Void War

I’m working on a project that’s inspired by FTL, so I decided I should do some market research on the one other FTL-like out there: Void War. After playing it for a week, I think it is better than FTL in some small design aspects but as a whole package the balance makes the game very tedious. There are also a number of other areas where the game is a clear downgrade from FTL: limited build options, boring writing, and muddy aesthetic.

Firstly, the design decisions in this game create an extreme reliance on micro. For example, this game’s version of drone crew are husks, and they changed it so it takes energy to produce but you don’t need energy to keep them running. So it’s kind of like FTL cloning except putting in more energy means better unit stats. So the game encourages you to do annoying micro like powering the husk room on the frame it finishes making one and then lowering power the frame after. Another example is new environmental hazards. They introduced a few new ones on top of FTL’s fire, oxygen and breaches, and unlike FTL there are no shipwide upgrades like the fire suppression module to help deal with them (at least I’ve seen in my 10 hours of playtime). Fire don’t drain O2 and put themselves out either. So you have to constantly micro crew around to deal with them in the late game where enemies utilize those environmental attacks.

Speaking of crew, they are way too squishy for a game where the enemy boards your ship like crazy (because boarding crew can be infinitely summonable a number of different ways now). They can take a few hits before you have to micro them around the ship to keep them alive. Also did I mention healing is a lot more limited now? Yet crew are even more expensive to buy than FTL so they aren’t really disposable either. Top tier crew with lots of hp are over 100 scraps, if you even manage to get to a shop that has crews because it’s a lot harder to get to them when you have a Slay the Spire style move right only map. And that’s not counting the 20-80 scraps in equipment you might lose when a crew dies even if they die on your own ship. They got rid of the old xp system only to replace it with a much more complicated equipment system that makes it impossible to tell what a unit does at a glance (bonus dps in large rooms, enemy dps reduction, dps caps, bonus dps based on poison…). FTL Multiverse’s approach of gene modification is a much cleaner approach to crew customization without readability issues.

The builds you can make are also less varied because gunship only builds are heavily nerfed. This is because there is a shield booster system for temporary infinite shields and the ship guns are a lot closer to vanilla FTL where most weapons are basic lasers or basic beam, and no cool stuff like crystal lockdown weapons in FTL Multiverse. Weapons also only deal 1 damage to crew except for the rare weapon with bonus damage against crew. There are some artillery options that can be equipped on any ship but they are like faster normal weapons so not super interesting. There are also no endgame upgrades like FTL Multiverse’s Aether upgrade system so I had runs where I had more scrap than I could spend yet I still had to slog through the bosses. Furthermore there is no backup battery subsystem so you’re a lot more power starved if you want to keep up full shields and engine. This means you have to invest in crew in all builds for late game stuff.

The biggest miss of the game though, is not having storylines. Even the overarching “we need to get from the left side of the map to the right side” is more vague than it should be. I don’t expect anything like FTL Multiverse with its 100 unique characters, but it could have at least done something like a story quest for each of the commander we play as or for the map region. There’s no reputation system either so you can choose to murder everyone without consequence and there’s no procedural storytelling element. Some people didn’t like the FTL xp system but I thought it was a good procedural storytelling device, letting characters grow throughout the run.

The aesthetic is distinct from FTL, but it makes the game just harder to read at a glance. FTL Multiverse weapons are clearly color coded and you can guess its function without having to dig through the stats screen, whereas here everything is just brown and white. The crew, in addition to having unreadable hidden stats, are also hard to tell apart when their colors are all brown and red. I can tell when to be worried in FTL from seeing the green glow of the explosive Zoltan or the bony white of the O2 sucking Lanius.

Maybe I’m not the intended audience. I’m not a fan of the Warhammer universe, I just like FTL and RTS games. So maybe people who like Warhammer likes intensive micro and poor readability. But I guess it means there is space in the market for the game I want to make.