Why is this game so bad?

[OldPayphone]

The tutorial is laughably bad. The ships that the game gives you are incredibly weak or barely even work. The game does not tell you how to play story, campaign, or any other mode. In campaign, the strongest faction comes in and kills you instantly. What even is the point of this game? I open up adventure mode and can't even load a pre-fab. For some dumb reason deleting the silly little platform results in a game over. Did the devs not even test the god awful implementation of the various game modes?

[ChrisK(Germany)]

In order, the tutorial does tell how the base systems work, detection basic boat building, missiles/cram cannons/ advanced cannons, how to set up ai for ship movement. The ships that the player gets are reference crafts to build better own designs, atleast for me. Adventure mode if i remember right you need a heartstone, if you dont have that you die/lose so the building needs to be done with the starter platform there. In a normal neter campaign you shouldnt face the strongest enemies, only the Deepwater Guard at the start and their designs are easy to medium difficulty to defeat for beginners unless you put the campaign on the hardest difficulty

[JonasIV]

more complexity = fun i guess, i dont think the game has ever recieved an update that made it easier to access and play

[ChrisK(Germany)]

The more complex systems are harder especially for beginners, currently trying to find a decent guide for subs

[budisourdog]

FTD is a game of complexity. When you understand it, that complexity means you can make really specific and efficient designs, but when you don't its menu after menu of settings, stats, and remembering what block goes with what.
If you don't know much about the systems you should stick to sandbox mode and learning how to build, first getting something that works and kills things, then refining it until it becomes workable as a campaign unit or a good prefab system you can place wherever.

[fleatoad]

All good points. Yes the tutorials are terrible but there is plenty of good tutorials on Youtube. Campaign is hot garbage. It is only hard when you are starting out. It totally lacks structure, story and any reward. It is a crap skirmish at best.
Adventure is okish, it does get boring quite fast. You need to look up adventure mode. You can't destroy the junk you start with. You need to keep adding to it. Kill stuff for more resources and keep adding more guns.

Design mode is where this game is good. Building, designing and getting it to smash other things. Just like playing with lego but with missles and big guns.

[thunderpanzer]

Originally posted by fleatoad:

Design mode is where this game is good. Building, designing and getting it to smash other things. Just like playing with lego but with missles and big guns.

I'm an old player, been here since like 2015, and I've never once played campaign or adventure mode properly. I did like 2 story missions, but that's it. I don't care what anyone says, I hold that this is primarily a sandbox building game. The only way you'll come to enjoy this game is if you're willing to learn for the sake of building your own cool stuff AND fighting against other AI vehicles in a sandbox-like environment. If that doesn't sound engaging for you, I'm not sure you'll enjoy the process.

[Carolus Magnus]

Up-front presentation to new players and general jank are both very awful, serious issues in this game, and always have been. If you are able to get past these first impressions and hurdles and learn to work the game you'll find a real diamond in the rough however.

It has a very strong set of core design features that you won't find anywhere else (literally). But outside of these core features the game has seen very little development over the decade since its initial early access release. Neglected, one might even say.

Originally posted by thunderpanzer:

I'm an old player, been here since like 2015, and I've never once played campaign or adventure mode properly. I did like 2 story missions, but that's it. I don't care what anyone says, I hold that this is primarily a sandbox building game.

I've been here since 2014 and I don't care what you say either, the campaign is the primary game mode and the one you keep in the back of your head when building craft in the sandbox mode :p

[thunderpanzer]

Originally posted by Carolus Magnus:

I've been here since 2014 and I don't care what you say either, the campaign is the primary game mode and the one you keep in the back of your head when building craft in the sandbox mode :p

Hell yeah! lol
Nah, but seriously though, the campaign updates over the years kinda ruined it. Yeah I agree it should be the main gamemode, but the devs sure aren't treating it as if it were... I know you play on older versions, where the "strategic AI" and new diplomacy stuff doesn't exist. I won't say old campaign was amazing, but it sure felt more like a campaign than nowadays.

[Sedrido]

i miss crystals metal wood and alloys uwu

[Zzo]

The point of Adventure is to constrain the character to a ship or between nearby maintained ships. If you delete the starter ship and die from running out of heartstone, that's not a bug, it's working as intended.
The campaign is more of a strategy/RTS mode but it suffers the problems some other strategy games have.
(The Diplomacy could be better, probably, like a lot of things in the game but IMO it's not a terrible idea. The game just doesn't really have that level/style of strategy baked in through).

I spend most of my time in the designer though. Iterating designs to "theoretically" be fielded in an eventual campaign run.
Though it does suffer from there either being a non-obvious correct way to build, or needing to find some kind of exploit/weird interaction. If anything, it feels like over time more of the things players can build are not effective- instead of optimizing to squeeze a bit more performance it's facing a cliff where anything less just doesn't work at all.
It's not just that the systems are complex, they're full of pitfalls and nothing works the way you'd expect it to in actual battle. (AI doing stupid stuff, weapons barely making a scratch more often than not, etc)

Also it's kind of ugly but that's more subjective and something that can be worked on after performance, if performance is on the todo list or do-able.

Yes, you could just say "get good" but I'm kind of addicted to the game, lol.
I don't want to say to say it needs to be dumbed down or take away options, but it feels like it's designed for countering/challenging power users and I want the choices to feel like they matter.
Failure is to be expected, and it can be a learning experience. But it can also be disappointing if you just want to see your hand crafted vehicles in epic battle yet every battle is practically over before it begins.

[Tuesdak]

Originally posted by JonasIV:

more complexity = fun i guess, i dont think the game has ever recieved an update that made it easier to access and play

The reason I love FTD is the complexity, the game has gotten simpler in a couple of cases such as the 5 materials becoming one and fuel and ammo getting reworked into how they are now from another material that needs storage like materials. Tutorials have been updated and many more were added newer weapons have much simpler tetris than older weapons.

[Sedrido]

Originally posted by Tuesdak:

Originally posted by JonasIV:

more complexity = fun i guess, i dont think the game has ever recieved an update that made it easier to access and play

The reason I love FTD is the complexity, the game has gotten simpler in a couple of cases such as the 5 materials becoming one and fuel and ammo getting reworked into how they are now from another material that needs storage like materials. Tutorials have been updated and many more were added newer weapons have much simpler tetris than older weapons.

speaking of which do you know a good guide/pattern for plasma gun tetris?

[Lorenzo[FR]]

3x3 5x5 7x7 11x11
the only one who need more thinking is the 3x3, you are limited to some height increment and you should no use 3m spin turret if you want to add 4x1m generator on the level 0.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3354867720

[Sedrido]

Originally posted by LorenzoFR:

3x3 5x5 7x7 11x11
the only one who need more thinking is the 3x3, you are limited to some height increment and you should no use 3m spin turret if you want to add 4x1m generator on the level 0.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3354867720

thanks man