Subset Games Forum

Apologies if this has been discussed a million times over before, I don't browse these forums too often. =)

But I was wondering today while playing FTL. One of FTL's largest flaws with ships is that there is almost nothing that makes them all special or unique. Maybe this is just something that keeps the game from being over powered in some places, or balanced even. But I think having ship-specific augments is meaningless if you can simply uninstall or swap out that augmentation.

The way I see it, the only truly unique thing about each ship is their layouts which can be huge depending on how you run your ship and the amount of guns or drones they can carry. I think there should be more to this, like the Zoltan ship should not have removable Zoltan shields. This should be an inherent augment that cannot be removed no matter what. Or the Engi have Medi-Bots. That should always be with their ship regardless of what augs the player should go with. The only thing you'd need to do to rebalance for this is make ships slightly harder to compensate for the bonus, I'd imagine.

Just thinking out loud. Feel free to contribute. =)

I don't look at it that way, the ship specific augments are unattainable for other ships (except for engi one) and still they have special stuff. The fed ship has a unique beam weapon and mantis B and crystal B have 4 man teleporters. Making Zoltan shield unremovable isn't really a buff. I wouldn't want redundant differences and EE will give us 10 different ships, so...

I don't think the fact that most ships' unique abilities take the form of augments diminishes their uniqueness. Most of those augments are not available at all to other ships, and the ones that are (I can only think of Engi medbots and rock plating) are only available through very specific random events.

That said, it's a shame that really only the Zoltan shields and maybe the Engi medbots impact gameplay both significantly and consistently. Most of the augments are just free scrap, honestly. I imagine this is really what you're getting at. Ideally the augments would be strong enough that you would not want to sell them (some ships would need to be rebalanced in this case), or at the very least their resell values could be severely reduced.