THIS. It's obviously possible to win without a defense drone... but if you don't have it, the whole game is just a giant lotto. Get hit by too many missiles (putting you behind the curve) or have a missile hit something important? too bad, game over.
My last game I actually did really well till sector 3 or 4... and then ate two breech missiles in a row to the engine room (the first one managed to start a fire as well as making a breech for extra BS).
Game over, nothing I could have done, it just totally removes all skill and strategy from the game, you just randomly die sometimes and it sucks
You're saying that their breach missiles... created a hull breach?? How very unusual and unlucky.
In all seriousness though if all your other systems were intact you should have been able to do something. Weapons, drones, hacking and cloaking can all provide answers to missiles. You should be able to get at least one of them running.
Totally maxed out (which is very expensive) is only 55% chance to dodge. That still leaves a LOT of room for RNG to just screw you over with nothing you can do about it.
Or 100% with a cloak. But in any case five levels of engines is usually enough, 45%. Yes, you'll still get an occasional unlucky hit, but overall you'll get hit a lot less and the damage will not add up as much. You also get to flee more easily.
Hitting their weapon room to stop missiles is problematic because missile weapons tend to use little power so they are usually the last to go down, and meanwhile you're shooting through their shields and full dodge chance the whole time so it usually takes a while unless it's sector 1.
This isn't true at all. The dangerous missiles (Hermes, Breach, Hull, Pegasus) all take 3, which makes them pretty easy to knock down. The only cheap one is the Artemis, which really shouldn't be a game ending threat past like sector 2.
Swarm apparently takes 2 power but I don't think I've ever seen an enemy use it.
Cloak is almost as rare as defense drone and costs 150 - a very heavy investment in the early-mid game (especially since you have to keep it saved up just hoping to get one) . Hacking I have not experimented with that much, but at level 1 does not seem to drain the enemy weapons very much. It might be a viable alternative to defense done after you've ranked it to 2.
Edit: Just tested it, even maxed out hacking only drains maybe half the charge from a breech missile, it's got plenty of time to fire while hacking is on cooldown.
Cloaking isn't any rarer than any other system, and is really good enough to be worth buying at some point. Same for hacking only it's also way cheaper.
And I wasn't claiming that hacking could keep the enemy missiles out of the equation forever, but maxed out it gives you 28 extra seconds in addition to the 20 or so that a dangerous missile takes to charge. If you can't do
anything at all in 50 seconds then frankly you deserve to lose.
It just seems strange, it's like you're expecting FTL to be a game where the enemy can never retaliate in a meaningful way.
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Topic: FTL - Faster than light - spaceship crew management and roguelike. (Read 378476 times)