History YMMV / FTLFasterThanLight

* StopHavingFunGuy: To some players, playing on Easy is a felony.

* PlayerPunch: There is a chance to find a rebel ship refitted for transporting goods to civilians in need during the war. [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential and you can steal the supplies from them. Or destroy the ship.]] [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs or both.]] [[http://ftl.wikia.com/wiki/Rebels_Supplying_Civilians The game can and will call you out on it.]]

** The Glaive Beam can do massive damage on enemy ships with tightly-arranged rooms, but it takes a whole ''25 seconds'' to charge, or about 22 with a crewmember with no improvements to weapon skill. And like the Burst mkIII, it uses four bars of power; an unlucky hit can shut that beam off very easily. This is part of why getting out of the first few sectors with the Stealth B ship is quite hard (along with that ship having no shields to start with), as it is the ''only'' starting weapon of that ship and only has enough power in weapons to power the beam (no extra power slots to act as a buffer).

* ScrappyWeapon: The Burst Laser Mark III fires [[MoreDakka an impressive five-shot barrage]], but players generally avoid it due to its high power requirements and long charge time, and because the same amount of firepower can be easily achieved by firing several cheaper lasers at once.

* PolishedPort: The iPad port runs smooth as silk and has a number of interface tweaks to accomodate the use of a touchscreen, allowing you to enjoy the same game on a device about the size of a sheet of paper.

** [[spoiler:The Crystal race]], though their Game Breaker properties are justified by the sheer difficulty involved in [[LuckBasedMission unlocking them]]. Their lockdown ability prevents entry and escape from a room, which can be used to contain enemy boarders, trap enemy crew inside a room, or prevent them from accessing a room while you hammer away at its occupants and systems. Extra hp allows them to defeat most opponents (excepting Mantis, Rockmen, and Boarding Drones) without suffering any drawbacks save for a slightly reduced movement speed.
*** Their ships are also quite powerful as well. The Type B rivals the Mantis as the premiere boarding ship of the game, starting with three crew members, as well as a four-slot teleporter located right next to a medbay. The Type A is no slouch either, possessing weapons that bypass one layer of shielding, don't require ammo, and have a small chance to cause hull breaches.

* CrutchCharacter: Many ships' early loadouts can become this once enemies become too strong for them to deal damage. On a broader level, the Engi A is often one of the first ships players unlock, simply by reaching Sector 5 with any Kestrel ship. Its typical gameplay -- set your Ion Blast to auto-fire, and allow your combat drone to do all the work of attacking -- requires little active input from the player. This playstyle will backfire when using later ships that require much more micromanagement.

* DemonicSpiders:
** Just about every ship in the game has a certain strategy it's just not cut out to handle, at least until you somehow acquire the hardware and/or crew to make up for starting deficiencies. For instance:
** Boarding parties, especially Mantis boarders or large 4-man groups, for ships that start off with small and/or combat-incompetent crews, which include:
*** The first two Engi cruisers (Type A has two Engis and a Human, Type B has just a single Engi), seeing as Engis do half-damage in combat. The Type A, however, has a Medbot Dispersal augment to help its crew in combat, and the Type B can be run almost completely depressurized (outside of the cockpit) once you get blast doors, and until you get extra crew, as its "crew" of internal drones don't need oxygen. Type C at least has a Lanius and a clone bay.
*** All three Zoltan cruisers. Due to their reliance on Zoltan crewmembers for power, relocating them to different rooms to fight off boarders may cause ship systems to lose power, resulting in weapons getting canceled, cloaks getting deactivated, shields dropping, etc. Their Zoltan Shield augment can prevent enemy ships from using their teleporters or launching boarding drones while it's active, but the ''Advanced Edition'' introduces a special augment that allows enemies (and the player) to get past it, and several random events involve its use. On the other hand, it also gave Zoltans the special ability to explode and damage enemies when they die, giving at least a little hope to the Zoltan Type C with its clone bay.
*** The first two Slug cruisers, but especially the Type B. It's not quite as bad for the Type A since Slugs can telepathically track the enemy boarders, and the Type A helps its two-Slug starting crew by being pre-equipped with blast doors. The Type B though has no starting medbay, and it depends on its Healing Bursts to keep its three-Slug crew alive, so if weapon systems go offline or you run out of missiles, you have no way to heal your crew.
*** All three Stealth cruisers. With no shields, evasion and cloaking are their main form of defense, and they need their systems to be manned more than any other ship. The Type A, though, has a crew of three Humans, while the Type B has two Humans and a Zoltan with only a two-square medbay. Boarding parties in your cockpit are bad for any ship, but are worse for the Stealth ships because you lose evasion and can take hits even when cloaked. The Type C gets a shield overcharger that creates a Zoltan shield, but it's only 1 bar of shield, it takes loads of scrap to upgrade the power system, and then to buy a shield.
*** To a lesser extent, boarders are also problems early on for the Kestrel A, the starting ship, which also has 3 Humans, and the Federation Cruiser B, which has a Human, a Slug, and a Zoltan.
*** The Rock B has no external doors, and the crew of four Rockmen are sturdy but very, very slow. If enemies board you, you cannot simply vent the room they're in, you have to chase them around with your crew. And your crew is so slow that any boarders will have probably destroyed a system or two by the time you finally catch up to them.
** Attack drones and beam drones for any ship that doesn't have a proper shield system, seeing as the drones have higher damage-per-second than regular weapons at the cost of burst damage capability, and are hence particularly lethal against unshielded targets. This includes all 3 of the Stealth cruisers, and to a lesser extent the Type B Zoltan cruiser. The Stealth ships cannot conveniently cloak away from the almost continuous drone fire like they can with ship-to-ship weaponry volleys (not that the Stealth C can do that anyway), so hull damage becomes inevitable. With the Stealth A (Nesasio), you can still go under cloak early and try to take out the enemy drone control with your first volley. But with the Stealth B, you have to wait and suffer, and if your weapon systems are hit, your power-hungry Glaive Beam goes offline and your only option is to try and run. The Stealth C has it that much worse, as its only protection from drones is the fairly unreliable Anti-Drone and its slow-charging Shield Overcharger, as it lacks a cloak in spite of being a Stealth cruiser. The Zoltan B has temporary protection with its Zoltan shield but drones tend to tear through it fairly rapidly, but like a cloak, this still buys you some time to charge your weapons and try to disable the enemy's drone control. The Zoltan B also has it easier since it can acquire regular shields earlier than the Stealth cruisers can.
** Zoltan Shielded enemy ships for any ship whose direct-damage offensive capability is either completely dependent on missiles (Rock A, Slug B), or just flat out non-existent (Mantis B, Unidentified B). A Zoltan shield takes five damage to knock offline, which is the equivalent of three missiles. That's basically one whole dead ship in the early sectors. And ships that start with no weapons at all have no option except to run, since the shield blocks out teleporters and boarding drones (''Advanced Edition'' adds an augment that can bypass it, but getting that is hit or miss). Furthermore, the Zoltan Shield takes at least one round of combat to knock out, three if you're unlucky. For the Stealth B, which depends on OneHitKill tactics with its Glaive Beam to prevent (most) damage in the early game, that extra round is an eternity of vulnerability which can easily cost you the game.
** Ion Storms, a randomly occurring environmental effect in Nebula nodes. Running into one cuts your reactor output in half and depowers systems at random accordingly. This works on your enemy, too, but they can generally manage greater reactor output than you can. When you have to juggle power between your weapons, shields, engines, and life support, you can expect the enemy waiting for you to put some big holes in your hull before you make it out of there. Fortunately, having the Long-Range Scanners augment you can see the storms from afar and avoid them accordingly.
** Boarding drones. They're essentially Rockmen boarders but with the attack power of a Mantis and an immunity to suffocation. They pass through shields and cause a hull breach in the section they impact, making it ''that much harder'' to kill them if they're attacking a system. Oh, and if you manage to kill one, the enemy will just send another, which will put ''another'' breach into your ship, unless you take out their drone control first or they run out of drone parts. If you get hit by one, hope it doesn't land anywhere vital and destroy the enemy's drone control before it causes too much damage. While they can be intercepted by defense drones, they're small, fly fast, and can be launched faster than missiles, and have a better chance of getting by as a result. Zoltan Shields and cloaking can buy you some time to try and take out enemy drone control, if you have them, and Slug ships can automatically repair breaches, making them slightly less hazardous. ''Advanced Edition'' implemented a cooldown on all destroyed drones that nerfs this significantly; now drones take about as long to recharge as an average missile, meaning that while it will take far longer to force the enemy to run out of them, neither can they spam them at speeds greater than you can counter. Sadly, the hacking system did not get this treatment.
** Most of the time, Rebel AI-controlled Auto-Scouts and Auto-Assaults are GoddamnedBats. However, ships that lack direct damage weapons will find themselves largely incapable of doing anything about these ships. The Mantis B can defeat Auto-Scouts by launching a Boarding Drone at them and letting it destroy and re-destroy systems while the Auto-Scout auto-repairs them, but this doesn't work against Auto-Assaults because they're compartmentalized and hence prevent the Boarding Drone from moving around within them, requiring a very tedious and specialized method to destroy them without weapons. The Unidentified Cruiser Type B can't destroy them either until you find some regular weapons. And, to provide a challenge for any and all ships, sometimes in the late-game you can run into really dangerous Auto-Assaults, packing defense or anti-ship drones, cloaks, full batteries of four weapons, stupidly high evasion, and (rarely) up to ''five'' layers of shields. And since they're automated and depressurized, they can't be damaged by fire and have no crew that can be eliminated, so you're in for a long hard slog to try and bring them down.
** If you're in a Slug nebula, then expect to run into many events where a Slug ship hacks your oxygen/medbay/doors/engines/various other systems, and then exploits your newfound weakness. If you haven't upgraded your systems enough to get a blue option, then you're in for a world of pain. Particularly nightmarish are the ones where they hit your oxygen, since that essentially puts you on a strict timer to either kill the ship or bail.
** Any enemy ship with a medbay is this for the Mantis B, a boarding-oriented ship that doesn't start with any weapons. Enemy crew will simply retreat to the medbay at low health, and fighting in the medbay is pointless since the enemy can simply heal faster than you can damage them. Unless you've managed to pick weapons capable of hitting the medbay, your only hope is to get the crew to retreat to the medbay then cause damage to the shields (easier said than done, even with a Boarding Drone to [[WeNeedADistraction create a distraction]]), since the AI prioritizes the shields over anything else, allowing you to take out the medbay. The Crystal B ship is also boarding-oriented with no weapons, but at least Crystals can beam into the medbay then lock it down until it's offline.
** The ships in the Crystal Home Sector. They tend to show up with full arsenals of crystal weapons, which ignore one layer of shielding. Even worse, Crystals are very tough to kill, having boosted health and being resistant to suffocation. They can easily put a serious crimp in your plans to complete ThatOneSidequest.
** Enemies with hacking capability can be this, depending on your loadout and where it hits (randomly assigned thanks to ArtificialStupidity). The worst is when it hits the weapons system of a player that relies on long-charge-time weapons (which can shut down your entire offense and make the encounter {{Unwinnable}} if you have no other way of destroying or disrupting the enemy hacking system), a non-upgraded O2 system (which drains oxygen far faster than a mere hull breach and can easily mean death for your entire crew if you can't destroy or disrupt the enemy hacking system or jump away fast enough), or a medbay when the enemy also has boarders attacking you.

** The Crystal race is supposed to be a WalkingSpoiler, but the [[LuckBasedMission heavily luck-based requirements]] to unlock their sector and ship are [[ThatOneSidequest so notorious]] that it's anything but a secret now.

** Ancestry, which requires you to go through ThatOneSidequest in the Rock Cruiser. That said the Rock Cruiser has blue options that make it slightly easier to complete. If you intend to do it in the Type A, get non-missile weapons as soon as possible (see DemonicSpiders above). If you intend to use the Type B, you need to complete two other hard (but still much-easier-than-this-one) achievements in the Type A to gain access to it - which involved destroying an enemy ship which has a defense drone using ''only missiles'' (alright, you start with only missiles, but defense drones are... designed to block them, and ships that field them often have the crew or repair drones to keep their drone control online), and killing an enemy crew in a room which is on fire (which is hard because you need to set a room on fire, then board it and kill an enemy crew member there - and the enemy crew members are programmed to flee from burning rooms if they can).

* AssPull: One of the issues with the supershield / Zoltan Shield in ''FTL'' vanilla is that boarding parties can teleport into your ship as part of random events, and the game couldn't think of a good explanation for how [[LampshadeHanging the boarders managed to get past your Zoltan Energy Shield]]. ''Advanced Edition'' finally gives an explaination: the Zoltan Shield Bypass. Sure, boarders can still slip past your supershields, but at least there's an explicit in-universe justification for it now. You can get said augmentation for your own use as well, so it's no longer a case of computer cheating.

* AssPull: One of the issues with the supershield / Zoltan Shield in ''FTL'' vanilla is that boarding parties can teleport into your ship as part of random events, and the game couldn't think of a good explanation for how [[LapshadeHanging the boarders managed to get past your Zoltan Energy Shield]]. ''Advanced Edition'' finally gives an explaination: the Zoltan Shield Bypass. Sure, boarders can still slip past your supershields, but at least there's an explicit in-universe justification for it now. You can get said augmentation for your own use as well, so it's no longer a case of computer cheating.

** The fact that many elements of the game are random does not sit well with some players. Case in point: In one run, you may end up finding four Burst Laser II's, allowing you to cheese the FinalBoss with 12-shot [[BeamSpam laser spam]]. In another run, you may be stuck with default weaponry or at the least ineffective weapons at stores that prevent you from damaging the flagship at all unless you also invest in a teleporter or hacking system.
** The occasions where you have to choose text options with no idea if they'll wind up helping you or hurting you. To give one example, you might have to choose whether to let a seemingly insane person on board. You will either lose a crewmate or gain the one you let on board as a crewmate, with nothing indicating which outcome will play out. Thankfully, there are occasionally options highlighted in blue which help you no matter what.

* AuthorsSavingThrow: One of the issues with having a supershield / Zoltan Shield in ''FTL'' vanilla is that boarding parties can teleport into your ship as part of random events, and not only [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard are supershields completely ineffective against them]], but the writers made a nominal effort to make this make sense by [[LampshadeHanging lampshading]] this issue. ''Advanced Edition'' recitifies this by adding the Zoltan Shield Bypass augment, which lets your teleporder bypass supershields too, as well as explaining that those random-event boarders have the augment; sure, boarders can still slip past your supershields, but at least there's an explicit in-universe justification for it now.

** The game couldn't think of a good explanation for how [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard the boarders managed to get past your Zoltan Energy Shield]]! ''Advanced Edition'' finally gives an explaination: they use Zoltan Shield Bypass. You can get said augmentation for your own use as well, so it's no longer a case of computer cheating.

* AuthorsSavingThrow: One of the issues with having a supershield / Zoltan Shield in ''FTL'' vanilla is that boarding parties can teleport into your ship as part of random events, and not only [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard are supershields completely ineffective against them]] but the writers made a nominal effort to make this make sense by [[LampshadeHanging lampshading]] this issue. ''Advanced Edition'' recitifies this by adding the Zoltan Shield Bypass augment, which lets your teleporder bypass supershields too, as well as explaining that those random-event boarders have the augment; sure, boarders can still slip past your supershields but at least there's an explicit in-universe justification for it now.

* DemonicSpiders: Just about every ship in the game has a certain strategy it's just not cut out to handle, at least until you somehow acquire the hardware and/or crew to make up for starting deficiencies. For instance:

* {{Fanon}}: Nobody but the devs depict the FTL engine as a jump drive (essentially, the ship teleports), but either a warp drive or a hyperdrive, so as to get some downtime that doesn't involve sitting around nav beacon 180,000,000 doing nothing.

* GoodBadBugs: The new features of ''Advanced Edition'' have some possibly unintended effects on achievements, making them far easier to unlock.

* TearJerker: Winning the game by destroying the [[FinalBoss Rebel Flagship]] but [[MutualKill getting your ship destroyed or crew wiped]] in the process. [[HeroicSacrifice Your crew is hailed as Federation heroes, but they don't live to witness galactic freedom.]]

* MostAnnoyingSound:
** The sound of the enemy cloak activating, primarily because the cloak forces you to wait 5, 10, or 15 seconds to strike again.
** The sound of a missile hitting your ship.
** The "whoosh" your shots make when they miss the enemy's ship.

* SugarWiki/CrowningMomentOfAwesome: Any time you and your crew help out an NPC in desperate need and save the day in triumphant fashion. After a bad run where you had to refuse help to almost everyone you met, it feels liberating to blast the pirate scum and save the innocent refugees the next time around.

* CrowningMomentOfAwesome: Any time you and your crew help out an NPC in desperate need and save the day in triumphant fashion. After a bad run where you had to refuse help to almost everyone you met, it feels liberating to blast the pirate scum and save the innocent refugees the next time around.

* AuthorsSavingThrow: One of the issues with having a supershield / Zoltan Shield in ''FTL'' vanilla is that boarding parties can teleport into your ship as part of random events, and not only [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard are supershields completely ineffective against them]] but the writers made a nominal effort to make this make sense by [[LampshadeHanging lampshading]] this issue. ''Advanced Edition'' recitifies this by adding the Zoltan Shield Bypass augment, which lets your teleporder bypass supershields too, as well as explaining that those random-event boarders have the augment; sure, boarders can still slip past your supershields but at least there's an in-universe justification for it now.

* AuthorsSavingThrow: One of the issues with having a supershield / Zoltan Shield in ''FTL'' vanilla is that boarding parties can teleport into your ship as part of random events, and not only [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard are supershields completely ineffective against them]] but the writers made a nominal effort to make this make sense by [[LampshadeHanging lampshading]] this issue. ''Advanced Edition'' recitifies this by adding the Zoltan Shield Bypass augment, which lets your teleporder bypass supershields too, as well as explaining that those random-event boarders have the augment.

* AuthorsSavingThrow: One of the issues with having a supershield / Zoltan Shield in ''FTL'' vanilla is that boarding parties can teleport into your ship as part of random events, and not only [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard are supershields completely ineffective against them]] but the writers made a nominal effort to make this make sense by [[LampshadeHanging lampshading]] this issue. ''Advanced Edition'' recitifies this by adding the Zoltan Shield Bypass augment, which lets your teleporder bypass supershields, as well as explaining that those random-event boarders have the augment.

* AuthorsSavingThrow: One of the issues with having a supershield / Zoltan Shield in ''FTL'' vanilla is that boarding parties can teleport into your ship as part of random events, and not only are supershields completely ineffective against them but the game provides a flimsy LampshadeHanging message about it. ''Advanced Edition'' recitifies this by adding the Zoltan Shield Bypass augment, which lets your teleporder bypass supershields, as well as explaining that those random-event boarders have the augment.

** Mk. II Attack Drones. While they cost the normally excessive 4 power to use, they fire much faster than a Mk. I, take only half the space to use, and, if you can manage to get your hands on two of them, [[http://imgur.com/a/RMbKL Can basically defeat the final boss on their own]]

* TearJerker: Winning the game by destroying the [[FinalBoss Rebel Flagship]] but [[MutualKill getting your ship destroyed or crew wiped]] in the process. [[HeroicSacrifice Your crew is hailed as Federation heroes, but they don't get to live to witness galactic freedom.]]

* TearJerker: Winning the game but [[DoubleKnockout getting your ship destroyed or crew wiped]] in the process. [[HeroicSacrifice Your crew is hailed as Federation heroes, but they don't get to live to witness galactic freedom.]]