get a bit more resolution and it allows for a whole new style of sprite.

I know that probably means they'll either have to be scaled down, or the world scaled up, and a whole bunch of stuff would have to be reworked, though, so feel free to shoot the idea down.