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FTL: Faster Than Light has a new patch to fix some lingering issues

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FTL: Faster Than Light [Official Site] launched in 2012 and years later it's still being supported which is fantastic. This latest patch is mainly bug fixes and some quality of life changes. This is an example of an indie developer doing good support!

The latest release adds in a change to screen mode switching, with the game no longer requiring a restart when you change between windowed and fullscreen. I tested it and it works beautifully even with my dual-monitor setup, so that's fantastic.

They've also gone through and fixed a couple of rare crash bugs, some event logic, spelling, and grammar fixes along with minor tooltip text changes. On top of that, they also fixed some annoying mouse input bugs, restored the useful “Low O2” warning, small art fixes, AI improvements to their use of power juggling when weapons are mid-charge and so on.

See the full changelog here. It's live on Steam, with other stores to follow soon.

I'll be honest, I've never completed it. As much as I've genuinely tried and I absolutely adore the game, I do find it really difficult. I've reached the boss many times, but I just never seem to be well enough prepared to face it! Even after this many years, I can still happily go back to it and try again, which shows what a really great game it is.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Janne Jan 16, 2018
This is one of my favourite games. I've had it for years and years, and I _still_ play it now and again. And yes, I've beaten it on the normal difficulty and the standard ship. I've unlocked most of the others, but I've yet to beat the game with any of them.
g000h Jan 16, 2018
Funnily enough I played a long session of FTL last night. And I was feeling very confident when I reached the final boss. My ship had Burst Laser III (5 shots), Flak Gun II (7 shots), Basic Laser (1 shot) and Automated Reloader and Weapon Pre-Igniter augmentation. Level 3 shield, 51% evasion. Plus other good stuff. Unfortunately no Small Bomb or Breach Bomb as a 4th spare weapon. (I would have bought that given the chance.)

Literally, all those weapons fire off immediately - and were aimed on the Boss shields to take them down as quickly as possible.

What does the Boss do?... He only randomly / flukily sends a Hack-Bot to attack my weapon systems. Absolute b**tard! It powers down my weapons regularly, and I find myself unable to take down his shield. Literally this was the only thing that could have saved him. Still, it was a good run. Love this game.

I contacted the FTL developers some months ago about how much I liked the game, and also an improvement suggestion. FTL looks fine on a 1920x1080p monitor in windowed-mode. But, it does not look fine on 4K (3840x2160p) in windowed-mode. You need to run it full screen else it is much too small. My suggestion was to have pixel resizing as a Setting option, e.g. 2x resolution or 3x resolution (or dynamically resizing by grabbing the window border with the mouse). They responded, but I think they indicated it would be unlikely to happen (old game and all that). I guess this hasn't gone into the game patches, but I'll have a look when I get home.

Probably played 250+ hours of FTL (and still haven't unlocked everything yet).
shawnsterp Jan 16, 2018
I don't know why I am so addicted to this game. I have beaten it with every ship on hard difficulty. This is not so much bragging as it is a confession, because it takes quite a few runs on hard to get 'lucky' with the drops and stuff. 1185 hours lol.
Geppeto35 Jan 16, 2018
Still no translation. With the number of copy sold, they may have pay/develop a dude to do a script to translate it, at least into latin-based-alphabet languages (and, even, with most current libraries, "latin" is not an excuse). They even refuse the help from the community...bullshit! They can touch them I will buy their next game and I hope that the mass will do as me.

Very native English-speaker inability to understand 95% of the world (source
cprn Jan 16, 2018
Crap, now I have to get back to this one again. Like I wasn't drowning in backlogged games already. :D
Mountain Man Jan 16, 2018
I think this was the first game I purchased on Steam for Linux.
g000h Jan 16, 2018
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: GuestFTL had so much potential, but really it's an exercise in masochism. It should be called "RNG: Count the Ways it will F*#$ You."

It does not matter how many times I've attempted to complete a run, some new BS event would take place. One you simply could not overcome, or would have to deal with at the worst possible time.

I was blown away at the sheer creativity put into the number of ways the game can ruin your run. I don't remember if the RNG (ie. so-called "luck" ) ever really worked in my favor. Another one of those games with a solid foundation but turned into a cultural fad in itself as a game that's stupidly hard for the sake of being hard.

So until they add a mode that has less RNG events (much much less), or one that balances the number of bad RNG events with good ones (if there even are any), I doubt I'll ever install or play again. This game sits in my "Garbage" steam category out of principle. My patience (and free time I have to sink into any game) has reached its limit with FTL, which, in this case, appears to be 5 hours of playtime.

You should try Massive Chalice :)

Actually, where I really really like FTL (including its balanced game mechanics. Yes, the RNG too), I'm not at all keen on the mechanics of Darkest Dungeon. FTL - you start a completely fresh game each time (or load back to the point you had reached). The game lasts no more than 3 hours start to finish. You choose your starting ship and you have difficulty options (Easy, Normal, Hard ~ and then Mods as well.)

With Darkest Dungeon, you are trying to build up a team of characters and every step along the way, they're getting increasingly insane and diseased. So, you finish a dungeon, your best characters are ruined, and you're hoping to take on harder and harder dungeons. Basically, you make mistakes in your DD play, and you might as well wipe hours and hours of punishing work that you put into the game to get to that point.

The RNG in FTL is a lot more balanced than you'd think. Watch some game play videos on Youtube, and see the techniques people employ. Use the Pause button a lot! Fire off the weapons by hand so that they all work together. A lot of the fun in FTL is choosing options based on your current status. Do you need to buy another weapon, do you need to repair the ship, do you need to reinforce the doors. When RNG favours you with an item - Do you use that item or do you stick with your existing weapon, augmentation, crew member. Lots of strategy involved.


Last edited by g000h on 16 January 2018 at 5:47 pm UTC
g000h Jan 16, 2018
Me again. Great News - I'm not sure when it happened, but finally FTL supports windowed-mode resizing (on Linux at least).

I'm on a 4K screen, I load up FTL and change from full-screen mode to windowed-mode in the Options, and I get a too-small play-window. Then, I select the corner of the window with the mouse, and resize it to be the window size I want, and the game is nicely handling the game-window resizing.

Whoop! Very happy about this.


Last edited by g000h on 16 January 2018 at 6:44 pm UTC
Icecore Jan 16, 2018
Might have to revisit this one, but I have to admit, I really do not like it. I love it at first, but the RNG is so random and can make a match swing so widely that it doesn't really make and sense to me. One match will be easy, the next 10 will be impossible, and then every once in a while they will be nicely balanced. Not worth the time investment!
Hamish Jan 16, 2018
I have to admit that the first time I won FTL was by save scumming it, which involved manually moving and backing up the save files using my file manager from outside the game. Then a few attempts later I was able to win the game with no trickery using the same strategies I had used previously. Part of the problem I think is that the game itself actually does a remarkably poor job in teaching you how to defeat the flagship.

I also credit watching Kikoskia's incredibly fortunate Let's Play with helping me get there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2wyBHX_6fA&list=PLTvwKQHVid4bzdxY1nJYqFUrfPGGBwLpa

Sometimes you just need to know that the game is in fact winnable. :|


Last edited by Hamish on 16 January 2018 at 7:57 pm UTC
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