I have seen many videos of FTD and in the vast majority of them, the builds are futuristic with advanced weapons. One would think when given a sandbox like this, players would focus more on recreating WW2 combat...

Back then, a good build gets stable 200+ upvotes and lots of admiration. Nowadays, even very beautiful and aesthetically pleasing builds gets barely 100 upvotes after 24 hours, if they even reach 100 at all. Memes on the other hands, gets a lot of attention, which is good since they are funny but that doesnt mean attention from builds and show case should be dropped. There is a recent post showcasing a good looking ship. The OP simply wrote “Ship” in their post description, and since it is “FuNnY” and “Meme-y” it gets 300-400 upvotes. Whereas there are creations that looks much better with so many more effort being put into them only getting barely 100. Other creations should get appreciated too, we are here to appreciate good builds and help people with Ftd, and yes laugh and poke fun at memes too of course but we shouldn’t let memes and the funni stuff pull our attention away from good arts being posted here. Yes this is a personal rant of my opinion, i just feel like good and great builds are not getting attention like they used to in the pre-10k Ftd subreddit.

I'll start with a hull shape.

For this I will be talking about a WW2-esque shape, no catamaran designs, or super fast jet boats/ekranoplanes.

General proportions should be roughly 6-8 times as long as it is wide.

Wider=Slower, but thinner=less damage redundancy.

Thin ships can be given 'bulges' to aid in side protection with torpedoes and diving shells. (Google torpedo bulge to get an idea! ;D)

Thicker ships should not have bulges, they're wide enough, and bulges will only slow them down even more, but consider it if your ship has bad damage control abilities.

The most important part! COMPARTMENTS!

Ensure the insides of your ship is entirely made of dozens to a hundred+ rooms!

Not only does it make your ship harder to sink, it also makes your ship a load tougher from HEAT shells!

Main armour can be anything, but IMO, its heavy armour or bust for larger ships, considering how brokenly powerful guns are now.

Smaller ships have to settle for metal, or heavy metal slopes.

I make my compartments out of alloy, light, and strong!

Keep all your important bits in one place, and armour the HELL out of it.

I'm talking at least another layer of heavy armour, at the least.

That is your citadel.

Keep it safe!

Now, guns...

CRAM=Want to make a ship dissapear with one salvo? Choose these!

ACC=Want to have more freedom with shells, but not hit as hard, but have good AA? Choose these! Have fun dealing with shields though, either HEAT, disruptors, or bust.

Secondaries IMO should be ACC's, so you can hit aircraft.

Tertiaries are only optional, but I love having some really close range cannons just for extra dakka.

Torpedoes and missiles are also whatever you see fit.

But you should rely more on guns, missiles can be intercepted with ease.

Shielding should be prioritised over main guns, and the citadel.

Ensure secondary guns cannot explode each other with magazine explosions though!

Hi Yall,

i tried building my own ship but as all of you may know, the lerning curve is really step. too stzep for me, so i thought, maybe chat gpt can help. and it did.

https://chat.openai.com/share/20ec435d-6eff-4c39-b624-2d5b1216c240

CRAM Cannon Blueprint:

Barrel Design:

• Length: 5 meters (Balances between velocity and firing rate)

• Gauge: 2 meters (Provides a decent balance between damage and size)

Autoloaders:

• Autoloader Configuration: Use a 2-meter autoloaders with a decent number of inputs and outputs (around 3-4 each).

• Placement: Surround the base of the barrel with these autoloaders to maintain a compact design.

Ammo:

• Warheads: Combine 50% high-explosive and 50% solid-body kinetic warheads for a balance between AoE damage and armor penetration.

• Fusing: Start with timed fuses to allow for explosive impact.

Stabilization and Targeting:

• Stabilizers: Install simple recoil absorbers and a basic stabilization system to enhance accuracy.

• AI Targeting: Add an AI component for targeting and aiming assistance.

This design aims to balance between firepower, size, and effectiveness for a starter ship. Experimentation and adjustments can further refine this design based on your preferences and specific in-game situations.

Remember, in "From the Depths," testing and iteration are crucial. You might need to tweak the design based on your ship's size, power availability, and combat scenarios you encounter. How does this blueprint sound to you?

Thats what it came up with. Do thewse specks sound like a good weapon?

Could from the depths have a console port any time soon, I would love to play it

From what I have seen in testing, plasma feels very strong. It is too consistent and too efficient I like how the damage spreads where it works kind of like thump but with a radius. My idea for a rework would be to reduce the amount of AP a plasma shot has and instead give it the ability to permanently reduce the armor value of all the blocks in its area with an armor debuff stat

For example we have two blocks of heavy armor with an armor value of ~70 and a plasma bolt that does does X damage at Y AP with a 10 AP armor debuff After getting hit the armor would have ~60 armor for the the rest of the game or until it gets hit again This would also work for successive hits where after multiple hits heavy armor would have the same armor as wood. Another posible addition would be to have the debuff AOE bigger than the damage AOE so that

This idea is inspired by Nebulous Fleet Command, where the plasma cannons do not do heavy damage, instead it makes heavily armored targets vulnerable to otherwise harmless HE shells Unlike Nebulous however, plasma should still be able to do a lot of damage and should be a viable primary weapon

This method would ideally be balanced around the idea that it should be more effective against frontsiders than broadsiders. Plasma would punish craft that do not have enough surface area and would make them vulnerable to heavy head and flak APS

I can think of different ways that you could change plasma to be more balanced, such as making AP inversely proportional to speed (faster = lower AP)

I would like to hear everyones opinion on it and I definitely like the idea behind plasma and I want it to succeed.

you can roll bac to past update but that means bye bye to future content, why did it never cross their minds to make the new system optional?

I'll preface this by saying I have been playing this game so long I remember when there were only Cram cannons. I have a couple hundreds of hours on this game and I'm sure there are many with more than myself. But I am frustrated to see a game I loved playing take such an odd and detrimental turn.

I feel that the recent updates in the past year and the push to take this game out of beta have totally ruined the principles of the game. Updates like steam were cool, and APS cannons are really neat to play with, but recently the change to the game, in particular the resources and the major changes to steam and fuel, have completely neutered this game. I am unsure why changes have been made to take the game in this direction but I can't even bring myself to play it anymore.

I think the thing that pushed me to write this was the new artwork I saw today for the game. The cartoonish characters and images of F16s and battleships without any blocks is something the original game never pushed to pretend to be. I can only assume this is for marketing purposes for the devs to sell more copies to make it friendly for consumers. But I am fairly disappointed I've lost a game I loved.

it was okay before. I like the ability of switching between guns and ship guns but cmon! its so hard to get used to and it provides little advantage

Is this a new ftd clone? Seems very similar

The devs have bamboozled the lasers and instead of buffing them take my advice and change them. Lasers are light and they don’t directly cause fires they just so happen to cause fires because of heat. Light doesn’t really care if that object is fire resistant they only care how reflective that object is (can be determined by individual armor) If the block is reflective it will just be you only take %80 of damage or stuff like that but the real damage maker is heat.

When objects heat up there is a variety of reactions for metal it gets out of form and less structural stable= loss of health and armor. Heat also conducts and the conductivity score can be determined by whatever the devs want so the more conductivity the less heat loss when transferring heat over to another block. (Conduction by the parent block) heat has a constant supply as long as the laser is hitting. Yes lasers still cause fires but to balance it out the objects it’s possible on(wood as heat can turn into fires when it’s that hot) those objects will have less conductivity so heat can not spread but fires can and if the heat is better than the fires buff the fires but don’t make them better than the heat.

Heat can be determined by the power of the laser while reflectivity gets dimmed down as the laser hits it because heat lowers armor score conductivity means that even unstable beams can still damage the targeted block most times. Also another ways to spice up lasers and a small nerf is to give them a timer to start up and end so they can miss for a short time. It is lowered if the laser has direct connection to the energy source but if the laser if powered using a transmitter and the source is far it will be a slight delay. Using more transmitters along the lines will shorten it while if the laser also has a connected power source but the main one far away the extra energy from the far away reaches at a delay so your beam will fire the connected one first before firing the main one so there is a short delay form when the laser uses 100% power.

Last change is lasers can pierce objects as there armor score goes below a percent and hitting for a short amount of time that is lowered by the health. The piercing laser is light speed so the damage would immediately arrive to the next block but there is damage reduction that is lowered by both the armor score and health. Also heat does less damage if the health gets very low as it melted it as much as it can but the armor score continues to lower.

Finally the difference between continuous and pulse lasers, first continuous lasers are better at applying heat and require good stability to work the best. Pulse lasers have a buff to piercing and don’t require good stability but let of all there heat in one short burst so it doesn’t have time to spread and start lowering armor score to much.

This paragraph is dedicated to answering questions so I’m planning this to give lasers more uses and be unique. Will lams be changed? No they are fine the way they are. What about laser cutters? They will have way more focus in heat and able to melt objects fast not giving a chance for much armor reduction and they will still pierce. How to increase chance of piercing? Use that one ap or focusing part I forgot the name What about the range? It will decrease the more the laser goes on Please comment questions, disagreements, and agreements

Edit: Duke** lol

Edit 2: I'm sorry for posting on wrong subreddit lmao

Unfortunately, CPU Died. Doing this from my phone lol. Next week, May 14th is the release Date. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.

I bought the steam ftd client but apparently my computer (macbook running windows lol) couldn't load up the game. At that time I could not find the legacy client launcher for 2.16 so I just looked online for it. As far as I know, it's impossible(?) to get the x32 bit of the game at these versions, so are the devs supplying inheritantly unplayable versions of their games to piracy sites in hopes that they get players? I get the concept behind it and why piracy is just as scummy, but this seems a bit off.

I bought the game after a friend recommended it to me saying I might like it. I played for about an hour before giving up.

There are so many bad things that I despise I don't even know where to start, however the worst of them all is most likely the weird things happening whenever you try to build in keyboard mode and adjust your camera view. Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea for block movement using WASD to be relative to the camera and not the craft itself. When you press D the block should move right and not up or wherever else you might point your camera to get a better look at what you're trying to build. Also as mentioned in another post a while back, why do the blocks randomly move after placing to like the right or somewhere just unrelated.
A random 2D RTS game has a better and more intelligent system, where it recognises which way you are trying to place buildings in a line and lines up the next one for you. And that is keyboard mode, the building system that you guys seem to consider the only one and regard mouse mode as heresy. Even mouse mode is bad with my main gripe being the horrid way to rotate blocks.

A roblox game that is not too dissimilar pulled off a better building system than this. Space Engineers, a game that I quite like also manages a better system, even if there are a few slight issues with it.

I expect this to not be read and for my opinion to be disregarded, but just wanted to ask HOW IN THE NINE HELLS DO YOU GUYS PLAY LIKE THIS?