[color=#009900]We’re very interested to know - how long is it taking you folks to do any or all of the following?[/color]
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color=#009900 to complete a play session[/color]
color=#009900 to play until you don’t feel like you want to play any more[/color]
color=#009900 to ‘complete’ a game, either win or loss[/color]
color=#009900 to upgrade significantly[/color]
color=#009900 to upgrade every piece of equipment all the way?[/color]
color=#009900 to exhaust all the story content (i.e. total time in days or sessions until you stopped seeing any new content out of the current map)[/color]
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[color=#009900]Don’t feel pressed to get your stop-watches out: I only need broad, hand-wavy answers. ‘Half an hour’ ‘An evening’ ‘a week’ ‘I’ll tell you when I get there!’ [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]I have a whole bunch of calculations about how long it takes to travel or accrue resource (and a bunch of those numbers are temporary anyway and will change as the map grows), but I’m interested in a wide view on subjective experience, doubling-back, misunderstanding, experimentation - all of which is hard to get to with the kind of playtesting we do at this end.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Thanks folks! As a reward for reading this far, here’s a peek at one of the locations in ‘Amethyst’, which should be coming later this week… http://www.dropmocks.com/mE5kH1[/color]
edited by Alexis on 6/2/2014
I’ve put in only a few play sessions, the latest being maybe 15-20 minutes, enough to do a few FL - Venderblight circuits. I never felt the pull to do anything else. I have not upgraded anything.
Edit: I’d guess that I have logged maybe an hour or slightly more - enough to get a feel for the mechanics and ui.
edited by Theus on 6/2/2014
How long does it take to complete a play session?
I haven’t sat down and played for more than two hours at a time since the first release. Play sessions since then average 45 minutes to an hour.
How long until you don’t feel like you want to play any more?
My last three play sessions have looked like this: sail from Fallen London → Venderbight → Port Cecil; do a bunch of Port Cecil → Iron and Misery runs to stock up on scintillack while keeping well-stocked and controlling Terror; sail back through Gaider’s Mourn → Station 3 → Abbey Rock → FL; unload my scintillack, buy an upgrade. Repeat once or twice more.
When there was enough ‘unseen’ content to keep me running the route from FL → VB → Cecil → Gaider → Station 3, I was excited about playing longer and skipped the money-making trips.
How long to complete a game?
I haven’t lost in a long time. I haven’t won, either. It seems like every time I DID die, it happened during the first major leg out from the FL → VB loop. Once I have a couple hundred Echoes socked away, there’s no chance of dying as long as I plan accordingly.
How long to upgrade significantly?
Depends – what’s significant? My engines don’t seem to have made much difference. Guns, a little moreso. I haven’t upgraded to my dreadnought yet. My upgrades never feel that large.
How long to exhaust all story content?
If I started from the beginning with everything I know now, just a few hours. Not more than five, probably more like three or four, depending on the proc rate for Soothe and Cooper boxes and whether I pick up a Khanate token.
[quote=Gordon Levine]
If I started from the beginning with everything I know now, just a few hours. Not more than five, probably more like three or four, depending on the proc rate for Soothe and Cooper boxes and whether I pick up a Khanate token.[/quote]
[color=#009900]That’s incredibly useful, detailed feedback, cheers! but I’ve edited my last question to make it clearer. Four hours sounds exactly right to read the whole current content through, so probably about that to do a speed run in-engine. But it’s harder to calculate how that breaks down into number of total sessions first time through.[/color]
[color=#009900]Also… possibly I’m imagining a subtext thanks to designer’s paranoia, but it sounds like you feel there should be more content in there. Bear in mind we’re about 30% content and map complete - I think we’re looking at a final total of 1K storylets, 200K+ words :-)[/color]
edited by Alexis on 6/2/2014
(i) to complete a play session
I generally play anywhere from an hour to five, depending on what else I have to do that day.
(ii) to play until you don’t feel like you want to play any more
That depends on my mood. I’d say three hours is average.
(iii) to ‘complete’ a game, either win or loss
I haven’t yet. There are enough things to do and explore, and to look for, that I haven’t tried to "complete" a game yet. If I wanted to just get to having the retirement in the mansion with a fund, not caring about exploration or stories, maybe a couple days or a week?
(iv) to upgrade significantly
I’ve never paid that much attention.
(v) to upgrade every piece of equipment all the way?
No idea. That generally isn’t my goal while playing.
(vi) to exhaust all the story content (i.e. total time in days or sessions until you stopped seeing any new content out of the current map)
The way I prefer to play, it can take me a week to exhaust the content. I don’t like rushing through the content.
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I’m so glad you found it useful!
Total sessions: I think it would probably take me two or three big gulps to do a full play-through right now, given my current level of knowledge. If I were coming to the game fresh without prior knowledge or a guide, it would take me a lot longer – at least two false-start sessions of two hours apiece, plus another four to six sessions stretching my legs.
I’d say, with fresh eyes, it’d take me ~8 sessions, or sixteen hours total, to play through the existing content and see a good number of the upgrades.
[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)][/quote]Also… possibly I’m imagining a subtext thanks to designer’s paranoia, but it sounds like you feel there should be more content in there. Bear in mind we’re about 30% content and map complete - I think we’re looking at a final total of 1K storylets, 200K+ words :-)[/quote][/color]
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I know that paranoia! :)
Certainly I think there should be more content, but that’s (1) just greed talking, plus (2) it’s earlyish days, plus (3) I’m having a good time and don’t want to stop, so please don’t interpret any griping on my end!
I think my only actual content concern right now is that Station 3 is in an awkward position between the nearest ports, none of which are far enough away to proc Something Awaits You on a straight trip. But I think I recall you mentioning elsewhere that the plan is to increase the length of time for SAY to proc, so the point is probably moot.
(I can’t find a citation, but I remember hearing a story about how, at a major airport – maybe LAX? – passengers were complaining about eight minute wait times at baggage claim. The airport looked at the problem and decided they couldn’t speed up baggage processing by eight minutes. So what did they do? They lengthened the walk to baggage claim by about eight minutes. Complaints vanished. The Station 3 thing makes me think of that story. It might help just to wash it further out to zee!)
Station 3 is far away from Gaider’s Mourn to proc Something Awaits You, and when we get Polythreme that will be a decent distance as well.
1 and 2) I tend to play up to an hour or so at a time but might take different characters out for a voyage in that time, it depends on how I feel.
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I have never "completed" a game. If by that you mean getting to the point of retiring to a mansion or writing the Song (but I can’t do that anyway - you can’t get a Port Cecil Report as far as I can tell and I still haven’t managed to get every other item on the list)
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Upgrade significantly and 5) Upgrade equipment - That depends on what choices are available and how well I manage my echoes. Fuel, supplies, repairing hull damage and managing terror come first. If I have any profit from a voyage I will buy something else. Stat boosting is more difficult as that depends on getting enough fragments to get a secret to speak to an officer or the right options in port. So I really can’t put a time to it…
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I don’t think I’ve seen all the content yet and definitely not with any one character. Then there are choices that I still haven’t played or succeeded at yet.
As for journey speed I seem to have managed to work out routes between ports that get me to the dock just after Something Awaits You. But part of that is looking around for things to fight. Occasionally I need to wait and circle around a little bit but that is more likely to happen between Mutton Island and Abbey Rock which I think is the shortest distance between ports.
[color=#009900]Tara, Ciel, thanks![/color]
[color=#009900]>baggage claim[/color]
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[color=#009900]Yeah. I had considered requiring a Long Box to interact with the island every time, and tuning the rewards up accordingly, but I didn’t want to discourage players from focusing on the story and make the island too much of a vending machine.[/color]
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[color=#009900]re: the Something Awaits You issue generally. We’re not tuning it right now, because two things will alter the picture:[/color]
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color=#009900 there will be a lot more map, and Station III will be a stopping-off point to various destinations, including Polythreme;[/color]
color=#009900 that map will differ between playthroughs, so some arrangements will be more convenient for SAY than others.[/color]
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[color=#009900]…but we will be tuning it once those things are in. Tuning will be tricky and will inevitably lead to some lingering at sea waiting for the miracle to come on some routes, given the shuffling. We have considered allowing, at some or all ports, a ‘time in port’ option where you spend a chunk of Supplies to refresh SAY - but I am strongly inclined to believe that would encourage grinding and discourage exploration, which is already a tension point for balance. Your thoughts welcome, anyway![/color]
Thanks Alexis! That all makes good sense. FWIW: I’m glad you didn’t require a Long Box for each interaction; that would’ve been painful given the vagaries of the RNG.
color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to complete a play session & [/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to play until you don’t feel like you want to play any more[/color]
[color=#009900] [/color][color=#ffffff]It depends on what other things I have to do that day. I had so much fun being sucked into the world while on vacation (I think I started around 8:30 pm and ended around 3:00 am) but I can’t frequently indulge in really long sessions. On an average day I could probably play for about 1 hour. If I have a day off with little else to do then I might play for about 5 hours-ish.[/color][color=#009900]
[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to ‘complete’ a game, either win or loss[/color]
[color=#ffffff]I can lose a game in about 8 ports if I forget to pay attention to something or run into a lifeberg. The lowering of the buoy deadliness has been a blessing. I have not yet "won" a game. When I first started playing I think I managed a one-way trip Fallen London > Venderbight > on my way up the coast before running out of supplies and staring in horror at my screen as my whole crew starved and/or ate each other in rapid-fire succession… I had decided to sail further north to see what was up there and had NO IDEA that my crew were going to go through supplies like a kid goes through a candy bar.[/color]
color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to upgrade significantly[/color]
[color=#ffffff]I’ve only made some middling upgrades so far, and not yet tried to buy a dreadnaught, but probably a day or two of focused effort.[/color]
color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to upgrade every piece of equipment all the way?[/color]
[color=#ffffff]I haven’t the foggiest… maybe if I played for a week straight and actually made upgrading the ship my main focus? Currently my main focus is devouring story bits except when distracted by the "what’s over there?" thought, followed by "oops! my it’s dark out here" and "well darn…"[/color]
color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to exhaust all the story content (i.e. total time in days or sessions until you stopped seeing any new content out of the current map)[/color][li]
[color=#ffffff]I have not yet seen all of the content, but then I’ve had several very busy weeks and haven’t had much time to play lately so I’m an update behind at least. [/color]
color=#009900 to complete a play session[/color]
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[/color]When there’s a storyline to complete, or something new to read, as long as it takes (usually an hour and a half or so)
When just sailing around, forty five minutes.
I tend to frame my play sessions in terms ‘journeys’, setting out from Fallen London, doing a couple of Venderbight runs or a London-Gaider’s Mourn-Port Cecil-Venderbight run, and then coming back to Fallen London.
color=#009900 to play until you don’t feel like you want to play any more[/color]
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However long it takes to explore all the content + another 3-4 sessions of sailing around. I’m story-focused, so… off the top of my head, I’d say that total playtime has been somewhere in the fifteen to twenty hour range (of gaming), maybe more (I’ve been playing intermittently since it came out). It took me a couple of false starts to figure out how to not die instantly due to Terror, so there’s a definite learning curve, but afterwards everything is fairly straightforward.
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color=#009900 to ‘complete’ a game, either win or loss[/color]
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I haven’t won yet. I was on my way to a luxury win when Ruby came out and my save stopped working, and since that took quite a lot of time and I’m nowhere close. Haven’t lost since my early runs either. Once you get the hang of how supplies, fuel, and terror work and how to manage them, the game is fairly easy (monsters are rare and easy enough to avoid).
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color=#009900 to upgrade significantly[/color]
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…eh? The only significant upgrades I’ve noticed are the ships. I just spent about 4-6 sessions getting my engines maxed out, so that’s probably a good estimate, but I notice the faster fuel drain more than I notice the more rapid speed.
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color=#009900 to upgrade every piece of equipment all the way?[/color]
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Maybe ten sessions to get max cannons and engines, haven’t reached the New Dreadnaught yet but I’d estimate longer.
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[/color]
color=#009900 to exhaust all the story content (i.e. total time in days or sessions until you stopped seeing any new content out of the current map)[/color]
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[/color]The first release kept me occupied for a week or two, I ran through Ruby in a couple of days.
[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
color=#009900 to complete a play session [/quote][/color]
~2 hours
[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
color=#009900 to play until you don’t feel like you want to play any more[/color][/quote]
ditto
[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
color=#009900 to ‘complete’ a game, either win or loss[/color][/quote]
Haven’t yet managed to lose :). So don’t know. If winning was defined as getting dreadnought/mansion, then maybe 2-3 days; but I am going for the Zong and it’s not yet close after launch of beta.
(If I gather correctly from the other thread that my save is now adrift, I shall be sad!)
[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
color=#009900 to upgrade significantly[/color]
color=#009900 to upgrade every piece of equipment all the way?[/color][/quote]
Those are about the same, I think. Maybe 2 days.
[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
color=#009900 to exhaust all the story content (i.e. total time in days or sessions until you stopped seeing any new content out of the current map)[/color][/quote]
A week? ish?
Hard to tell: each update only gives a day or so, but trying to think what it would be like from scratch.
[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=#009900]Also… possibly I’m imagining a subtext thanks to designer’s paranoia, but it sounds like you feel there should be more content in there. Bear in mind we’re about 30% content and map complete - I think we’re looking at a final total of 1K storylets, 200K+ words :-)[/color]
edited by Alexis on 6/2/2014[/quote]
I think that is a fair reflection of my thinking. If you’re about 30% done, then in total the game is going to provide me a bit less than 20 hours’ gameplay, best estimate. Which is decent value, certainly; but not the epic I’d assumed/expected (granted, with expectation bias from FL - this is the first video game I’ve spent up-front money on in at least a decade).
Just timed a session to gain an additional data point: 30 min. That was enough time to (i) do a Venderbight-and-back trading run, then (ii) try out the new commission with a trip to Pt Cecil [where I was again unable to play chess, sadly] via all intermediate southerly ports collecting info en route. Relevant variables are that Gaider’s Mourn gave a second piece of strategic info, and Station III no longer gives even port reports: net gain over the 30 min I think on the order of 700 Echoes.
edited by Ewan C. on 6/3/2014
color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to complete a play session[/color]
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[color=#009900]Sometimes an hour or so, more often a few minutes - one or two journeys between ports.[/color]
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[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to play until you don’t feel like you want to play any more[/color]
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[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to ‘complete’ a game, either win or loss[/color]
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[color=#009900]I’ve died a few times, but mostly while trying out different ways to die. I’ve yet to "win" - I could have retired at my town house once, but that didn’t seem terribly satisfying.[/color]
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[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to upgrade significantly[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]It took maybe a week to upgrade to the original dreadnaught, and that didn’t seem to get me much other than a bigger cargo bay. The upgraded ships in the current build don’t seem terribly interesting.[/color]
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[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to upgrade every piece of equipment all the way?[/color]
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[color=#009900]Haven’t done it. Trading is tedious at the moment, and generating enough cash to upgrade takes a while (and the upgrades don’t seem to provide that much benefit, certainly not compared to increasing skills, so there’s not a lot of "I’ll just do one more circuit.").[/color]
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[/color]
color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to exhaust all the story content (i.e. total time in days or sessions until you stopped seeing any new content out of the current map)[/color]
[li]
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[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]Hard to judge. Maybe four or five hours if I were to start from scratch?[/color]
[quote=Ewan C.][quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=#009900]Also… possibly I’m imagining a subtext thanks to designer’s paranoia, but it sounds like you feel there should be more content in there. Bear in mind we’re about 30% content and map complete - I think we’re looking at a final total of 1K storylets, 200K+ words :-)[/color]
edited by Alexis on 6/2/2014[/quote]
I think that is a fair reflection of my thinking. If you’re about 30% done, then in total the game is going to provide me a bit less than 20 hours’ gameplay, best estimate. Which is decent value, certainly; but not the epic I’d assumed/expected (granted, with expectation bias from FL - this is the first video game I’ve spent up-front money on in at least a decade).[/quote]
Even ten hours of pure narrative excellence - which, of course, is something that depends on the quality of writing - is enough (for me). That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like more, but, let’s be realistic here. Few games can reach that, regardless of their formal length.
I did a bit of an experiment, by starting a new game, to see if I could manage to exhaust all the story content.
I have played for around five hours, total, and thought I would report on my progress so far.
I’ve managed to gain most of the officers, still no Cook though.
I have started all the stories but haven’t progressed far enough to complete any of them yet.
I have visited all the ports that have current content (even if I haven’t got far enough in some stories to need to go there) but still haven’t seen all the various results or all the storylets that might be available on any visit.
I haven’t managed any significant upgrades yet, but I do have slightly better weapons and engine. I haven’t made enough money to upgrade my lodgings or ship. But most of my money has gone on fuel, supplies, managing terror, replacing crew and one hull repair. I haven’t got enough secrets yet to significantly upgrade my skills either.
I still haven’t seen all the beasties and am avoiding the strongest ones when I see them as I know that they would kill me at my current level.
color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to complete a play session[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]I’d say I could play anywhere between 2 - 6 hours when I sit down to play. It does just suck me in and I find myself aiming toward a goal I want to just keep on going[/color]
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[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to play until you don’t feel like you want to play any more[/color]
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[color=#009900]I normally run out of steam either after I complete a self set goal or when I die for a stupid reason that tends to suck my desire to carry on playing out of me. So I take a break and come back to it in a few hours or the next day[/color]
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[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to ‘complete’ a game, either win or loss[/color]
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[color=#009900]To lose a game? Anywhere between 5 minutes to 30 minutes. Usually when I die it is either because something has blown me out of the water or something happens and I mis-manage my supplies or fuel and end up stuck outside port with no way to get in or no money to restock.[/color]
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[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to upgrade significantly[/color]
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[color=#009900]I can upgrade in about an hour of work, shuttling back and forth. It does feel like it takes a LONG time to get anywhere with upgrades and I have never made it to changing ships. My terror ends up too high and BAM all my heard work goes out the window as my crew go insane and everything falls apart and there is no way to bring it back down in any significant way to make a difference.[/color]
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[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to upgrade every piece of equipment all the way?[/color]
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[color=#009900]Never managed this, I always die or never have enough echoes. All my echoes vanish into just keeping the ship restocked most of the time and if I do splurge on upgrading something then suddenly I have no money to restock and the endless cycle of death occurs.[/color]
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[/color]color=rgb(0, 153, 0) to exhaust all the story content (i.e. total time in days or sessions until you stopped seeing any new content out of the current map)[/color]
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[color=#009900]I’ve only really managed this once I think, took me about 6 hours to get to the point where I stopped seeing anything new and that might just be because I wasn’t going to the right places.[/color]
I generally don’t play for several hours continuously, though I might do that once in a while. A typical session for me is one where I wander around the Unterzee and stop playing once I’ve hit every port or almost every port (Whither is not very conveniently located, nor was Mutton Island before Shepherd’s Wash and the Amethyst update were put in) and come back to London or Venderbight (since that’s where I usually am at the start of a session). This takes… I dunno, half an hour to an hour? Two hours? I’m not good at estimating time, but no more than two hours. In the last build (haven’t seen it so far in 0.1.4)
I was also intermittently plagued by a bug that would make my engine die while I was trying to leave a port and fix itself when I saved, exited, and reloaded; sometimes I didn’t reload after saving and exiting if it happened when I’d been playing for a while.
I do often play multiple times in a day, though. I’ll play until satiated, go do something else, then come back a few hours later and zail some more. (I find the zailing part of the game quite soothing, apart from the moments of terror and profanity that come when a tough enemy starts chasing me.) Oh, and if there’s a major update I’ll download it as soon as I can and play until I’ve seen all the new locations, because NEW THINGS. But that’s not every day, obviously.
I’ve never won a game so far because it takes too long to get enough money and items for the victory conditions and new builds come out all the time that encourage you to start a new game instead of keeping the one from the last build. The former probably won’t be a problem when the whole Unterzee is implemented, because you can explore lots more places and fight lots more enemies even before you get to the storylines, but the same victory conditions applied to a smaller map mean a lot more grinding to get to that point. (I am not exactly a fan of unnecessary grinding - then again, few people are - and ‘get the best ending’ isn’t a good enough incentive for me to grind away.) Obviously the latter won’t be an issue in the final game, at least not to nearly the same degree. In my current save I have enough echoes to buy a townhouse and retiring to one wouldn’t be too far away from there, but… meh. It seems boring compared to the more expensive victory conditions.
I don’t die that often anymore, though. If you don’t count crashing into light-ships (which was almost always on purpose, either to kill myself or to see if it was still deadly; exceptions are the first time when I thought I could fight it and once I didn’t notice it was there until I smashed into it) my most common causes of death are trying to fight something too tough and the occasional mutiny. (I haven’t run out of fuel so far and I haven’t run out of food since the supply drain was slowed down, but Terror is a lot harder to mitigate once you’ve got a lot of it.) I’m more inclined to reload the game than start a legacy captain when I do die, by the way. I don’t save every time I visit a port, but I do save quite often.
Since I start over frequently and make no particular effort to grind, and am thus usually in the early-middle stages of the game, I’ve never actually bothered upgrading my ship. Well, I tried getting a better gun in one of the very first builds, but I nearly went broke from that. (Now I’m much better at having stable finances, but it discouraged me a bit.) I focus on recruiting lots of officers, preferably one for every slot, before getting better hardware. Since you can’t always hire an officer at all, that takes kind of a while (like… a week or maybe two on my playing schedule?)
The bigger the map is, the longer it takes me to exhaust it; when there were only seven squares to explore I’d at least feel like I’d exhausted it in about the same week-ish amount of time it took to gather a full complement of officers, get bored with it, and wander off to chart the placeholder sea. I hadn’t technically run out of story content at that point, since I hadn’t finished the Mount Palmerston storyline and I hadn’t seen every single storylet result at Venderbight or Mutton Island with their large numbers of randomized options, but I’d seen the rest of it enough times that I didn’t really feel like holding those ports upside down and shaking them until all the story fell out.
edited by CameoAppearance on 6/6/2014