FTL: Advanced Edition Announced and Also Coming to iPad

Award-winning Indie developers Subset Games have just announced a content expansion for their surprise 2012 hit, FTL: Faster Than Light.

The ‘Roguelike’ realtime strategy game – which offers micromanagement control of a spaceship crew as they fight against enemy ships, boarding parties, fires and a host of other perils –  met with critical acclaim on its initial release following a successfully Kickstarter campaign.

The announcement, published today on the FTL website, reads as follows:

We’ve been working hard over the summer and are excited to finally officially announce a free expansion, FTL: Advanced Edition! FTL: AE is a huge content addition that includes new weapons, drones, augments, systems, enemies, and more. Here are some details on just a few of the additions visible in the trailer:

• Mind Control System: Temporarily turn enemies into allies. Force a boarder to repair the damage they just did, or have the enemy pilot sabotage their own helm.
• Hacking System: Lockdown and disrupt enemy systems. Unique effects for each system, ranging from forcing a teleporter remove boarders to making the medbay damage instead of heal.
• New Sector and Events: Our writer Tom Jubert has returned along with special guest writer Chris Avellone (of Planescape fame), who managed to find some time for us between his work on Project Eternity and Wasteland 2. They’ve been helping us add a new sector and scatter new events throughout the rest of the game.
• New Weapons and Effects: Many new weapons that take advantage of new mechanics: overcharging to increase the number of volleys, stun effects to freeze crew, and area effect targeting, to name a few.
• And more systems, drones, augments, enemy ships, enemy layouts, and hostile environments. All of which we’ll be sure to talk about more in the coming weeks!

In addition to new content, we’ve continued to polish FTL and add some of the most requested small features. As a few examples: you’ll be able to save your crew positions and send them back to battle-stations, save and quit during combat, and find more items for purchase in stores.

For the purists out there, FTL vanilla will still be available. All of the new content can be disabled from within the hangar before starting a new game.

 FTL on the Go

As if that wasn’t enough to breathe new life into that fantastic little game (it was easily my favourite of 2012, even beating X-COM), it’s going to be on the iPad too.

“We’re also very excited to announce that FTL is coming to the iPad! We’ve redesigned the FTL interface to be optimal for touch devices. It plays beautifully on both the full size iPads (2nd generation or later) and the iPad minis. And of course it will include all of the new additions of the FTL: Advanced Edition expansion.”

The FTL development team hopes to bring the game to other tablets but has stated they will not be exploring smartphones, stating, “Unfortunately, FTL will not be coming to phones. From repeated testing, we have determined that it’s just not possible to achieve the quality of gameplay we want on such limited screen space.”