Giant Bombcast 523: Realistic Wad of Flesh

@skinnersweet: It's hard to know why they're struggling at Into the Breach without seeing them play at length, but it's a game where you can accidentally tunnel vision and think "well I *have* to move this guy and do this thing" and suddenly you're leaving way too much work to your other mechs. Usually if you really look on most turns, you can minimize grid damage to zero, or at worst a single enemy hit.

That being said, if they really don't understand the fundamentals of the game that keep you "ahead" (getting free kills from hazards/water/enemies hitting each other, blocking enemies from spawning to prevent being overwhelmed, etc.), then maybe the GB crew is just finding themselves in unwinnable turns because they let too many threats pile up.

It always surprises me when people harp on the Rebel Flagship in FTL. It's hard, certainly, but far from impossible. You need two things to beat it, a decent run so you can hit it as fully juiced up as possible, and a plan. I typically start each run with a plan in my head before i've made the first jump. There's 3 that work for me consistently:

1. Boarding party, Rocks and Mantids, though a few leveled up humans can suffice with some additional support.

2. Hacking + Fire

3. Powerful weapon combo, heck, if i can find a Chain Vulcan that's almost always a win by itself, and cloak or some defensive hacking/Mind Control.

Once you get to the Flagship, regardless of your plan, the goal is the same, kill the crew, all of them (or all but one, see below). Start with the jerks in the single room turrets, once you knock them out that turret is a sitting duck taking them out drastically reduces the ship's firepower. They're always just one of them in the room too, so drop a pissed off mantis on their head, or start a big fire in there and you can usually forget about them until the turret's down. Killing the crew in the main ship is more of a challenge, unless you're rocking the 4 person teleporter your best bet is to drop your boarders on the pilot, to limit the enemy defenders they'll face. While your boarders are on the ship you need to somehow disable the medbay. Hacking is a big plus here, as it's a guaranteed kill for any weakened crew in the room, but a good hull breach, or raging conflagration in there is just as good. Even if you don't have boarders, disabling the medbay and killing the injured crew that go there should be your top priority after the turrets are down. Now you can either kill all the crew or leave one of the middle turrets up. The disadvantage of leaving a turret up is balanced by that single crew member keeping flagship's AI from kicking on. The ship's AI isn't great but it will slowly auto-heal systems, while if you keep one of the turret guys alive once you knock out a system for a phase, it's down for the count, no repairs possible!

Either way, once the crew is down, the Flagship is a much more manageable threat, and it's possible on some phases to just completely defang it, leaving it unable to hurt you while you repair systems and prepare for the next phase.

@faridmon: having access to a subset of heroes is a far more meaningful disadvantage than seeing if you're dying more than the average. I'm sure that people who die 3x in 5 minutes have a good feeling already whether they're doing well or not. This just shows the impact of that to new people who don't have that feeling yet.

I will not stand by and listen to someone disparage Radio BIG!

Interesting to hear Jeff describe Burnout as this blue skies positive game.

I agree that DJ atomica & the soundtrack fit that style, but the way the game looks has always kind of turned me off on Burnout. I thought it was a very grey / brown game with not many colors that pop out at you.

Ben calling the Wii U Smash a 'port' of the 3DS game.. What?? They're different versions of the same game, they came out a month apart.

@onemanarmyy: There is no disadvantage when Ranked i.e. the matches that actually counts being competitive in, is not locked until you have 16 champions. You are in no way disadvantageous when you play ranked in League. You will have enough champions to compete, counter, play your favourite.... for no cost at all. All the money you spend is cosmetic. DOTA, from have gather from Giantbomb, seems more pay to win (Do you actually pay for items?), than League ever was and is.

@faridmon: When there are 140 heroes in a game, and you only have access to 16 of them, it's going to restrict the ways you can play as a team. For instance, if i see a batrider offlane, which can cast a stackable spell multiple times, which slows you and makes you more susceptible to his attacks, you require a carry that can dispel those stacks, once it gets scary. There are maybe 4 carries that can do that efficiently. When i see a hero that duels people 1v1 with physical damage, i want to pick a hero that can make the target immune to physical damage for a while, or heal for quite a bit. If i see a illusive hero that needs to be bursted down, i want to have a hero that can initiate from far or have a silence. Playing with people that only have access to 16 heroes would be a huge problem in those cases. What if i'm stuck with 4 players that all play the same position and only have those heroes unlocked? What if there's no viable initiation in our hero pools? What if 3 guys are not communicating at the start and i assume they'll play a role , but find out they hardly have any heroes for that role?

In dota, You pay for items with gold that you get from last hitting & bounty runes. You pay real money for cosmetics & this Dota plus stuff. I was sceptical about this at first, but it really doesn't matter when you realize sites like dotabuff.com & dotapicker have done the exact same things for years already. Seems like Lolking , LeagueofGraphs & LOL counter are relatively similar to Dotabuff & Dotapicker.

Dotaplus is really nice for newcomers, but if you're spending a decent amount of time with the game, you get a feeling for which heroes are good against others and which are not. I'm sure i've played against a ton of people that use all kinds of websites & mobile apps to get a good team composition, but straight up being outdrafted to the point where you can't win only happens in like 5% of the matches.So it's still very much about how you perform.

Dotaplus also fails to realize that networth & K/D score only really matters for the midlaner & carry most of the time. I rather play with an offlane abbadon that sacrifices his networth a bit to protect our more valuable players with his shield, than a guy that tries to get the highest numbers.

Secondly, pickrate of a skill build doesn't equal to winrate. If everyone picks the skills that the majority picks, that's probably a solid way to go, but it doesn't make them realize what makes it good. It's also going to be slow to catch up to meta changes. It's similar with the ingame community guides at the moment, where people get a good base to work off from, but have to learn themselves when to deviate from that path and why. So now you have a more data driven ingame community guide that mostly shows what the popular build is. Information that's already widely available on the internet. Once a new patch hits, it will take a long time before a new build becomes the most popular one, and people start to pick it. Personally, i don't see how that makes the game suddenly Pay2win.

This is a perfect summary of why that boss makes me fucking hate what is otherwise almost a perfect game. FTL is about improvising with what you've got, making do in a bad situation, finding creative ways to play different systems and abilities off of each other. The flagship is counter to all of that. It's just not in the spirit of the game, and given how big an investment a run through FTL is, and how rare it is to even make it to the flagship if you're a new or casual player, getting obliterated in 90 seconds, without scoring a single hit, before you can even figure out what you're doing wrong is incredibly demoralizing and just makes me not want to play the game at all. I shouldn't have to go online and read six paragraphs about somebody's perfect build to beat a game that otherwise implies any set of weapons should be viable (and, as you said, usually is viable for the preceding 99% of the game).

roguelike roguelike roguelike roguelike

Them fools ain't the boss of me!

Brad, you're expected to lose 90% of FTL games, but with preparation you should win most of your rebel flagship fights. Probably 2/3rds to 75%. Which, it's a hard encounter with a good build, but the boss engages in highly predictable behavior and holds your hand at times. It just forces you to have at least two different ways of solving problems plus having good defenses to a large variety of attacks.

Almost every combination of a fully upgraded ship and crew will likely work with a bit of strategy and luck. The example I gave (teleporter + mind control + high defenses + beam weapons) is just the easiest one to reliably get and reliably pull off.

It is a game you can rush to the end as quickly as possible, barely firing a shot, never upgrading or never buying stuff - there are steam achievements for doing that. I'm saying the flagship will kick your butt if you do. The game is unfair in that it lets (forces) you to touch the end game when you're not ready for it. If someone handed you a sector 8 save with a fully outfitted ship, I bet you would beat the rebel flagship in two or three attempts, and then pretty reliably after that. It'd also be a bit more obvious why certain combinations don't work.

Ganon and Mother Brain are hard fights, but they're usually not the hardest because if you got all the heart, armor, and energy upgrades those give you a ton of room to find a strategy that works. You can beat Ganon without the master sword, fire rod, 20 hearts, and silver arrows, but you probably shouldn't. The difference is, Zelda doesn't force you to fight Ganon.

@alexandrite: I think you missed the gist of what Brad and BisonHero's argument is. Mother Brain and Ganon can be tough, but you can beat them using the same tactics you learned through fighting all the other enemies and bosses in the game.

The FTL boss is designed to *break the rules of its own game*, and that's where the blemish on an excellent game is. You can have a a great run using a drone-reliant build for 98% of FTL, and then it's "ha ha fuck you, drones are practically useless against me".

The argument of "you just need to be prepared" falls flat when you realize that the game *never* hints as to the Rebel flagship's strengths or weaknesses. At no point does the game say "Watch out' the Flagship's drone/missile defenses are near-impenetrable!" At no point does your crew come across an in-game informant who whispers "I heard that the Flagship is vulnerable to boarding actions." Instead, the game says "The boss is tough! Get strong! What, you thought the same strategy that carried you through the entire game would be worthwile?! Ha ha, you lose!"

And that's a shame. It doesn't make FTL a bad game in any way, but it's a cheap shot when you lose a game because the game changes its rules without informing the player that it's doing so.

@dasakamov: Drone's aren't useless though.

There's only two rules it breaks: 'Power surge detected', which is not that different than fighting under a solar flare or asteroid field, and that it has multiple weapon compartments instead of just one.

Everything else it does: Zolton Shields, AI Control, Boarding, Breach Weapons, Defense Drones, and so forth are all things you see at some point earlier in the game. They're just intentionally layered in such a way that no one plan of attack on its own will work (except, alpha striking with high end beam weapons). A drone based strategy works fine if you combine it with boarding or strategic ion cannon usage. It's less reliable, harder to find the good parts for, more rng prone, and more expensive, but you can win with pretty much any ship and any end game combination. Leaning on drones on the defensive is actually a very good build if you have the firepower to win as well.

I have the same Russian Roulette situation Jeff has with coffee. It doesn't happen often but there's that random time my digestive system just says "We're working overtime boys! Gotta moooove it all out right the hell now."

Plus, I crash REALLY hard with coffee. For some reason tea keeps me wired longer.

For a long time I was just getting the Bombcast off iTunes, but suddenly there's advertisements for dick pills so it's time to download the premium version again.

can you ???????? fuck it?

Sorry Ben, but Egg Beer is real.

Incidentally, I recently had a drink called rompon, which is like a Latin-style eggnog, and this one used dark beer. It was actually pretty good, and it tasted a lot like coffee, oddly enough.

FTL's final boss breaks several rules, all of which are small changes that add up when you consider all of them:

• It is a combination manned/AI ship, an attribute no other ship has and which you're given no indication of beforehand. This has advantages and disadvantages for the player, but it does rule out the strategy of trying to eliminate all crew for a victory which first time players might assume is possible
• Its multiple weapon compartments mean you can't quickly pummel one room to disable all weapons. No other ship has multiple weapon compartments.
• Its missile weapon is unique and objectively better than any other missile weapon in the game; by firing 3 missiles in succession, it's more than a defense drone can handle, meaning you have to lean more heavily on your ship's dodge rate or cloaking device to defend you, or disable the missile weapon ASAP since it is so overpowered.
• Unlike all other ships in the game, it has infinite missiles. While not always an advisable strategy, against most ships in previous sectors you could technically divert all power to engines and cloaking device and try to just evade enemy missiles until they run out, then divert power to the offensive. With infinite missiles to work with, the flagship will kill you with missiles given enough time unless you disable the missile room permanently or just end the fight very quickly by punching through the shields and damaging its defensive system. Inexplicably, the flagship does have a finite number of drones in each stage, but they decided that a finite number of missiles would be too fair.
• It has the power surges (2nd stage drone swarm, 3rd stage laser spam/Zoltan supershield) which can't be disabled in any way.
• Its 3rd stage has a Zoltan supershield that has 12 HP instead of the normal Zoltan supershield of 5HP, plus this shield periodically recharges from zero to full (this is better in every way than both a normal Zoltan supershield or the supershield drone that just gives you 1HP of Zoltan supershield on a slow interval that is easy to remove).
• Also the mere fact that the fight has 3 stages, which they don't allude to at all during all the exposition you get when you reach sector 8. Honestly, even stage 1's fight is an order of magnitude tougher than any single ship you'll ever encounter in sector 7 or 8, so it's understandable that some players just ragequit the game when they make it through an incredibly tough stage 1 fight only to learn there are more stages to go.

The flagship does so many things that other ships can't do that the fight feels cheap and unfair the first few times, and even when you know what you're doing, I still think aspects of the boss are overly cheap and unnecessarily strong.

The fight is beatable, not so much your first few times but once you know exactly what to be prepared for in all 3 forms. I've beaten it numerous times, I get how to do it, but I still don't respect the fight at all. It's bad design that feels like it wasn't properly playtested; I played an early Kickstarter backer build that had just 3 or 4 player ships (only layout A) but otherwise most of the events and the final boss completed, and the flagship fight went completely unchanged between that build and the final release.

I still think it's a valid criticism that you can have ship builds that are entirely adequate at sectors 1-7, but completely inadequate at toppling the flagship fast enough before you just get missiled or drone swarmed to death. At times it feels like you're playing 2 games of FTL simultaneously: the "how am I doing against the ships I'm fighting right now and in the sector I'm going to be in next" game, and the "am I working towards a build that can specifically topple and counter the rebel flagship" game. This feels like poor design that quite a few strategies that satisfy the first game just aren't up to par to satisfy the second game.

I'm honestly amazed the devs never caved on making the flagship fight a bit easier, especially on Easy. It's just a needlessly harsh difficulty spike, in a game that otherwise gradually increases difficulty a bit each sector.

Easy mode should really just have you win the game when you beat the first form; I feel like that would make fewer players stop playing the game forever. Or instead of making it a 3 stage boss fight, make it a 1 stage bossfight that randomly has the attributes of one of the stages (either cloaking device, or drone swarm, or laser spam/Zoltan shield), and if you beat it you just win. Or even just have the Federation tell you more about what to expect from the Flagship.

I think that your whole post is excellent but the part that I quoted in particular is one that very much hits home for me each time I give FTL another go (I love the game, have completed it, but you perfectly surmised in my head what I experience even on a successful run).

It's really quite a shame because as Brad said, it's really quite a perfectly done game in many respects that just feels badly designed to the point of being broken at the end.

Unrelated, I feel like I always read that coffee generates the game of Russian Roulette in a supposedly small percentage of people (I wanna say like 30 percent of drinkers) but yet...literally every coffee drinker I've ever met experiences it (anecdotal, I know, but still). How is this possible?

@bisonhero: As someone who backed FTL on Kickstarter an enjoyed what I played of the game, but only ever beat it on easy, you're 100% spot on here.

@cavemantom: yeah but Robotix are nothing like Transformers... they were building toys with motors, not quit lego, maybe inspired by erector sets

In no sense of the word is into the breach a deep strategy game. Unless you eat crayons.

You can absolutely beat the flagship in FTL with weird weapon combinations, you can do it with boarding, fire, beam weapons, rockets, flack, lasers, teleporting bombs, ion weaponry, automated drones with lockdown, stealth, full drones, suffocation, etc. And I've done almost all of them.

All you need is a decent investment in upgrades and not be reliant on just 1 strategy. As long as you have something logical to combo together it's fine. All this talk about 90% of the weapons being not viable is pure poppycock sorry, it's closer to the reverse about 90% are viable and the rest you normally learn to phase out as the campaign progresses. Almost any single weapon or strategy is unviable against the flagship short of pure overwhelming firepower (or boarding cheese). There are some that can do the job faster and easier, that's about it.

There were even some threads going back a few years when FTL was a more recent release with people posting a myriad of strategies.

And no you don't need a guide either, some experimentation, trial and error, learning and eventually experience under you belt and people have figured it out for themselves. FTL uses failure as a learning tool, and in that respect the final flagship is just another rake to step on a few times before you learn.

One of the greatest joys I get from and one of the core reasons why I personally play strategy games is - learning. Learning how they tick, their systems their ins and outs, dissembling them and learning how to beat them and exploit them. When a game can offer up a second serving of that experience to me after I have become complacent and stagnant with is of great value to me. There needs to be adversity for triumph to be valuable. It's why I was much more satisfied for example with Xcom2 ramping up things in the last mission compared to the anemic last mission of Xcom1. To flex that grey matter one more time and remind me why I liked said game at the journeys start.

Will you EVER turn Jason's mic up? He talks quiet compared to the rest of you and for the entirety of his life on this podcast he's always whispered while his mic has been quiet. It's infuriating. Every single podcast he's on he's quiet. I do not enjoy the idea of having to turn the volume up and down depending on who is talking.

I just had to bite the bullet on getting all that Mass Effect DLC. Luckily, I was able to pick it up during a rare 50% off sale.