OK, a point of feedback on the difficulty oscillation: Lorn-Flukes at least are now (I think) too easy. Only 200 Life is not much for a top-level monster with superb rewards; I just took two down without any damage or even Terror, as they opted to Seek rather than use their rapid Terror-attacks. I’m all for getting my Zong soon, but I think the balance (as is the way of such things) just swung too far, perhaps?
New terror mechanic is great! Now exploring less safe waters ensures you’re always on the tipping point, but no guaranteed to die. If I don’t play it safe, I’m not instantly doomed, it just means I have to start every expedition with 50 terror and be careful about letting it climb. Thanks for listening to feedback!
edited by conductorbosh on 6/23/2014
[color=#009900]yes, definitely - this is why I made a point in the notes of saying it’s a work in progress. :) We’re moving the furniture about - it’ll settle down anon.[/color]
I don’t know about too easy. I just got surrounded by 3 Lifebergs - somehow killed the first but then got slaughtered. Thanks to playing in Merciful Mode I went back a step and avoided them.
When everything has settled down I might start playing the other way but at the moment I am still finding it too easy to die.
I also want to ask are we going to get any Officers who increase pages when we give them a secret, for some reason playing chess has been locked for me since my first game.
I think playing chess is only available at certain levels of Something Awaits You; it’s definitely not always locked, at least.
Thanks, it sounds like I have just been unlucky then. I haven’t visited many times but the Admiral has just asked me to go to Mount Palmerstone again so I’ll just have to brave the Bound Sharks and Albino Morays again and see what happens, maybe a nice game of chess.
“Intro missions sound alright for new players - I’d imagine that players should be given options to skip them though.” - Sure. I would err on the side of accessibility, though. Besides, I’m not imagining anything binding, any more than - say - the shiny “pick up some tomb-colonists!” option is.
“As for the Seneschal’s Log, I sort of dislike it. It may be seen as making trading a tad too easy, but if the economy ever incorporates fluctuating prices that the Log cannot keep track of unless one docks at the ports, it may very well be viable.” - I don’t know. Personally, I find “ooooh we have a challenge for you, you have to remember a list of facts!” to be a tremendously tedious affair, and there’s precisely nothing to stop me from keeping my own ‘seneschal’s log’ on a bit of paper or a notepad file, it’s just less engaging and more tedious.
[color=#009900]yes, definitely - this is why I made a point in the notes of saying it’s a work in progress. :) We’re moving the furniture about - it’ll settle down anon.[/color][/quote]
[li]
Yep - and why I tried to note multiple times that I expected the oscillations to dampen toward appropriate homeostasis. Personally, I’m hugely impressed with the responsiveness and hope that I’m also empathetic about the difficulty in making any game that is fun for both hard-core types and newcomers.
So I wanted to give my anecdotal experiences with combat.
Stats: Hearts: 40, Veils: 49, Pages: 29, Mirrors: 39, Iron:89. Starting Tramp Steamer.
As I see it, there is simply an unavoidable amount of damage in Sunless Sea combat. When Pirates can get 50 illumination in one action (I have never in my life accomplished that) there is almost no way to not get hit, unless you’re capable of reading the AI’s mind.
So this has made my strategy in SS this: Against monsters, 2 flares then all salvos. Against boats: Sneak, Flare, then all salvos.
There is no point in my mind to playing evasively: The AI will always have better illumination, so all you’re doing is giving them more opportunities to attack.
Distance does not seem to matter at all for the vast majority of attacks. Why a bats have an attack that works at 40 yards, or why guns are equally effective at 20 yards as they are at 70 yards, I don’t know. If there are mechanics in place with regard to illumination/damage vs. distance, they are not demonstrating themselves very well.
So with my current setup, and my current strategy (illuminate ASAP, open fire ASAP) I can kill 90% of what I’ve encountered. A Torpedo made short of work of the Giant Crab. I’ve taken down Unfinished Raiders as though they were pirates. Same story with Lifebergs. As long as I can shoot first, I win.
This is the reason I won’t play SS in hardcore in its current state though: at the end of the day, it all comes down to randomness. Not planning, not tactics, not execution. Randomness. When the enemy AI can fire a devstating salvo after only two illumination actions, there is no point to trying to play tactically. The AI will either "roll" the most optimal attack, or it won’t. Those aren’t odds I am willing to play hardcore under. Forget getting 1 shot, I simply can’t envisage a grind where it’s that random whether you’re going to get set back 1, 2 or more trips because the dice came up that way.
As it is, combat boils down to "shoot first, or reload your save." I don’t feel there’s room for much more in the current implementation, especially for new players who only have the tramp steamer and are likely to be using it for a long, long, long time yet. The difference between the early and mid game combat is this: in the early game, "failure" is ~5 to 20 missing hull points. In the later game, "failure" is getting one shot. This isn’t really an enjoyable combat balance at all.
What also throws things out of whack is that players will typically one shot pirates (with no equipment or officers) about 50% of the time. These odds only increase as your irons score climbs, to the point where now, I 1 shot 95% of all pirate steamers…making the inevitable "2 flares open fire" move that much more irritating.
I don’t know if this is a solvable problem. It may just be the way FL’s combat is. But right now, combat is not enjoyable to me. It feels like a rigged game, where you’re either walking away with no scratch and all rewards, or you’re taking a massive hit to your echoes because of all the repairs you have to do. Or you just get one shot. There is no real flow to combat, it’s not a back and forth as the whole "evade/fire" gameplay seems to imply. To me combat is just more like a quick draw match, where the person who shoots first will usually win.
Maybe part of the issue is damage. Player damage is really high. Later game monster and ship damage is really high. This really prevents the "back and forth" of evading, illuminating, attacking and fleeing. None of these mechanics, IMO, have a chance to show themselves when 50% of combats are decided by who fires the first shot. It may keep combat quick, but it loses all nuance because of it, and several maneuvers are useless in such an environment.
edited by Nenjin on 6/23/2014
That hasn’t at all been my experience with a Veils-and-Mirrors heavy tramp steamer. I’ve been experiencing the exact back and forth you haven’t–the lynchpin of my strategy is evasion.
I also rarely if ever one-shotted enemies until I picked up the Heart-Ender, which attacks Crew rather than Hull (and pirate steam-pinnaces only have 5 crew).
I think your experience of combat is so damage-centric because your stats are so damage-centric–you have a whopping great Iron score, but only mediocre Mirrors and Veils
edited by Jack Vaux-Harrowden on 6/23/2014
I have to agree, given that my Veils and Mirrors are my highest stats, (80 and 70 respectively), with Iron trailing back at 60 my strategy is to Flare, Flare, Evade 3x, then fire off a Salvo before Evading again.
I have to agree with Jack - my experience with Veils and Irons is rather reliant on evasion, and even more so with Veils and Mirrors. In fact, before I got the heart-ender I required 4-5 hits to kill an a western angler, and still require at least 3, making evasion vital.
My mirrors is 60-ish, with veils 90, and I tend to alternate evade with flare/attacks.
(I was not aware the heart-ender targeted crew, though - is this with flensing or just regular salvoes?)
edited by Kerine on 6/23/2014
Evasion is pretty much the best way to do a combat. I’d say Veils is probably the most important stat, with Mirrors a little close behind. If you start attacking when an enemy starts a long-warmup action (like Seek) and then you queue up an evade immediately behind, then you can get a free shot off and then shake off the Illumination from the Seek. Often the enemy will be a few seconds into an attack when you do that; evasion shakes off the attack (sometimes even if you don’t dip below the required illumination… but not always??? i’ve ended up with Illumination 70 after an attack and still cancelled out a Salvo which needs 50), wasting the enemies’ time while giving you the opportunity to let off another shot. Sometimes the AI gets confused and does nothing at all for a few seconds after you shake off an attack, making things even easier. evade crew 4 life
Flensing salvoes do crew damage, yeah, regular salvoes are unaffected by Harpoons I’m pretty sure.
It’s a fair point. But I’m kinda cutting to the meta of combat.
In your avoidance strategy, how often do you take damage (hull, crew, or nightmares) at all? How long does the fight last?
Because me taking damage only occurs for a few reasons:
- A less than optimal illumination roll (because my Mirrors isn’t good.)
- An exceptional illumination roll by the enemy (the way it looks, most enemies must have a 50 or higher Mirrors.)
- My first salvo, somehow, rolls low.
And the fight is over in, on average, 4 turns. More like 3, occasionally 5. So to me, every turn the enemy has illumination is just one more turn you can be made to lose money. If avoidance works but takes 10 actions and you still inevitably get hit, it’s not an optimal strategy in my mind. (Flavorful, thematic, sure.)
This has also really exposed to me to me the highly random action queues of the enemy, because there are only a few queues that can stand a chance of hurting me. So when the AI Seeks twice and flares twice, it’s kind of like…ok? Not sure what you were ever going to accomplish with that. Are the queues hard coded? Randomized within its own logic? Procedurally determined? Because I’ve watched the AI both queue up un-useable attacks, and capitalize on its good fortune (by for example, getting two amazing flare rolls and immediately queueing up its biggest salvo. God I hate that.) So basically by the third turn, I know whether a fight has been a loss (taken damage) or a win (no damage.)
Maybe my experience is because I’ve been really only farming the early game the whole time. But still, with torpedos, the same pattern has resulted against way, way tougher enemies. Shoot first, win, take no damage.
I should probably try a no-combat character and see if it works as well as blasting everything in the face. But my sense so far is that, long-term, it’s faster and less expensive to kill the enemy before they ever fire, than it is to constantly evade their illumination.
As for Iron, I started at around 50, 55, and I was one-shotting probably half of all bats and pirate steamers using just the basic guns.
Lastly, I hope that Distance somehow factors into combat other than when you can flee. It really should affect damage spreads (maybe even causing someone to miss altogether), illumination values, delumination, ect…Knowing more about the inner workings of combat would maybe change my strategy.
I’ve also kind of wondered if illumination shouldn’t decay over time slightly. That could put a crimp in my game, personally, since I need every point of illumination I can get. It also kinda makes sense. Flares dim and go out, people move around and retreat. Evading an enemy 10 yards away should be a lot different than evading an enemy that is 60 yards away.
edited by Nenjin on 6/24/2014
i pretty much never take damage in combat (maybe an appalling cry or two b/c that has like a 3 second warmup and no illumination req, but it’s only like 1~3 terror and they don’t do it often, and it’s basically an opportunity to get a free hit in) and it’s over pretty fast (like maybe eight or nine actions against something really buff like an elder crab, depending on luck) so, y’know, whatever
What Sm9 said. I posted more on this previously elsewhere, but his experience and approach appear to Mirror - sorry - mine exactly.
I will agree with the above, minus the Western angler crabs. that 4-cooldown attack gives me no chance to evade. It’s killed me twice now…
edited by Kerine on 6/24/2014
So apparently I need another -8 Fragments for my next secret. This is…inconvenient.
Find something, anything. That’s the only way to kickstart it back into realizing it’s over the counter.