Gold Feedback - Corsair's Edition!

Sunless Sea
81

fake edit; hell alexis came in with a post that addresses like half of this while i was in the middle of writing it but i’m posting it anyway because i do really like one or two of the ideas i had, you can’t stop me you’re not my dad

I think the balance sits mostly like this; hunger increases too slowly (seriously I haven’t once had to worry about food consumption being an issue since it changed), fuel is way too quick (especially with bigger engines, which don’t seem to speed you up all that much) and terror is a little too fast but suffers mostly from a lack of actual good cures.
Also- another problem is random event inconsistency; when my Terror gets above 60 or 70 or so I get zailors leaping over the rail to swim South constantly, sometimes even in quick bursts of twos or threes. But a few friends apparently never even see that event at all, even if they’re trucking along at 90 Terror, instead getting things like Horrors Below or Burning Blue which can be inconvenient but are nowhere near as crippling as losing crew. I wonder if the RNG is actually really genuinely for real behaving inconsistently now that those calculations are being performed clientside on different hardware rather than on one static server. It could just be superstition- lord knows the fallen london RNG has enough tied to it- but something definitely seems off there if someone can play for entire voyages with high Terror and never have anyone suicide at all, while I can lose three people before I even make it across Wolfstack Harbor.

here are some ideas i have, mostly for terror;

Speed up hunger and slow down fuel consumption a little. Maybe make scuttling ships award fuel independent of the Cache reward (which may also be fuel)

Add more ambient terror reductions, such as for beating tough monsters. Zee-bats sort of have this, but they reduce so little terror that they’re worthless.
Boost practically every Terror cure in the game by a few points or make them all cheaper. Especially the Genial Magician’s magic show if it still cures 5 Terror for like 200 echoes worth of stuff. Also terror reducers that burn Something Awaits You, because they’re usually no better than ones that don’t but you also don’t get a shore event. Most of the profit from journeys goes towards curing the Terror built up on it, and shore leave outside London is near universally worthless because of the high cost and minimal effect. Weirdly one of the best terror reductions in the game comes from getting chased through a sewer by Khanagian cops??? it does damage your stats permanently but still, what
-I guess making Terror less of a drain to reduce means that getting money is easier, but everything is so expensive right now that I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I dunno???

Make hiring new crew reduce Terror proportional to how many people you hire. New dudes shouldn’t be spooked right away, and hiring new crew only for them to immediately mutiny and kill me after a rough voyage was basically The Worst. cmon guys i just hired you what’s your problem??? Maybe make crew hired outside of London like Khanate zailors or the desperate Demeaux Island folk give less Terror reduction.

Make the Lodgings Terror reduction offer additional benefits besides pure Terror; otherwise it’s going to be eternally competing with carousing, and if one ends up edging out slightly better than the other then nobody will use it. Right now resting at your lodgings is only practical if you own a Zeeside Mansion, and if you have a Zeeside Mansion then probably cash is the least of your concerns. I propose making the lodgings boost worse on average than carousing, mostly, but with secondary benefts attached. For example, Hunger reduction, Fragment gain (from strange dreams), maybe a Well-Rested item that confers some temporary advantage for a few minutes, like raised stats or mitigated Terror gain or even improved engine performance.

I do kinda like the idea of lamps reducing Terror gain but on the other hand half of them also seem kind of terrifying and it seems like it might be hard to balance; i’d suggest extra Fuel drain as a tradeoff if Fuel didn’t burn out so quickly already

okay these are all the words i have at the minute goodbye
edited by Spacemarine9 on 6/18/2014

82

[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=#009900]The approach we are, tentatively, taking, is the one Eggix suggests: escalation. You may notice the ‘Time, the Healer’ quality you gain, since the Amethyst patch, when you return to London: this tracks the number of visits to London and, later, other major ports, and in concert with log dates will ultimately determine some narrative pressures to go out further from home. Similarly, we’ll be introducing an, uh, inverse escalation effect, where you get some cheap terror reduction early on.[/color][color=#009900]
[/color][/quote]

This sounds interesting, and I’m eager to see how it pans out. One of the obstacles I could see with this approach is the danger of having static terror reduction rates based on something as arbitrary as # of visits to a port, opposed to something dynamic, or based off of a constant like a world-clock.

You’ve mentioned previously the desire to have there be multiple paths through the game: trading, smuggling, privateering, hunting, exploring. I imagine that these paths would require varying numbers of port visits. A trader might visit the port 5 times as often as an explorer might in the same time-frame. I know this is quickly branching into other planes of game balance, but I’ve noticed that port visits are often the metric that progression is measured. Is it going to remain this way? How will this affect the various methods of play? Am I asking too many questions?
edited by Eggix on 6/18/2014

83

Thanks for the response Alexis. Of course, I assume you guys know what you’re doing, and I figured that Terror balance was a delicate situation to get right. I’m sure it’ll all pan out just fine over the course of development; my only concern was that right now, my desire to play a daring adventurer living on the edge and cutting out into unknown waters is impossible without an insane amount of grinding to increase stats and reduce terror. Just giving feedback to try and cut down on that grind.

Overall, I’m loving the game, and I look forward to seeing future updates smooth out these little bumps.

84

[color=#009900]Only if you expect them all to be answered! cos I have to set a small child offline and get that content patch out. Which is also why my response to spacemarine’s post is limited to: yup, crew recruitment will dilute terror at some point soon; and the Khaganian sewer, yeah, there’s a misplaced minus sign in that one.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]World clock vs port visits. (i) my strong sense is that watching hunger, terror, fuel and having a world clock going takes anxiety over the line, especially when it comes to indeterminate narrative events. (ii) there’s some specific relevance to it being specifically port visits because of the narrative beats involved (although there’s a random element in there too, like Hunter’s Keep). But I am leaving the door open to modulating it with the log clock, as per the slightly hand-wavy reference I made. We’ll see.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]@conductorbosh sure, don’t worry! feedback is massively anecdotal, but it’s still our best tool for taking the temperature of a game that we’ve played half to death and can’t black-box-test, and we appreciate your passion. And there is a tension between CRPG and roguelike that we’re still working on resolving, here. I will add that though that when you find yourself posting the same opinion several times and resorting to bold text emphasis, we’re probably getting to a conversation that generates more heat than light. :-)
[/color]
edited by Alexis on 6/18/2014

85

[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=#009900]@conductorbosh sure, don’t worry! feedback is massively anecdotal, but it’s still our best tool for taking the temperature of a game that we’ve played half to death and can’t black-box-test, and we appreciate your passion. And there is a tension between CRPG and roguelike that we’re still working on resolving, here. I will add that though that when you find yourself posting the same opinion several times and resorting to bold text emphasis, we’re probably getting to a conversation that generates more heat than light. :-)
[/color]
edited by Alexis on 6/18/2014[/quote]

Hey, I think you misunderstood my use of bold text. I’m not actually using it for any sort of emphasis; I’m not at all upset about any of this. I’ve done so much early-access style testing like this for so many games: I was expecting plenty of unrefined things. In fact, Sunless Sea is probably the most polished early access release I’ve seen yet.

I’ve found that when I try and express feedback in situations like this, I often get a little wordy. The bold text is a sort of in-feedback &quottoo long;didn’t read&quot summary, the most important single thought I’m trying to get across, because I understand that busy devs often won’t have the time/inclination to read an especially long/wordy bit of feedback.

Sorry for any confusion!

86

I too have recently started playing, with much the same comments. Terror has no realistic way to be reduced (I suppose I could go renounce the gods, but that’s a one-time thing), with all i’ve seen being 1s or 2s for something that gains 1 or 2 ridiculously quickly. When I inevitably get high terror, I promptly lose all of my crew because they want to swim south when we’re inches away from port (or further away, it just keeps happening). In terms of fuel and hunger, these have never actually been an issue - hunger particularly is easy to manage, especially with the hordes of zee-bats around that think i’m a magnet. For combat,zee-bats are easy to defeat, but come in hordes, so I have to spend a LOT of time just doing the same thing to kill them, pirates are tough but manageable with a loss to hull strength, crabs are between, and anything else I see I haven’t even tried to kill - i’ve just started running in the other direction hoping to reach port (Not sure how tough they are because of this, but I have a hard time killing two pirate ships in a row).

In actually gaining stuff - At the moment, boosting any stat seems quite expensive - I’ve only gotten a couple secrets, and none of them are very helpful. I certainly haven’t explored very far - I can safely make it to Whither (lifebergs, at least, are slower than me) and back and have ventured to the cumaean canal and the beginning of the placeholder stuff, but I can only go so far with terror rising. The only particularly profitable things I have done involved getting a report from codex and finding an item the Alarming Scholar took for 500 echoes.

I’m still trying to find my way around the game, and have been mostly playing it safe (and still dying), but these are my thoughts . I know most of this has already been said and addressed, just adding my voice to the pile.

87

I am your father, Spacemarine (9).

88

Anybody recommending changes, I suggest looking at this series of columns about Roguelikes in general:
http://www.gamesetwatch.com/column_at_play/
It provides probably the most in-depth education on the whys behind the mechanics in Roguelikes, that I’ve seen.

The reason I link is that it very effectively convinced me that there should be more persistent progress in Sunless Sea, hopefully some kind of fate points or something that make the early game far more trivial to get through. Because at the moment the early game is precisely what the Stone Soup guys have tried to avoid, a series of boring trivial choices.

Essentially if I go back to Sunless Sea, I have to trade with Venderbright over and over until I capture a pirate ship, not a guarantee as that, and then use that windfall to become a little bit better, and continue to trade with Venderbright until I capture a pirate ship, and so on adnausium as the progress is so minor each time. Terror isn’t even a provocation to go exploring as it will only continue to grow outside the main trading route. Essentially I have to get bored and decide to kill the character by deciding to see more of the game. There is no risk because the only options are between safety and certain death. There is no real risk mitigation, except for the boring gameplay of sticking to light paths and shores, the most interesting traversal problems are when you are being chased by monsters not having to plot out exact routes from point A to point B every single f-ing time. Veterans will always insist on boring gameplay because they have to justify their own mastery and time investment into that gameplay, and one best indicators of the division between veteran and the non-veteran is that the non-veteran isn’t putting up with the boring gameplay. The early game is pure and simple a grind, and appears fairly feature complete which is why I’m worried about it.

89

Trading with Venderbight in the early game is hell boring, so… don’t do it and go straight to Pigmote Island in the southeast (roughly south of station iii or thereabouts); contributing to either side via a stat challenge will net you nearly a thousand echoes worth of stuff and, if you help the rats at least, ten fuel. i only helped the cavies once and I can’t remember the rewards for that but they’re still about the same. The stat challenges are rather difficult, especially if you haven’t put a starting boost into Veils or Iron, but you can keep trying them until you succeed.
Pigmote Isle is a hella good starting point; perhaps too good, but much better than running up and down from Venderbight and London. That thousand echoes will at least finance a slightly better engine, a harpoon gun of reasonable quality and enough fuel and supplies to give you a reasonable shot at making it to Port Cecil and back a few times, which is probably one of the better cash sources at the minute. Enough capital to pursue Admirality Commissions, at the very least, which are pretty profitable (you’re almost definitely not going to burn 15 fuel on a round trip to wherever they take you).

None of that is incredibly obvious to a new player, I will say. I do plan on writing some guideposts to things for a better cool fun time in a little while when the balance is a little bit more stable, but I’m an external meta resource so mayyybe the game could use some more helpful pointers within it itself. I dunno.

[quote=babelfishwars]

I am your father, Spacemarine (9).[/quote]
noooo
edited by Spacemarine9 on 6/18/2014

90

Thanks for the advice! And I’m sure at some point soon we’ll reach a point where there are no longer 2 or 3 &quotfirst things to do&quot that are almost essential for a new player; I’d like to not start my playthroughs the same way every time in a perma-death game.

91

Goes to read the articles on Roguelikes.

I actually have played several Roguelikes, and I’ve even played Rogue, although Zangband was probably my favorite. Those games were fast-paced with lots of randomization and sudden death. Some didn’t even have vendors or a “home base.” They almost never had involved storylines or quests. Until Diablo. That was one weird Roguelike.

I love that this game is going to have Roguelike components, but the balance really needs to be found so that the wonderful stories can actually be finished without having had perfect luck on all the RNG rolls.

92

Just as an alternate suggestion, you can do Venderbight runs until you’ve progressed the Genial Magician’s storyline a bit and run south to the Khanate, then hit Pigmote, then build the Serpentine if you’re lucky. Right now the speed bonus will do more for survivability than anything else you can do in the early game.[li]
edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 6/18/2014

93

[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
…
[color=#009900]We’ll also likely tie terror reduction to some of the NPC rewards in FL.[/color]
[color=#009900]…
[/color][/quote]

Hopefully the benefits aren’t seen as so great that they become seen by the community at large as necessary, as you could alienate some of the potential playerbase if it appears to play SS properly you need to be playing FL.

94

[quote=AorticAneurysm][quote=Alexis Kennedy]
…
[color=#009900]We’ll also likely tie terror reduction to some of the NPC rewards in FL.[/color]
[color=#009900]…
[/color][/quote]

Hopefully the benefits aren’t seen as so great that they become seen by the community at large as necessary, as you could alienate some of the potential playerbase if it appears to play SS properly you need to be playing FL.[/quote]

This. Terror should be 100% manageable to someone who has never played FL and never, ever wants to. I haven’t actually seen devs say whether or not they’ll be altering the Terror mechanic or improving the efficiency of Terror-lowering actions, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that FL will not be the only way to adequately reduce terror to the point where you can regularly explore uncharted waters.

this is coming from an avid FL player; it just shouldn’t be necessary for obvious reasons; it would worsen the only real problem that Sunless Sea has at the moment: the grind

edited by conductorbosh on 6/18/2014

95

[quote=AorticAneurysm][quote=Alexis Kennedy]
…
[color=#009900]We’ll also likely tie terror reduction to some of the NPC rewards in FL.[/color]
[color=#009900]…
[/color][/quote]

Hopefully the benefits aren’t seen as so great that they become seen by the community at large as necessary, as you could alienate some of the potential playerbase if it appears to play SS properly you need to be playing FL.[/quote]

I have the feeling that FL stands here for the place, not the game. But I can be wrong, of course. ;)
edited by Ridiculus Undarke on 6/18/2014

96

[quote=Ridiculus Undarke][quote=AorticAneurysm][quote=Alexis Kennedy]
…
[color=#009900]We’ll also likely tie terror reduction to some of the NPC rewards in FL.[/color]
[color=#009900]…
[/color][/quote]

Hopefully the benefits aren’t seen as so great that they become seen by the community at large as necessary, as you could alienate some of the potential playerbase if it appears to play SS properly you need to be playing FL.[/quote]

I have the feeling that FL stands here for the place, not the game. But I can be wrong, of course. ;)
edited by Ridiculus Undarke on 6/18/2014[/quote]

Good point! I hope you’re right. The more helpful FL is (the place in SS), the more viable it’ll be to scope out the randomly generated zones.

97

[quote=Ridiculus Undarke][quote=AorticAneurysm][quote=Alexis Kennedy]
…
[color=#009900]We’ll also likely tie terror reduction to some of the NPC rewards in FL.[/color]
[color=#009900]…
[/color][/quote]

Hopefully the benefits aren’t seen as so great that they become seen by the community at large as necessary, as you could alienate some of the potential playerbase if it appears to play SS properly you need to be playing FL.[/quote]

I have the feeling that FL stands here for the place, not the game. But I can be wrong, of course. ;)
edited by Ridiculus Undarke on 6/18/2014[/quote]

Ah that might make more sense!

If so mea culpa!
edited by AorticAneurysm on 6/18/2014

98

Haven’t bought the game yet. You know… money. :( But I expect that will be corrected until the Steam release.

Anyway, just want to add my 2 cents of… something.

I expect nothing less than fiendishly difficult enemies, almost impossible to defeat for even the most experienced captains with most advanced ships and weapons :cool:… but only for high-level parts of the game. The Lorn-Flukes fit that role well, and we know there’ll be others (Nemesis?). A game of this kind - that is, with focus on exploration and lore, not combat - needs enemies that can’t be defeated by mere human force, but then they have to be made easily avoidable for a cautious player. Why does Planescape: Torment come to my mind as an example of a game that avoids battle whenever it has a chance and is better because of it?

Of course, low- and mid-level enemies need to be more evenly matched, as others have already pointed out.

99

Just out of curiosity, are there any plans for terror reduction options when away from FL, by sailing near lights or using resources or anything? My concern being actually being able to spend time in the area that aren’t static every play through. Or will there be a point-of-no-return distance where you’re too far to return to FL no matter what and you’re looking at a guaranteed terror fail-state?

100

[quote=Spacemarine9]Trading with Venderbight in the early game is hell boring, so… don’t do it and go straight to Pigmote Island in the southeast (roughly south of station iii or thereabouts); contributing to either side via a stat challenge will net you nearly a thousand echoes worth of stuff and, if you help the rats at least, ten fuel. i only helped the cavies once and I can’t remember the rewards for that but they’re still about the same. The stat challenges are rather difficult, especially if you haven’t put a starting boost into Veils or Iron, but you can keep trying them until you succeed.
Pigmote Isle is a hella good starting point; perhaps too good, but much better than running up and down from Venderbight and London. That thousand echoes will at least finance a slightly better engine, a harpoon gun of reasonable quality and enough fuel and supplies to give you a reasonable shot at making it to Port Cecil and back a few times, which is probably one of the better cash sources at the minute. Enough capital to pursue Admirality Commissions, at the very least, which are pretty profitable (you’re almost definitely not going to burn 15 fuel on a round trip to wherever they take you).

None of that is incredibly obvious to a new player, I will say. I do plan on writing some guideposts to things for a better cool fun time in a little while when the balance is a little bit more stable, but I’m an external meta resource so mayyybe the game could use some more helpful pointers within it itself. I dunno.

[quote=babelfishwars]

I am your father, Spacemarine (9).[/quote]
noooo
edited by Spacemarine9 on 6/18/2014[/quote]
Slightly off-topic, but…

Upon seeing this advice, I found my way to pigmote (used 6 fuel and 50 terror as I had never been there before), and received only 3 scintillack (300 total) and 1 parabola-linen following the recent update. Did I do something wrong, or has this changed? (sided with the rats, attacked with irons, failed all subsequent challenges and could not repeat).