FTL Analysis Index

FTL: Faster Than Light (Normally shortened to FTL) is a roguelike spaceship combat game with strong shades of classic 'space trucker' games.

These are the posts for discussing its game design and occasionally its narrative design.

Intro post. In which I talk about how mixed my feelings are when it comes to this game. If you're just here for mechanics explanations and general aid in learning the game, this post is not relevant and you can freely skip it.

Laser weapons. This also provides an overview of Normal Damage in FTL, which is in fact a technical term.

Missile weapons. Seriously, how did this happen?

Ion weapons. A weapon category whose design is largely actually competent, with most of the issues actually being pretty understandable... the Chain Ion being inexplicably impressively bad is frustrating, but this is a better track record than most weapon categories in FTL.

Bomb weapons. Broadly comparable to missiles, only much, much better-designed. Still with notable flaws, but the flaws are much less obtrusive and much less problematic anyway.

Beam weapons. Star Trek Phasers but with a generic term, I don't understand why these aren't our 'laser' weapon in terminology. Their raw gameplay is also a bit underwhelming to start, though thankfully the advanced edition update seems to have recognized the problem and made an effort to correct it. It's an effort that even works some!

Crystal weapons. Why would you do this?

Flak weapons. The only overall weapon category added by the advanced edition update, flak is a nice little boost to beam weapons... and also kind of bizarrely overtuned when you consider that advanced edition content mostly runs toward being undertuned.

External Drones. The Drones that fly around the enemy ship and shoot it, or fly around your ship and protect it.

Internal Drones. The Drones that hang out inside your ship and cosplay as bad crew, as well as the Drones that dive into the enemy ship and... also cosplay as bad crew. Man. What a waste of potential...

Subsystems and Reactor. Door Control has some clunkiness but is reasonably sensible. The rest of this is just... confusing.

Systems: Original. The Systems not added by the advanced edition. There's... a frustratingly large number of dubious, downright bizarre decisions here.

Systems: Advanced Edition. The Cloning Bay, Hacking, and Mind Control. All even more flawed than most base-game Systems, unfortunately, poorly thought out and way too swingy in their RNG even though they don't have inherent RNG! Mostly, I wish the enemy didn't get them -this would instantly escape all their worst problems.

Augments: Intro. The Augments that both exist in the base game and can be randomly looted and found in Stores. Also a bit of an overview of general Augment mechanics.

Augments: advanced edition. I genuinely don't understand why advanced edition is such a big step backwards on Augment design, when Augments were already generally underwhelming.

Augments: Limited Access. Mostly this is Augments that some player ships will start with where it's possible to get them in the middle of a run but it's far less likely to happen than with other Augments. Sadly, for being such special, limited-access tools, only a relatively small portion of them rise above mediocrity. Several of them are impressively awful.

Crew Overview And Experience Mechanics. How crew behave, how crew room assignment works, how crew experience works, and me talking about how I appreciate the crew behavior end being unusually competent for a game using indirect command and control like this.

Species. The assorted species of the game, how the game handles them mechanically, and an extended look into how utterly horribly the writing handles them.

The Kestrel Cruisers. Your starting ship and its variants, with very uneven design. Also an explanation of the format of these player ship posts, and touching on how unlocks and Achievements work broadly.

The Engi Cruisers. The easiest unlock, though there's certainly plenty of players who unlocked others first. Clunkily-designed all-around, but the A is a big step up regardless, and the C and B at least have interesting ideas underlying them, if... poor execution.

The Federation Cruisers. Perpetually hampered by Artillery's flawed implementation and subtly hampered by Defense Drones working less reliably due to sheer scale, with the former undermining the argument that they're at least unique due to Artillery being unavailable outside them.

The Zoltan Cruisers. Hampered by the game being poor at properly teaching beam mechanics, seriously hampered by the game clearly thinking Zoltan Supershields are amazing when they're actually quite bad (Especially since the devs actively negate their anti-boarder utility for no clear reason...), further hampered by the devs deliberately negating the advantages of a Zoltan-heavy crew by stripping away initial Reactor levels even though you can't actually use all that Zoltan Power generation... put another way, the Zoltan Cruisers are harmed by there being significant disconnects between the reality of the game and the way the devs think they're game works.

The Mantis Cruisers. Inexplicably all missing a weapon slot with no innate advantage to counterbalance this serious flaw, seeming to suggest the devs recognize boarding is broadly a powerful strategy but don't recognize how hostile they designed the Rebel Flagship to be to boarding strategies, the A and B are at least pretty solid ships. Their biggest flaw is less a playing-to-win issue and more that they're designed so that the player readily ends up in situations where optimal play is tedious and boring -which is actually a more broadly recurring flaw with FTL, but comes up particularly readily in a particularly extreme form with the Mantis Cruisers due primarily to being so boarding-centric. Boarding really needed more polish, basically.

The Slug Cruisers. The Slug Cruiser A is one of the best ships in the game, but sadly what follows is... not so much. Also, I touch briefly on the writing problems covering in the Species post, as playing the Slug Cruisers naturally pressures the player to ram right into some of them even if they're actively disinterested in thinking about the writing.

The Rock Cruisers. I really don't understood how so many deeply problematic decisions got concentrated on the Rock Cruisers.

The Stealth Cruisers. The A is a clunky, frustrating ship to play, but relatively viable and reasonably able to be fun. The B and C are some of the most mystifying ship designs in the game.

The Crystal Cruisers. An impressive concentration of decisions that are bad, several of which are simply baffling. Also an incredibly disappointing payoff to what's liable to be months of a player's life expended trying to unlock these.

The Lanius Cruisers. There's a fair few sub-optimal decisions here, but the B variant is reasonably solid and fun, and there's only one semi-egregious decision here that fortunately is positioned so it doesn't hurt that much in practice. So this works out okay.

The Rebel Flagship. A boss fight that would be a pretty cool cap to a very different game but alas is an incredibly bad fit to the game it was made for, and also a good 'face' for how amazingly strange and obviously problematic some of FTL's central narrative elements are.

And that's it; all I really have to say about FTL.