After 13 tries I managed to beat FTL...

[Quellist]

Teleporting a couple of crewmembers into the missle bay does wonders. Once i figured that one out Teleport and Cloak pretty much give you an edge. Still that game has killed me more times than i care to remember

 

[UniversalRonin]

So, I've gotten to the final boss once, and been fried like a chicken off-cut in KFC.

But my favourite moments on FTL. I died by transporting in front of a sun. 3 times in a row (each time I got solar flared before I could get out, people died, engines died, and well, yeah. The third one I didn't actually die. I rage quit.)

Still, FTL is such an amazing game. I love it.

 

[Elamdri]

Everyone complaining about the difficulty has no boarding parties.

No kidding. The Crew Teleport is almost necessary to beat that game. One game I had a 4 man Mantis assault crew and a maxed Teleporter. I was basically unstoppable.

 

[Strazdas]

20 hours sounds more like 1-2 games though. i mean, 20 hours is very small amount of time to spend on a game. well, maybe with those 3 hours for 60 bucks titles nowadays its not that small, but it used to be

With FTL its more like 30-60 goes. At most an FTL run takes maybe an hour and a half to victory, a loss might only take 5 minutes, then you start over.

ITs that short? this is quite sad.

Nobody's that lucky. You should see some of the threads from when it was a recent release -- there were people complaining about how it was nothing but luck, and the game was stacked against you so much that it was impossible to win. The reality is the game is stacked against you, and the skill comes in minimizing the damage that that bad luck does to you. Although even then, there's the occasional run that ends on the very first jump. I had one once where the first beacon was into a nebula with an ion storm and a strong ship waiting. Ion storms cut your engine power in half, which with it being the first jump, meant I was pretty much doomed.

Dont underestimate luck. Sometimes blind luck can do wonders in gaming. you roll that 0.01% chance for a hit and win the lost game and stuff like that. (on the other hand, a 99.9% chance of victory ends up in your army slaughtered is also fun)

 

[Jellly]

I've beaten it multiple times on Easy now, although I have played for 46 hours and faced the boss multiple times so I know the general strategies to win. The only problem is getting enough resources to do so, which I find incredibly difficult on normal.

I've only ever won it 3 times. Twice with Engi ships, seems to be one of the stronger types in my opinion. The other time I was showing my friend the game for the first time so I just used the default ship and set to normal to show him how I'd get crushed most likely etc. I got to the final boss and I have no idea how but I managed to beat the damn thing. Then I beat the second form and final form. My friend wasn't too concerned, he thought it was no big deal but I was freaking out. I wasn't even trying and I won. Never been able to replicate that run, the default ship is just bad.

 

[Johnson McGee]

Trying to beat the game using the damn mantis ship. That ship is so bloody awful, there are so many situations where the teleporter is useless. But I do so enjoy taking over enemy ships using my murderous bugs.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

20 hours sounds more like 1-2 games though. i mean, 20 hours is very small amount of time to spend on a game. well, maybe with those 3 hours for 60 bucks titles nowadays its not that small, but it used to be

With FTL its more like 30-60 goes. At most an FTL run takes maybe an hour and a half to victory, a loss might only take 5 minutes, then you start over.

ITs that short? this is quite sad.

Nobody's that lucky. You should see some of the threads from when it was a recent release -- there were people complaining about how it was nothing but luck, and the game was stacked against you so much that it was impossible to win. The reality is the game is stacked against you, and the skill comes in minimizing the damage that that bad luck does to you. Although even then, there's the occasional run that ends on the very first jump. I had one once where the first beacon was into a nebula with an ion storm and a strong ship waiting. Ion storms cut your engine power in half, which with it being the first jump, meant I was pretty much doomed.

Dont underestimate luck. Sometimes blind luck can do wonders in gaming. you roll that 0.01% chance for a hit and win the lost game and stuff like that. (on the other hand, a 99.9% chance of victory ends up in your army slaughtered is also fun)

Well, it's a roguelike, so that's really not short at all. If it were much longer, the permadeath would be too harsh of a penalty. It's hard to describe if you've never played one, because it comes across sounding like NES era fake difficulty when it's really something very different, but the genre is about starting and failing many, many times, learning from your mistakes each time, until eventually you learn how to beat the game. The goal isn't really to finish the game, it's to learn how to abuse the mechanics so that no matter what the RNG throws at you, you're able to win. And the mechanics are complicated enough that you're not likely to be able to just go in with a strategy guide and win. More complicated roguelikes are just too darned complex to get it all in your head without ever having played it. FTL is less complicated in terms of what you can encounter, but since combat is real time (though pause-able), it has its own way of making sure you earn your victories.

As far as the luck goes, imagine winning on that 0.01% chance 100+ times in a row. That's what you'd need to do to win at FTL by luck, and even then you'll probably die in combat somewhere along the way. I had an insanely lucky run a day or two ago, but still died in the fifth sector (not the fifth jump; it's equivalent to the fifth level in a more traditional roguelike) because I screwed up in a battle. If I were a better player, that run would have been a pretty much guaranteed win.