Subset Games Forum

With a sufficiently underpowered ship - like a Red-Tail with five laser shots in Sector 6 - every fight against an Elite Fighter is a life or death situation and thus sufficiently exciting to continue jumping around like a mad grasshopper. And I think it's exactly in the spirit of the game, being on the verge of disaster and exploring the boundaries. After I've done the score runs with only boarding (Carnelian), shooting and boarding (Red-Tail) and only shooting (most boring, Vortex) I also don't feel sufficiently motivated to beat my own scores, and I wouldn't do it with a Zoltan ship, since it's just too easy if you know a bit about the game.

But I agree the scoring system is a bit broken, like Donkey Kong, where a more or less skilled player can go for (almost) infinite scores. And the record holders of Donkey Kong are even listed on Wikipedia (including scores), although the game is quite a mindless grind of doing exactly the same things in exactly the same sequence over and over, quite different from the variety of things you do when engaging the rebel fleet. I guess if high score grinding would be easier in FTL, more people would be doing it, but since grinding is not too easy, people opt out - and because it's boring if you actually don't like the fights in FTL, but more the story wrapped around random encounters.

I don't compete for score because it is completely uninteresting and tedious to me. Why put forth effort there when I could be speedrunning, doing challenge runs, or just playing other games

Why climb a mountain? Because it's there!

And why compete in speed runs when the decisive factor is the hardware you're playing on?

shadowcrust wrote:And why compete in speed runs when the decisive factor is the hardware you're playing on?

That's going to very rarely be the case, but if FTL runs very slowly for you then it could be. I've seen that with maybe 1 in 8 people I've seen stream the game, where their laptops or whatever can barely support it.

Haha, yeah, I wouldn't have a chance in a speed run competition, but I'd probably do very well in no pause competions... I realised how much faster the game can be when a friend would finish four games while I still was playing on my first (non-rebel farming) game.

I guess you can't really appreciate the true nature of Rocks if not playing on deprecated hardware

I don't see much point in grinding for score. With a heavily armed Zoltan cruiser packing a Pre-Igniter, one could keep going for a very long time.

Not doing so means unusually high scores remind me of fun times... like finding the Crystal sector, or finding out that that last jump point didn't connect to the exit beacon so I had to go through 10 elite fighters without being in any way kitted out to do so.

I'm not sure I get what you guys mean with grinding - it's like moaning that you need to grind so many sectors and so many beacons until you reach the flagship, or that you need to grind for better weapons, or grinding all those events... engaging Elite Fighters is about as much grinding as the aforementioned examples, especially if you do it with a slightly underpowered ship, it's challenging and nerve-wrecking, much more so than grinding for the next handful of scrap to upgrind your grinder.

shadowcrust wrote:I'm not sure I get what you guys mean with grinding - it's like moaning that you need to grind so many sectors and so many beacons until you reach the flagship, or that you need to grind for better weapons, or grinding all those events... engaging Elite Fighters is about as much grinding as the aforementioned examples, especially if you do it with a slightly underpowered ship, it's challenging and nerve-wrecking, much more so than grinding for the next handful of scrap to upgrind your grinder.

Playing a game for 2 hours, fighting a hundred or so varied enemies in varied environments, finding unique weapons and augments and other rewards and building up a ship capable of taking out the boss is not grinding.

Fighting hundreds of ships in a row that are all essentially the same and getting a single, set, boring reward for each one is grinding.

If you truly don't know the difference then I can't convince you any better.

Hopping around in the rebel-controlled area is like doing 20 or 30 runs in one run focussing on fights and reducing all the boring event, weapon and scrap grinding... the Elite Fighters are all different between different runs, and you have to react differently depending on whether all your shots missed or just most of them...

I wager a guess most people dismissing a super high score by saying "it's just grinding" have actually never tried to get one and/or are intimitated by the rebel fleet. It may be a bit boring with a Zoltan ship or a 12-shot pre-ignited ship - I wouldn't know -, but still worth a try going for the high score.

I don't quite understand why such a contemptuous attitude abounds towards achieving a high score. I maintain that the high score is the most prominent and comparable feature of the game, bar none. Second come achievements, and then the other scores like beacons visited, crew members hired etc. All the other "personal achievements" are a bit vain, like finishing Monkey Island with the least number of mouse clicks or with your monitor turned upside down - interesting, but not really something to brag about.

Anyway, while I think the evidence is glaringly obvious that the high score is something that is encouraged to care about, it's also kinda obvious that many/most players totally disregard the high score, so that's that.

I don't think the Highscore is all that comparable, since taking on elite fighters hinges more on build than on skill, at least after a certain point. With a sufficiently powerful ship, your highscore depends solely on your patience, how long you are willing to farm the rebel fleet. I am aware that with increasing skill, you require less and less hardware, but nevertheless you'll need a bare minimung of offensive ability and survivability to get by.

I won't deny that flying through rebel territory is a thrill, especially in an underequipped junker, but even then you'll fail if your ship's hardware isn't good enough. And in my experience there aren't that many different types of elite fighters, meaning that either you die quickly in a fiery explosion, or you *will* be going through the same motions over and over again when meeting a specific fighter, in order to minimize damage and/or use of consumable resources.

That's actually *the* major point turning me off from rebel farming: it's repetetive and not very exiting.

But anyway, the point stands that Highscore correlates more with build and equipment than with skill. Every moderately skilled player can endlessly farm rebels with a decent ship, but it takes real skill to pull off shieldless / airless and otherwise restricted runs. Plus, and I think many players will agree here, these runs are simply that much more entertaining and varied than grinding the rebels.

By all means, go for the highest score ever. Meanwhile, we'll be over here, attempting a shieldless, airless run on a Zoltan boarding ship