The game thinks and expects you to have more knowledge than you currently possess. FTL is exactly what you think it is at your current knowledge level. This is one of those games you need to learn how to play before you can enjoy it. Maybe try watching a stream or two of a high level player playing on Hard to get a crash course in what you should be doing to maximize success.

You can get by on Easy not knowing much about the events, but one Normal and Hard the game starts fighting especially dirty. You should consider checking the wiki every time an event pops up that you don’t recognize or doesn’t have an obvious best choice.

you're ♥♥♥♥♥ at the game, play on easy and learn.

Originally posted by lvan:

you're ♥♥♥♥♥ at the game, play on easy and learn.

You really don’t need to be an ass about it.

Do learn the game on Easy, if you are not already. Easy is actually still plenty difficult.

Originally posted by DishonoredHero:

The progression system is abysmal and the RNG seems badly implemented because I always feel like the game thinks and expects me to have more resources than I do.

That sounds to me like you might want to examine your scrap management and your spending priorities.

For the Kestrel A and most ships, as soon as you have 20 scrap upgrade those Shields to level 3. After that, as soon as you have your next 30 scrap, upgrade those Shields to level 4. With 2 layers of Shields, about half of the enemies in Sectors 1 & 2 cannot hurt you. That helps you save on repairs.

You do not need to upgrade your Reactor to power the extra Shields. Against ships that cannot penetrate 2 layers of shields, you do not need to power your Engines. There are enemies that have a missile launcher, but no other weapons that can penetrate 1 layer of shields- so you only need to power 1 layer.

Unless you need to build up the FTL Drive to escape, your Engines only need to be powered at the moment an enemy shot hits- so at that moment, you can shift a power from Oxygen to Engines, then shift it back when nothing is firing at you. Also, if you need to, you can shift power away from the Artemis missile after you fire it the first time, put that power in Engines in time to try to evade the enemy's first shot, and then shift it back to the Artemis if you need to fire again.

So after the upgrade to level 4 Shields (2 layers), save a fund of scrap- at least 50 but preferably 80-90- to buy a useable weapon when you see one come up in a store. Your priority has to be weapon or at least useable offense. 80 scrap will buy almost any useable weapon; it will also buy Hacking (if you are using Advanced Edition) which is a good alternative if no weapon comes up.

Stores are completely unreliable in what they sell, and weapon availability is the absolute worst aspect of it. So until your weapon slots are full with everything you need against the Flagship, you need to constantly keep a fund of scrap to buy a good weapon if you see it. That fund needs to take priority over other upgrades.

You want to figure out which weapons are good, which weapons are bad, and which weapons have synergy. On the other hand, you can't be a weapons snob. There is no guarantee that the next store will be any less worse than the current one. Choose good weapons when you have a choice; when you don't have a choice, don't pass up a mediocre weapon because you are holding out for a better weapon.

Avoid hiring crew in stores. I won't say never- occasionally it makes sense to hire the right crew. But 3 is sufficent at least through the first half of the map. One crew should be manning Doors whenever you jump, in case you face a boarding situation at the next beacon, then you can run that crew to Engines or Weapons or wherever if not needed at Doors. Upgrading Doors to level 2 is probably scrap better spent than hiring a crew member, unless it's a special crew memeber.

Be very careful spending your scrap. Stick to your priorities, spend on needs but not luxuries. This is especially important in Sectors 1 & 2, where scrap rewards are lowest but you absolutely need to prepare for the difficultly bump at Sector 3.

I want to also add that you should resist the urge to restart if you have bad luck, and keep playing to hold on until you finally lose that last point of hull.

There is not much to learn when you are having a streak of good luck. You can learn quite a bit though when you are trying to survive a streak of bad luck. That is especially true when the streak involves lower than expected scrap and awful stores, because it gives you the opportunity to find out how much you can squeeze out of limited resources.

New Moon is casting pearls before swine. Ivan gave you the advice you need. If you won't follow his advice, anything else is wasted on you.

You don't seem to know what it means to be a roguelike. There is no progression system, changing the difficulty up and down based on how you're doing. Just progressively tougher enemies. Keep up and have a chance at winning, fall behind and die.

This was why you weren't handed a win on a silver platter in your first "couple of playthroughs," like you have been in every other game you've ever played in your life. And your response was telling. It wasn't to ask for advice, it was to whine about how it's bad, and boring, and abysmal and badly coded. You want a game that's the opposite of all those points you made, that will give you the endorphin rush you crave? Go play Hello Kitty: Island Adventure,

There's no shame in it. They're just two ends of a spectrum: people who want to click buttons at random until they get a cookie vs people who want to get kicked in teeth 100 times until they finally scrape by and just barely win.

And that's the answer to the only question you asked. That's what you are missing.

Play on easy like...for a long time lol. Easy isn't Easy at all until you're really really experienced

So many rude people on this forum. Sorry OP.

The advice to start rhis gaame on Easy mode is not a rude as it might sound like, there really is quite a bit to this game, and there is nothing wrong or shameful about easing into it.

Also, there is a bit of luck involved. If your first three or four games were unlucky ones, I could imagine how your impression of it might not be entirely positive. But, myeah, that's FTL. Play it to win second, for the story first, I always say (wll, actually this is the first time I say that, but it is my mindset ;-) )

Originally posted by yaerav:

The advice to start rhis gaame on Easy mode is not a rude as it might sound like, there really is quite a bit to this game, and there is nothing wrong or shameful about easing into it.

It's just good advice. I think it was a bit cheeky for the devs even to call it Easy mode. It is not remotely easy until you have a good grasp of the game mechanics. Just starting out at Hard or even Normal is begging to get curbstomped by the game every single time.

Something like 100 hours in, maybe Easy becomes actually easy.

Unless you are some literal wizard, Easy is where you should start. That's not an insult. It's just how this game is.

Originally posted by Aepoh:

The game thinks and expects you to have more knowledge than you currently possess. FTL is exactly what you think it is at your current knowledge level. This is one of those games you need to learn how to play before you can enjoy it. Maybe try watching a stream or two of a high level player playing on Hard to get a crash course in what you should be doing to maximize success.

You can get by on Easy not knowing much about the events, but one Normal and Hard the game starts fighting especially dirty. You should consider checking the wiki every time an event pops up that you don’t recognize or doesn’t have an obvious best choice.

Even with additional knowledge, it plays by solitaire rules for a ton of things.

Even with planned ideal build paths you'll get stuck with numerically unwinnable situations;
Either you'll be too resource short, or you're going to encounter unwinnable battles with very cruel difficulty spikes.

Even among roguelikes, FTL is particularly grossly unforgiving;

Where atleast in other roguelikes you will have 10+ resolutions to any given situation;
spending unrecoverable resources like... healing, or one time use special items. Or you can eat through your HP pool.

But here its...
"either you have it or you don't"
And if you don't have the damage output, or you don't have a build to counter certain setups, or you roll a sector where ever enemy in it all have upgraded shields, or bare minium 3 weapon hardpoints + drones.

Your run is basically over, all outcomes are a 100% loss the second you started the run.

Your run is basically over, all outcomes are a 100% loss the second you started the run.

Truly forced losses are very rare.

We don't know exactly how rare, but the top players are winning around ~97% of runs on Hard (AE), and that's from players with hundreds of games broadcast live on Twitch, played roughly evenly across all ships, under win streak conditions or similar.

Much of how well you do in FTL is determined by your attitude towards losses, and whether you are motivated to learn. Top players always look for what they might learn from a loss.

For example, Crowrevell did a "project" of 13 runs with each ship (364 total), live on Twitch, and ended up with just under 97% win rate. He even had a 92% win rate on Stealth B.

In reviewing the losses, he decided about half of them were down to mistakes, and he could now potentially win those runs. I agree with that. Winning those runs would bump his win rate up to ~98%.

He also acknowledged it was possible to do even better than that, but that it's simply beyond his capabilities. He knows he can't play in the way that is required to push 99% win rate. He knows there's one last level above where he is.

That is something that distinguishes the really good players. They are students of the game. They make objective assessments rather than emotional ones. They don't allow ego to get in the way of accurate perception.

Originally posted by Mike:

Your run is basically over, all outcomes are a 100% loss the second you started the run.

Truly forced losses are very rare.

We don't know exactly how rare, but the top players are winning around ~97% of runs on Hard (AE), and that's from players with hundreds of games broadcast live on Twitch, played roughly evenly across all ships, under win streak conditions or similar.

Much of how well you do in FTL is determined by your attitude towards losses, and whether you are motivated to learn. Top players always look for what they might learn from a loss.

For example, Crowrevell did a "project" of 13 runs with each ship (364 total), live on Twitch, and ended up with just under 97% win rate. He even had a 92% win rate on Stealth B.

In reviewing the losses, he decided about half of them were down to mistakes, and he could now potentially win those runs. I agree with that. Winning those runs would bump his win rate up to ~98%.

He also acknowledged it was possible to do even better than that, but that it's simply beyond his capabilities. He knows he can't play in the way that is required to push 99% win rate. He knows there's one last level above where he is.

That is something that distinguishes the really good players. They are students of the game. They make objective assessments rather than emotional ones. They don't allow ego to get in the way of accurate perception.

It is also a matter of patience and attention as brushing up against that 97% win rate requires you to exploit all the systems of the game to their fullest.
Crew XP farming is one of the basics of high level play and often one of the most annoying and time intensive parts of the game, especially on ships like Stealth B. And doing stuff like waiting for oxygen to recharge/drain on safe beacons so you can make very exact adjustments to it to do O2 tech is also annoying. It would be quality of life to have features that make these things easier without needing to stop the game and open a save editor to avoid long periods of idling.

In combat you have to see everything and avoid tunnel visioning as much as possible, which is one of the hardest habits to break. Even a quarter second lapse in attention can cause problems or miss critical cycles. At the highest level of play the pacing and flow of FTL drags down to a slog that only a few players can tolerate and even fewer can execute on.

It is fortunate then that for the above-average player who isn’t doing win streaks and is just trying to win with every ship on Hard and get all the achievements, FTL is really quite a generous game. Past knowing a certain set of techniques (like crew XP farming), the game doesn’t push you very hard to learn higher echelons of tech. You can think about what you could learn from every loss, but you can also just keep pulling lottery tickets until FTL throws you an easily winnable run.

It’s also worth noting that a good number of FTL’s more advanced techniques revolve around knowing info that the game obfuscates from the player. Information that the player doesn’t know is useless to them to exploit, and FTL does commit a cardinal sin of leaving tactics on the table by going out of its way to hide critical information from the player. FTL without the internet and without wikis and without your online tools is a much less impressive game for the average player. Before high level players cared enough about FTL to learn about things like smart targetting, or event probabilities, the apparent randomness of FTL was simply a reality for every player that didn’t also have datamining skills, which is to say nearly everyone.

While the players that complain about FTL’s RNG factor are ultimately wrong, I do sympathize with them, as FTL design should ultimately be judged by what Subset has given us, rather than FTL + all of the third party tools and free work that the community has done to improve the game beyond an opaque RNG fest.

Although it is also worth noting that a community likely formed around FTL because of its obfuscated design. A game where all the cards are laid bare to you on the table is a much more individualistic experience. There is no need for any advice beyond “git gud” and “look at this part of the screen”.
Similar to the opaqueness of how elemental damage works in Monster Hunter, the obfuscation in the design of the game serves to foster a community of knowledgable and unknowledgable players, where the knowledgeable players are given appreciation and status for their contributions to the playerbase.

Newer Monster Hunter games like Rise are much less of a communal than previous games due to baring much more of their mechanics to the player will higher transparency. As such the players who would stand in lobby coaching the newer players on armor set optimizations and what elements each monster are weak to and where to hit them are no longer needed. If FTL was designed with full transparency in its mechanics then players like Mike would not be needed, and perhaps FTL would be a much lonelier and worse experience as a result.

At the highest level of play the pacing and flow of FTL drags down to a slog that only a few players can tolerate and even fewer can execute on.

I think it looks different from the outside. For me at least, it doesn't feel like a slog. The main reason I play slowly is that I'm engaged by the details.

It's actually the other way around, in that I get bored and "fidgety" if I'm not taking my time. This can happen when I'm doing a casual or testing run and I'm "rushing" through it. It all starts to feel too "automatic" and I get annoyed that I'm missing the interesting plays.

I find FTL to be soothing when I'm engaged in the run. It occupies all my attention and it's kinda like my version of meditating. It gives me a break from my ADHD.

But if I disengage and start rushing, I feel twitchy. The ADHD comes back.

Before high level players cared enough about FTL to learn about things like smart targetting, or event probabilities, the apparent randomness of FTL was simply a reality for every player that didn’t also have datamining skills, which is to say nearly everyone.

While the players that complain about FTL’s RNG factor are ultimately wrong, I do sympathize with them, as FTL design should ultimately be judged by what Subset has given us, rather than FTL + all of the third party tools and free work that the community has done to improve the game beyond an opaque RNG fest.

I mean ... to some extent yes, but also not really. A lot of information is directly observable if you pay attention, although of course resources like the wiki help a great deal.

If you want to squeeze out the last few % of win rate, especially with Stealth B, then yes -- you need to rely on some very opaque information, such as the Hard mode "smart" targeting logic.

But bear in mind Thomas Petterson had a win streak of 80, which died to Stealth B before the targeting info came out.

If you're "only" talking about something like, say, getting 90% win rate on Hard? I don't think you need any arcane knowledge. You just need to be observant, experiment, and learn from losses.

Of course that's not an easy thing to do, it takes time, and it's definitely made easier by community knowledge. But you don't need community knowledge to progress beyond the level of RNG fest.

If FTL was designed with full transparency in its mechanics then players like Mike would not be needed, and perhaps FTL would be a much lonelier and worse experience as a result.

That's an interesting point. I think it makes sense.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of hidden information, and in a perfect world maybe there'd be some kind of in-game encyclopaedia.

What I enjoy more is the development of new strategies and tactics, and discussions about them. I think even without hidden information, there is plenty to discuss and build a community around. The game is hard and there's a lot to learn in terms of strategy and tactics.