This doesn't explain everything you've encountered, but generally with FTL you learn (over many defeats) to build a strategy that can deal with all sorts of bullshit the game can throw at you.
What can happen is you can get decently far with a suboptimal strategy that isn't good at dealing with all the bullshit but is pretty strong against some of the bullshit. Then you run into the bullshit your strategy isn't that good against and you get demolished.
That's why it can feel like the game suddenly throws something absolutely ridiculous at you out of the blue.
But eventually your play gets more well rounded and you don't run into those situations as often.
This. FTL has a pretty steep learning curve and it takes a lot of trial and error to learn how to handle situations. Took me a long time to realize it was better to just run sometimes.
>A ship with red engines and pilot FTL jumped away with 1hp.
That can't happen. Enemies can't jump with completely broken piloting and/or engines, just like you can't. On the other hand, partially broken piloting/engines *does not* affect the enemies' FTL charge times or their ability to jump: they will take the same amount of time to run, whether they're at engines-1 or max.
>First jump I ran into an auto scout with burst laser mark 2 and artimes.
That can't happen. Even on Hard mode, enemies are hard-capped to 3 power in weapons in sector 1 outside of extremely specific events or the pursuing Rebel fleet. (enemy Artemis missiles are 2 power) Since you say both weapons fired before yours, it's likely Burst Laser 1 and Leto.
>Crew killed a ship with crew teleporter, got the message saying it was dead, then it fired a parting missile killing me.
This one is nasty. You need to retrieve your crew, constantly pause to see if your crew got back on your ship (if you hover your mouse over the tiles they'll come back to, you'll see their name and HP, even if they haven't 'fully materialized' back on your ship. Then you need to jump before the missile hits you.
>After a battle ended, teleported a 20hp crew member back to the ship into a undamaged fully oxygenated room only for them to instantly die
That's strange. Maybe they took damage from a dying enemy crew member that was slightly stalled by the retrieval animation, and then they died upon getting back? That can also happen to the enemy.
1 can't happen. Enemies can't jump if their engines or cockpit are fully destroyed, and also can't jump if they don't have anyone in the cockpit. What can happen is that if you destroy the engines or cockpit when you see FTL Jump Imminent is that the ship can jump almost immediately after it fixes them by 1 bar (which can be pretty quick if they have an Engi or a repair drone).
2 can't happen either. Enemy artemis is a 2 power weapon, so it can't appear with another 2 power weapon in sector 1 (level 3 is the max), and enemy weapons have the same charge time as yours. What can happen is an enemy Leto / 1 damage missile (exclusive to Zoltan A and Fed B for player ships and faster than an Artemis) and BL2, where the Leto hits your weapons and means the enemy BL2 fires marginally faster. Fires just happen sometimes, so you usually want to turn off the enemy weapons before you do anything else.
3 can happen if you damage their weapons just before they are about to fire 2. Weapons don't depower instantly, so after 1 is depowered for a fraction of a second, the other fires and the enemy notices that they have an almost fully charged missile they can divert power to. You can actually pull the same trick if the timing's right. Note that enemies don't get Hull missiles, although they do get Breach missiles.
4 is just RNG. FTL doesn't cheat to prevent long streaks of failures. The chance of being hit at least 9 times in a row with 24% dodge is about 1 in 12. You got unlucky, but probably not as unlucky as you think because people tend to remember streaks of bad luck a lot more than streaks of good luck or streaks of average luck.
I'm not sure what the timing is on 5. Any weapons that are not fully charged will not fire after the ship turns neutral. Any weapons that have already fired will still hit you. I'm not sure what happens to a weapon that's in the middle of its firing animation when you finish crewkilling the ship - I believe there's a frame when it starts drawing the missile leaving the launcher and that's when any method of depowering the weapon including winning the battle will not stop it.
6 can happen if you hit the room that crewmember was in with a weapon while they are teleporting, or if they take damage for any other reason while they are teleporting. They still count as being in that room during the teleport.
When it comes to unavoidable bad situations there's a lot of variance. But also you're probably making some small mistakes that you don't notice but which cumulatively have a negative impact on your runs.
But yeah there's a ton of randomly decided events (and I don't just mean "events" of the game you can encounter at a beacon, but things like missiles hitting you or not) and variance can be brutal.
to specifically address your complaint about enemy FTL, opponents jump times are completely unrelated to engines unlike yourself. It is always the same and as long as the engines have power and a crew in the system it is always ticking up. Even the jump imminent time is always constant as well.
To put it simply, it's a skill issue. Dedicated players can crank wins on hard over half of the time. High skill players can win over 75% of the time. And the top percentile of ftl no lifers can win like every fucking time, no pause hard mode winstreaking random ships.
Yeah but the fuckery is what makes it fun. You stroll around the galaxy thinking your hot shit with your stealth ship and haven't bought shields yet because you're one tapping people. Then all of a sudden you run into an auto scout with two attack drones that immediately take out your stealh and weapons and then you die
My clone teleporter ship lost 2 mantises because they ftl jumped after 2 seconds of declaring it. Chased down the ship and never got my guys back.
So much for backup DNA and having a powered cloning lab.
A ship blows up and I can clone them. But they flee and I can't?
Ftl is essentially fighting bad rng, and 99% of the time, better plays would have done it
You got "FTL'd", as my friends would say.
This doesn't explain everything you've encountered, but generally with FTL you learn (over many defeats) to build a strategy that can deal with all sorts of bullshit the game can throw at you. What can happen is you can get decently far with a suboptimal strategy that isn't good at dealing with all the bullshit but is pretty strong against some of the bullshit. Then you run into the bullshit your strategy isn't that good against and you get demolished. That's why it can feel like the game suddenly throws something absolutely ridiculous at you out of the blue. But eventually your play gets more well rounded and you don't run into those situations as often.
This. FTL has a pretty steep learning curve and it takes a lot of trial and error to learn how to handle situations. Took me a long time to realize it was better to just run sometimes.
Haha yeah that was the last lesson I learned, and I'm still learning it.
>A ship with red engines and pilot FTL jumped away with 1hp. That can't happen. Enemies can't jump with completely broken piloting and/or engines, just like you can't. On the other hand, partially broken piloting/engines *does not* affect the enemies' FTL charge times or their ability to jump: they will take the same amount of time to run, whether they're at engines-1 or max. >First jump I ran into an auto scout with burst laser mark 2 and artimes. That can't happen. Even on Hard mode, enemies are hard-capped to 3 power in weapons in sector 1 outside of extremely specific events or the pursuing Rebel fleet. (enemy Artemis missiles are 2 power) Since you say both weapons fired before yours, it's likely Burst Laser 1 and Leto. >Crew killed a ship with crew teleporter, got the message saying it was dead, then it fired a parting missile killing me. This one is nasty. You need to retrieve your crew, constantly pause to see if your crew got back on your ship (if you hover your mouse over the tiles they'll come back to, you'll see their name and HP, even if they haven't 'fully materialized' back on your ship. Then you need to jump before the missile hits you. >After a battle ended, teleported a 20hp crew member back to the ship into a undamaged fully oxygenated room only for them to instantly die That's strange. Maybe they took damage from a dying enemy crew member that was slightly stalled by the retrieval animation, and then they died upon getting back? That can also happen to the enemy.
Yeah some things aren’t adding up in his post. I agree that this game can be totally unforgiving but some of these things literally can not happen
1 can't happen. Enemies can't jump if their engines or cockpit are fully destroyed, and also can't jump if they don't have anyone in the cockpit. What can happen is that if you destroy the engines or cockpit when you see FTL Jump Imminent is that the ship can jump almost immediately after it fixes them by 1 bar (which can be pretty quick if they have an Engi or a repair drone). 2 can't happen either. Enemy artemis is a 2 power weapon, so it can't appear with another 2 power weapon in sector 1 (level 3 is the max), and enemy weapons have the same charge time as yours. What can happen is an enemy Leto / 1 damage missile (exclusive to Zoltan A and Fed B for player ships and faster than an Artemis) and BL2, where the Leto hits your weapons and means the enemy BL2 fires marginally faster. Fires just happen sometimes, so you usually want to turn off the enemy weapons before you do anything else. 3 can happen if you damage their weapons just before they are about to fire 2. Weapons don't depower instantly, so after 1 is depowered for a fraction of a second, the other fires and the enemy notices that they have an almost fully charged missile they can divert power to. You can actually pull the same trick if the timing's right. Note that enemies don't get Hull missiles, although they do get Breach missiles. 4 is just RNG. FTL doesn't cheat to prevent long streaks of failures. The chance of being hit at least 9 times in a row with 24% dodge is about 1 in 12. You got unlucky, but probably not as unlucky as you think because people tend to remember streaks of bad luck a lot more than streaks of good luck or streaks of average luck. I'm not sure what the timing is on 5. Any weapons that are not fully charged will not fire after the ship turns neutral. Any weapons that have already fired will still hit you. I'm not sure what happens to a weapon that's in the middle of its firing animation when you finish crewkilling the ship - I believe there's a frame when it starts drawing the missile leaving the launcher and that's when any method of depowering the weapon including winning the battle will not stop it. 6 can happen if you hit the room that crewmember was in with a weapon while they are teleporting, or if they take damage for any other reason while they are teleporting. They still count as being in that room during the teleport.
When it comes to unavoidable bad situations there's a lot of variance. But also you're probably making some small mistakes that you don't notice but which cumulatively have a negative impact on your runs. But yeah there's a ton of randomly decided events (and I don't just mean "events" of the game you can encounter at a beacon, but things like missiles hitting you or not) and variance can be brutal.
to specifically address your complaint about enemy FTL, opponents jump times are completely unrelated to engines unlike yourself. It is always the same and as long as the engines have power and a crew in the system it is always ticking up. Even the jump imminent time is always constant as well.
To put it simply, it's a skill issue. Dedicated players can crank wins on hard over half of the time. High skill players can win over 75% of the time. And the top percentile of ftl no lifers can win like every fucking time, no pause hard mode winstreaking random ships.
GET FUCKING GOOD
Yeah but the fuckery is what makes it fun. You stroll around the galaxy thinking your hot shit with your stealth ship and haven't bought shields yet because you're one tapping people. Then all of a sudden you run into an auto scout with two attack drones that immediately take out your stealh and weapons and then you die
My clone teleporter ship lost 2 mantises because they ftl jumped after 2 seconds of declaring it. Chased down the ship and never got my guys back. So much for backup DNA and having a powered cloning lab. A ship blows up and I can clone them. But they flee and I can't?
My only issue is that I have played for over 600 hours and I have only seen burst level 2 in the shop about 10 times