FTL: Danker Than Light

[Rolan7]

Why hasn't anyone made a SS13 gamemode based on this yet? Except don't, because I plan to one of these years.

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Anyway this topic is for the best space game ever except for Star Control 2 and maybe Freelancer, discus.

[Jacquerel]

I like FTL a lot but I think the creator made some questionable design decisions and this continued into Advanced Mode.
The Boss is the biggest offender, fighting it is just so different from the rest of the game that you can breeze through every sector but know for certain that you're doomed anyway and this gets even worse when they throw in a bunch of dice-rolling elements so that sometimes you can warp out and heal yourself between every phase and sometimes all the repair stations are captured instantly by the rebels. Sometimes it launches a hacker drone at something useless like your oxygen room and sometimes it instead periodically removes your shields or evasion without any actual possible counter-play.
Like I get that there should be some randomness involved and usually it's fine but you can't use that as a key element in your final boss fight.

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[center]APPEAL ME NOW I KNOW YOU'RE READING THIS[/center]

[Drynwyn]

I like FTL a lot but I think the creator made some questionable design decisions and this continued into Advanced Mode.
The Boss is the biggest offender, fighting it is just so different from the rest of the game that you can breeze through every sector but know for certain that you're doomed anyway and this gets even worse when they throw in a bunch of dice-rolling elements so that sometimes you can warp out and heal yourself between every phase and sometimes all the repair stations are captured instantly by the rebels. Sometimes it launches a hacker drone at something useless like your oxygen room and sometimes it instead periodically removes your shields or evasion without any actual possible counter-play.
Like I get that there should be some randomness involved and usually it's fine but you can't use that as a key element in your final boss fight.

The final boss fight is surprisingly easy. All you need are decent shields, 2 mantis men (ideally 4), and a teleporter- The guns on the flagship are isolated from the rest of the ship, so if your boarders blow them up and kill the occupants, they can't be repaired.

At that point it's just a matter of spending 40 minutes shooting at the damn thing until it finally dies.

[Jacquerel]

It's not so much a case of "the boss is hard" though, than a case of "you can have a ship that works perfectly on everything prior to the boss but the boss shits on it"
Yeah you can beat it easily if you've already specialised your ship in one or two specific ways but it just seems jarring that you're presented with a world of viable options for 8 sectors of the game and then it suddenly narrows to two or three at the very end. Not every ship can even run teleporters, and if you don't have a teleporter or a cloaking device then you'd better start praying to the dice lords.
If you're not the kind to look everything up on wikis in advance, hitting that after 8 acts of what seemed like piloting an invincible battle machine is just a bit shit.


And the fluctuating availability of repair stations is still bullshit.

[Miauw]

It is the way the game is designed, really. It's a bit harsh for first-time players, I guess, but everything before sector 8 is simply preparation for the boss.

[Rolan7]

Which is normal for roguelikes, and I like how ship-unlocking requires *reaching* the boss with various ships instead of actually killing it. I don't want to start the whole "It's all luck!" versus "It's pure skill!" argument that crops up in every FTL general on any board, obviously luck is a factor and the learning requires trial and error. I personally like the balance though, it feels tense to know that things can go south even on a good run if I'm exceptionally unlucky or I make a mistake.

I still haven't tried hard but I have a pretty good success rate on normal, after the first sector. The boss's missile room can be bombed, missiled, hacked, boarded, and maybe taken down with a good mind control? Of course none of those work through stage three's supershield, so taking a round of missiles is hard to avoid if you don't have a cloak or defense drones.

It's actually the drone swarm that gets me the most, since the defense options are more limited and you get wrekt FAST if your shields go down. But if you have three bars of shields it'll probably be okay, assuming nothing goes wrong.

Anyway I think it would work pretty well as a gamemode, not station-versus-station but ship versus ship. Kinda like that unreal mod where you fly airships and load cannons and such.

[SergeantSkread]

I love that game but i'm too shit at it. I got to sector 8 ONCE and I got annihilated at the first beacon out of the federation base

[ExplosiveCrate]

Anyone tried out the Captain's Edition mod? It's been updated for AE and it has a bunch of nice additions, like missile flak launchers, swarm missiles, lasers that deal more damage the more you shoot them, delayed ion weapons that penetrate shields, and slow-as-fuck mine launchers. Plus, it fills in empty beacon encounters by letting you talk with your crew for bonus resources/quests and you can get augments that let you create missiles/drones/AI crewmembers.

[TheTerbs]

8/10 its alright

[cultist-chan]

Oddly enough I don't enjoy this game as much as some people do.... I don't know why.

[TheTerbs]

i have downloaded the advanced edition


i have arrived

[peoplearestrange]

I really enjoyed the Endless Space mod, where there is no final boss and no fleet chasing you. Difficulty does ramp up fairly quickly so its still an insane challenge but you dont have that constant thought of "I gota get cloak/missiles/teleporter so I can defeat the boss" looming over you.

I'm not sure if they updated it so you can use the advance edition yet though.

Still though its a very good game changer.