For some reason, I cannot repair my ship at the shop, even though I have plenty of scrap.
While my ship is not invulnerable, I feel like I am exploiting the game. I am getting lots of scrap now, and went to a shop and hired a number of crew members. My sole boarder has 125 kills now.
I got boarded, and I think I tried to counter-board, but my crew might have been forcefully returned, or I miss-clicked, or something. One of my crew died, my engine crew member, but at this point I have many crew members, 7 after his death. I found a few combats ago a double-sword fire crew member, and am trying to train him up. I only had a bit of gear for him, but I found two items that gave him regeneration, and one of them seem to scale with my medbay, if I understand it correctly. And I have upgraded my medbay a lot, in order to heal more quickly after combat. So despite having very little combat experience, and mostly poor items and stats, he has actually survived boarding. Two boarding members now.
I think I will stop now. The gameplay is rather monotone now, and I think it is because I am abusing the system. Also, crew boarding seems to be able to kill any ship. In FTL, this was not generally the case for multiple (many as it turns out, now that I have listed a lot of them) different reasons:
- Drone ships have no crew and have no oxygen, meaning only one rare type of crew member can survive there indefinitely.
- The enemy flag ship will continue fighting, even when all its crew has died.
- If the enemy has a highly upgraded health system, killing off enemy crew can be very difficult.
- Random events can not always be handled by crew.
- There can be defensive drones that can fight.
- In FTL, the combat system allowed a maximum number of crew in a room, rooms are at most 4 tiles I believe, and not all crew went to a specific battle. Also, the weapon system continued to work even when there is no crew in it, and at most one crew member could contribute to the weapon system's effectiveness, at a maximum of +20% I think. Crew battle is also much slower. This means that even if you had 4 full-experience mantis, the enemy ship could still fire its weapons and do damage to your ship, depending on if you had cloaking, defensive drones (shooting down enemy missiles, projectiles, boarding drones, maybe hacking system).
- Cloaking on an enemy ship prevents teleporting to the ship, maybe also teleporting back and rescuing crew.
- Supershields on an enemy ship (always present on enemy Zoltan ships) meant that you had to shoot down the Zoltan shield first. And, if the enemy has a shield drone (or the enemy flag ship), regeneration of the supershield might mean that you cannot board or rescue your crew, making boarding dangerous. This means that, for Zoltan ships, you really need to be able to hit the enemy ship with attack drones or weapons (or have the special ship augment (FTL lets each ship have 3 augments) that enables you to teleport through supershields) to defeat Zoltan ships and other ships with supershields.
- There is no crew equipment.
- There are system effects, such as asteroid field, pulsar system, and too-close-to-sun. The pulsar is especially dangerous for boarding, since it might knock out your shields and teleporter, meaning you take a lot of damage and might be unable to board or teleport back crew.
- Enemy mind control can making boarding more dangerous.
- Enemy hacking can make boarding more dangerous, such as draining oxygen or making health systems cause damage instead of healing, or make clone systems not work.
- There is a cool-down on the teleporter, meaning that rescuing crew is not instantly done, and deployment is not done instantly. Also, you have to target the specific room you teleport back from.
- Enemy ships have door systems that can hinder movement.
- FTL has visibility where you cannot always see all of an enemy's ship (or your own ship in a nebula!). For instance if your sensor system is damaged or not upgraded, or you are in a nebula, you may not see all that is going on the enemy ship. And enemy cloaking can hinder visibility.
I think your game is really fun and complex already, and I am impressed by all that you have implemented so far. I think there are a number of game design and game balance challenges, and after giving that large list before, I am beginning to be impressed by FTL's game design. It got a bit repetitive during the last part, in part due to me abusing the systems, and in part due to boarding possibly not being balanced and varied. I have not played through a lot of the game, simply because I barely used the weapons, so this does not try out a lot of what the game has to