Boarding allows for bypassing shields entirely, by default, and directly targeting subsystems *and* crew at your leisure. Countering boarding attacks themselves requires anywhere between moderate to heavy investment in fairly specialized upgrades or tech, whereas boarding itself requires little investment beyond a strong enough boarding party, which is more dependent on what ship you start with than any given strategy. It's like being able to fire an alpha strike right at the start of every battle, without any special augmentations. Counters to teleporters are completely nonexistent-nothing short of being cloaked can block it from happening right away, and even fully upgraded cloaking doesn't last long (and requires a moderately lengthy recharge cycle). Obtaining crewmembers yourself requires incredible luck or or a fair amount of scrap.often both. After the first sector or two, nearly every hostile ship you run in to has a teleporter, and their ships will always have enough excess crewmembers to send a sizable boarding party over while still having enough to man and maintain vital systems. Mother of god, this is beyond frustrating. But the enemies you face have no such restrictions or concerns, and this becomes extremely problematic when combined with.īOARDING. Missiles completely bypass shields, deal significant damage to both hull and subsystems, and are only disadvantaged by using a finite ammo source. The problem is that this inevitably leaves me with few options even when I am lucky enough to not have the entire plan shredded to pieces by some unforeseeable random event or result.
So I try to plan ahead for various builds, contingencies, trouble areas, etc, when managing my scrap and spending. There is nowhere near enough scrap to make more than a couple of those factors a priority for entire sections of the game unless you are very lucky (or starting with a far, far better ship than the Kestrel.which is completely moot, as the sole available ship to start with should not be the most difficult ship to beat the game with, even on the easiest difficulty. Scrap is essential for upgrading your ship, repairing your ship, buying necessary supplies, buying new components to your ship, buying new weapons, and buying more crewmembers. Exploring can be just as risky or worthless as beneficial, so there is a massive discrepancy between the risk/cost/reward dynamics. Running low on fuel-even if you did everything you could to avoid that situation-makes getting more fuel almost entirely a matter of luck. It costs one type of your precious resources in order to progress at all, let alone explore. You're under a very strict time limit the whole game. Resources are also vital in both the short-term and long-term of every playthrough. If the experience I carry over from failed playthroughs counts for little in the face of extreme randomness and high difficulty, and there is no way to give myself a better chance in my next run through unlockable upgrades/options/progress, I feel like I'm wasting time and banging my head against a wall.Ģ) Resources are, for the most part, stupidly scarce and also entirely random.
The one exception is ships you unlock, but the problem is that they aren't customizable or upgradable whatsoever, and unless you play the game extensively (and/or know exactly what to do and what to look for), you hardly get anything until you've already beaten the boss. Worse, you carry no kind of progress or advantages over to subsequent playthroughs, other than experience-which is not nearly as valuable as it should be, as so much of the game is random and luck-based. But when you combine this with an absurdly difficult and luck-based game, it becomes crippling. I get the idea of permadeath, and I appreciate the elements it adds into the game.
SPACECHEM BOSS HINTS FREE
Let me run through the list of reasons, and please feel free to offer constructive feedback on them:ġ) No save feature or carried-over progression. So unless I'm some kind of absurd outlier here, this game-for all of its strengths and feats-receives an F in game balance. DO NOT TL DR, AS IT CONTRIBUTES NOTHING EXCEPT SPAM.īut after well over a dozen hours of play, hours of watching much better players play, and reading through tip threads, I'm still utterly incapable of beating the game's boss, even on Easy.
SPACECHEM BOSS HINTS HOW TO
So.maybe I'm somehow missing something (or several somethings) that drastically change how difficult this game is to succeed in, and how to not get screwed over by the RNG that randomly generates events, maps, and resources.