Am I mistaken or tomb colonists don’t work anymore? I re-installed the game recently. I distinctly remember Colonist runs being the sure way to make some money in the early stages. Now I can only get one colonist at London and when I unload him I am told I need to do some random quest which is really hard to do. How am I supposed to do that without money? How am I supposed to earn money now?
Please help me :(
edited by Bluebeard on 11/23/2014
Far from ideal. With just a profit of 30/50 echoes and considering expenses the profit margin will be minimal. And besides, Godfall could be far and it’s always in a different place no?
Really, is there no way to ensure a safe profit?
edited by Bluebeard on 11/23/2014
Well, a lack of assured profit is vaguely realistic, even if it is annoying.
Then again, a talking rat just thanked me for ending a war between them and the guinea pigs over a piece of shiny coral.
I think a couple of things have been nerfed in the latest build - not being able to buy deck or aft guns or Secure Storage for most of the ships and the change to Tomb Colonists which is very annoying and you need three of them for another story as well.
As for making echoes I think the only things that are guaranteed are Port Reports, there don’t seem to be any easily repeatable Trade Routes. If you are lucky enough to have the Salt Lions or Godfall close to London and have enough echoes to cover the cost they can be profitable.
Edit - there are the quest stories - First Curator; Merchant Venturer and the Principles. They might be one offs but when you get the items you make significant money.
edited by reveurciel on 11/23/2014
If this is the case, that’s pretty frustrating. The tomb colonists run was a really important profit source for my early game. I needed it to tide me over until I could clear out enough of the map to start higher grinds like the Stone Lions. Getting rid of it makes the starting bits feel forbiddingly arduous, I think.
I’ve adapted to not having the Tomb Colonists to run anymore. (By just running to Mutton Island over and over again until I get that one storylet. I swear, that storylet is the only real easy money in the early game.)
What vexes me though is there’s no obvious way to reduce your “Trouble with Tomb Colonists” quality. My very first run it shot up to 190. I thought it would be one of those qualities that fell over time. I kind of assume there’s other storylets I haven’t seen, aren’t in, or aren’t working properly.
Yes, that’s very annoying, also because there is no real warning on what happens really.
I just know that somehow I got Trouble with Tomb Colonists at 110 and, considering that my map is pretty empty in the first row after the coast, I am really struggling with my current early game to find a decent source of money.
I’m actually glad they "nerfed" this one… I still remember having to ship those mummies over and over again for hours and hours on end in the very first installments. I cannot imagine why anyone would actually want to do that. Right now you should be better off doing just about anything else.
I haven’t tried it with a totally fresh character yet, but the best Thing about the Salt Lions might not be Sphinxstone, but the Searing Enigma you can get with Salt’s Attention - it just costs you a Secret and a Zee-Story, basically… and sells for a round thousand with a certain Scholar. And it’s repeatable over and over again.
Edit: Oh my, hopefully I haven’t just assigned the next target for nerfing :D[li]
edited by Reshemin on 11/24/2014
It’s almost like I have to go to the goddamn Tomb Colonies FIVE THOUSAND TIMES to ever get Viric or advance the Magician’s quest and I STILL HAVE NOT DONE EITHER because I have never gotten that RNG event ONCE in this round of the game and maybe I’d like my constant trips there not to be 100% a drain on resources. I’ve sailed up Adam’s Way and come back alive. I’ve visited every currently available place in the game. I hit the colonies every chance I get and I STILL CANNOT GET THAT GODDAMN EVENT. I’ve gotten every other color, still not that one!
…Or, barring my frustrations, that "Trade with strange new lands" and "Trade silk and souls, mushroom wine and hallucinogenic honey" are actually part of the blurbs advertising the game. Chill out, man, some people want to trade. The game advertises trade. If trade is really difficult and unbalanced, they need to know about it so they can fix it.
I don’t get this. If people want to get bored out of their mind by going up and down one thousand times from London to Vanderbight just for trading a measly 45E of Tomb colonists (not net of fuel and supplies use), it should be their choice.
[/li][li]And as Midnight said, it’s not much different than being forced going up and down the Colonies in the hope of triggering a specific event. And trade IS part of the advertisement of the game; this one was a nice little route for the beginning to get on your feet a bit before launching yourself to more exciting ventures. Actually what irritates me most is that the current way of blocking it feels very arbitrary.
[/li]
If memory serves… Alexis has, in the past, talked about the problem of having easy grinds in your game. Now matter how tedious and low-profit the grind is, compared to actually going out and adventuring, it will always attract a huge crowd who never see anything of the game proper. I gather that conventional trade routes - especially easy-to-predict and -navigate trade routes - are being de-emphasised for that reason.
edited by Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook on 11/24/2014
Yes - I started a new game yesterday and have uncovered most of the active islands and started some of the stories. I never did see much point in puttering up to the tomb colonies and back - the profit margin was so low. It was worth it when I was heading North for a Port Report or something but hold space is valuable and there are items out there which sell for a lot more than 15 echoes each. You just have to be lucky with the random storylets or when fighting pirates and beasties.
Edit to add - I haven’t actually started a new game from scratch I used the legacy option so I have a nice mansion and some money to get things started. I expect it would be a lot harder with a completely new captain.
edited by reveurciel on 11/24/2014
[quote=Reshemin]I’m actually glad they "nerfed" this one… I still remember having to ship those mummies over and over again for hours and hours on end in the very first installments. I cannot imagine why anyone would actually want to do that. Right now you should be better off doing just about anything else.
I haven’t tried it with a totally fresh character yet, but the best Thing about the Salt Lions might not be Sphinxstone, but the Searing Enigma you can get with Salt’s Attention - it just costs you a Secret and a Zee-Story, basically… and sells for a round thousand with a certain Scholar. And it’s repeatable over and over again.
Edit: Oh my, hopefully I haven’t just assigned the next target for nerfing :D[li]
edited by Reshemin on 11/24/2014[/quote]
Whether you mention it or not, I’m pretty sure it will get nerfed in the next patch. The return from this + sphinxstone in the same run is just incredible.
Regarding trade, the site states: "The bones are there, but we want to add more". Hopefully this is coming in Sapphire[/li]
I’ve got 70 hours in game, m’kay? If I have to put another 30 in to the beginning game because I don’t have viable alternatives I’ll probably vomit magma from my eyeballs. You’re entitled to your "too grindy" opinion, but don’t lambast people who don’t find the (incredibly repetitive) port runs for next to no profit exciting. I can probably write out every single available storylet for the first 10 islands you run into in game, I’ve done them so many times.
Besides, I’ve done over 50 runs to Mutton Island this game for that Judgement’s Egg. How is that any different, or more fun, than actually doing trading? Answer: it’s not! It’s just as grindy!
edited by Nenjin on 11/24/2014
[color=#009900]I can see the temperature on this thread rising. A few points:[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]- stay courteous, please, folks, we’ve got a nice tradition on this board.[/color]
[color=#009900]- very profitable runs (like sphinxstone) will be time-limited and dry up over the course of a game[/color]
[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]- there will be basic trading; it will never be the best way to make money, because if it was, people would never do anything else.[/color]
[color=#009900]- all (or very nearly all) of the items available only from random events will also be purchaseable, somewhere.[/color]
[color=#009900]- the new legacies system (that you may have seen teased today) will make it easier to maintain progress between games.[/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]Thanks for your patience: it’s been tricky balancing the needs of the future story with the needs of the current player base, but the pieces are coming together.[/color]
Maybe make the trading factor to be playable like tradewinds series or space rangers, including with news that give hint if certain place need/surplus on certain trades and limited items on ports? This probably also can solve a problem that when you get wealthy, fuels and food no longer a problem…
edited by rosedragon on 11/25/2014
Honestly, I feel the prices just need to diverge a little more.
Take the Brass Embassy for example. What they will buy souls for is painfully and obviously balanced against what London sells them for. We get as gamers why it is this way, but it seems so draconian. I think the prices could diverge more and it wouldn’t honestly put game balance in that much of jeopardy, or entice otherwise "honest" players to start bottom-dollar trading.
For everyone but the Cargo and Dreadnought captains, cargo space prevents you from making money on trading in bulk in most cases anyways. So when your "take" from selling 10 Mushroom Wine at Venderblight is 30 echoes…it just seems like it doesn’t need to be that restrictive.
Also if SS was willing to have stores hold actual quantity, instead of unlimited purchases of all items, you could play a lot more with pricing levels and have the same overall impact on the game.
Because I think the main problem with trading in SS is perception. Players don’t feel like the effort they put out to do X is being rewarded adequately. (Researching prices, making room for goods, spending the resources, ect…) A better return on a less farmable set of transactions I think would improve people’s perception of both trading and how the game treats trading. If in the end you still can’t make that much money, but in individual trades you can make an appreciable amount (enough to at least come close to covering fuel and supply costs) people wouldn’t be so bent out of shape about stuff like changes to Tomb Colonists.
Note, I come from the camp of "let the player ruin their own game if they want to." So to me, preventing people from grinding a trade activity to stop bottom-level play has the adverse of effect of punishing everyone else by making what seems like an obvious way to play infeasible. So I’d rather the game say "Buy 1000 souls from London and sell them to the BE at 6 echoes profit a piece if you want", than rigorously try to keep prices balanced across the whole world. It’d be even cooler if prices could be dynamically generated but I know that’s wishful thinking at this point.
edited by Nenjin on 11/25/2014
That being said, you can make a decent profit on souls if you buy them from Khan’s Shadow. They’re much cheaper there.
Depends on the location of KS (i.e. how many fuel and supplies it would cost you just to try running souls from there to FL.)
Most trading is profitable on some level until you consider the overhead involved in doing anything in SS.
I think the game would benefit a lot from a "Patrician III" approach.
In Patrician 3 there were no fixed prices. It all depended on supply & demand. Prices could drop suddenly, or rise. It wasn’t certain. Now, I’m not suggesting that Sunless Sea should adopt a system as complex as that. Patrician 3 modelled it with actual production and consumption of goods. In Sunless Sea it could be mostly random, with some towns generally being better at producing certain goods and at consuming them (but, once again, no certainty). If we randomize prices people will be encouraged to explore, travel and seek opportunities in other ports instead of grinding the same old usual trade route.
Example:
You go to Venderbight —> you notice that that week the price of Mushroom wine is actually lower than usual, so selling it wouldn’t be profitable. So you just go on to Whither, and we shall see if the price there is better. It would revolve around learning what prices are good for buying and seling each good. Also, prices raising or lowering could be influenced by the things you do in certain places. For instance, let’s assume you manage to disrupt the production of scintillack at Port Cecil: the price would rise. A big producer of mushroom wine has an issue at his winery and you solve it for him: the production would be increased and the price would lower.
edited by Bluebeard on 11/26/2014