Hi guys, I’m very new to the game but now that I’ve been putting a few more hours into it I was toying with a few ideas about how terror works. At first I was a bit cold to the fact that terror seemed to keep adding up with very minimal possibilities of reducing it, but now I’m starting to enjoy the idea of it not being just a number to keep in check, but rather an insurmountable foe that one way or another, sooner or later, will claim you and your crew.
The thing is, as it is now I feel it slows up the game a bit too much (because of all the careful navigation you have to do around lights, very cool and immersive but it’s basically your only real option) and cuts down too heavily on exploration. So I was thinking of a couple of solutions:
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Make lights actually reduce terror. This is my least favorite option because it would require a lot of work to make sure it doesn’t become exploitable (for example: you could reduce terror if you stay inside a ring of light from a buoy, but only up to 3 points maximum or so. Also, if we assume the zee to become a bit more populated with enemies later on, and we assume random-generated maps, it would make it risky for the player to just sit in the zee to reduce terror while pirate ships or monsters pursue him.
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Make winning fights reduce terror. This is the option I think would be better. It’s pretty straightforward and I think it makes a lot of sense that winning a fight improves morale of the crew and decreases anxiety. It would still need a little attention to avoid exploits, for example each enemy should be assigned a fixed value of how much terror they reduce (to prevent farming small crabs or stuff like that), and I think better yet would be to make sure that there is some kind of diminishing return. For example, if you fight the same kind of enemy more than once in a row, only the first time it will reduce terror; or only a victory every X will reduce terror; or again, you can only reduce terror every once in a "event x" (like only once per the ‘something awaits you’ event).
The thing about this system I like is that, provided the math works (again, no exploits), it make the player have to make difficult decisions: I don’t really want to engage that ship, but my terror is rising and a win would really help me… or the other way around, I really want to attack that little enemy to get an easy terror boost, but I can’t afford to take damage and repair right now…
This obviously boiling down to the fact that the premise is the same as before: terror is not just a stat you gain and lose, it’s something that you can fight for a while… but eventually will get you. So the numbers on the terror loss would have to be small, but not as small as to be insignificant (example again: you lose 5 terror when you win a fight, but only once every 3 wins, and only once per time of enemy. The game generates a timed event to reset the count).
There could also be dimishing effect with the passing of time, this too would make sense: the more your crew becomes experienced and battle-hardened, the more they will expect to win fights and get less enthusiasm for the win (so say after a tot amount of passing of time you start to get the terror loss every once per 5 wins, every once per 7, per 10 etc).
What do you think?