FTL: Faster Than Light - a covertly moral rogue-like

FTL is a game that you end up pouring too many hours into without making any actual progress.
It was about 10 hours in that I realized I hadn't even made it to the final boss, let alone seen it.

So began the quest to find out what the big bad ship looked like; I decided to smarten up, and immediately realized there is a surprisingly large learning curve to the game.

Equipped with the knowledge of how much I sucked, I could now take a competent step down the path of not-sucking-quite-as-much. The specific path that I chose was to set fire to the enemy ship's inside and dodge/block as many attacks as I could as they slowly roasted, like a big space Shawarma.

Only when I had successfully encountered, and then quickly been disposed of by, the boss [Rebel Flagship] did I look back and realize i'd made makeshift easy-bake ovens of over 20 space ships, and that although getting humiliated by the boss was pretty fun, it just wasn't right to cook aliens well-done.

I then turned away from using firebombs and lasers and chose to use drones with a healthy serving of ion beams. Which again led down a strange path; targeting the enemy oxygen units and slowly suffocating them.

Looking worse than the rebels do at a moral standpoint, I began to see that there is a strange spectrum of moral choice within FTL. It is for this reason I have decided to keep playing, and categorize the 'good' and 'bad' ways to play the game.

To make this blog post short and concise, I will keep the 'good' and 'bad' lists to a maximum of three, and i've already covered two of the 'bad' ways to play, so here is the last one:


This automatic killing machine will punch a hole straight into your enemies ships and bear-hug the crew into submission. As an added bonus, if your ship is equipped with cameras that can see inside enemy ships, you can watch the onslaught unfold before your very eyes. It's like being the handler for an obedient Terminator, except in space.


Now for some 'good' ways to kill some aliens just trying to do their jobs:

One way to do it is to disable the enemy's shields and time a spray of rapid-fired lasers into their hulls for a quick and hopefully painless kill. If done correctly, it can be performed much like a surgery, except instead of saving lives, you quickly and efficiently take some in a big fiery explosion.

The second one i'll mention is kind of wimpy, but I did manage to meet the final boss with the setup of just a few ion lasers and a crew that could pilot the ship with uncanny dodging abilities. The strategy was to simply disable the enemy weapons and then wait for an opportunity to run away, picking up scrap from other sources along the journey and upgrading the engines for a larger chance to dodge. This way no one had to die. Well except for you, when you meet the boss. At that point it becomes a standoff, because you have become an untouchable monk who's sworn to never harm a fly, but the Rebel Flag Ship must be killed to progress.

The last way, and I think the easiest, is the Glaive. A well timed and slightly lucky shot from this monster has devastating effects. In early game it will tear apart ships in a single blast, as well as mid game and sometimes late game, perhaps with another shot or two. This is the space-fight equivalent of ripping off a bandaid; just say Ouch! and it's over. As far as killing aliens in a humane fashion goes, this is as fast and painless as it gets, not to mention fun.

P.S. I'll get you someday you bastard!