Subset Games Forum

Ok, so I've been through the game a fair few times now, obviously I've unlocked the Torus and Osprey. Those are fine.

What's annoying me is the reliance on random luck to unlock the other two ships. I go for Mantis/Engi homeworlds whenever I see them, yet have found the Mantis cruiser event once and never found the stealth ship event.

I really don't think chance should be so heavily involved in unlocking content of this nature. I'd really like to be able to enjoy the game with the variety more starter ships provide, but it's demoralising to do repeated runs through the game without even finding the event leading to them.

My suggestion would be to change the game such that these ships are acquired either through certain or likely events, where the challenge lies in the event itself, not in having the superhuman patience to grind the game repeatedly until you find it by pure chance.

But that's the whole game not just unlocks

its random chance that determines what weapons/crew you'll end up with for the final boss battle, as soon as you remove randomness then you'll see the "guide to unlocking ships 100% guaranteed" and honestly where's the fun in that ? you might as well just skip the middle man and have a "would you like to unlock all ships ?" button in the start menu

I'd like that button.

TenLetters wrote:I'd like that button.

long as I can get a "for not using the ship unlock button your final score is increased by 10%"

I dunno, I just like playing the game, not playing for unlocks. Which I feel compelled to unlock.

TenLetters wrote:I dunno, I just like playing the game, not playing for unlocks. Which I feel compelled to unlock.

Embrace the completionist in you

Funny thing is. I'm a completionist. But I'd lose interest iin this game if some of the unlocks weren't determined by RNG.

Yeah this could be a situation where we can't please everybody.

Due to the purely random nature of the game, if we want to make a ship be unlocked through events, it's going to be possible that the player misses it during their playthrough (which is fine with me design wise). The other option would be to not tie it directly to an event, but to have it be attached to some sort of achievement - i.e. do x 25 times or survive with 1 HP in x situation or something. Personally I don't think those would be as rewarding to obtain and we already have 2 ships like this (which is maybe enough).

In terms of the actual difficulty of unlocking... getting the stealth ship was meant to be able to happen by accident ('easy' to do) and the mantis ship was meant to force the player to plan and figure it out ('hard' to do). I assume the difficulty of unlocking the rest of the ships will... somewhere in between. I'll see if I can make any other ships be unlocked through non-event based methods (therefore not requiring the super lucky playthrough) but no promises.

I actually don't have a problem with how it is currently, and it worked basically as you described (as I bet you can see from the thread about unlocking ships, haha). From reading the description of the ship you get a pretty good hint as to what it is.

I think what would make it a lot less frustrating is knowing what the sectors are in advanced. Playing through hitting all but one Red sector and then finding out that the one you missed was the Mantis Homeworld was pretty frustrating as I tried to unlock the ship. It makes sense from an outside point of view (it's pretty likely that a society that has space ships, a federation base on one side, and us taking rebel info on the other side would know where the huge cluster of stars termed "Mantis Homeworlds" would be, instead of just a "Yeah, that area is either Pirate, Rebel, or Mantis, we got no clue."), but if you want it to be less known (if you're tying certain drops/shops/whatever to specific types of sectors, for example) it's understandable to make this more of an educated-guess type of approach.