Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (https://cataclysmdda.org/) is ab open source post-apocalyptic near future scifi roguelike. The best way to play it is with a launcher:
Surprisingly I found the best way to play was on the phone. First spend some time on PC to get familiar with mechanics and interface, then switch to mobile. Some things are horrible, like on-screen keyboard frequently obscuring more than half of screen, and some hard to read text. Some things are easier, like swipe to move and a toolbar with recent key shortcuts.
The thing that makes it worthwhile is that it is so easy to jump in and out of the game. You play few moves while waiting in line, then put it in your pocket. Play for half an hour while watching TV. Your player gets into impossible situation, just put the game away and resume later with fresh ideas. The game is so deep you can get a feeling of living a parallel life. You pause your life to play game, then you pause game to continue your life. Can be a surreal experience. It is so much more complex and satisfying than your average mobile game.
Cataclysm: DDA does a great job at being a semi-realistic 21th century zombie apocalypse. Vehicles, guns, prepping, martial arts, ridiculous amounts of crafting; it has it all. It's best in genre, IMO.
Cogmind was mentioned elsewhere; robots, guns and commercial-level polish.
(Personally, I'm working on a gun-oriented RL in my spare time, but it's going pretty slow ATM.)
Teleglitch is an awesome scifi/survival horror roguelike. The graphics are quite interesting, too. Be warned it's masochistically difficult.
Duskers is another scifi roguelike with a pretty cool premise: you command a bunch of remote drones while they explore randomly-generated derelict ships, possibly infestated with aliens and/or rogue robots. Your drones are generally helpless against hostiles, so the key strategy is to avoid rooms with enemies (or find creative ways to destroy them without a direct confrontation). Very, very cool.
Seconding Teleglitch. I couldn't stand permadeath though - it wasted too much of my time. I made back ups of the temporary save file after every level so I could choose for myself how far to go back when I died.
I personally enjoyed the game an order of magnitude more. Sure, I lost some of the raw fear that grips you when you are deep into a good run and an unexpected squid appears, but I have a wife and kids and very limited time, and beating the game without saves would've taken an eternity.
In general I like playing games without permadeath until I'm really good at them. Then I enable permadeath as an added challenge.
That's perfectly fine. I remember back in the old X-COM days (DOS game!) I reloaded liberally whenever one of my favorite soldiers died. Was it cheating? Maybe. But it was my game and my way to enjoy it!
Yeah, FTL has several different ways to build a killer-ship that can destroy any opposition in seconds, including final boss mothership, so if you survive first few jumps, you're basically guaranteed to win. And that is a bit boring.
In the end I have gravitated towards my personal favorite style of play, building a vicious boarding squad comprised of mantis or those rock dudes, that still required a constant danger of losing some crewmembers, but yielded more scrap in return after victory.
FTL is punishing to me, and people who've won it describe it as hugely chance-based, i.e. that though there are some prevalent strategies, chance is likely to ruin them (and not just in the first few jumps).
For the sake of curiosity, can you describe those surefire ways to win?
Well, It's been a while since I played it last time (Steam says, summer 2016), so I might mess up some details like weapon names.
The core principle is to be able to adapt to whatever the have is sending your way. For every ship/layout variant, there are several paths which you can exploit. Some ships are more heavily skewed towards certain strategies (like if you have a 4-person teleport pad, you DEFINITELY should employ a heavy boarding strategies), but you always have some options.
There 2 main aspects to FTL warfare: you should kill your enemy and you should keep yourself safe.
To kill enemies, there are 3 reliable ways that I've found: lasers, drones and boarding.
With starting cruiser, you already have Burst Laser II that does 3 shots, and it's arguably the best starting gun. What you need to win the game is to have 2-4 shots more than enemy shield level, to drop down their shields and then do damage to systems. The heaviest shield level is 4, so if you are capable to deliver an 8-volley barrage, you can reduce the final boss ship quite fast. If you do NOT have firepower to drop enemy shields, missiles/bombs really help, since they can bypass shields and damage the critical systems. So, for starting ship, all you have to do is to luck your way for some more firepower. You can also augment it with teleporting, if you happen to find a couple of mantis crew members. If you find some good beam weapon, you can use this instead after shields drop, targeting most dangerous systems (I always tried to disable cloaking / mind controlling structures first, but that depends.Sometimes you need to disable their drone control first, if they have some nasty repair drones or attacking drone)
Drones is another surefire way to kill the enemy. Augment a couple of Mark II offensive drones with ion weapons, and most enemy ships will be disabled 5 seconds after combat starts.
Third reliable way to win is boarding/teleporting. Just find a couple of mantis crew members (though rock guys are no slouch either), and drop them to the enemy to kill off their crew, just be ready to bring them back or do some micromanagement running away from enemy if your teleporter is disabled. And of course be sure to destroy their medlab facility, so wounded enemy won't be healed. This way requires the player to be most alert, cause you can lose your crew rather easily, but it's the most rewarding, cause you often get the ship intact, giving you the most scrap bonuses. Curiously, the last boss battle is split into 3 phases, and if you manage to kill all enemy crew on the first approach (rather hard, you need to disable their level3 healing facility), then all other phases are really easy: you just teleport your killer crew and disable their piloting, shields, and other systems really fast. You can also easily disable their isolated crew who run their offensive beam weaponry, and disabling those really helps.
That was about killing enemies. Now, about keeping yourself safe. One, evade chance really helps, so try to have your evade ratio as high as possible, with best possible pilot. Second, try to bring your shields to a lever where expected opposition can't drop it with one volley, this progressively needs a raise towards the later stages. Third, CLOAKING helps, if you have it. Time it for the heaviest volleys/missile barrage, like those launched by the final ship. Four, defensive drones rule! With Mark II defensive drone, you can practically not worry about incoming missiles. Though it's a bit expensive to maintain, unless you have a drone retraction arm (or how it's called, it allows a drone parts reuse, or something).
That's basically it. I never figured out good ways to fight with missiles, but I'm sure there is a strategy that works for them too. Hope that helps. :)
All in all, after figuring it all out, I don't remember losing a game ever if I managed to get past sector 1.
P.S. Bonus: if you ever run into a droneship that can't get past your shields, there is a gamey tactics to level up all your crew with zero risk: just reduce your offensive attacks so you hit their shields, and wait till your pilot, shields, drive and weapon operators level up after evading shots. Then rotate them in their stations, and continue. This can be achieved even on sector 1 easily, and having high level crew REALLY helps. Leveling up combat ability is not that easy, unfortunately, but doable, too.
Thanks, I'll try it. Though it seems to me it's still chance dependent. If you don't get the crew/encounter/weapons you need, you're screwed. And this is what often happens...
Another game by the same devs worth looking at is "Into The Breach". Really great rogue like that's akin to SRPG's but distilled. Often times battles end up being more crisis management and you have decide what you're willing to loose to win the stage.
Into the Breach also gets rid of the real-time aspects of FTL, it's purely turn-based.
Each turn you get to see what the vek (enemy aliens) are about to do, and it's up to you to disrupt their moves so they don't destroy buildings etc.
Each vek move plays an ascending tone one after the other, and even though they're not loud and the notes aren't discordant or anything, it gets really stressful when there are a lot of them.
an important aspect of rogues is the interaction with the world, using a fantasy background allows to take a lot of shortcuts in world building, imagine you join the game the first time and you have to select a role, you kinda know what to expect from an elf range or a dwarf thief, but if the world is original content, say like rogue trader, most of the initial choices are arbitrary and disorienting on the first few games and can impact negatively on the perception of the game system
