Love the game, hate the random

[LordAshram]

Hey all,

Okay, relatively new to the game. There are some aspects I absolutely LOVE... but man, the randomness just kills me. I can be puttering along, doing great, and then suddenly some incident happens where I lose and it was largely just random. Nice powerful ship, jump into a star and four mantis are on board? Great, nothing I can do. I am always disappointed by games in which randomness plays such a big part, and in fact a big enough part that it can overwhelm any tactics or skill. I would say 80 percent of my deaths have been not because of a preventable mistake I made in tactics or loadout, but just bad luck. It leaves me irritated and not wanting to play more.

Anyway... I know that is supposed to be one of the great appeals of the game (sort of) but I just find it frustrating that a game that has so many things I like about it leaves me so irritated just about every time I am done playing it.

[5thHorseman]

I have found that in the vast majority of situations, I am not killed by randomness but by my not being prepared for that randomness. Now, you can't be prepared for every situation every time (hence the concept of losing) but you CAN be prepared for ALMOST every one.

Every time you lose, think honestly about why you lost. It's hard to do, trust me. If you have the means, record the game and watch it later as dispassionately as you can. You'll notice flaws in your tactics and strategies. Fix those, and that torrent of times you get screwed over by the RNG will magically diminish to a trickle.

And yeah, complaining about randomness in this game is like saying, "I love so much about Unreal Tournament, but hate all the shooting."

And one more thing: Change your focus. Getting there is not half the fun in this game. It IS the fun. When you get killed in sector 4 that just means you get to play sectors 1-3 again, which you would have done anyway.

[LordAshram]

I understand, and I know that the random is a big part of the game. And honestly, I love the random... its what leads to replayability.

I guess it is just frustrating when you make progress and play carefully and then something happens that you realistically could not avoid, and voila; done. I don't mind permadeath (I make games and most have permadeath) but...

And I do analyze my tactics after, and I certainly do make mistakes:) I guess what I find most irritating is, for example, the example from above. I had built up a pretty good ship, had tried to balance it nicely between defending against boarders and defending against enemy ships, and then BANG, right into a sun, which fried my ship, and four mantis warriors who teleported aboard. And the whole time the enemy ship is blasting away. So... what do I do? I could have just focused on only boarders from the start, but I would have died before that. And this seems to happen in the majority of my deaths in the game.

It is just very, very frustrating, and I guess as a gamer that frustration leads to walking away pissed rather than wanting to jump back into it. I am a HUGE fan of the accretive process in games, and when a game has that but it can end so randomly, AND it doesn't carry over... eh, just leaves me frustrated.

I know that is the name of the game:) Maybe I'm just venting, and maybe I need to look at it a different way.

[Nevill]

It is hard to give advice when we do not have the full picture of what happened. The best one was already given - if you have the means, record the session and analyze it later, or, better yet, put it somewhere for others to see. It is pretty hard to learn from your mistakes when you are not even aware you made one, but other people are much more likely to notice them.

My guess would be that with door control at level 2 to prevent both fire spread and enemy rampage across your ship, you could wait for your FTL to charge up and move on. Me, I usually get rid of the enemy ship before the third flare hits, boarders or not - but, of course, that depends heavily on your ship build.

RNG might hamper your progress, but things that cost you the game more often than not turn out not to be random.

Edit: I would like to add that mistakes in FTL might not be immediately obvious. Getting repairs instead of an extra weapon might not feel like such a bad idea at a time, but when two sectors later you can't penetrate enemy shields, that's when you are going to feel it. The problem is, most people would not trace it back to the point where the mistake was made, and would instead complain about impossible situations the game throws at you. In that sense, there could be a lot of encounters where you might lose no matter what you do, but it usually means that something should have been done differently before the situation even arose. That is why the game is listed as 'strategy', after all.

[Dontmindme]

There are plenty of things you can do. Vent key areas like weapons and shields so that neither fires nor mantis can hurt them. I don't see what's stopping you from destroying the enemy ship. I mean, they get hit by fires too. If you have built well, by the 2nd volley the enemy ship should be neutered and you don't need to necessarily man the weapons for that. Sounds like your mistake was by not attempting to deal with the boarders from the start. Just because manning stations give a nice little bonus doesn't mean your crew is stuck there. Besides pilot, the rest of the stations are fine unmanned. you lose a little dodge and volley speed, but that shouldn't matter that much. If you intercept the boarders before door control goes down, you can deal with fires by venting. Even after, send one crew in after they leave to repair it. I'm just saying, Mantis + sun should not equal game over. It's a perfectly survivable situation if your ship is up to snuff. It's just another situation you need to master.

[UltraMantis]

The random in FTL can be compared to the random in card games. It's still up to a player to make the best out of a hand, so there's skill, but sometimes your fate is sealed or greatly helped by luck.

[zeek]

Keep at the game. I think you'll learn over time that there are very few situations where the randomness really leaves you high and dry. In the situation you describe you probably should have paused right away. Open all the doors except the med bay and possibly some surrounding rooms if you can't fit your crew in the medbay, cut the O2, Run all your crew to the closed off rooms and faced the boarding party in the medbay. IIRC even 3 engi can beat 3 even leveled mantis in a medbay. You'd probably need to do some shuffling around of your crew as 1 of the mantis will be outside the medbay. So, unless you had a rockman or a mantis of your own to fight him or double team him then you'd need to shuffle some healing. Remember that you can heal more crewmen than the medbay can fit by walking them back and forth through the medbay. You should be able to keep them in the room indefinitely and they will heal. As a bonus any fires that start in vented rooms should go out fairly quickly.

[Elhazzared]

The only thing I hate about the random of the game is when it comes towards requirements to get ships. The huge dependency on the random to get the crystal cruiser is at very least idiotic. It is also a bit too much when it comes to the stealth cruiser to unlock the version B because almost every single run I'm forced to jump into an hazard because it's the only possible route given to me and avoiding 9 points of damage with the cloak is also only possible at the boss. Considering this ship has one of the worst starts it's just reload and restart after restart and when you get a decent run going, it still likelly something will destroy the way to get the archievement. The main problem there is archievements that no matter what, require you to get to sector 8.

Other than that, random can be minimised except in the very first levels in which your ship is not really decked out and you might just not get thrown anything.

[zeek]

The only thing I hate about the random of the game is when it comes towards requirements to get ships. The huge dependency on the random to get the crystal cruiser is at very least idiotic. It is also a bit too much when it comes to the stealth cruiser to unlock the version B because almost every single run I'm forced to jump into an hazard because it's the only possible route given to me and avoiding 9 points of damage with the cloak is also only possible at the boss. Considering this ship has one of the worst starts it's just reload and restart after restart and when you get a decent run going, it still likelly something will destroy the way to get the archievement. The main problem there is archievements that no matter what, require you to get to sector 8.

Other than that, random can be minimised except in the very first levels in which your ship is not really decked out and you might just not get thrown anything.

The only time you'd be forced to jump to a hazard is if it's the first jump of a new sector and you have no alternative. Otherwise you can jump back and forth waiting for the rebel fleet to overtake the hazard beacon and that will remove the hazard. That is what I had to do to get the achievement.

[Elhazzared]

Which is fine if the hazard is like, one jump away from the beacon. However if that means you'll have to fight through elite ships on like, the 4 sector for some 4 or 5 jumps before leaving... Forget it, it's lost. the stealth cruiser starts off really bad.