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[Telgin]

After about 42 hours of trying, I finally beat FTL for the first time, which was on normal difficulty.  I probably should have dropped down to easy, but never did.

The secret to winning is that you just have to get lucky.  Nothing made my run more successful than getting a free Burst Laser II early on from a random event.

[Dunamisdeos]

I eventually turned off the chasing thing so i could just enjoy the game XD

[Nighthawk]

After about 42 hours of trying, I finally beat FTL for the first time, which was on normal difficulty.  I probably should have dropped down to easy, but never did.

The secret to winning is that you just have to get lucky.  Nothing made my run more successful than getting a free Burst Laser II early on from a random event.

I started to feel the same way about FTL after a while. There's definitely a notable aspect of skill to the game--putting out fires, targeting the right systems, and all that are important things to learn, but at the end of the day there's just so much RNG deciding whether you live or die. Do the random events give you boons or ruin your day? Do the missiles fired by the enemy ship hit or miss? It's not like many other roguelites, where if you dodge everything you can conceivably have a successful run without any upgrades at all; if FTL decides not to let you win... you don't win.

I'm a huge hypocrite, though, because I stopped playing FTL but I played the heck out of XCOM (which has the same kind of RNG nonsense), so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

[Telgin]

I read somewhere that the developers wanted you to have about a 10% success rate if you knew what you were doing.  It feels like that's about right, but I question why they wanted normal difficulty to be so hard.

There's skill involved for sure, but even the most skilled player will have runs where every other event kills a crew member and no store has useful or affordable weapons.  Many such runs.  Actually, a skilled player probably just avoids most events, which is what I learned to do.  A few are safe, but a disturbing number have a significant chance of losing a crew member or having 3-4 mantis teleport onto your ship while you're still in sector 2 and only have 3 human crew.  Skill doesn't help.

[Iduno]

I read somewhere that the developers wanted you to have about a 10% success rate if you knew what you were doing.  It feels like that's about right, but I question why they wanted normal difficulty to be so hard.

There's skill involved for sure, but even the most skilled player will have runs where every other event kills a crew member and no store has useful or affordable weapons.  Many such runs.  Actually, a skilled player probably just avoids most events, which is what I learned to do.  A few are safe, but a disturbing number have a significant chance of losing a crew member or having 3-4 mantis teleport onto your ship while you're still in sector 2 and only have 3 human crew.  Skill doesn't help.

That sounds like 10% for hard. I think it's like 25-50% for normal if you know what you're doing.

It's doesn't feel as obvious as Slay the Spire or any Klei game, but the game just has non-win conditions designed in. Having upgrades you're good with and grinding xp on characters when you get the chance helps a lot.

Once you have better shields than you need for an enemy (real easy for rays), you can go do something else and come back to maxed engines and command. Turn off any weapons that can manage to do damage, and you'll probably get maxed weapon skill as well.

[heydude6]

I feel like you guys underestimate shitty weapons. Shitty weapons don't do much on their own, but they charge and fire faster than their higher tier variants and they don't use as much power. All you have to do to learn how much they shred is to use the type B Kestrel. Spam is good for breaking through shields.

[Akura]

Handed Hans Capon his blue-blooded ass in both the archery duel(with no skill levels in archery) and sword-fighting. Almost beat his ass in the tavern brawl later, but that's scripted to end before the fight can be won.


Also found out I can make decent amounts of money brawling with Milan. After knocking him out, you can rob him in a place almost guaranteed to be free from witnesses. Aside from your wager(the game doesn't remove it from his pockets if you win, it just spawns the winnings in yours), you can strip his clothing and gear, which respawns every day. It's marked stolen, but there's a friendly miller just down the road who will gladly help "store" some "lost, but found" goods. This is in addition to the various stats you train while brawling.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

[Rolan7]

I constructed a skeleton!  Technically I constructed a dozen skeletons last week, but the mostly-intact human remains that keep washing up on the river hardly count.  All they needed were "skulls".  Human skulls are bizarrely rare compared to every other bone, but fortunately you can buy replicas.  The constables who buy the "murder evidence" seem more impressed than concerned that the replicas are made of brass.

But these remains weren't human, oh no!  Nothing so nearly-authentic!  Today I did "paleontology" in the most cynical, victorian sense!

So first I went on a dream-safari and captured a bird with seven heads.  This part was actually legitimate science, of a sort.  Then I butchered it, which I felt kinda bad about because it's sentient and very talkative.  Lots of talking animals get casually killed in this game, it's a little weird actually.  But Victorian science, right?  At least this was in the interests of knowledge?

Ha no, the skeleton was way too small so I used a magically warped ruler to make it human-sized.  Then I took it into a slimey bohemian basement in the suburbs where squid-peopled helped me glue an eighth spine on it.  You know, for... science?  _{Why did I do that part?  I think I saw the option and assumed it was useful somehow?}

So I kinda let it sit in that state for a few weeks because it needs 8 skulls, and skulls are the one body part I don't have piles of.  I also just had no idea how to use this thing - clearly it was valuable, or at least expensive to make.  Who would buy it? 

Ah, a bizarrely wealthy author of gothic tales, perfect!  She'd pay in scrip, which meant I could invest some scrip in buying 8 skulls.  Giant bird skulls?  No no, we're long past any sort of authenticity, I bought sabre-cat skulls.  Because they met the buyer's desires of antiquity and menace.  I think the thighs I attached were from a dinosaur, maybe, so that's a nice coincidence of taxonomy.

I don't know of any dinosaurs that walked on three legs with one pincer-arm.  It... it was the best way to balance the antiquity and menace, see, and also I wanted to see if the buyer would go for it.  Apparently limbs are anything-goes with chimera, so it was "fine".  To her credit it was actually very difficult to convince her that this monstrosity ever existed - but apparently some people really want to believe in bygone monsters.

For my trouble I made a decent profit in scrip (after expenses) and a heaping pile of "stygian ivory".  I also reached a market exhaustion level of "Depleted for Two to Three Weeks, But You Certainly Impressed Them".  Those are real-life weeks, ehehe.  That suits me fine.  I'm just... kinda reeling with how incredibly cynical this game's depiction of paleontology is.  Dredging up murder victims really is about as authentic as it gets, here, and even there you have to fake their skulls.

It is pretty funny though, and obviously inspired by real bestiaries.  Like, it's fine to recount stories, but it's amazing what was stated as fact:

Near the town of Lisbon, mares stand facing a west wind and conceive a foal from it; such colts are very swift but only live three years.

Okay ramble done.  Fallen London

[Telgin]

I feel like you guys underestimate shitty weapons. Shitty weapons don't do much on their own, but they charge and fire faster than their higher tier variants and they don't use as much power. All you have to do to learn how much they shred is to use the type B Kestrel. Spam is good for breaking through shields.

Oh, sure.  But then I get 3 attempted and failed runs because I don't get any opportunities new weapons at all for 3 sectors, not even weak ones, because no event drops one, no store is selling weapons, or the only weapons the stores are selling are higher tier weapons I can't afford or can't power.

The starting burst laser on the Kestrel and Odyssey are good enough up until sector 3 or so, but then you start running into enemies with 3 shield barriers and your only way to hurt them is with missiles or the artillery beam.  If they have a defense drone you're more or less screwed with missiles, and the artillery beam doesn't charge fast enough or hit reliably enough to knock out their weapons to survive such fights.

[Iduno]

I beat Dicey Dungeons on the 3rd challenge of the Inventor.

Every single item you have, including the invented item, have 4 charges. Invented item starts out as "turn all dice into 6s", which is great except for weapons that have a maximum or 4 or whatever (one you start with does). When an item runs out, it replaces the invented item with 4 charges, no matter how good it was or how many charges were left. About half of the items you find are not weapons, which can be a problem when you need to kill the enemy to leave a fight. Upgrading an item (I had 1 anvil on the map, 1 in a store, and one possible from a level-up but took the copy and item instead - there was never a blueprint on the map or store) resets it to 4 charges. You're also limited in equipment slots (although the backpack you can refill from is large enough that I can't imagine filling it) during a fight.

I got the vampire final boss, who has a wooden stake in a chest right before the fight. It takes up one of your 6 slots, and several of my best weapons took up 2 slots each. He can also steal health. I took the upgraded ice weapon (on a 6, turn their largest die into a 1, does die plus 1 damage, but 2 slots), an upgraded hammer (does damage equal to the die face, on a 6 disable one enemy equipment), the wooden stake (total of 40 from your 6-sided dice does 5 damage and kills the vampire if it gets them to 0), and a staff (put a total of 8 from various die faces to do 6 damage and disable 1 of their dice, but 2 slots).

I used up my last non-stake item with a 1 to bring him down to 5 health, so I killed him with my absolute last chance. Glad I saved my upgraded items and mostly had weapons that had 4 charges left.

A bit frustrating sometimes, but it's a great game for the $10 or whatever I picked it up for on itch.io.

I feel like you guys underestimate shitty weapons. Shitty weapons don't do much on their own, but they charge and fire faster than their higher tier variants and they don't use as much power. All you have to do to learn how much they shred is to use the type B Kestrel. Spam is good for breaking through shields.

Oh, sure.  But then I get 3 attempted and failed runs because I don't get any opportunities new weapons at all for 3 sectors, not even weak ones, because no event drops one, no store is selling weapons, or the only weapons the stores are selling are higher tier weapons I can't afford or can't power.

The starting burst laser on the Kestrel and Odyssey are good enough up until sector 3 or so, but then you start running into enemies with 3 shield barriers and your only way to hurt them is with missiles or the artillery beam.  If they have a defense drone you're more or less screwed with missiles, and the artillery beam doesn't charge fast enough or hit reliably enough to knock out their weapons to survive such fights.

I've lost against the boss a few times because I can't do enough damage. Especially when the hacking drone hits the weapons.

[Telgin]

Having beaten the game with the Kestrel, Odyssey and Nesasio on normal now, I do now recognize that the game is much less random and doable if you can get past the first 3 sectors.  But the mention of hacking reminds me that I now need to try it with AE content enabled since I have no experience with lanius, hacking or mind control.  Hacking and mind control in particular look like they can be pretty infuriating to deal with, but mind control can at least be countered with your own mind control.

[Akura]

Met a cowardly knight along the side of the road who challenged me to a duel. I told him he should focus more on wooing the beautiful women of Bohemia. He agreed and started to walk away.


As soon as his back was turned, I choked him out, then snapped his neck. Stripped his corpse and fenced his shiny armor for quite a lot.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I wasn't sure if the stolen flag disappeared, as it wasn't shown when selling it to Peshek. If it had, I probably would have been better off just keeping the full set of plate.

[AzyWng]

Henry’s the good guy, right?

[MrRoboto75]

Game offered me to dual wield double heavy machine guns.  How could I say no?  All the damage of double miniguns with far far better accuracy and therefore better ammo economy.

Lil Hunter literally evaporated and got to loop no problem.  Ballguy Mom's final projectile killed me as I killed her.  One day I'll get her without running out of ammo, as that's how she typically ends my run.

Also, apparently the popgun family cannot benefit from recycle gland, in spite of being bullet weapons.  Go figure.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Nuclear Throne

[Nighthawk]

Fought a Rathian with Sword and Shield. I start the fight with a tap to the ankle, just to get her attention. Rathian gives me the usual hello roar. I counter it with Metsu Shoryugeki and instantly stun her, then follow up with a Perfect Rush. She gets up, gets mad, and tries to hit me with a flying tailspin. Metsu Shorygeki. Dunked. Perfect Rush. She gets up and shoots a fireball. Metsu Shoryugeki. Stunned. Perfect Rush.

Repeat again and again until the poor wyvern limps away with too many concussions to count, and is promptly captured.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Monster Hunter Rise
Dear Gog, I love what they've done to Shoryugeki. In Generations Ultimate, it was a fun move to use if you could place it correctly and time it well. In Rise, it's a counter. And as you can tell from my description, it's hilariously strong.