Hello!
Thank you for the beautiful game. I have a suggestion, to make the game more viable. You should manage a way to avoid the exploiting of the Something Awaits You in port, waiting a minute next to a port and triggering it multiple times to acquire potentially infinite goods (some examples, and not the most dangerous ones: infinite supplies at the Mangrove College, infinite terror reduction at Visage, both at Pigmote’s, terror-fuel-supplies at Frostfound).
Some ideas could be that the SAY cannot be triggered in the same port twice (this will reduce, but not eliminate the problem);
or that the SAY needs a minimum requirement of distance voyaged -not just by circling around the port, but by absolute distance from the point in question (same here, less exploitation but still not the problem eliminated in toto);
setting a fixed number of other ports to visit before making the SAY work again in the previous ports (this would eliminate the problem but maybe render the game counter-intuitive);
a combination of the previos ideas.
Hope this may help you. At the present moment im roleplaying this by not triggering the SAY in the same port twice, but its kind of making the game less feeled, spoiling it.
Do people really do that? It sounds like a very tedious way to play.
I do go back to the same port sometimes. Not to exploit SAY but because I am hanging around to hunt a beastie that spawns in that area.
I don’t think it’s really a big issue as-is, since hanging around is balanced by hunger and terror gains. Making it impossible to hang around outside dock for SAY would also cause problems for anyone with fast engines like the Fulgent Impeller, as it’s usually possible to travel between ports before SAY triggers, so hanging around for a few seconds is necessary. Changing it to trigger based on distance travelled would likewise make fast engines too powerful as they could trigger SAY more often than the cheaper engines.
Yes,in some ports it is a balanced way to go. But in some other ports (like frostfound, mangrove, pigmote ecc) you can just full up with supplies, fuel, terror or all of that by just waiting.
In other places, such as Mount Palmerston, coming with a bunch of supplies permits to raise your primary attribute by 5 as a time.
You’re right,it is not a big issue, but still it is a flaw: better to fix it somehow. Just a suggestion.
People who actually wait around said places are probably in danger of dying and very much in need, because it would take a really long time to seriously cash in to any extent.
Yeah, I for one only do it a occasionally and only a couple of times, because it is pretty tedious and not that lucrative most places. Frostfound or Aestival if I’m desperate - and Aestival is far enough out that I’m often desperate there. It’s exploitable but far from overpowered.
Anyway, it makes perfect sense from a roleplay point of view to stay in one port for a while.
I find myself loitering at Vaarchas and the Isle of Cats a lot, if nothing else because you can’t even start the next phase of those quests without SAY.
Relatedly, I like that SAY is a lot less important in Zubmariner, where it occasionally provides a nice bonus but is never really essential to the main questline of a port like it usually is aboveground. I hope one of the lessons they’ve learned for Sunless Skies is to drop the mechanic entirely.