Actually, if you attack the slavers, they will (from what I've seen) always surrender and give you a free slave. If you want to save on scrap and can easily take them, definitely attack. You even get the slave if you board and kill all of the crew. -- I like FTL, a lot in fact, but it feels like a limited game - I hope it sees an update or two to increase the pool of possible events and add more secret stuff. After a couple few dozen games or so it felt to me like there's nowhere near enough random factors to make it hugely replayable.
^Sorry, that's what I meant, since I mentioned give you a slave, not buy As for the miracle shot, that's awesome. What's less awesome is when you have a drone and their shots hit your drone.
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood that. Yeah, if you get every potential crewmember you can from the beginning of a game until the end, you probably still won't max out - horde them zoltans in particular, incredibly useful crewmates.
Luckily this mechanic works both ways. I can see the modders giving this a workout. It will be grand. 20+ ships, more variables of starting configurations (Layouts), and a massive stockpile of modded equipment and items. I can see in time there will be weapons that target and do extra damage to specific systems. Some will only work on the specified systems. Like a anti-transport bomb for your nice cloaked ship to avoid a melee. I can see plague bombs that can target your own ship in addition to the enemy, and you better not try to run through those rooms until you vent the air from them. I can see displacement augments for the ship, giving you a ~20% chance to avoid being hit. (That ~ is a tilde. Look closely and compare it to this minus -. See?) I can see a hard mode mod for the game with extra potent gear available for both you and the enemy. (As well as extra scrap and missiles/drones since you will need them. I can see proximity anti-personnel mines. Even cloaked versions of such. You could even put them on your own ship. They would not trigger on your own crew, and would do minimal or even zero damage to systems and hull. As a premium penultimate version of this, I can see cloaked proximity anti-personnel plague mines that are able to heal your crew while quickly killing the enemy in the same field. But that would be a wickedly potent weapon and would either have a massive cooldown or massive power cost. Perhaps even both. (Note that I use the word mine, since it does not explode instantly. It would otherwise be a bomb like those already in the game.) Mayhaps I should make an account for their forums and spread these ideas a bit... I could keep right on typing ideas.
Bought it last night. Loving it. I'm trying not to read too many tips so I can figure things out myself though.
Just wanting to state that the random engine was weird my first 6 hours I played. Since then (still on normal) I have systematically gotten a lot more scrap I can really actually purchase stuff now regularly.
I played almost 10 games before I discovered you could upgrade your ship directly (more power, shields, etc.)
Just played for the first time today. Good fun, and brutal, even on Easy. I was having the most fantastic run, got to sector 7, albeit with only 3 crew. Came across a pirate ship carrying ammunition. My loot sensors go off, so I have to try to take out their crew without killing their ship. Send two of my crew over with my fancy new teleporter that I just bought, manage to take them out and get the missiles. Little did I notice, while I was so focused on invading their ship, they had ripped my ship apart. My two remaining crew suffocated trying to fix the O2, and that was all she wrote.
Weird Worlds is excellent and I've spent a big chunk of time with it. It's definitely worth it for the low price. My only complaints are that, as a coffeebreak game, it is inevitably not very deep. There are some mods but they are hit or miss and a lot have balance issues. It does have some nice Dredmor-like humor, and challenging, unforgiving death which you have to learn to navigate around. There is an iPad version of Weird Worlds. I've played it before and it is a solid port. Some people say that Strange Adventures in Infinite Space is better balanced, but I like both games equally. They are just different in some subtle ways.
While I disliked SAIS and Weird Worlds talking about them made me redownload them and check them out again, to see if I still feel the same way about them. I also, because of this comment and the one made by OmniaNigrum, downloaded The Ur-Quan Masters. I just booted it up for the first time. O_O Immediately the Starflight vibe hits, and it seems AWESOME !!! The story is cool, it's NOTHING like SAIS and Weird Worlds from what I remember and it's AWESOME! I LOVED Starflight to bits, and owned a megadrive version of that game, bought for myself ages ago (when it came out) with pocket money. I played it a lot and really enjoyed it a lot. The Ur-Quan Masters is basically a "modern" port of Star Control 2, it says on the site (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/), and Star Control 2 is a successor of Starflight. "Starflight spawned a sequel, Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, and was very much the spiritual predecessor to the more popular, but similarly themed Star Control 2.", - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight So the fact that I recognized Starflight in it is not surprising. Anyway... this all to say: you guys go play Starflight and/or Ur-Quan masters as well, that way multiple people are enjoying the same thing miles apart and that's a happy idea EDIT: and I just realized this might be slightly off-topic... woops!
I really should play Star Control some time. It's a brand of sci-fi straight up my alley and I've just never had the time to track it down.
Drone bay. Both squares occupied by repair drones. Crew will not move to repair it. Drones will not move as drone bay is destroyed.
Great game. I highly recommend it. Modded the heck out of it a few years back. WW:RTIS has a sense of humor much like Dredmor. Tons of sci-fi references and trope abuse. It's intended for short individual plays, but lots of runs over time. A successful game takes 45-ish minutes, so you can launch it up on your lunch break, complete one whole play-through after a couple brief "died on the second planet" mishaps where you failed to get the needed equipment to survive your first battle. The game balance is intentionally off-kilter, that's part of the charm. They specifically built in a lot of "unfair" events and game-breaking items, to work well with the short time frame of the game. Sometimes you fail miserably and never had a chance. Other times you get a super-weapon and a hyperdrive and dominate every alien culture on the map. You're king of the galaxy... for 20 minutes, and then the game wraps up and you have to start over from square one in a new randomly generated galaxy. Combat system is fast and fun. Real-time play with you in control of from 1 to 6 ships, and usually facing slightly more than that in enemies. There's definitely room for tactical maneuvering, but as mentioned above, much of the potency of your flotilla comes from what ships you've hired and the technology you've plundered. There's several super-weapons that can totally wreck a fleet, and some of them see heavy use by the enemy. iPad version is nice, but doesn't handle mods, so eventually grows repetitive. There's a number of mods available for the "real" version that feature additional events, alien races, and new ships to pilot so as to keep it fresh for a long time.
I got it for the IPad and my problem with it is that I can't read a lot of it on the small screen, and the interface kind of sucks for me. I started playing it a bit, and couldn't figure out what I was doing. I don't know how much of it is my vision, but I find that I hardly want to use my IPad at all these days. If I'm home, I use my desktop PC with it's good-sized screen. If I'm not at home, 99.99999% of the time, I'd rather just bring my Kindle to read. I spend a lot of time bringing my mom to doctor's appointments, and the hospital and what-not, and I used to bring my I-Pad to kill time waiting around. But it's probably been about a year now since the last time I've wanted to bring it anywhere. Now I just bring my kindle instead (doing a whole lot of reading)
The Ur-Quan Masters is one of the best sci-fi products I've known. When you take into account the race characterization, voice acting, background... It's a shame that I suck ballz at the combat system - I've seen more or less as far as Fwiffo can carry me XD
Just wanted to share this here nice picture... 'Commander! It seems the Rebel Flagship is made of swiss cheese!'
I'm really hoping for a Christmas sale on steam for this. I was disappointed to see it not go down on the autumn sale, though at the same time, they were like 13th in indie sales w/o it.
Just so people know, GOG has FTL on sale for $5.99, that's 40% off today. Here is the link and I will also post this in the persistant games thread in case people read that instead of this. http://www.gog.com/gamecard/faster_than_light
I finally picked up this game, and now I understand why everyone here likes it so much. Very easy to learn, but full of depth. If they ever manage to port it to iPad I will definitely double dip...i bet managing your ship is much nicer on a touch screen.
