Subset Games Forum

Hi there!

I recently got FTL, and I really like it. The lack of a save is frustrating, but I get the arcade vibe, so it's fine. But the balance of the procedural is kinda wonky, and leads to situations like this:

Like this for example: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-90Va ... olgasm.jpg

Here's the scenario. Engi ship. Never found a missile battery at any store in 3 sectors, and there were at least 6 stores visited. Never bought a laser with any kind of damage, just two ion weapons. I used Boarding Drones to eradicate all life on enemy ships that couldn't run or shoot back and rack up crazy scrap. It was hilarious. I got near invulnerable shields because I never had to repair at a dock once. That was working great! Then I ran out of fuel... and I ran out of drone parts.

So I got a chance encounter to gain fuel from an Alliance bomber. Twice. Both asked for drone parts. Then the Rebel boarder hit. I was sure i was dead... but they don't have any missiles. So they can't breach my shield, I can't hurt them... Then they jump away. I wait with the distress call on. The Rebels come back. The system says they have fuel just in reach, I might just pull this off... like Tantalus staring into an abyss of frozen methane and hydrogen, full of enemies that can never be killed, yet I can never die myself.

So, at first I'm like, "Okay, I'm dead. Have a funny line for this situation in a future update. 'Stranded, out of power, no offensive weapons, just an invulnerable shield and the ability to switch off the enemy computers for brief periods of time. You decide to troll the Rebels until starving to death, but the medicomputer keeps you alive. Trapped. Trolling. Forever Alone.'"

If it wasn't for that medbay I'd say stick one of your crew on weapons and try and keep the rebel ship's oxygen turned off long enough to kill the crew, but I haven't had an ion-dakka ship in a while and I don't remember if you have enough dakka to pull that off even without the medbay.

Anyways, it's not so random as you think: Using boarding drones to kill enemy crew can cost you multiple drones in each encounter where using just the anti-ship 1 drone would only cost 1 drone. Boarding gives you more scrap but you may have paid for that in loosing all your drones and therefore you only way of beating enemy ships.

Anyways, this isn't really a bug. It'd be kinda hard to determine in code when a stalemate like this is completely unwinable, so it's basically the super game-over screen. At least you weren't eaten by giant alien spiders.

You're right, it isn't as much a bug as a potential branch of the story. It has all the components of a legitimate ending. But, ultimately, I went 25 rounds of this before getting killed off, which is rather tedious. I tried knocking out their O2, but it either wasn't enough, or Ion doesn't disable O2. I'll have to investigate on my next free day.

Cheers!