Artamba wrote:Also, TheReaverofDarkness, it's easy to blame the game for bad decisions you didn't even understand you took. It's also easily possible that you got damn unlucky not getting any fuel from encounters, but there's so many options to avoid fights and get resources in CE that I think it might just be that you're not used to it all! Especially since you lowered yourself to easy mode!
I got used to it all pretty quickly. It's all intuitive, I can see exactly how it works. Simple fact of the matter: I got far less fuel in addition to the rebels advancing more quickly. There's way more events that advance the rebels than before, a lot of them supposedly option and yes, I can turn them down which I pretty much always do because their benefits are really minor and not worth the extra time. They would be barely advantageous even if they didn't advance the rebels. Selling cargo for +10-15 scrap over what I bought it for is often not even worth the augmentation slot it takes up, and it certainly isn't worth it if I only make the profit by advancing the rebels. Then I have to spend 2 extra fuel every sector just to avoid advancing the rebels double speed for two turns.
I know how to avoid fights, and there were lots of ways to do that in stock FTL. As a matter of fact I was avoiding fights on the run I mentioned. I was thinking about it afterward and I figured perhaps the reason I wasn't finding fuel was due to an oversight: adding all the content about surrendering or accepting surrender and fuel was never added to the enemies' surrender offers but you have to give fuel to surrender to them. So I tried a new run, this time with a Mantis ship. I know that in the original game you get the most fuel by taking ships via boarding parties. Well that didn't fix the problem. I ignored pleas to surrender (unless they offered fuel, which they almost never did) and I still got almost no fuel. I rejected chances to advance the rebels except I did spend the 2 fuel at each sector start, and the rebels still advanced a lot faster than they ever did in stock FTL, and that extra fuel use caused me to be barely scraping enough fuel to get by even though I was buying all of it from every store I visited. I only did slightly better with fuel that run.
After having played a few more times, I see more discrepancies with CE:
1.) there's significantly less fuel, even though you use significantly more of it
2.) overpowered enemies are more common
3.) you wind up with less scrap, not because you get less, but because you spend more of it on repairs and fuel due to so often losing 3/4ths of your hull to one overpowered enemy you had no possible way of defending yourself against
4.) you can't properly take advantage of the features because you never have enough scrap to buy the cool weapons/drones let alone upgrade your systems to use them, and the features you can afford to access will advance the rebels for way too little benefit to make it worthwhile.
The only way I can see people being okay with this is if you all are masochists and like to be tormented. Well I'm different, I actually like games where my choices are the most important part. I like a game in which victory is only a matter of skill, not random chance in which the odds are stacked against me. You know, on one run I died on the second jump, to an enemy that tore apart my hull to zero before my engines charged to flee. It had 1 shield bubble, a 3-flak weapon, and a minelayer drone. The amount of power bars it had to have been spending on that weaponry is absurd for so early, and its damage output was utterly insane. There was no way for me to thwart the minelayer drone given my ship had no way to turn off any of its weapons/drones and my evasion was too low for them to ever miss. The flak went right through my 1 shield bubble, and my ship which was designed for boarding parties (Mantis C) was utterly incapable of getting past their crew AND antipersonnel drone. Yeah, they had an antipersonnel drone AND a minelayer drone, both up at once.
I'll grant that the Mantis C is just straight up a bad ship, but there's no excuse for an enemy that can literally tear a ship to shreds before it has a chance to charge engines and escape--on the second jump. Now I've lost the first fight of a run multiple times before CE, but it was always to a ship getting lucky and shooting out the engines, weapons, shields, weak spots. That didn't happen this time. Its aim was lousy and I had the shields and engines up almost the whole fight. My hull just went down too fast.
