We’ve been working hard over the summer and are excited to finally officially announce a free expansion, FTL: Advanced Edition! FTL: AE is a huge content addition that includes new weapons, drones, augments, systems, enemies, and more. Here are some details on just a few of the additions visible in the trailer:

• Mind Control System: Temporarily turn enemies into allies. Force a boarder to repair the damage they just did, or have the enemy pilot sabotage their own helm.
• Hacking System: Lockdown and disrupt enemy systems. Unique effects for each system, ranging from forcing a teleporter remove boarders to making the medbay damage instead of heal.
• New Sector and Events: Our writer Tom Jubert has returned along with special guest writer Chris Avellone (of Planescape fame), who managed to find some time for us between his work on Project Eternity and Wasteland 2. They’ve been helping us add a new sector and scatter new events throughout the rest of the game.
• New Weapons and Effects: Many new weapons that take advantage of new mechanics: overcharging to increase the number of volleys, stun effects to freeze crew, and area effect targeting, to name a few.
• And more systems, drones, augments, enemy ships, enemy layouts, and hostile environments. All of which we’ll be sure to talk about more in the coming weeks!

In addition to new content, we’ve continued to polish FTL and add some of the most requested small features. As a few examples: you’ll be able to save your crew positions and send them back to battle-stations, save and quit during combat, and find more items for purchase in stores.

For the purists out there, FTL vanilla will still be available. All of the new content can be disabled from within the hangar before starting a new game.

FTL on iPad

We’re also very excited to announce that FTL is coming to the iPad! We’ve redesigned the FTL interface to be optimal for touch devices. It plays beautifully on both the full size iPads (2nd generation or later) and the iPad minis. And of course it will include all of the new additions of the FTL: Advanced Edition expansion.

But many of you might be asking “What about Android (or Surface, etc.)!?” For now, the answer is that we hope to get it on all tablet devices but do not know for sure. When we first released FTL, we did so on three operating systems simultaneously and it was a gargantuan task for a two man studio to accomplish. Learning from the difficulties of the past, we’re trying to preserve our sanity by focusing on one system at a time. Expanding tablet support will be our next highest priority, but we don’t want to make any promises (or rejections) until we’re 100% sure of the outcome.

Similarly, some people might be asking “What about phones!?” Unfortunately, FTL will not be coming to phones. From repeated testing, we have determined that it’s just not possible to achieve the quality of gameplay we want on such limited screen space.

When?

We plan to simultaneously make the iPad version available for purchase and update the existing PC game early 2014!

OH FUCK YES

Will the iPad version be iPhone compatible as well?

Yes, Yes, YES!

Been waiting for this since it came out. Seemed like just the type of game that would get this kind of update, shame we have to wait till 2014 for it :(

I really hope they have tried to balance the game a lot more. After a while (a fair few hours to be fair) you realised that you need fairly specific gear to do really well.

chris avellone gets around. I can't wait until he's writing for Japanese RPG's at this point

Awesome.

They say no, which is unfortunate. It's tough though, I'm sure the interface and control just wouldn't be possible on that small screen. It just makes so much sense though as a mobile game.

Perfect.

Still not on the Vita, eh?

Took them long enough, new scenarios sound good. But I'd rather have a new campaign.

WOOO. Super excited for this. I still play FTL regularly, and it's still so hard on normal. Love it!

Sounds good, I don't have an iPad, but I'm planning on getting a retina mini asap.

@artisanbreads: yeah, I was hoping but it makes sense the controls would be a tight squeeze.

Def getting it on the Ipad.

No word on Steam cloud, achievements, leaderboards or other stuff like that? Cloud saves would be great.

There better be more events. I found FTL to be disappointing, given that a lot of things seemed to repeat often. Also, I hope there are more viable ways to win.

Had me at Avellone.

Oh FTL. You are so fucking awesome.

God damn it, now it's going to get harder...I can't wait!

Will the weapon descriptions for beam weapons be fixed, or will beam weapons be changed to match their descriptions? Or more likely will that just be ignored?

Any chance of a lower difficulty level so that we can have fun with all the systems and explore more of the galaxy in one playthrough?

EFF TEE ELL !!! NOW !~!!

Release is April 4th

Source

@fakekisser said:

I know this thread is old, but c'mon, Easy is significantly more generous with resources than Normal.

It is officially out now. I've played the iPad version for about 4 hours. It's great. I was quite concerned about how the controls would work but they did an amazing job with them. The tablet is the perfect platform for this game.

Also, it seems like Easy has been toned down a little now that there is a Hard mode. The final boss also seemed easier though I still managed to lose because 3/4 of my ship lit on fire in the span of about 2 turns.

I have only seen two new pieces of content (one being a drone that is called the "Infiltrator" or something like that. It runs around the enemy ship and ion-blasts systems. The other being a clone machine that clones crew when they die so you don't lose them. They take a stat penalty but that still sounds really cool) but that is because I just turned on the Advanced Edition stuff (there's a toggle) because I wanted to get my sea legs with how the game played on iPad first.

So far it definitely is amazing.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

IT'S HERE YOU GUYS IT'S HERE

its out, and it's great I'm in love again.

The hard difficulty is messed up. I've made it at most through 2 sectors before dying. There's a new weapon that is a giant ion blast that shuts like half the system down. There's another that does what appears to launch a bunch of debris at you and can hit multiple areas. It's crazy.

Yaay! I've been playing FTL on and off since it came out, so this is most welcome. Time to dust off the Torus and get back in there!

I got one of the new aliens as a crew member on my first run and they have a very interesting interaction with your ship!

Hacking seems insanely powerful too.

Oh good, it IS here, I'll pick this up.

That novel version of 999 came out too and it's pretty good.

I started a game with the new alien ship and I think hacking is pretty awesome. I'm also really interested to see what the C variants on all the old ships are going to be. I'm personally hoping for a variation of the Stealth Cruiser that isn't complete garbage, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's out already? shiiiit

There is a hard difficulty? shiiiiit

Do they unlock all the previous ships, or do i have to reunlock all of that stuff again since i don't have my save anymore?

They jacked up the price of teleporters >:( Good thing I always go Mantis cruiser.

Nice. This should be good. Must get back to FTL actually..

Been playing a bunch over the past couple days. That game is still awesome. In the process of unlocking all the type C ships. I've really enjoyed messing around with the hacking and mind control systems and new weapons like the flak cannon are pretty interesting. If you havent bought FTL, its still only 10 dollars. Buy it, it might just be the most fun you're going to have with any downloadable game...

Also... The music that was added for advanced edition is pretty incredible.

@tennmuerti: It's easier to unlock the ships (or at least the layouts) now.

I liked FTL before, and with the new content I absolutely love it. Also, I just found this guy: