My spaceship is on fire. Let's Play FTL: Faster Than Light!
Hey, guys! I'm gonna be doing a liveblog of FTL: Faster Than Light, but you probably already knew that.
FTL is basically a roguelike-like spaceship simulation game thing. The player is in control of the crew of a small Federation (currently on the losing end of a rebellion) space ship, sent to deliver vital information to the headquarters of the Federation fleet. Did I mention that they're being chased by basically the entire rebel fleet? Also how the Federation headquarters are on the other side of the galaxy, with pirates, evil space aliens, rebel scouts, and killer giant space spiders standing between them?
Anyway's here's the starting screen. First of all, if you'll look at the top left part of the screen, you'll see the ship's name. We can call it whatever we want, but it's mostly a cosmetic thing. Along the left side, you can see the various things for selecting a different ship, but I only have this one ship unlocked so we'll be using it. At the bottom, where it says crew, is our loyal crew. We can name them whatever, and choose if they're male or female. Again, this is mostly cosmetic. For weapons, we have a missile launcher and a laser. The laser gun shoots lasers that damage the enemy ship's hulls and/or systems, but is blocked by shields. The missile launcher bypasses shields, but is really slow to fire and uses up missiles, making it useless if you run out of missiles. If the hull is completely damaged, the ship explodes spectacularly. If a system is damaged, it becomes harder or downright impossible to do what the system does, like raising shields, firing weapons, or supplying oxygen to the ship.
Speaking of systems, those are the things right below the ship. There's Shields, Engines, Oxygen, Weapons, Medical, Piloting, Sensors, and Doors. They can all be upgraded during the course of the game with Scrap, which can also be used to buy things from merchants. Shields are your basic sci-fi energy shield, they stop lasers from causing damage to the ship. Engines give you a better chance of dodging enemy fire and are required for actually traveling anywhere. They use fuel whenever you travel. Oxygen provides oxygen to the ship. If it gets to 0%, you die painfully and horribly. Weapons provides power to the guns and stuff. Medical heals the crew when they stand in the medical room. Piloting increases the chance to dodge and is required for travelling. Sensors let you see the rooms in your ship (and also the enemy ship's rooms, when sufficiently upgraded). Doors opens and closes the doors on the ship. Might not sound like much, but if you upgrade them, it becomes much harder for an enemy boarding party to get anywhere on your ship. There are other sensors too, like Drones, Cloaking, and Teleporters. We don't start with those, but we can buy them from traders. I'll discuss them if we actually buy one.
Augmentations are things you can add to your ship that do stuff, like nanobots that heal the crew even when they're not in sickbay.
Anyways, I think that about sums things up, mostly. For now, we need a ship name and crew names. I can't think of any good ones, so I'll leave it to you guys.
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Comments
The ship shall be christened SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANCE!
also crew names should totes be heaper usernames.
Can I be captain?
If that position isn't available, then I call... um... I dunno.
>thespacephantom is now playing FTL: Faster than Light
so this is apparently a Steam game.
I'm always wary of buying things on Steam.
No idea why.