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Tag: FTL

Thrower’s Tallies: Games of the Year 2014

Matt Thrower 1 Comment

2014-goty-silly

Another year, another end of year wrap piece. Time to reflect on the past 365 days as you force down another sweetmeat and another glass of cheap sherry and then to wonder what the future holds.

This has not been the best gaming year for me, personally. Not just in terms of titles released but in terms of finding opportunities to play. For one reason and another, I just haven’t spent the time at the gaming table I’d have liked.

That makes me sad. Real life is important, of course, but you only get one shot at it, a thing I’ve become increasingly aware of as the years slip past. Since gaming is one of my favourite things to do, I ought to be able to find more space for it. Other things just always seem to intervene.

So I look at my collection, much of which is gathering dust in the attic, and wonder if I’ll ever play most of them as many times as they deserve. Or that one day I might look back and regrest not making more time for my favourite things, which so often get lost in the push and shove of family life.

I guess that’s a game in and of itself.

Anyway, enough of the melodrama. This long preamble is setting up the point that a lot of the games I’ve played this year just haven’t lasted beyond the required review plays. Not because they’re bad games, just because they weren’t quite good enough to elbow their way in to a very crowded itenerary.

But when I looked back on what I’d played this year, I conveniently found that there were exactly three games that had broken that trend. Three games that had forced themselves back onto the table after I thought I was done with them by virtue of their brilliance. I was also exceptionally surprised by what they were. Can you guess?

Before I reveal all, I wanted to mention something that’s been bothering me more and more in recent years. I’m just not seeing as much fun in new titles as I used to. I still want to game as much as I ever do, but that itch of excitement when you read a preview or tear the shrinkwrap has gone.

The problem, I think, is that game design has become a process of iterative improvement rather than fizzing creativity. When I got back into board gaming at the turn of the millenium, the design community was still buzzing with the influx of ideas from Germany. Over the next few years, recombining this new paradigm with the traditional American model of gaming proved a fertile furrow.

Now, those ideas seem to have run dry. Genre-breaking games seem to be few and far between. I think this is because, with the market glutted by kickstarter titles, we’re near the limits of what can be done with mere card, wood and plastic. Newer titles are, for the most part, still a step up on older ones. But the improvements are so small, it’s not worth the money or the effort to acquire and learn them over existing games.

We’re done with the misery. On to the awards.

2014-goty-daft

#3 Band of Brothers: Ghost Panzer

Don’t judge games by their boxes. I was put off the original game in this series, Screaming Eagles, by the small publisher and the bad art. Then, while it had its supporters, it didn’t seem to gain much fan traction either, so I wrote it off.

That was a serious mistake. I enjoyed its perfect blend of realism, accessibility, tactics and excitement so much that I played it solo, something I never do. I enjoyed it so much that I went right out and bought Screaming Eagles second hand in case it never got reprinted. The components still suck, but these may be the best tactical wargame rules ever made.

#2 Splendor

This was the real shocker. In many respects, Splendor represents a lot of what I dislike about modern game design. But it keeps coming off the shelf, again and again. And it keeps finding its way into friends collections, again and again. It’s a keeper and, on reflection, one of the best Eurogames I’ve played.

While everyone was mistakenly raving about the way Five Tribes had cross-hobby appeal, Splendor was quietly doing just that in the background. It has one page of rules, can be played competently by my 8-year old, yet is challenging to win at consistently. It’s got gorgeous pieces, a smidgen of interaction and can be completed in 30 minutes. When you step back, what’s not to love?

#1 Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition

Ok, so I’m cheating slightly. But in terms of table time, this is the undoubted winner this year. I thought I was done with role-playing games. I thought over-heavy rules and anti-social players had ruined the genre for me forever. Then fifth edition came along and reminded me of just how amazing, how limitless and soaring, role-playing can be when it gets things right.

I have never seen a rules system which achieves so much with so little. Yes, there’s still lots of spells and magic items and stats to remember. But the actual play mechanics are lean and mean, yet manage to cover almost any situation, allowing groups to mine whatever rich seam of fantasy they choose. I’m so looking forward to where this system is going to go next year. More so than any board game in the pipeline.

Well, except XCOM, perhaps.

Speaking of which, I guess I spend enough time iOS gaming nowadays to make a best of year list for that platform too. I have an odd love-hate relationship with my iPad. Part of me longs for the hours and hours of total engrossment that only a AAA PC or console game can provide. On the other hand, in a busy life I’m grateful that I can now enjoy such excellent bite sized gaming.

It feels like 2014 is the year mobile gaming came of age with meaty franchises and big studios finding their way to the app store. But these are the top of the pile for me, staying installed long after their peers have been deleted.

#3 Hoplite

I’m a big fan of rogue-like games but the classic model doesn’t tend to port well to tablets. It’s too involved, too stat-heavy. Hoplite hit the nail on the head by reducing the genre to a kind of puzzle game, with role-playing elements. It sounds dull, but isn’t, because the procedural generation ensures every puzzle is unique.

#2 FTL

FTL may be the most perfect game in the most perfect genre ever devised, an endless story generator with strategy and role playing thrown in for free. I’ve yet to beat it, even after about twenty hours of play time. And I’m still trying, even after about twenty hours of plat time. This might be number one, were it not marginally better on PC than tablet.

#1 Hearthstone

FATtie Erik Twice has asked me several times why I complain about it all the time on social media, when I profess to love it. The answer is simple: it’s the same reason drug addicts complain about crack. Addiction is a terrible thing, but it doesn’t make the high point of the trip any the less sweet.

FTL Tips and Strategies

Todd Brakke 8 Comments

Note: I originally published this article in September of 2012. I haven’t updated it for the Advanced Edition, but with Advanced Edition and the iOS port out today, I thought it worth a bump back up to the front page. Most of the advice herein remains accurate. I’ve only just begun to mess with the AE on iOS, but hopefully (maybe, maybe, maybe) I’ll have some new thoughts to post on it next week. Possibly. I think.

I am, very likely, the last person on Earth who should be writing tips guides for gamers. Nonetheless, I’ve put in enough time and spectacularly destroyed enough starships (along with going 2 for 2 in victories on Easy) that I feel I can offer you, dear reader, the chance to learn from my mistakes. Without further adu, I present to you 15 tips for surviving to the final boss in FTL:

1. No rule is more important that this: Scrap is everything. EVERY-GODDAMED-THING. Without it you don’t repair your ship, you don’t buy upgrades, modules, or crew. Sectors 1 through 7 are entirely about the accumulation and proper use of scrap. Every decision you make should be done with an internal scrap calculator running in your head. If it will result in a net loss of scrap for no notable gain, avoid it.

2. It should be obvious, but it bares saying anyway: Pause is your friend. Pause early. Pause often. Pause whenever you’re not positive that you know exactly what’s going to happen next. They put Pause on the space bar because they want you to use it.

3. Explore. Because this game is a drive to reach Sector 8 it feels like it wants you to beeline for the exit from sector to sector. This strategy can get you safely to Sector 8, especially if you have long-range scanners that let you avoid encounters, but it won’t prepare you to survive Sector 8. That requires a significantly upgraded ship. Ship upgrades cost scrap. To get more scrap you need to spend as much time in each sector as possible. Maximizing your encounters maximizes your reward potential and that’s the only way you can build up your ship and crew well enough to have a chance against the final encounter. Remember that the Rebel fleet only advances in your sector when you jump. You can spend as much time as you need to at each individual beacon (jump node).

4. Pay attention to distances between beacons. (This tip seems invalidated for Adv. Ed. You can select any system and see a way to navigate there.) The randomly generated map only tells you which beacons you can jump to next and it doesn’t let you know when two beacons, while perhaps still adjacent, aren’t close enough to jump between. Consequently, it’s entirely possible to jump your way to a dead-end and have to back track. This both wastes fuel and gives you less time to explore before the Rebel fleet overtakes you. Back tracking in FTL should be avoided as much as possible, though it can be worth it if you’re finishing off a quest or checking out a distress call.

5. Your ship’s weapons systems are an orchestra. They should be targeted and fired in concert with each other and with their strengths and weaknesses firmly in mind. So, don’t use the Autofire option, which tells your weapons to fire as soon as they’re charged. Fire them in a sequence that makes sense given your particular opponent. As an example, against a ship with marginal (strength 2) shields, firing a missile to damage the shield system and then immediately following-up with a burst laser to the weapons and a fire beam to its life support rooms (along with whatever else it can reach) and you’ll have dealt a crippling blow. The AI then has to balance its crew resources between repairing weapons and shields and keeping life support going. There are tons of weapons variations in this game. Learn them. Know them. Synergize.

6. Understand how beam weapons work. They can get through shields if the weapon has a higher damage rating than the shield, but they don’t reduce shield strength like lasers do. Use a fire beam first and it won’t so much as dent the shield. Use the burst laser first and you’ll waste half its potential just getting through the shields, but you will reduce them.Also, beam weapons stretch from point A to point B, where you designate the start and end points. Because they do their damage on a per-room basis, make sure you hit as many rooms as possible. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re not hitting three rooms with your beam weapon then you had better have a specific purpose in mind (targeting a specific ship function or room with crew in it).

7. A successful missile attack is a beautiful thing, but they can be dodged or shot down by a defense drone. Bombs, which use the same ammunition, can bypass both of these defenses. (I’m not entirely clear on how bombing accuracy works as sometimes they seem to miss. I haven’t figured out the rhyme or reason to that. Maybe shields/dodge can play a role? Chime in in the comments if you know.)

8. Don’t be afraid to run. You won’t be in optimal position against every ship variant you’re likely to run across and sometimes you’re going to be outgunned or just in a bad match-up relative to your build. If you’re taking damage from an enemy ship, get out of Dodge as soon as the the Jump button lights up. Remember that scrap is everything and if you’re going to end up spending more in scrap to repair your ship than you’re taking in by winning, then the encounter won’t be worth the effort. “He who fights and runs away, can run away another day.” Words to stay alive by. To this end, engine upgrades are your friend as they not only increase your dodge chance, but they significantly reduce jump spin-up time.

9. Assign your crew specific jobs. Crew members level up at a system/task the more they do it. At the start of your run, pick a pilot and keep him in that role. The same with engineering, weapons, and shields (if you have enough crew to do that). If you have the luxury of extra crew, assign someone specific (preferably Engi) to repairs. If you have excess Manti crew members, they’re excellent boarders. Just don’t shuffle people between roles if you can help it. Also note that skill progression can be gamed. The person who finishes a repair gets the credit for it, no matter who starts it. The guy who kills someone in hand-to-hand gets the benefit of that experience regardless of who did the most damage.

10. Capturing ships by eliminating opposing crew offers better rewards than destroying them. Mostly you get more scrap, but somewhere in here you may have seen me mention this: Scrap is everything! A bio beam (crew killer) or fire beam (damages systems and sets rooms on fire) are ideal for this. A fire beam combined with the ability to teleport in some Rockmen crew members (immune to fire) is a killer advantage that you should exploit when you’re able to.

11. If you teleport in a boarding party, give your teleport system at least two power (this requires an upgrade). On one power you have a longer wait between use and very often that wait is longer than your boarding party will survive if under attack from the target’s crew. A healthy party will almost always live long enough for you to beam them back if the transporter room uses two power bricks.

12. Automated ships do not have life support. This means they have no atmosphere. Sending a boardparty to these ships? Not a great idea.

13. Fully upgraded sensors may seem unnecessary, but a single upgrade is essential for boarding parties so you can see the make-up of the target, where the crew are assigned, and where you may have damaged their hull or started a fire. Beaming them in blind is a huge risk. Full upgrades (three bricks) give you the luxury of knowing how the ship is using its power, which can play a huge part in deciding where to target your weapons or send your boarding for the most bang for your buck.

14. Roll with the punches. There’s a debate to be had about how much this game depends on luck, but just as much depends on your ability to play the hand you’re dealt. You won’t always have access to a cloak or your favorite weapon or drone combination. You have to adapt your strategy to the opportunities the game presents. Remember that this isn’t a game about winning so much as it is about seeing how long you can survive. There is immense satisfaction to be had in simply surviving long enough to reach sector 8 despite a sub-optimal build.

15. Did I mention that scrap is everything?

Wish Fulfilled: A Week with FTL

Todd Brakke 19 Comments

Saavik: So you’ve never faced that situation? Faced death?
Kirk: I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.
—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn

Is there any sci-fi geek of my generation (anyone born in the 70s) who hasn’t wanted a video game to bring the infamous Kobayahsi Maru scenario to video games? Various games have tried. There have been actual Star Trek games that have tried. None that I’ve played have ever quite captured that spirit of crewing and powering and surviving aboard a starship like FTL: Faster Than Light. This rogue-like in space that stumbled into $200,543 in Kickstarter funding, while petitioning for a mere $10,000, is the game I’ve been looking for ever since I first heard Kirk tell Sulu to lock phasers on Reliant and “await my command.”

It’s been a long wait…

Before I descend to full on hyperbole, let’s dispense with the notion that the game is perfect. It’s not a beauty. It’s limited in scope. What plot there is, is best not looked at too closely (or at all). Because you can’t play a crew past the end-scenario or play with custom ship builds, it doesn’t go quite far enough to offer a lasting experience. It screams for an iOS or Android iteration. And it still needs a certain something, even if I can’t quite put my finger on what that something is.

It’s also the $10 product of a two-man operation – Sunset Games’ Matthew Davis (programming/design) and Justin Ma (art/design). I wouldn’t know these two gents if they walked up to me and signed my belly, but it’s obvious that what started off as a flight of fancy, as a “I bet we can do this” project, has turned into something neither could possibly have anticipated. Given that, it’s understandable that the game doesn’t present like something that was funded at 2,000% of its goal. At the same time, what these two accomplished would be amazing to me if they were funded at $2,000,000. (That, if you were wondering, is the beginning of a chorus line of Hyperbole.)

In FTL you are given a starship and an initial crew that’s usually comprised of three our four people that can come from a variety of races, each of which has the usual array of strengths and weaknesses. All ships –there are something like eight, each with a variant model– have a few core systems: Life Support, cockpit, engine room, medical bay, shield control, etc. There are additional systems found on some ship variants by default but that must be installed on others, like cloaking, transporters (for boarding actions), and drone control. All of these systems have some kind of upgrade potential that increases their performance or adds capability. You assign your crew to these positions as you like, which both increases that system’s effectiveness and, as they gain in experience, that crewman’s ability to man it. For example, manning shields incrementally increases its recharge rate.

The goal is clear: You are part of a crumbling Federation, under siege from oncoming Rebel forces. You have information vital to the Federation’s survival and must safely reach your fleet at Sector 8. Each sector is composed of a number of jump points and you jump from point to point and sector to sector. Every stop along the way has some kind of encounter that ranges from exchanging goods with merchants to being attacked by rebels or pirates to helping the locals fight off a spider infestation. (Why must it always be spiders?) Although survival is possible, the game really isn’t so much about survival as it is about seeing how long you can survive. It’s the Kobayashi Maru. That is the challenge and the fun.

I’ve manned the captain’s chair of no less than a dozen starships and only one has both reached the promised land and then survived the final encounter (at which point the game ends). That one successful foray was played on the game’s Easy mode (there are only two difficulty settings). Most of my other attempts have ended in destruction before so much as reaching Sector 5. But then, in the realm of legendary starship captains, I probably rank alongside Jason Nesmith.

Backwash!

What separates FTL from other attempts to crack this impenetrable genre is balance. It doesn’t overplay its hand or try to take on more than its core design can handle. Its UI is simple enough that you can pick it up and understand how to play within minutes. You don’t need a rulebook filled with turn ratios, consumption curves, and hull thickness specifications. You don’t have to learn how to fly the ship because there is no flight control. You don’t have to line up cross hairs or do anything else remotely twitchy. Really, all you do is issue orders, balance power usage, and upgrade your ship. You are The Captain. The Decider. Trust me when I tell you all that keeps you plenty busy.

Power and scrap, the latter of which functions as currency, are everything in this game. Although there are ship systems you can find or purchase, all upgrades require scrap and power. Upgraded engines that improve your dodge chance and speed the time it takes to activate your ship’s Jump capability require you to feed them more power to take advantage of those benefits. Did you add a new ion cannon? I hope you have the scrap parts needed to both enhance the weapons control’s power capacity and your ship’s ability to feed it the power it craves. What’s taken me a dozen hours of play to learn is that trying to fully power every system at once, or even most of them, is folly. You’ll spend all your scrap just upgrading your ship’s power capacity while not being able to afford the actual upgrades needed to survive the range of scenarios you’ll face, not to mention keep your ship maintained (fuel, missiles, drone parts, and armor are all expendable resources you must replenish).

Survival demands knowing when you need a system and when you don’t. It’s easy to turn off a med-bay when the crew is at full health or risk shutting down life support for a few minutes in the name of activating a second weapon or drone, but that kind of thinking will only get you so far. If a pirate is coming after you with a single fire laser and a pair of hull-breaching missile systems, having upgraded and fully powered shields but only stock engines isn’t going to mean much. No, the laser isn’t getting through, but missiles ignore shields and, if you can’t dodge them, wreck both hull and systems alike. This is the moment where you’ll wish you skipped a bigger battery in favor of engine upgrades to which you could’ve diverted power away from your shields. Of course, next time around you’ll encounter a rebel ship that does its damage by sending over a boarding party . If only you had upgraded to security doors when you had the chance, maybe you could’ve slowed the invaders from taking out your ship’s sensors or life support.

Then there is the pain and delight of managing your crew. Having your Rockman put out a fire in the security room or sending your robotic Engi crew member to repair a damaged system is a no-brainer. What about when you’ve vented the ship to repel boarders and only then does life support, which is all the way on the other side of the ship, take a critical hit? (Ship design and system placement also plays a huge role in how you manage your crew.) Somebody has to hold their breath. And which critical post do you abandon in order to repair it? Can you afford to leave the helm when under missile attack or for your weapons to charge up a few seconds slower? And when your ace pilot is killed trying to aid a sick colony do you put off ship upgrades while you look for a jump point with a general store that might or might not have replacements readily available? And even if they do, you’ve still lost half a game’s worth of experience at the helm. It’s a never-ending string of decisions that you have to make and, very often, you have to make them blindly.

This is where the genius of FTL lies. Jump to jump you have no idea what you’ll encounter and, although there is a counter to every attack, there is no way to outfit your ship to handle everything you might face. One minute you’ll wish you had the ability to power more weapons, the next you’ll wish you had saved enough scrap to afford that transporter that would’ve let you send crew over to take out a ship from the inside that that you can’t even hope to scratch on the outside. One minute you sit smugly in your chair knowing a rival can’t touch you, the next you’re cursing the gods as you frantically send crewmen to extinguish a fire and repair a damaged engine that is your only hope of escape. It’s a game of strategic and tactical choices, but it’s also a game of luck. It’s an addicting combination that never ever plays out the same way twice.

FTL may not quite be everything I’d ever wanted from or hoped for in a starship simulator, but it’s much, much closer than anyone else has ever gotten. Matthew Davis and Justin Ma deserve every accolade they receive for this effort, but mostly I just want them to get to work on a bigger and badder version, be it add-on content or an outright sequel. In the meantime, look for FTL as a digital download from either Steam or GOG.com.