Subset Games Forum

So I just got breach missiles for the first time.

Toying around with them, was going up against a... slug? Ship of some kind. Slaver. Big silver manta-ray looking thing.

Anyhow, I hit the shield room a couple time with breach missiles before pegging the weapons room with my heavy laser. The slaver ship offered a slave in return for their lives, and I accepted.

So, of course, my vision of their ship shuts off (as combat is now over). However, I hear a crash noise, and realize their ship must be on fire.

I wait.... another crash noise, and a blip of their hull disappears. Only one left.

Another crash, and BOOM! Ship falls to pieces.

Problem? No loot. No scrap, nothing.

Although I'm not entirely sure it's a problem.

My first reaction was "Where's my loot?!"

But then I thought about it and wondered: If we could push ships to more frequently die after a surrender, that might result in much more loot and goodies going towards the player than the game is balanced for. At which point fire-creating weapons and breaching weapons would become "the weapons to get", and surrender would always be the better option, because "maybe they'll die after they surrender, and I'll get double loot", and that strategy would either make the game too easy or the game would end up balanced around it, making other strategies too hard.

Except the fact that I'm NOT scrapping the wreckage is somewhat immersion-breaking.

So I thought I'd mention it here. Thoughts?

I have seen it a couple of times too, usually after boarding them and leaving the crew dead. Guess it is just one of those things that happens.

I love watching an enemy ship gradually burn up and die after the battle is resolved. Fires are the cause.

For immersion and realism I'd liek to see soem scrap, even if it was lessened. Perhpas a message like:

"The floating hulk suddenly disinegrates as explosions tear it apart from inside. You move to salvage what you can butt he heat of the fires has left very little behind"

Then get SCRAP only, no missiles, fuel or drone parts. and a small amount, like 5 to 10 max.

The devs have already commented on this on getsatisfaction.com/ftlgame; as you suggested, they intentionally don't give you rewards for that for game balance concerns. I agree that a reduced amount of scrap would be a bit more realistic, though.

It seems like you could have both.
Have a certain percentage (10-15%) of the auto-generated reward set aside during surrenders.
This makes more sense, as presumably they're not giving you the scrap from their hull, and all their fuel.

This way, if they are destroyed afterwards you get the remaining loot.

It's not so much balance concerns as people trying to intentionally set up surrender conditions such that the ship blows up afterwards. That would really cause some folk to try and maximize their gains out of a fight when it really shouldn't be encouraged.

After a surrender could the ship not jump out?

curithwin wrote:After a surrender could the ship not jump out?

I'd rather it didnt.. would be hard to get your boarding party back then.

Darthcaboose wrote:It's not so much balance concerns as people trying to intentionally set up surrender conditions such that the ship blows up afterwards. That would really cause some folk to try and maximize their gains out of a fight when it really shouldn't be encouraged.

Why not?
It's a pretty realistic situation.
The way to maximise gain from a battle is to make someone surrender and give you their cargo, and then blow them up anyway and salvage what's left.
If you just blow them up, then you risk damaging the cargo, while if you just accept the surrender then you don't get the scrap from the hull. The highest profit is in doing both.

What I'd like to see is an option to outright betray someone after accepting a surrender, a good balance would be for word to get out and people trust you less later in the game. Maybe some shop'll refuse to sell to you or something. Or they could make it so that you only get the negatives if the ship manages to escape after the betrayal.

Great point, the betrayal should always have a consequence.

There are two different scenarios here though:

1) the unintended demise of a ship after battle has been concluded. This isn't your fault and playing to achieve this would be a challenge anyway.

2) The choice to attack a neutral ship (probably after a surrender)