Subset Games Forum

This game has a lot of potential. However, there are just too many things wrong with it.

In roughly 140 minuets of playing:

1)A) Too much randomness. It's kinda hard to stratagize with random elements.. I mean I randomly jumped and had 0 oxygen, hull breaches and immediately died. If i'm going to lose a game, I want to lose because I suck or i'm being stupid, not because I rolled a 6 instead of 1.

B) Please get rid of "random" solar flare activity. You can't get away, the enemy ships are immune to it and it just burns everything important. It's an auto lose. I don't even bother, just hit restart as soon as you see that big sun in the background. Extremely annoying, unfair and poorly designed. By the time you have energy to jump, everything has been burned or your crew is dead.

C) Please get rid of electrical disturbances in Nebulas. Again, they are random, enemies are immune, and they disable excessive amounts of power bars. Unfair and poorly designed. You can't counter it with skill or strategy. It's just a bad roll. If I wanted to play a luck based game, I'd go play online blackjack

D) Item shops. Very frustrating. They are 90% useless and you only ever come across t3 items in the beginning when you have no scrap. Please FORCE ITEM SHOPS TO ALWAYS SELL AT LEAST ONE COMBAT WEAPON. You literally have better luck just maxing your shields and fighting the tough rebel ships with missiles early game and just saving all scrap for power and shield upgrades.

2) Fire. Please greatly decrease the amount of time needed to put out a fire. Please greatly increase the effectiveness of opening airlocks. (That's called a vacuum, that means the fire is INSTANTLY PUT OUT. NOT 20 SECONDS LATER, AFTER IT DECIDED IT'S GOING TO SPREAD EVERYWHERE) Please do not allow fire to spread while being combated by ship crew members. (This is really bad and I rage-quitted out of one game for no reason other than the sheer stupidity of fire spreading despite being combated by 3 crew members). Please allow crew members to fight fires in front of doors so they aren't forced to take damage from fire. Or better yet, take all the fire extinguishers away from them and force them to purchase a fire suppression system like any other normal sentient being would.

B) Airlocks should work both ways. Yes, that means locking off a room from the rest of the ship means the fire will burn up it's oxygen, thus eliminating one side of the fire triangle. If this isn't possible then patch the fire-airlock mechanic so that you can manually cut oxygen flow to a part of the ship. I understand that fires need to actually be dangerous but right now it seems that they are much more of a nuisance then they should be. We're in Space. Fire should literally be the least of our worries. Soo many patch options. Co2 upgrade to flood rooms with Co2 and put out fires. Foam system. Water system. Drones. ANYTHING BUT CREW MEMBERS WITH FIRE EXTINGUISHERS. It's so corny and inefficient, they take unnecessary damage and it literally defeats all logical thought processes.

3) Please greatly improve unit selection and movement. One of the most fundamental mechanics in the game and it's clunky and buggy. Sometimes they don't follow orders and sometimes you can't select crew members at all.

4) "Miss" mechanic. You can't dodge a laser beam. Misses happen to often. I understand that the miss mechanic is based of off the enemy's ability to "dodge" in relation to their engine prowess/upgrades. Please remove the dodge mechanic and replace it "Weapon Targeting Systems" or something of that nature and have the ability to purchase upgrades for said weapons systems. Or allow two crew members to man the weapons room, one for a charge up bonus and one for an accuracy bonus. (This would be an awesome addition, so much more STRATEGY and so much less LUCK) This would fix the dodge mechanic by allowing for an element of missing a shot while not relying on luck to do it. Or at least negate the effect so that the amount of luck a user experiences is directly proportionate to a user's choice of strategy and items.

5) Replay ability. Game has good replay ability but anybody with time and a half decent memory is going to leave this game after a few days simply because they figured out all the little tricks. For instance, A distress beacon from people on a planet in trouble being attacked by spiders will always leave you sans 1 crew member.

Sometimes everybody but 1 person should die. Sometimes you should decimate the spiders. Sometimes the beacon should be an error and it's just some arbitrary peaceful community. Sometimes it should be trap set by pirates. Sometimes you should get there and discover that the people under attack are actually evil rebels and you aid the spiders in destroying the rebel scum.

TL;DR

Too much random. Feels like 40/60. Please adjust to 30/70 or 25/75. Move random mechanic away from things like environment hazards and combat actions and towards things like enemy generation, loot generation, world generation. Regulate merchants and shops to have better loot, especially in black market or from rebel shops.

1) You don't "randomly have no oxygen and hull breaches" when you jump. Turn on the oxygen system and repair any breaches.

2) If fires bug you so much, use a repair drone. Yes, it is hard to take them out, but take care of them. If you can't use a team member, use the airlocks and shut off the o2 room.

B) If you get level 2 sensers you can see that fires do actually effect AI's. In fact, you can see them taking hull damage from every flare.

3) If there was no randomness and there were always no hazards and good shops, it wouldn't be fun, now would it? If you feel that Ion storms are such a problem, avoid nebulas at all cost.


All in all the game is almost fine as-is.

Wow, 140 minutes of playing and you act like you know everything about the game. Someone please tell this guy what's wrong with his post since I don't have time right now.

4) The weappns targeting system is the weapons room
cant target if thats down.

If you hate your shots missing, disable their engines. As for the "You cant dodge a laser" argument, the Beam weapons will never miss, as they are instant, but regular lasers can. It's a video game, loosen up.

The ships being stationary is just a gameplay/design choice. Imagine the pilot as moving and dodging shots constantly.


If you don't like the random aspects, then this game might not be for you. You can always make a mod with nothing random and just a fixed campaign.

GreenZanbato wrote:Wow, 140 minutes of playing and you act like you know everything about the game. Someone please tell this guy what's wrong with his post since I don't have time right now.

My thoughts exactly. I was gonna make an incredibly sarcastic post but decided otherwise.

Also, about the unit selection. It is not "Buggy", you can only have a certain amount of people in a room. Each person takes up 1 tile. All rooms are 2-4 tiles big (usually).
If the room is full, nobody will enter. You can always Pause the game to miscromanage, and drag a box to select multiple crew

CheezyPie

Imo this game could be great. Those are the flaws with the game.

I even played a game earlier where the fire was spreading THROUGH a room that was flashing red. Mind you it went out very quickly but it still spread nonetheless.

Just some things need to be tweaked and this would be an awesome game.

I guess I went really overboard on my post and was literally speaking my mind. After having just lost due to a random solar flare jump and derping of crew members.

I just think they should move random away from combat situations and more towards unit, item, enemy and situations.

I just said things I was supposed to think.

Dear topic creator,

1A) Any other player experiences this? For my 300 games, never. If you had, please make a youtube video. I will thumb up and I will be the one who push the developer to fix this. You have my word.
1B) The fire spread much much slower if you upgrade your door.
1C) No !! No !! Enemies are NOT immune to it

2A) You got a point. But this rules play both on you and enemy. I am ok if no changes.

4) Most negative minded people will only remember the bad thing and forgot the good. Is like there is a white dot on blackboard you keep complaining on the white dot.
Your attack should hit most of the time in the first few sectors, based on your experience/description you shouldn't able to survive till sector 6.

5) In most event, you can choose want to take risk or not. Having variety of gear help you reduce a lot risks.

Enemies aren't immune to solar flares. It just seems like it sometimes as a lot of the enemies you face are automated ships with no oxygen, so the fires quickly go out. But they do get started, and it can damage other enemy ships (though they often end up being rock ships, and rock crew are immune to fire so they can usually put them out without much trouble.)

They also aren't immune to the ion storms. It just seems that way as you can't see enemy power usage (you're in a nebula, so even level 3 sensors won't allow it), and they always power all of their weapons. I have noticed for instance though that sometimes when you damage one system (thus they can't send power to that system any more), they respond by redirecting power to the shields, bringing online more bars of shields than they had at the start of the fight. They might also respond to damage by activating a previously inactive drone. This doesn't happen with ships fought in other locations.

Hi StupidGame.

Reading your suggestions it seems you thought FTL would be a very different game. You are entitled to your opinions and complaints, but that list of suggestions asks that FTL be radically changed. It would no longer be the same game at all. Thank you for speaking your mind, that's what this forum is for. Most of us like the game as it is, but there's allways someone who doesn't enjoy it, at least at first.

Unless you have fun playing it, there's no point in trying. The game was designed to be very hard to win. Every jump you make is supposed to be a challenge. Sometimes you get very lucky or very unlucky but most of the time you are going to struggle. Everyone who has achieved a victory in FTL had a very hard time doing it. You will have to adapt to the game's rules and learn how to deal with problems.

You say you like the game and that it's got potential to be awesome. I suggest giving it a few more days and see if you have any fun at all. Success feels very good esp. when you know how crushing defeats can be.

The fires spreading illogically and starting in airless rooms thing has been mentioned before. It happens very rarely though.