i guess it got nerfed, rip, it used to give 10 fuel 10 linen and 3 scintillack. Still, 360 echoes is still a pretty reasonable sum to start with even then
I understand the need to make combat more challenging, for sure. I guess what I was getting at with my earlier critiques of combat was the lack of scaling, and flensing being the only kind of weapon worth having. What I think would be better would be to make other weapon varieties more viable to catch up to flensing’s power, rather than just scale down flensing or scale up enemies.
As for difficulty right out of the gate, I understand making things hard is important, but the question is how hard things get before they stop being fun. My issue with the diminished profit of echoes isn’t so much that I don’t have stuff as it is that just funding exploration and enjoying content is where most of those echoes go, with very little return. That was really my issue with echoes and secrets limiting stats, was that I was facing a wall in front of gameplay and experiencing content based on circumstances I had very little control over.
Indeed, the rewards plus the port reports I gathered got me enough to but myself a cannon with harpoon to use in my playing (though how i’ll get rid of the terror that haunts my crew and drives them overboard is to be seen).
Actually you only get fuel if you succeed the Veils check now, I think; that comes with a cure of 15 Terror, 1 Scintillack and 4 Parabola-Linen. Which is still a perfectly respectable haul; 340 echoes of goods, enough fuel to explore for quite a while and a rat friend to boot.
Refuelling at Pigmote is kinda awful, though; you get 1 fuel for a SAY charge, but the time it’d take to deviate course enough to park there will probably cost you more than that alone. If it were 2-3 Fuel then it might be worth the stopoff.
Most of this advice boils down to "do the same boring thing for a long time every time you start a play through of this randomized game to earn the ability to experience new things."
Grindy. It’s like if the first world of Spelunky/BInding of Isaac/whatever was static every time.Not blaming the people giving advice, or even the devs, as the game is obviously in an early state and much of it is enjoyable, but this isn’t the sort of thing that should be necessary when the game hits 1.0.
edited by conductorbosh on 6/19/2014
there isn’t actually any random map shuffling yet though
i mean i see what you’re saying but, y’know, you keep bringing up the randomization that doesn’t actually exist yet (and even if it was in it probably wouldn’t change that much unless pigmote spawned way the hell off in the chelonate or something)
it is probably always going to be a game where fixed strategies work to a reasonable degree, though, even if they don’t suit every single situation. story content’s probably not going to be all that fluid, after all, and some locations kind of have to stay in roughly the same place (anything on the coast, for instance)
edited by Spacemarine9 on 6/19/2014
I was under the impression that Fallen London’s immediate environs (tomb people shores, etc) would stay in the same place. If not, the criticism still applies, as in the games current terror-system state you would have to get lucky with things like it and pigmote spawning nearby to survive.
Again, I’m just providing feedback; overall this is an awesome game that scratches my lovecrafty-exploration itch like no game has before.
Also the music is bonkers good
PS. I have no issue at all with fixed strategies working! Every game has fixed strategies that work, pretty much. I only mind if fixed strategies end up being necessary to not get terror-screwed very quickly, as some might argue they are now. Again, I don’t think this is going to happen necessarily, I’m just warning against it in my limited capacity as some nobody who bought/enjoys the game and is giving feedback on the forums.
Keep on keepin’ on
edited by conductorbosh on 6/19/2014
edited by conductorbosh on 6/19/2014
edited by conductorbosh on 6/19/2014
map shuffling will be A Thing eventually (in July), just not at the minute is all. by then there’ll probably (???) be more ways to make money. maybe.
I think everyone’s already covered the same issues I have with difficulty/terror - though at least I can run away from enemies once I know which ones are going to insta-kill me! :) The terror is a much bigger issue because it accumulates way, way faster than I can decrease it.
Actually, speaking of terror, even though I did initially like the music that you get when it starts getting high, the jarring beginning part gets super annoying (and I feel like I hear it every ten seconds) so I turn the sound off whenever it starts playing (which is a lot :( ). That’s a pretty subjective thing though.
But besides all that I’m really enjoying this so far! (Once my first three characters died and I actually figured out how to move my ship without crashing into islands, that is.) The atmosphere and art especially have a really cool, unique vibe to them.
Finally got my copy of this from the humble bundle site and played around with it a bit and ended up dying to a mutiny from terror within an hour. I figured I had to be missing some way to reduce it in large chunks since even modest explorations grant enormous amounts of terror. The game led me to believe that exploring the Zee was the Big Thing in the game, from the kickstarter updates, from the emphasis on (eventual) random maps, and from the obvious first ‘Mission’ being asking for a destination at the admiralty.
Coming here to see what other’s experiences were and seeing that the consensus is that it’s a game of risk mitigation and a game over clock is jarring and not at all what I was expecting or hoping for. I was expecting terror to be a limit on just how far you could go in one voyage, rather than a slow deterioration into inevitable death.
I hope that as development continues exploration is no longer disincentivized by the core game mechanics. The first thing I thought of to allow for better exploration without breaking the economic balance of the game was to take a mechanic from Sid Meier’s Pirates! where you have to let the entire crew go with shares because, in that game, they simply want to enjoy their earnings, and in this game because they’re too horrified to continue.
Whether that or some other game mechanic, I hope and look forward to a game that better rewards its implied theme.
edited by talain on 6/19/2014
You can still explore even with terror, you just have to explore carefully. You have to do a bit of planning and careful scouting and learn where the lighted corridors are. Learn to minimize your time spent gaining terror. That’s the risk of exploration in this game – you might find something new and cool, you might take a wrong turn and gain a bunch of terror in the unmarked darkling deep.[li]
I’m really not having the same problems with terror that everyone else seems to be. I mean I gain between ten and twenty terror or so per trip but I always manage to have enough spare cash to bring it back down again. Maybe it’s because I’m always doing the side missions and gathering port reports etc., maybe it’s because the Serpentine makes me go faster, but I think the main thing is just that I avoid big stretches of open ocean and plan my routes so I’m staying in lit areas and moving from island to island rather than charging into the deep unknown every time. If I do plunge into the lightless deep I do it carefully and retreat if I don’t see any buoys nearby.
edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 6/19/2014[/li][li]
edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 6/19/2014
But isn’t it fuuuun to plunge into the lightless deep… Sometimes…?
And I agree that everything will be fine, as long as more efficient ways to reduce terror (or at least better or more numerous ways to make money) are added before randomization is. The main concern is not making early game too much of a slog, as early game is the type you’ll be experiencing the most (I.E. You might not always make it to mid game but obviously you’re back to early every time you die… Unless you play with saving like a yellowbelly)
And yeah, a faster engine helps a lot.
edited by conductorbosh on 6/19/2014
edited by conductorbosh on 6/19/2014
I think more ways to make money are a better solution than a terror mechanics one. More specifically, I think it’s a matter of implementing more purchasing options in other ports, with fiction-matching price differences. Actually implementing some form of functioning trade in the game will allow for terror reduction while maintaining the risk and tension of uncharted exploration.
If this is the intended gameplay then there needs to be a lot more feedback as to the danger. Giant enemy crabs and a moving iceberg of the deepest black convey the danger and fear they represent very well (I certainly ran away from the latter with a panicky click on the MORE SPEED button as soon as it started moving at me!), but if simply sailing somewhere without a local light source is more dangerous than either (as it was for me) it should be made much more clear: in tooltips, sound effects and the GUI.
I’d also rather that it simply wasn’t the biggest danger, because a slowly increasing clock is the most boring form of danger. Even in (strict) roguelikes the food clock is very generous, easily reset and only exists to stop incredible amount of grind. Here, the incredible grind is what you’d use to best defray the terror clock.
Not to mention this game really doesn’t give me a roguelike vibe, even with the voluntary permadeath. It feels like Pirates! or Escape Velocity, where you’re trying to slowly build up and explore outward and find story until things come to a seemingly natural conclusion, unless you’re murdered by pirates (or zee monsters!). The character creation involving picking a personal story and hoped-for-conclusion is probably the most jarring bit of flavor with the (intended?) roguelike character of an outright time limit.
edited by talain on 6/19/2014
When playing the Amethyst update, I’ve been pretty annoyed with having to sink a couple hundred echoes into terror reduction whenever I come back from a long voyage - long as in, say, a loop via Port Cecil, Gaider’s Mourn and Polythreme - but I didn’t think to complain about this until everyone else spoke up about it because it wasn’t making the game unplayable. I was even still able to scrape some profit on a good voyage and more or less break even on a bad one, by means of bringing back lots of port reports (an incentive to stop at every port I pass!) and strategic information, taking the Cheery Man’s job offer every time, and fighting all the weak beasties and pirates I saw (bound-sharks back when they had 5 Life, steam-pinnaces, and frigates and giant crabs back when they were tougher than a tramp-steamer but not lethal enough to immediately stomp you flat).
Still, I don’t think I would have made it to the point where I can afford to spend hundreds of echoes on terror reduction and another hundred-odd echoes on resupplying if I hadn’t started my save a couple updates ago, judging by how difficult it currently is to get out of the early game grind. Certainly it would be much harder to profit from killing things at the current difficulty (although that’s already slated for reconfiguration so this comment is a bit superfluous), and I’m not sure if fuel actually drains faster in Gold but it was already draining really damn fast in Amethyst – even with the default engine on the tramp-steamer, since I have never upgraded my engine – and does not need to run out any faster.
I think if I tried the Gold update, even starting from this mid-level position, I’d slowly run out of money until I could no longer mitigate the costs of longer voyages and then die of terror or starvation. Or possibly a crab would get me first.
I’m one of the people Spacemarine9 was referring to who seem to be favoured by the RNG, too; my zailors hardly ever commit suicide or murder each other anymore, and I pretty much only lose them when I either capture a ship in combat or get someone killed in a port through recklessness or bad luck. All I get is autofire storylets that raise my terror even further and I can’t do anything about it, and then either I successfully duck back into London with Terror somewhere between 85 and 99 (I am not even exaggerating that upper bound, I once made it back in with 99 Terror) or trigger a mutiny on my way back because I couldn’t get to a port that offered shore leave in time.
I’d suggest adding more places at zee where you can recruit crew members, so that if something you can’t avoid swallows most of your crew (whether it’s terror events or monsters snatching them from the deck in battle) you don’t have to limp all the way back from, say, Palmerston’s Reach at half-speed. Especially since you’ll gain twice the terror if you move at half-speed. The only places you could pick up zailors in Amethyst were the Khanate, which was expensive, and Demeaux Island, which only gives you one zailor and uses up your Something Awaits You.
Also, about the terror music, since ReginaOctavia reminded me. I like the track in and of itself (well, I like all the music) and I find it very fitting for generally zailing around with high Terror, but on the other hand, I’m not thrilled with how hitting 75 Terror instantly makes the location-based music fade out and the terror music scare-chord itself onto the stage. It’s… well, maybe it’s supposed to be jarring and/or a startling wake-up call to let the player know "HEY! Your crew is dangerously scared!". But it does that job a little too well.
I’d suggest allowing the current music to finish before the scary music begins; that would make it no more startling than zailing into Palmerston’s Reach, and make the music change subtler rather than being obviously tied to a somewhat arbitrary number. (I mean, the Terror gauge is an abstraction, your crew is only a little more scared at 75 Terror than they were at 70 Terror and they won’t be a lot more scared at 80 Terror.) I think that’s what it used to do a couple updates ago, and it worked well then.
goodness I wrote a lot
edited by CameoAppearance on 6/19/2014
here is a small scatter of assorted bonus thoughts before I go to bed;
Zee-beasts are now slightly more reasonable to fight, but they’re still rather underhanded opponents. Yelling to raise Terror seems to basically be a free move, which makes sense but is kind of rude. Snatches have such a low Illumination range that they’re nigh-impossible to shake, and some creatures have them which maybe shouldn’t (Do bound-sharks leap straight on deck to eat a zailor or something?). Their main attack being 4 seconds rather than 5 is what makes them so tough, though; you need to have already started a conventional Evade or Attack if you want to outspeed them, which means taking hits happens a lot and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it unless you have a ton of Strange Catches.
why do my crew keep suiciding in rapid bursts it’s despairing
Raising the favor of Khaganian factions is really goddamn expensive; drowning-perals are rare, and 5 sacks of coffee costs a whopping 400 echoes for a single point of Leopard favor.
all the port reports are worse now except the shepherd isles for some reason, goddamn
the pneumatic ratsender is an incredible idea, i want seven irl and in FL. is nuncio the island i think it is?? i don’t know what my own island is called any more.
does the alarming scholar visit quality ever show up, i have genuinely never seen it when returning to london even after a lot of trips
terror reduction at wolfstack docks is worse now. welp.
i’m glad i can get hunting trophies by means other than being a total goddamn idiot when a white zee bat shows up
elder angler crabs are way intense to hell. they don’t hit that hard but they tank hits like whoa
the sound effect for Submerge is really bad. like really really bad. it’s awful quality and it lasts ages
i’ve still not ever gotten a soothe&copper long box. like seriously what the hell rng
it’s way too late for me to be awake ha ha ha ha. ha.
Just did this, btw: 8 Scintillack, 4 Linen, other stuff. So variable, but highly worthwhile.
[quote=Ridiculus Undarke]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]
[color=#009900]You’re not wrong. Don’t worry, folks, I meant NPCs like the Admiral and the Scholar in Fallen London the SS location. [/color]
Um, Alexis? Go to bed :-)
[quote=Ewan C.]
Just did this, btw: 8 Scintillack, 4 Linen, other stuff. So variable, but highly worthwhile.[/quote]
i got 3 scintillack, 4 linen every time for all results after i parked there and saved to test if any of the other outcomes were particularly desirable; i wonder if there’s something else at play, maybe mainstat scaling??? it’s not really feasible to get any more than maybe 10 or 20 extra stat points though so it’s not like putting it off would help much
why would anyone ever want to do this. sleep is for the we-- actually no never mind no its nto
edited by Spacemarine9 on 6/19/2014