[Suggestion] Hacking

[dicesquirrel]

Not sure whether this would work better from a subsystem or drone POV (why not both?)

1. You could hack enemy subsystems. Hack any subsystem with a much higher chance of success if the station is unmanned. Manned subsystems take much longer to hack.

2. Once a station is hacked, it is rendered inoperable to the enemy until repaired (reboot the thing).

A few examples:

- Hack the doors subsystem, you may manually control their airlocks, vent the oxygen from the enemy ship.
- Hack weapons, depower all the modules and force enemies to reload AND/OR begin jettisoning missiles.
- Hack engines, the ship is dead in the water and you gain 100% accuracy.
- Hack shields, shields down.
- Hack drones, drones now attack their mothership AND/OR jettison drone parts.
- Hack pilot, same effect as engines OR gives you ability to futz with enemy power distribution, one point at a time. (there's got to be some limit, like a 5 or 10 second tick, so you can't pause and depower everything instantly)
- Hack medbay, medbay now injures crewmembers.
- Hack oxygen, no more O2 replenishment.
- Sensors, no more sensors, OR sensors give wrong readings. The first is likely easier to implement.
- Hack hacking DIVIDE BY ZERO OH SHI

If this is a subsystem, then it must be manned and takes a variable amount of time to charge for effect depending on how many crew are manning it.

If this is a drone, then every X seconds it would make an attempt to hack a random subsystem. Some sort of animation of graphic would be necessary for the player to know which room was hacked. Sparks, or flickering light level in the room, or something.

What do y'all think?

[Warbird]

I think it's an interesting concept and I could see it in the game, but balancing would be a beast. I think it would need a little tweaking in order to differentiate itself a bit more from simply blowing up a subsystem.

[jocan2003]

Well blowing up the engines doesnt give the accuracy boost following this concept, Its like linking the ennemy engines system with you fire controls, basicly having work in tandem to make sure it doesnt miss. But all in all i very like that!

[Jason]

One problem with this idea is that from planing the demo, managing your own ship it's weapons and power systems, crew and repairs and from the videos there will be new tech like cloaking and teleporters there is only so much time you have to do stuff in battle and even that is prity limited, with all the stuff you have to do addng another machanic to the game would make it to much for the limited amount of time you have in battle to do stuff.

Also remember what ever tactic you can do the enemy will be able to do as well, not so much fun when your own doors are opening and systems are been turned off from them hacking you.

Also in the game now if you attack a system it goes from green to orange to red showing how much damage you did to the system. And the more damage you do the worse the system performs like weapons for example the more damamge it gets the more weapons go ofline till its repaired.

But your hacking idea still could work if you adjust it slightly. Instead of remote hacking or hacking with a drone instead as we know they will have teleporters in the game if you can teleport crew onto an enemy ship the crew start to hack any sytems they encouter doing stuff like you suggested but only if the cew members are in the systems room hacking away. This also can happen to you with boarders, instead of the boardes just hunting down your crew and attacking them they could split up and try and hack and disable your ship like you do to theres.

Makes for more interesting tactics with fighting ships and defending your own.

[dicesquirrel]

I hadn't considered what teleported crewmembers could do if there are no enemies to fight in a given room. How interesting! Anyway, I think y'all are right, the game has enough mechanics that adding one more could be the proverbial straw (or heavy-handed sci fi concept) that breaks the camel's back.

[Justin]

A hacking system has come up like every month during development. Maybe we'll go into details later, but we never found a way to make it work happily with the rest of our systems, our solutions was always too... gimmicky.

Our original idea was similar to yours (controlling enemy ship systems), but there just wasn't enough interesting things you could do with it from our perspective. Locking enemy doors would be useful; teleporting them back to their teleporter would be fun (maybe then if they cant get out, teleport them into space?); but other than that it would just function like an ion weapon. Feel free to discuss maybe there's a good solution we haven't seen yet.

and...

the game has enough mechanics

NEVAR!

[dicesquirrel]

Thumbs up Justin, psyched that we're brainwavin'. I see your point re: similarity to ion cannons. More blasty blasty type things are better than fiddly things like hacking.

[SkDG]

I think it's a great idea! There should be as many options to game styles as there're people wanting to play the game (or as close there can be).

The hacking approach can be more of a defensive tactic, keeping the enemy on there ship, maybe the option on getting more awards from not damaging the ship more then necessary and so on.
Imagen meeting a foe with a strong crew, lots of robots that you can't beat and way to strong shield. What do you do then? You hack them and let their own robots kill them. And that can happen to you as well so keep a up the firewall at all time! Or maybe you can bug them and if they run away, you can follow?

If there's any crew exp. level and upgrades in the end, this can be a nice touch as well. The better the hacker, the faster the hacking, and less randomness at what will be hacked maybe?

For the balance. Well, what ever you chose, there will be something that you didn't chose. And personally, i would try to whip out there hacking devices as fast as possible. And there's the price factor that you can't forget as well. The cheap one is that you got your crew member on the enemy ship all the way to the most expensive that's wireless from the safety of your own ship.

And you might get the option to hack the enemy before the fight to get an advantage.

To sum it all up. The more options, to more tactics and counter tactics you'll need

[CanadianWolvie]

I think to come up with a fun way to "hack" in game one must consider what hacking is. IMHO, hacking is essentially the re-purposing of existing materials and systems. What is often confused with hacking - which is just for the most part a harmless, creative DIY activity - is Cracking, specifically countering security measures to gain higher access than you were intended to have; for instance IRL lock picking is cracking. Hopefully that spurs on some ideas.

My own idea for what would be a good hack in FTL would be for one ship to screw with the communications between a ship and its drones and any crew teleported to the another ship. Signal jamming, scrambling, and other electronic counter measures (ECM). Another might be to first have a crew member teleport on to the enemy ship and upload a virus, which would then act like a poison usually does in other games, low damage / reduce effectiveness of their systems over time until it "heals". That doesn't seem too gimicky to me and hopefully wouldn't add too much overhead.

[Lambchops]

Another might be to first have a crew member teleport on to the enemy ship and upload a virus, which would then act like a poison usually does in other games, low damage / reduce effectiveness of their systems over time until it "heals". That doesn't seem too gimicky to me and hopefully wouldn't add too much overhead.

I can only at this moment think of Independence day! http://www.hark.com/clips/wccqznhrfp-computer-virus

Further to that idea (which I rather like) I reckon it should only be possible to upload viruses to ships of that crew member's race as I'm not sure it makes sense you'd be able to upload a virus to alien technology like what they did in the aforementioned blockbuster film! Or perhaps there could be a slim chance that a crew member you find on your travels is a specialised hacker who can upload viruses to any ship/heal viruses uploaded onto yours but suffers some other penalty (perhaps being rather hard to keep alive).

My other idea was to build one of the extra races around hacking style effects but as pointed out it's probably too similar to some of the abilities already on offer and extra races should be offering something unique, not just the same abilities but with different names.