[quote=MidnightVoyager]But that still won’t help because almost all the ships available fire only forward and to the sides a bit. We jammed in reverse because our gun fires forward and we can’t turn as fast as almost anything else without a particularly dumb sort of spinning in place and taking damage and hoping you can eventually catch up.
[/quote]
Precisely. This change hasn’t stopped me from hitting S in combat at all. Even for ships that DO have aft slots as well (frigate and dreadnought), well, there are two guns that fire forward and only one that fires backwards, so the front inevitably has double the firepower of the back anyway. And again, it screws over the new player who can neither fight nor flee in their dinky little 10-crew, 75-hull, one-gun steamer. With one! hundred! Veils! and lights off, I’m still tripping aggro with every single hostile that crosses my screen – I can eat the damage and risk Full Power if necessary, because I’m well into the game and have upgraded to a frigate, but I’m not sure how playable it’s going to be for someone who’s just starting out. And I don’t mean "steep learning curve", I mean "is this even physically possible".
OK, question for the peanut gallery: is there anyone who has not defaulted to fighting while moving in reverse? If so, what’s the alternative approach?
I don’t think there is one. If you keep going forward, the target will just slam into you, since they are also going forward. Standing still is even worse
If you have the cargo ship, you roughly have the same firepower in front and behind. With a smart use of Blue Scintillak, the best strategy against most enemies is to keep passing them and then turn 180° and repeat.
With higher gun power and hull ships, you can usually man-fight (i.e. stand still and fire) pretty much every enemy in the game right now, with the exception of Mt. Nomad.
And even this last one is quite killable (did it twice with a cargo ship since the update).
Oh, and since the repair are the same price whatever damaged is your hull (as opposite as in some updates ago), it’s actually quite okay to finish some rough fights (e.g. Nomad) with little hull remaining.
edited by Darkas on 1/7/2015
Well, if you have an aft gun and are being pursued by a minor nuisance, you can fire while steaming ahead – “walking” away from the explosions without looking back, as it were.
:B
> Well, if you have an aft gun and are being pursued by a minor nuisance, you can fire while steaming ahead – "walking" away from the explosions without looking back, as it were.
Double shot with Blue Scintillack for extra class.
Hurrah! :)
edited by Owen Wulf on 1/7/2015
This all requires a massive amount of stuff. What recourse does a new person have? They have no aft gun, no scintillack, nothing. Sounds… not exactly fun.
I mean, it doesn’t sound great for me either, because you can’t run away from anything anymore and I would rather have cargo space so I can make money so I can keep up with the maintenance cost of my sailing everywhere and stuff burned by fighting. “Buy the best ship and guns in the game and do a difficult sidequest” is an inherent part of your suggestion.
Running backwards looked dumb, but it worked, and you weren’t locked into a specific ship with specific guns to have a chance.
Aestival is my favourite new location: it looks fantastic. However, I’m finding the mapping problems really frustrating: the map no longer identifies my correct location, particularly around Irem and the Kingeater’s Castle, showing my ship on top of islands or much further away/closwer to islands than I actually am. New locations (Kingeater’s) have still got their old outlines, and Port Carnelian is in two places at once: it’s papered over Apis Meet, with both descriptions showing up when you dock there, and also in its original location closer to London - you can use the shops at the second Port Carnelian, but not access the stories.
> This all requires a massive amount of stuff. What recourse does a new person have? They have no aft gun, no scintillack, nothing. Sounds… not exactly fun.
The ship is indeed expensive (7k), but the rest is actually very easy to get.
Scintillack only requires access to Mt. Palmerston and the Iron Republic, and the aft gun is 600echos iirc.
And yeah, it’s the game, you cannot fight big monster in your starting ship anyway (you never could, 75 hull is way too low), and as soon as you have the next one, getting the two other "requirement" is not that tedious.
[quote=Darkas]Frostfound is awesome looking, as well as Kingeater’s Castle. Congratz on these!
Also:
"thus your reward. But I must now pronounce this curse upon you. Stand still, please…"
When giving the heart of his daughter to the Fathomking…
Excellent :P
edited by Darkas on 1/7/2015[/quote]
Darkas, would you mind letting me know where you found that story? I thought I’d been all over the Diamond release and haven’t seen it - there isn’t any content n Frostfound or Kingeater’s, and no update for the Fathomking’s hold.
Important disclaimer: I’m not at home, and so haven’t played Diamond yet. So, I’m just responding to what people have said here.
So far, I’ve had two strategies I’ve employed in combat. The first is zailing backwards, keeping the enemy in my lamp-light, and blasting them as they chase me. This is indeed incredibly silly, and clearly not the way the game is intended to be played. Further, it’s A: only worked against zee-monsters, and B: only worked in relatively open zee, or when I’ve been exceptionally good at reverse steering. So, I’m not really sorry to see that gone.
The second strategy is using stealth: killing the lights, getting behind the enemy, and giving them both barrels before they know where I am, then staying behind them (or behind nearby terrain) so they can’t ever draw a bead on me. This has been very stat-dependent - the better my Iron, Mirrors and Veils, the better it works, and the more dangerous enemies I can take on. Thus, it’s basically felt like a logical, intuitive employment of the game’s mechanics.
(The exception to this is that enemies don’t seem to take other light sources into account when determining visibility. Slipping past an enemy while brightly lit by a buoy is, in fact, a bit silly.)
If neither of these strategies are now viable, then, well, I’ll have to experiment, but I’m not sure what the intended strategy is, or how Veils should be used.
Oh thank god, I’m not just hallucinating the Carnelian thing! I bet the stories were meant to be added to actual-Port Carnelian and a value was just swapped somewhere or something. This is very relieving to hear.
Honestly, all of the newly artified locations look amazing. I did also experience the mapping problem – more egregiously around Irem, but in retrospect some of my confusion around the Kingeater’s Castle may have been influenced by a milder version of the Irem wackiness. (It’s Unplottable??)
MidnightVoyager, I agree. I’m also especially invested in the running-away issue (…can you tell?) because one of the things that pleased me about SS originally was that combat was not required. I even mentioned this when recommending to some friends. Sure, you’ll take some hits in Terror, and you might have to change your planned route to avoid nasties, and you won’t get ~epic loot~, but it was still doable. "Be rich and kill everything", eh. Surely things can be tweaked so that, e.g., more "beginners"-y hostiles give up chasing you sooner, or have smaller aggro radii, and Veils actually has a noticeable impact on things not noticing you when you’ve got your lights off (as opposed to the new current-state, which as a change feels more like "100% probability of detection!" rather than "somewhat increased probability of detection").
Darkas, the problem is that even the "little monsters" are still going to be a problem for newbies.
Sir Tanah-Chook, your second strategy is indeed no longer viable, because turning your lights off now does absolutely nothing except increase your Terror. Pretty much.
edited by Fretling on 1/8/2015
If you’re max range, turning your lights off still works for me. It’s a bit harder to get behind them, but still doable.
Newbies have to die a couple of times for them to become real Zee Captains.
But seriously, I just started a new mysterious hero for this update, and I have no problem running away from the monsters and/or pirates and reaching every port. If a monster is attacking you (Nomad at Avid Horizon e.g.), you can just dock and wait until it goes away.
The only time I was in danger was when a hidden shark surprised me with their new cloaking and ranged attack… But that was actually quite cool :P
The idea is to die a few times so you can learn how to survive. Many new players I’ve seen are already overtimid and overcautious, refusing to sail beyond the western coast and trying to eke a buffer from threadbare little trades like mushroom-wine at Venderbight. Learning the lesson “hide in dock until it goes away if you want to survive” isn’t going to help that.
And, I want my goldarn dadblasted hundred veils to do something, consarnit! :P
It really seems like every update makes it harder for people who are not good at the game to play the game. Because hey, clearly people are better at playing the game than me, and they’re enjoying it fine. But I wouldn’t even want to try to play a new character without carefully balancing out my inheritance so I can maybe accomplish something at the start. I haven’t been able to balance the cost of my travel/fighting with the cost of supplies and fuel used up for several updates now, and it’s just getting worse.
So I suppose the change is to emphasize battling? That is something I’ll regret updating for. (I guess what I personally wish is that there wasn’t a trade-off between immersion in character and reaching new content in the game - I remember how inconvenient it was when I started out carefully constructing a new captain, having them act according to their nature, and then dying over and over. It made sense in game that a poet or a priest would less likely to survive, but what about people with unrevealed pasts? This seems like it’d railroad new players into choosing a veteran or urchin in order to progress, which…makes me wonder why set out those options at the start, and then discouraging someone from playing by ramping up the difficulty.
If this was meant to augment replayability, then I can attest that I am willing to go through this game from start to end without failing tragically through giant moths whapping me into a watery grave.
[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]The more I have to look up weapon stats, spoilers, and so on, the greater my disconnect from the world of the game, which lessens the impact of all the gorgeousness, especially on the first play through where impressions are deepest. (Of course, this is just my own experience as someone who never would’ve played any videogames until lured in by the promise of delicious fallen London stories, so I understand that more jaded players would have a different approach to games!)) [/color]
Also, how can you find blue scintillack outside of the mangrove college/pigmote island? The iron republic is buggy for me or something, and I’ve only seen an endless parade of shops there. It’s not really a early-game thing.
According to the wiki, you can only get the Fallen London port report (for forwarding to the Brass Embassy) if you stay in the Iron Republic for at least fifteen days (which you can double-check in your journal, presumably) before doing the necessary action. Then again, the wiki also says that something with a 50% or 70% probability of occurring is a "rare event", so… I dunno!
Count me in for "sadfacing at combat emphasis", though.
edited by Fretling on 1/8/2015
Imo, the devs are going all over the place in terms of the combat mechanic. How I long for a day we get swiveling turret guns you can manually control. Or perhaps a wider firing arc for higher tier front/aft weapons so we can do "drive-by" shots better?
You can get Blue Scint after 15 Republic Days but it’s rather buggy (you don’t even get a Port Report sometimes), very easy to miss and tedious.
Good heavens the updated art assets are immensely beautiful. Didn’t know you’d even add something to the Sea of Lilies. But I’m going to wait for the next story patch to fix the Adam’s Way/Port Carnelian bug before I continue down that route.
edited by Bardigan on 1/8/2015
Yeah, that Iron Republic source is basically an extremely obscure easter egg - I don’t think it can be considered an element of any realistic general strategy.