Tuesday, January 29, 2013

FTL Anti-Cheating

The other day I was playing FTL and had a chance to buy a transporter device. This would let me send a couple members of my crew to board an enemy ship. I had some spare dudes so I figured I'd give it a shot. It didn't work out very well and my guys died. I killed the ship with normal weapons and considered my options. Even though I didn't need those guys I didn't like the idea of losing them. I'd just started playing for the day and had save/quit the night before right before buying the transporter so I figured I'd just quit without saving, restart the game, and reload my old save. Maybe it's a sketchy plan to save/reload when you get an outcome you don't like? But that's what I've been doing in Final Fantasy Tactics in order to keep from permanently losing some of my guys so it seems like I think it's a reasonable enough thing to do...

The guy who made FTL, on the other hand, disagrees. In fact, I didn't even have a saved game to reload. There is no save/reload in this game. You can save when you're done for the day and load to pick up where you left off, but doing so deletes your old saved game. Just like in old roguelike games! If you die to bad play or bad luck, well, guess you get to restart from the beginning.

I unlocked a second ship type and have been playing games with it, but it seems weaker than the first one. Or maybe I'm just playing it wrong, but I can't seem to make it very far at all. I find when things go downhill with the Engi ship they go downhill fast. I think the difference is the Human ship starts with missiles to keep fights from getting out of control right at the start (can take out enemy weapons with the first volley) while the Engi ship has to ionize the shields first before it can ionize the weapons which seems to buy the enemies enough time to land a hit or two on me. Damage the right systems and I'm boned. I wasn't dying every fight or anything like that, but every now and then I'd just lose. And in a game with permanent loss, well, that's a bad plan.

I think I'm going to play one more with the Engi ship and try to get an achievement and then move on to some other ship type. Without trying to cheat!

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