[Suggestion] Variable game speed, please?

[Mister Sammy]

I love me some Mantis cruiser. Especially B and C. But I don't love auto-ships on those cruisers. Having to wait around for like, 5 battles in a row, praying for a weapon so that I can expedite their destruction is a complete and total pain! This setting would also come in handy if, say, you just OOPS'd your whole crew on an enemy ship that blew up, and have to wait for the clone bay to do its thing.

[Leylite]

Having a fast-forward button would also let the player quickly re-fill their oxygen in those cases where they turned off their oxygen for the whole battle and need to refill from 20% to 100% with just a level 1 oxygen system, or those cases where Rockmen boarders or anti-personnel drones are nearly dead, and need to be healed up very slowly to their full health.

To avoid having to speed up any ship-to-ship or boarding battle mechanics, I assume this feature would only be accessible when the ship is safe and the upgrade screen is available.

[tempthomas]

Yeah fast forward would patch up a lot of the boring parts of the game that aren't fun.

[5thHorseman]

I asked for something similar in the Beta (I asked for super speed of many things when "safe." Like healing, getting rock men from one side of the ship to another, etc). I was told that it was surprisingly difficult to define "safe" and the current "can upgrade" has lots of holes in it.

I accepted this and moved on, but I'd still like Rocky McShale to get back to the teleporter faster after his 50th trip to the medbay...

[Leylite]

I was told that it was surprisingly difficult to define "safe" and the current "can upgrade" has lots of holes in it.

Yeah, it occurs to me now that you can upgrade your ship while it's on fire, for example.

[panda]

The solution is simple:

Add variable game speed to the game. "Variable game speed" means increasing/decreasing the speed of everything (crew speed, fires, repairs). Every game element would maintain the same speed relative to other game elements, but you could make everything go faster together if you wanted to. Defcon, a multiplayer game similar to FTL (in my opinion), does this well. At the top of the screen, you can choose between 4 different speed settings (1x speed, 5x speed, 10x speed, or 20x speed).

In the early game, I like taking the reactor power out of oxygen and putting it into an extra level of engines. The down side is that I am waiting 30-60 seconds after every battle doing nothing but being bored. Going through a nebula? Well, I need to make sure my oxygen is 100% in case there is an ion storm there, so I need to wait extra time for 100% oxygen.

[tempthomas]

This is ultimately a matter of time which is often lost to situations like that. May as we'll list the worst offenders
#1. Waiting for oxygen to refill
This is the worst offender ever. I upgrade O2 for the sole sake of wasting less time
#3 Waiting for FTL to charge in Mantis Cruiser
#4 Mantis repairman (even non engi repairman are slow)
#2. Sector 1 is boring and a waste of time (many times I wish I could skip it)
I end up skipping ftl entirely because I can't jump into real action against sector 7 lanius ships without starting a new game. That's really a cry for save system though


I know they are not in order but that's how I wrote it.