I've managed to assert some control over my compulsion to play this game. I think a big part of what makes it so enjoyable is how difficult it is. The statistics I have accrued are enlightening and a little sad:
Total ships defeated: 1630
Total beacons explored: 4266
Total scrap collected: 73148
Total crew hired: 688
Total games played: 130
Total victories: 5
There are some interesting commonalities among the five games I won. Each of the five victories came with a different ship or ship type, but ALL of them were armed with the Burst Laser Mk II by the time I got to the boss. All of them had a crew teleporter. Four out of five of them had a scrap recovery arm, which allowed me to max out the ship's most important systems before the last sector. Three of them had cloaking. Three of them had long-range scanners. All of the victories were in easy mode. (I still have not made it to Sector 8 on normal.)
At least 650 of the crewmembers I hired died--the VAST majority of them in non-combat random events. The game is ruthless and not very random about which of your crew dies in those events. I think the order goes something like
1) your most experienced crewmember, particularly the one who has leveled up more than once;
2) your Zoltan (reduces power bonus);
3) your Rock or Mantis (reduces combat bonuses);
4) your Engi (reduces repair bonuses);
5) whomever is in your engine room at the time (reduces evasion).
In one game I hired fifteen crewmembers, including the original three, meaning that I had to first acquire and then nearly replace an entire eight-person crew.
It is impossible to escape crew loss in many of the random events, but there are at least three ways to mitigate the losses somewhat:
1) Upgrade your medbay to level 2 as soon as possible. This gives you a blue option to use the medbay to heal your crewmember instead of losing him.
2) Acquire long-range scanners, and avoid beacons that do not have ships in them. This augment is inexpensive and very useful all the way to the end of the game.
3) Have as many aliens on your crew as possible; often one of them provides you with a blue option to avoid the worst consequences.
It seems particularly important to avoid vacant sectors just after the acquisition of a crewmember. This may just be confirmation bias, but I swear that many, many times I have picked up a shitty human crewmember, and then lost a much more important crewmember in the very next jump. It seems like the pilot somehow survives most random events.
Tonight I am going to test this theory by doing the following:
* When I acquire a new human crewmember, I will place him in the engine room.
* Then I will move my Zoltan to the pilot's seat for the next jump, and put my next most important person in that room with him. (It's a terrible idea to have a Zoltan pilot because their power bonus is not added to the ship's supply, so he'll have to run out quick in any combat situation. Having a second person in the room means there is no loss of evasion during movement.)
* I will move everyone else into an empty, non-system room so that none of them are in actual control of a system besides the Zoltan and the new human.
* My hypothesis is that the Zoltan will be skipped as the victim and someone less important will be taken instead, hopefully the common and uninteresting new human.
I like this game so much I'm thinking about making some tutorial videos of it.
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