Subset Games Forum

Hey guys! Long time (relatively) lurker, first time poster. I've been noticing a common trend amongst any complaints (well things people would like to see implemented) and figured we could pool ideas together from each other.

On to future content (if there will be any) post-release:

As it stands, the core of the game is absolutely fine. It has the perfect blend of absolutely everything, and we got what was kickstarted for.
What most people seem to be looking, the biggest nitpick, is for more of the same. More ships, more encounters that can occur. This is the easiest to implement, although it would be more beneficial if extra depth to the mechanics of the game was added thus giving the even further variety some purpose.

People like TotalBiscuit come across another one; lack of depth in most things.
Some ways (whether simple or complex depending how the engine is designed) to address this include weapons for combat onboard ships (rock paper scissors; kinetic beats armour, laser beats shield gear) and adding an armoury to house all of this (which can be taken over), the ability to take a boarder hostage if their teleporter is taken out or ship is destroyed/has left (they would surrender after a certain amount of health has dropped, choose to accept or not), in addition to a brig (break opponent's brigs to free anyone inside, but again they may or may not be friendly).

Also, people want more sub-systems present in addition to more systems, although the danger is arbitrary depth.
Anyway, a communications module; if it's broken then you can't actually receive any surrenders from your opponent (or accept a surrender offer; sectors 4 or less on certain encounters).
Hacking; hack the enemy ship and gain control of 1 system for a limited period of time (e.g. control doors and force all their crew to go into the med bay; disable weapons for say 5 seconds out of every 45). Get hacked in return as well (only possible to hack/be-hacked if module is installed, otherwise they don't accept outside communications). If yours is turned off before it is breached then you can't be hacked. Like ion blasting and boarding except it allows you to safely attack their ship over a longer period of time for lesser returns.
+ the brig as mentioned (powered down for more than 30 seconds and doors open).
Overcharging as well which is suggested many times (more of a use sparingly thing; overcharge shields for 1 extra level but costs 4 extra power or the like; something inefficient that would require diverting a lot of power elsewhere; same deal with weapons, something you'd do if your systems were disabled and you were going for a last ditch effort).

Game length as it stands is just fine; if anything it could be made slightly harder to be in line with other traditional roguelikes where you will only win maybe 1 in every 20-50 games or so (except nethack where you will win once in your life), or instead making the curve slightly more linear (but not too much) especially on easy where sector 8 spikes a little too much, making from sector 3 or so onwards harder.

Breaking down some systems a bit further; the weapons station (if more people are assigned to it) being broken down into different weapons being boosted instead of a global boost; assign 1 man to a global boost (have to have this first) then another to individual weapons that get another boost on top of it; something to assign all that extra crew to besides repairs and giving more variety in endgame content.

A cargo hold on board the ships, thus giving you a reason to not just camp your medbay as you drain the oxygen from all other parts of the ship and the AI a very real reason to grab what they can then to FTL away if you lose all your precious scrap (damage wouldn't affect your cargo). By extension, give it significantly strong doors that can be upgraded on their own and are innately much stronger than regular doors.

Surprise attacks on ships (probably only if you're cloaked) on very rare occasions (think 1 in 50 battles, and never later than sector 5/6), meaning you get a free shot at the start off on their ship.

The weaker ones:
External components to the ship that require spacewalks to fix, but make them at least 4 times harder than internal components to damage so it's more about causing damage that likely won't be repaired before battle end but doesn't cause too much harm. It would also give the player a reason to go and fix broken airlocks. E.g. damage cause 1 level of damage to shields/weapons from the outside (but it may require a fundamental change in the engine to occur).

Non-Biological entities on board the ship; AIs so to speak. Add a mechanical bay to deal with healing them, and give them different weaknesses as opposed to other races again (no oxygen required, not affected by fires, and can spacewalk easily).

Anyway, thoughts on all of this? I would love to see some more suggestion threads as some ideas are really quite interesting but what would be mind-bogglingly hard to implement (including some above).

I think you had some good ideas in the sense that they seem interesting. However, I think it might be better ways to implement your ideas than some of your suggestions.

making it so missiles can be taken 1 at a time by boarders from the weapon room, and drone parts from the drone room might be interesting (both from your ship by enemy boarders, and from the enemy ship). You'd probably need to limit it to 1 of each per battle. Maybe they'd have to damage the system first to be able to steal, and it would take some amount of time to prepare the item to be teleported, so you have a chance to fight them off.

I would like to see DLC and further enhancements to FTL, post-release, but am a little worried because I read something somewhere that sounds like the developers are planning on moving on to completely different projects after its release.

Then again, this Twitter looks pretty encouraging:

We don't have any concrete plans but, yes, there is post release content we would like to add.

Firstly, I think this is a brilliant game. It has the endlessly addictive quality that means I'll be playing it for years.

Anyway, as regards ideas for the future - I think some of the suggestions so far would be a bit of a turn off for me as they would make more complicated to the point that I think I'd start losing track of the number of systems I had to watch out for.

However I think a little more could be done to in the future to make the crew feel a little different. Maybe the addition of a bonus talent after a particular event (for example the crowd control event or space spiders- if successful one of your crew could get an upgrade on their combat abilities, or after a successful mission where you shield another ship from asteroids one person in the ship gets better at shields). An alternative to having an increase in the already set areas of expertise would be to give crew members a particular personality trait such as diplomat which would give you particular options when trading or feisty which would result in more fights but would be a faster weapon charge.

That could end up being a bit unbalanced so with the personality thing you could say only 1 in every 10 crew has a personality quirk or something to limit its impact.

An further crew suggestion might be that someone gets nominated as the captain with a possible bonus when dealing with ships of that same race. If this was the case then I think you'd need a rule to say you couldn't keep nominating different people depending on what sector you were in - maybe a rule that you have one captain and can only renominate when the first one dies.

pC

Interesting ideas to be sure.

I'm most intrigued by the ideas surrounding additional rooms on your ship. Prisoner holds are suggested in the events- for this reason I think it loses some of its appeal. That is how they implemented the prisoner concept and they chose to have it be a narrative device, not a gameplay one. Which is okay, because it's about ship combat and boarding is simply one aspect of that.

It makes sense when you destroy another ship that any boarders they have might want to surrender... at least, the game should address possibilities other than fighting to the death. This issue should be solved with a simple text bubble, not an additional system. I considered a couple of other possibilities. Taking them hostage to get their friends to surrender, ect. Really, it gets super messy when you consider that any of those systems should also affect you as you board them. What happens when one of your dudes is captured? How do you know if he's dead or captured... do you trade hostages? Can prisoners be extracted? Why not just teleport them out?

It offsets the balance this game has between crew actions and ship actions. The rewards are already greater if you focus on killing the crew. If there were a subsystem or system or rare augment that allowed me to sell captured dudes back to stores or interrogate them for system information, I'd do that every game. As it is I always get a teleporter ASAP. It'd be too good, and doesn't mesh with the theme of being chased. Hell, I attack slaver scum, why would I be one?

If there were an open RPG style game with a couple dozens of augments and systems to pick between, it'd make sense to have that degree of specialization. As it is, every ship has to have a room for every system. That likely rules out anything but an additional subsystem or additional augmentations.

I love the possibility of hacking the enemy's blast door control. Perhaps the best solution would be an advanced ion-type ship weapon that instead of disabling a system, gave you control over it for a short time. So the med bay would heal your own men, the enemy doors you'd control, the drone center would cause anti-personal drones to attack the enemy crew, the teleporter would send your own men back (if yours was busted) ect. A weapon like that would need a 30 second cooldown and 4-5 power req. Or it could be a Hacker boarding drone that you'd send in while your men cover it on location.

Thing is, battles aren't hard enough to need tactics that advanced. Most battles only last a minute or two. And between fires, breaches, ions, boarding ect, there are many options to take ships.

I have always been a fan of Terraria and Rediggit. When they added hard mode, it was like a whole new game. Although they stopped developing it, the initial release and the final product is so different and they did it right. Furthermore, they didn't milk the players like maybe CoD would with much less content like map packs.

I do think that FTL can have a future as bright, if the devs choose so.

But again, Terraria is one of the most successful Indy games, seeing how it shot up to the top of steam chart (and stayed on it for quite some time) on its release day.

The ship component I feel like they've forgotten is the Power Plant. We have all this power to shunt around our ships, but it doesn't come from anywhere. This would also assist in providing more targetting options once you've dropper their shields. Crew weaponry is a nice idea too.

Durus wrote:The ship component I feel like they've forgotten is the Power Plant. We have all this power to shunt around our ships, but it doesn't come from anywhere. This would also assist in providing more targetting options once you've dropper their shields. Crew weaponry is a nice idea too.

The "power plant" or "reactor" is a networked series of gelpacks containing a modified Zoltan blood (cloned ofc) cocktail that are situated safely behind armoured and fireproof panels in the walls all over the ship.

(I have no idea what the devs intend the power to be coming from. I just made something up that would explain the lack of room as well as how you can upgrade one bar at a time like that )

I always feel a little sad that enemy ships don't have to juggle power.

...And then you come into an ion storm.