Has hacking made the Flagship too RNG?

[stvip]

I wonder how viable would it be to depower the weapons for a cycle, then repower at the start of the Flagship cloak.

Doesn't work. Alas.

[mharr]

Getting to the flagship without a transporter bay OR hacking bay OR mind control thing AND have slow firing weapons? Seems a bit demanding to write off this as broken or whatever.

An effective boarding team is a really specialised build, there are ships that cannot install hacking and/or MC, and it's not so much AND have slow firing weapons, more like AND don't have two Vulcan cannons. If the RNG dictates a plain old guns'n'drones build, no other gun can drill though the flagship shields in the time available.

I think the problem here is that hacking your weapons discharges them completely, which is fair enough, but cloaking then prevents them from charging back up, which makes very little sense. (Especially aggravating now that we have multi-charge and self-targeting weapons.) If weapons still charged during cloaking, cloak + hack could still be combined without it breaking the game.

[5thHorseman]

An effective boarding team is a really specialised build

Actually in my experience it's NOT having teleporting that is the specialized build.

there are ships that cannot install hacking and/or MC

Every single ship has the potential to get hacking, MC, drones, or a teleporter. Not all 4 (some can) but every single one is possible with every single ship.

and it's not so much AND have slow firing weapons, more like AND don't have two Vulcan cannons. If the RNG dictates a plain old guns'n'drones build, no other gun can drill though the flagship shields in the time available.

Or BL2s. Or Flak 1s. Or an Ion2 and any other ion. Or dozens of other setups that aren't as good but can still get the job done. If you can fire 5 laser shots, you can drill through the flagship's shields. You don't need vulcans or a Flak 2 or anything like that. 2 BL1s and a basic laser can beat the boss if you're plucky (and sure, a little lucky) but even on hard mode you'd have to avoid good weapons to show up at the final boss with that sort of setup.

But anyway, the thing here is that unlike all other ships in the game, you have a HUGE advantage over the flagship because YOU KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT. Complaining that your ship was massively susceptible to a bad die roll, and then getting that bad die roll, is not going to garner much sympathy here. FTL is a game of punishing mistakes - be they strategical or tactical - incessantly and with no mercy. The Flagship is no different.

[Dark Jelly]

Yes, and it is nearly indisputable.

On hard, I have demolished the first phase with a relatively weak ship, when it hacked something like oxygen or cloning bay. But stronger ships have had their hull beaten way down when it hacked weapons or shields. One single random choice changes a battle from extremely difficult to laughably easy, that's too much RNG.

The time I crushed all phases of the flagship on hard with almost no damage taken I had to think "what would have happened if it hacked my weapons in the first phase?" Even with a very powerful ship I wasn't sure. Maybe I just got lucky.

It's anti-fun in two ways, both because the hacking weapons and then cloaking pattern vs hacking oxygen with no effect is way too big a difference for a single random choice, and because it takes away from victory when it uses an easy random choice.

[Sacarathe]

Flagship hacked my shields on a ship without a cloak, died on the first phase.

[project_mercy]

With two defense drones and a cloak, you can actually avoid the hack. You need to cloak during the first missile fusillade, and then drop the mega launcher before the second one. I actually got away with it with a single Defense II once, but I think it was just luck in timing.

I think it would be cool if you could counter-hack by default. I've seen other encounters have blue options to do it. Either put a button above the hack module's launch that says "counter-hack" and then sets it that way for the fight (which would be cool for the whole game), or add a blue option to the start of phase 1 to cancel out hacks. This would allow the player to opt out of this part of the encounter as long as they were willing to sacrifice an upgrade slot and the hack for that fight.

[LostAlone]

I guess the real problem that I was trying to point to when I made the thread was that there is no real counter to hacking - Nothing that you can just casually acquire in the average game that can insulate you from hacking.

On most fights thats not a problem because most ships are balanced enough that even if the hack hit your shields or weapons you could probably run before they murdered you. Not so on the Flagship. The flagship is the single thing that you are designing your run to beat, and having to make do without a random but significant part of it absolutely sucks. Just to beat the game with an otherwise rocking run you need to prepare a strategy that can win despite loosing any one sub. And honestly, most of the time if you can win without any one significant sub then you were hugely overpowered and would win almost no matter what.

That's what I was talking about when I said it felt too RNG. Boarding the Flagship is pretty much essential to winning in my experience. It let's you take down the weapons and kill the crew, thus giving you a fighting chance in the 2nd and 3rd stages. So what if the hack hits your teleport?

Maybe that's not as disastrous as getting hit on the shields or the cloak, but it totally changes the fight.

You go into the final fight with a strategy. You have to. If you don't it'll kick your ass, even on easy. Losing a sub, especially one that you had to go to significant pains to acquire feels like the game kicking you in the balls and saying 'No win for you' and sending you back to the menu. Which is not to say that hacking is overpowered at all. Just that having no specific counter that is available in every game makes it feel weird. When you win, it often feels like the game just let you win, not that you finally did something clever or different. It just stuck it's hack on your medbay. So victory!

And that was the whole point of this.

If, in two different runs, you can roll up with the same set up and one feels silly easy and one just kicks your ass, then the final fight is too RNG.

You should win because your clever and lose because you weren't. You shouldn't win because the flagship hacked your medbay and lose because it hacked your weapons.

[Iranon]

Amount of randomness feels fine now, closer to "not enough" for my tastes.
Make it too predictable and it becomes a boring chore to end a game that's already won.

[Russian Rockman]

I know a way to make the flagship randomized now and plan to make a mod that does just that some time in the future when I have time. For anyone who thinks the flagship isn't hard enough already. But seriously I don't want to make it harder, just less predictable. It works by giving the flagship access to more "stuff" and using the limit= control what "stuff" up it does or does not use.

Some things that are possible.
-Sometimes the flagship could use drones on phase 1
-Sometimes the flagship could use hacking on any phase, sometimes not
-Same with mind control
-Sometimes the flagship could use its Teleporter on any phase
-Sometimes the flagship could use a Clone Bay on phase 3
-Sometimes the flagship will use different drones against you, like sending an ion intruder instead of a boarding drone (but this is limited, kind of complicated to implement)
-Sometimes a fight could take place in a hazard (sun, pulsar, nebula, asteroids, ASB )
-Sometimes the flagship's artillery could charge faster or slower.
-Sometimes the flagship's evasion could be lower or higher

[obliviondoll]

I guess the real problem that I was trying to point to when I made the thread was that there is no real counter to hacking - Nothing that you can just casually acquire in the average game that can insulate you from hacking.

Countering the Flagship hacking your ship is easy, you just need a decent build with one of the following:

-Hacking.
-Fast-charging weapons (Ions, BL2, Chain Laser, Vulcan, the faster Flaks...)

Or any 2 of the following:

-Missiles/Bombs.
-Mind Control.
-Teleporter.
-Lots of non-Beam attack drones (or boarding drones).

If you have a hacking system and it gets hacked, just power it down and divert that power elsewhere on your ship during the first downtime between hacks. Build your ship well, and the hacking system being disabled doesn't matter. If anything else important is hacked, counter-hack their hacking system and the threat is negated. Fast-charging weapons work simply because they let you fire between hacks (sometimes multiple times). If you have more than one such weapon, you should be fine.

The "any 2 of..." part is because each of those options RELIES on it not being the system hacked. If you have Missiles or Bombs, but they hack your weapons and that was your only counter, then you're probably in trouble. If you have Mind Control as well, though, you can hack the guy allowing the ship to cloak, and your weapons will get a window of opportunity once the cloak system is damaged. Some of the faster-charging Bombs can actually fit into the "fast charging weapons" category, making them a very solid and reliable counter, although such weapons are a bit more rare than many others. If you have a teleporter, you can board the ship and either target the hacking or cloak systems to disable the threat (which you choose will depend on what you're fighting.

If you can't fill at least one of those sets of criteria before reaching the Flagship, then you've had a REALLY bad run. And yeah, really bad runs sometimes do happen. But that doesn't mean hacking breaks things. It's just a new set of rules to learn.

I think it's also worth pointing out that having your shields hacked won't remove any layers of your shields on its own, it just prevents them from replenishing when you're shot. I'd have assumed most people here already knew that, but some of the comments about it seem to imply otherwise.