Hit a wall - I have no goal

To be fair to the OP, I think most of us on this forum probably played during early access. It’s much easier to know what’s in the game when you read the patch notes of it being put it. To use an example from the OP, I would have no idea the Salt Lions had a story if I hadn’t read the update notes when they put it in. Knowing how StoryNexus works (which, as FL veterans we do) also makes things much easier.

On the subject of the wiki, I feel that if the response to any complaint or frustration with a freaking STORY BASED GAME is &quotgo look up spoilers&quot, than we have a problem. Of course, I’m not really sure how to make the game more newbie friendly. Having the ability to ask officers for hints or something like that?

Hints for the OP:

[ul][li]Whoever put the book pages together knew one of the pages (Pelgin) was less scrutable than the others, and included a note. Seen anything that resembles the description? Try poking around there.[/li][li]Mirror-catch boxes are often used for smuggling contraband. You’ll need a port that specializes in that. Maybe people who were kicked out of somewhere more… refined?[/li][li]If something has a quality, it’s progressing, even if you can’t see it.[/li][li]You’ll have more freedom to explore if you get a cash buffer. If only someone needed very expensive things they have a lot of to be moved a short way. Just because its not enthralling doesn’t mean it can’t help you get there.[/li][li]Vanderbligt (or however it’s spelled) has another quest you can do. It will take some supplies, but give you a profitable way to learn about the east.[/li][li]After all that, how about a nice game of chess. Or a lot of nice games of chess.[/li][li]Trading is unlikely to make a real profit without a large prior investment, but can help cover travel costs.
[/li][/ul]
edited by Avian Overlord on 2/13/2015

Hm, I see.

Knowing the UI can certainly contribute to more confidence, deserved or not. I feel like half the time, my mother’s &quotinability&quot with computers is a combination of her lack of confidence and her unfamiliarity with how to parse PC interfaces (each, of course, exacerbating the other).

Still, though, as has been pointed out, the currently experienced/established players were at one point not experienced or established. There may be a point to be made about accessibility to casual audiences, which might be more a pressing issue for a quirky indie game than some big-budget title, but let’s see how it pans out.

And since this is a thread about one person’s frustration, I think it’s more relevant to help the individual arrive at a happy solution, no?
edited by Fretling on 2/13/2015

I know this setting is steampunk and everything but that just seems like taking the archaism too far. Plus then I’d have to find it again and who could possibly do that on my desk?
edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 2/13/2015[/quote]
If you play in windowed mode you can just write on a notepad (after all I do click once in a while on the minimize window to check something in the wiki and I don’t think I’m the only one).
Besides, you can always write some notes on a smartphone, or a tablet close by. Nothing really shocking.

Well of course, if you are afraid of challenges or of making some effort you can do that.

Hey, no need for that.

Temper, temper, Polarimini. Less heatedly – you can do that, but if you remove the challenge of surviving on minimal ship speed and funds in the early game, and give yourself weapon slots you normally wouldn’t get until much later in the game, you’re removing some of the satisfaction of achieving wealth and a powerful ship later on.

I realize that Minecraft relied heavily on wikis to keep people from smashing their face into a wall, but it shouldn’t be required to play this game.

I went ahead and spoiled myself. It’s in a shop I’m not sure I can access a long distance away, at a high price.

It’s not fun taking hours to sail to these places and back again, especially since I’ve already been to them twice before and nothing about them changed the second time through, I’m not sure that sailing out there will actually achieve anything worthwhile (the traps in the game have made me wary), and the thought of having to sail out there yet again is making me not want to play again, no matter how strong the writing or impressive the setting.

Yeah, well, hindsight tells me gods are a thing in the game, and they actually have time enough to waste on fucking with me. Who knew? Not knowing that bit wiped out an entire quest line that’s apparently important, but oh well, that’s what I get for exploring.

Already done it as far as I can. Can’t beat it any more, the quest is too hard (unless I start risking a serious increase in whatever penalty failing the quest gives me, whatever that was, and the cost of perma-death is just too high to risk that).

I’m beginning to get the impression that I’ve just had nothing but lousy luck for this game, and I’m going to have to commit suicide and wipe my chart just to progress… but that means hours and hours and hours of sailing and repeating content I’ve already seen. Not a pleasant thought.

See, that’s just bad design/writing. I expected better in a game with such solid writing. If ‘doing stuff’ causes things to change, then things shouldn’t stay the same when I do stuff.

Progression hiding behind identical descriptions of the same event over and over again is not interesting, and is a bit like grinding in an MMO, only this time it’s text descriptions rather than rats.

I’ve already visited with and talked to the sisters 7+ times. The interactions are still identical. Two plainly commercial interactions for Sphinxstone were identical as well. Bad writing. There should be some variation, to encourage further exploration, not stale grinding drudgery to punish it.

Yeah, if I hadn’t read in-game explanations of game mechanics (wat?), I wouldn’t have known that’s how you remove curses. (Of course, I didn’t know that when I needed to know it, and haven’t run across any curses since, so they remain useless for now.)

Now that’s something I wish I’d known before wasting a third of my fuel taking a trip up there. I was pretty sure that was the case, but people kept insisting I must have some sort’ve item that could finish some part of that quest.

Well yeah, I assume it’s going to be on a ship I fight and sink or something. But folks kept insisting I remember stuff I’d read, and I remembered seeing the item mentioned in a shop. So I investigated, and it cost me my chance at actually progressing one of my officer’s storylines any time soon.

I do greatly suspect that the &quotobviousness&quot of these clues are only obvious in hindsight. I posted a link to my map in a previous comment (ctrl+F &quotimgur&quot), you tell me if I’ve found the relevant places or not. (Knowing that I have won’t help me, since as I mentioned earlier I can think of multiple locations for both of those.)

The problem is that solving those riddles involves much more than just finding the right port. You have to find the right port AND have the right item or the right skill or the right amount of luck to actually find what you’re looking for. Or so it seems. Either that, or every color is only available in the far east, because so far I’ve covered 3/4ths of the map, and I’m assuming that at least some of these colors are available in ports I’ve already visited, just locked behind some quest I haven’t unlocked yet or something.

Assuming I’ve found the location, I can think of at least four places that might fit that clue.

If I haven’t found the location, I have four red herrings distracting me away from the real location once I do find it.

It makes no sense for it not to be an exploit.

For example, why will the Admiral give you another mission without you first turning over the results of the last one? And if there is a reason for it, why doesn’t that reason apply to the time BEFORE you complete the first mission, so you can just pick up three or four fetch quests simultaneously? Why does he seem to know you’ve finished a mission and is happy to hand over another mission, all the while not actually receiving results for the last mission? It makes no narrative sense. Hence, exploit.

My lack of aft slots does, however.

Only fish I can fight drop nothing useful, or always cost me damage (which then costs me Echoes, etc). Ones I can’t fight might kill me, and likely in ways I can’t run from (unless I risk fire and death in an explosion, which is just another way of dying). So far I’ve been surviving through stealth almost exclusively. So apparently those two quests aren’t options to me until I get serious upgrades (unless I want to exploit movement mechanics they’re supposedly fixing or have fixed and spin in circles for ten minutes pushing 1 over and over again, at a risk of losing my progress and having to do everything all over again if I screw up or pick a fight that can’t be exploited).

Unf. The Hunter’s Keep -> Demeaux trip is long and empty of ports. I can do it, though I wish I could afford to do it AND buy two Live Specimens, so I could visit the Chapel while I was up there, but I can’t, so I’ll try without. But that long, vacuous first leg sorta illustrates what my current problem is with this game: There’s so much grindy ‘nothing’ standing between me and reading the good bits. (The fact that I’ll have to take the trip a second time when I can afford the 1000 Echoes is just another example.)

A long voyage here, repeating the same quest over and over again with no change in event descriptions there. A lot of mindless, grinding drudgery. I was having fun so long as I was hitting new content, but now that new content isn’t really around any more, and I’m not having fun any more.

There even seem to be fun little pitfalls designed to punish you for curiosity, such as the 100 Echo cost of asking about the Drowned Man in Wither.

But thanks for the advice, I’ll give it a swing. Maybe I won’t go broke doing it.


Honestly? Yeah, I’m starting to not have fun.

I feel like the content has now reached a point where I have to start ‘grinding’ something ala an MMO just to experience new content. Either I’m going to have to start making trip after trip of Sphinxstone (reading the same quest description over and over and over again until it finally changes, and I had to have someone spoil the fact that it would change for me to find out there was a point to doing that), or re-sailing already traveled water to try and figure out which of my already visited ports have something worthwhile waiting at them, or spending the ten+ minutes it’ll probably take for me to ‘safely’ fight something in combat without risking dying. (I’m not even sure I can do that last one.)

And grinding isn’t fun.

The first six or so hours were a blast, but things are falling to pieces now, and there’s nothing really solid and clearly achievable pushing me towards new content. Everything just feels either just out of reach, or buried amongst a bunch of already-experienced content, that I’ll have to sort through in order to find the tiny bits of hidden material remaining.


A way for me to review previous conversations and/or a way to ask the very people sitting on my boat the necessary questions to refresh my memory about things they’ve talked about.

An in game journal, perhaps? Something that records shops and what they carry would be nice too. There’s just far FAR too many shops and too many trade goods (that the game explicitly tells you aren’t worth trading, so it’s implicitly telling you to ignore them, right up until the point where you realize they’re important, and now you’ve ignored vital information) to keep track of mentally.

A wiki is a bad idea, because it contains information about things I haven’t seen yet, and the whole point of this game is to enjoy the story and writing, which you can’t do if things are spoiled for you. An in game journal that only reveals things you’ve already experienced? Much less cheaty option, with virtually no chance of spoilers.

(Specifically with the Mechanic, the problem isn’t that I don’t know what he needs for the trap, it’s that there’s no in-game connection between what he needs, and the trap’s existence. Before you explained that his current quest leads to the other quest that’s already visible to me, I thought that they were two entirely separate things, completely unrelated to each other. And I’m fairly certain that when he explained what he needed, he was being cryptic and mysterious, telling me to gather the box/clayman and he’d explain when he got both of those.)

&quotBeyond the gate there lies a sea more sunless&quot

I can think of at least three locations with gates or things that might be gates, one location with a ‘gate-like’ structure, one location that MAY (if I remember correctly) have mentioned a gate when I read it (I was busy panicking over being farther from London than I’d ever been before, and in drastically worse condition than I’d ever been before, so I don’t remember much. It was the first time I even learned about the ‘half-speed at half-crew’ mechanic, and didn’t figure out why I was going so slow until a tooltip or something explained it), and one part of the map that remember reading in one of the bits of description that it might have a gate in it, but I haven’t uncovered the area yet to see.

Not to mention all the places I haven’t been that might have gates in them.

Each of the places I can think of? Three are somewhat close to each other (I could conceivably look at all three in one voyage), but one is expensive to explore and would likely require multiple (unprofitable) trips, another ‘feels’ hostile (based on my first encounter with it), and the third may or may not exist. Two others could be visited on another journey, but again one is crazy expensive to explore (and would cost enough that I couldn’t visit the other), the other I can not pass through (already tried, need a ship upgrade). The sixth is almost my third-most visited place? So I doubt that it’s it.

So I’m not really sure what to ‘poke around’, or if I’d be wasting my time trying to do so with my currently revealed locations.

The game really ought to make that clear.

If you’re referring to Sphinxstone… I still feel like I’d be breaking even on making that trip. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. But the ‘profit’ isn’t that much.

Yeah. I’ve seen that one. Costs me 240 Echoes, over a quarter of my hold, and I have to hold on to that material until I locate three unnamed locations, potentially putting me into a position where I have something taking up space in my hold for ages to come, space I might need to survive the trips out to explore the areas I need to take the dudes.

And you mentioning that it involves ‘the east’ makes me all the more certain the game would screw me over in precisely the way I describe.

Already done it. Chance of success in that chain is now sub 20%? I think?

sphinxstone costs 200 echoes for 20, and sells for 500 per 20. It’s more than breaking even. Do pay attention to the text in London after you sell the sphinxstone, though. When it changes from the usual text, know that you have a trip ahead of you the next time. Maybe. Or you could take the other option, which may or may not involve a trip, depending on what background you chose.

Re: Colours

I can’t tell whether you’ve found the Gate yet. It’s labelled on your map, but it’s also covered in black. You have found the locations for the other two colours mentioned here, and even reasoned out where the clues lead (though then you went on listing other less likely possibilities for some reason).

As far as the chess game goes, if memory serves, the penalty for losing is not severe.

Also, the location of Mt. Palmerston on your map is nearly ideal for exploring the northern half of the Far East. Supplies cost 2 echoes more, but fuel there is actually cheaper than in London.

You’ve found two of the three. The last one shouldn’t be too far from Mt. Palmerston, and the reward at the end will more than cover your costs.
edited by Olorin on 2/13/2015

Looking at your map, there is no way that it is costing 300 echoes to get to the Salt Lions. Maybe 30.

Unless you’re getting Wounds from failing the challenge, you’re not risking perma-death. You can get three Wounds before you die, so you can head home to heal once you’ve got one or two. IIRC, though, failing at the chess game doesn’t give you wounds, it just locks out chess until your next visit to the island. You’ll need to keep trying, even though it’s now hard.

But, also … if the cost of perma-death is keeping you from trying difficult challenges, turn on Merciful Mode and save your game. Or accept frequent death. Progressing in storylines requires taking some risks and trying challenges that aren’t likely to succeed the first time. I don’t enjoy sudden permadeath, so I play in Merciful Mode. If you don’t want to do that, you really have to wrap your head around dying over and over and over again being part of the game.

But that’s how you learn. You do the thing the first time, and the game punishes you for it, and then your next captain knows not to do that thing. You can’t do everything in every game, and learning things requires having a lot of captains die. If not being able to have a London romance and a kid bothers you too much, kill this captain and start again.

You can’t see all the content in the game without going through several captains. If you don’t have Merciful Mode turned on and can’t save, you’ll probably go through many, many captains. If you’re trying not to get this captain killed until you’ve &quotwon&quot the game, that’s probably not a good goal. Try to die with enough stuff that you can give your next captain a better start in life.

Removing curses isn’t the only use for Salt’s attention. Experiment in various ports. Try going back to the Salt Lions with it. Or visiting Gaider’s Mourn or Mt. Palmerston; it may take multiple times for the option to come up that lets you use it there.

Places that feel hostile are likely to have interesting stories there. But I’m pretty sure you will recognize the gate behind which lies &quota sea more sunless&quot when you see it.
edited by penknife on 2/14/2015

You don’t even need a god’s attention to remove their curse. It’s used for other things. Mostly beneficial things (though obviously removing a curse is beneficial.) Honestly I liked the free supplies from the sisters better than the god’s attention, but eh.
edited by Olorin on 2/14/2015

Yes. This game involves taking a lot of risks, GENUINE risks, when you actually don’t know what will happen. The tagline is &quotLose your mind. Eat your crew.&quot and the startup screen literally tells you that ‘your first captain will likely die.’ You will make mistakes. You’ve clearly spent a lot longer with your very first captain still alive than most unspoiled people would, but you will have to take some risks.

That is the part of the point of punishing games. They are NOT fair, the consequences of your actions are NOT going to be clear the first time around. You will make mistakes, you may fail. As you go, you learn what does and doesn’t work the hard way - in many cases, it’s not obvious at all, and there’s not even any clue. Try, fail, learn, fail, improve, fail, improve more, succeed, that’s the way these games work. Sunless Sea’s actually fairly forgiving for a &quot&quot&quotroguelike.&quot&quot&quot

This isn’t to say ‘don’t be cautious’ - bring lots of fuel and supplies; don’t drop ALL your cash on something unless you absolutely know it’ll be profitable (eg Sphinxstone); if your Terror is getting really high or your hull really low you should flee; if the game actually, explicitly warns you &quotthis is really dangerous&quot (NOT just a skill check you’ll probably fail on!) you should pay attention; if you know you’ll need plenty of something specific but not how many (say, candles in Godfall) bring extra. But be willing to fail a skill check, to do something that doesn’t pay off, etc.

Permadeath seem like a huge pain, making you waste time? I agree. People who feel this way should turn it off. Use manual saves sparingly - say, only keep a couple and only reload when you actually die, and try to scrape through if you haven’t. Or, savescum shamelessly to focus on reading the lore or finding new stories.

I’d also add that a lot of things that seem small, in fact, are. A quality always means that things can change or progress at least somewhat (or have already), but I’ll tell you straight up that there’s no huge overarching quest chain that comes from the Salt Lions, I don’t want you to build it up in your head and get disappointed. It’s very much a sidequest you can incorporate into a big loop. A lot of things are. Nothing’s terribly obvious; sometimes you don’t know, and should just pick something you haven’t investigated yet and need to prepare for, and plan a course that goes through some ports you know, picking up Port Reports along the way, maybe some profitable things like Clay Men, Marked for London or Sphinxstone on the way back. Advance some minor sidequests on the way to and back from whatever you’re investigating.

Also, incorporate Pigmote into your trip (it’s RIGHT NEXT TO LONDON, other parts of your map suck but that is extremely handy!) for some free fuel or supplies; in your case, you can have it both be the first stop on your way from London and your last stop on the way back. It REALLY doesn’t make sense to both say that traveling is too expensive, but ALSO dismiss an easy source of free fuel or supplies :P
edited by Impish Axile on 2/14/2015

3rd Captain. Have unlocked 5/6 legacies (and will unlock the last when I retire this one).

Sunlight is 100% broken. (Derp: easy fix - you make obtaining 1 a SAL event and then limit the # number. You did it with red honey. Derp, no-one thought of this?)

I’ve also done 100% of the story lines. i.e. there is not a port with any more story to unlock that I haven’t already seen.

I’ve also done every difficult event / achievement (barring the broken ones) in or out of game. 4 marks? Yep. etc etc.

So, yeah. Give me a couple of hours, we hit 100% complete.

It was a fun 60 hours, and it was worth the price, but this game could have been so much better with a little more mature input. It’s not balanced. It’s not scaled. It’s not paced. And it’s not even funny the amount of people sailing the Nile in this thread.

~

7/10.

Nice little project, hampered by misunderstanding “difficulty” and massive denial on the feedback beta / EA.

p.s.

There is 0% risk once you can afford fuel / supplies. Seriously. Any semi-decent rogue player who farms the echoes means never dying. It’s kinda hilarious that you’re pretending that this game is actually difficult.
edited by ZeaCat on 2/14/2015

Moleculor: You keep saying that traveling relatively short in-game distances is prohibitively expensive and very slow (&quothours and hours and hours&quot). The combination of those makes me wonder if you might have something wrong with your game installation or savefile or both. I touched on this before, but, in balder terms: It should cost you one barrel of fuel to travel from Wolfstack to Venderbight, in the starting ship with the starting engine, at forward speed ‘2’ (caveat: I don’t remember if this is with the lights on or off). And it should take only a minute or two (the SAY timer goes off once a minute).

If you’re using significantly more fuel than that, or it takes significantly longer, and you’re still in the starting ship with the staring engine, something is wrong.

[quote=zwol]Moleculor: You keep saying that traveling relatively short in-game distances is prohibitively expensive and very slow (&quothours and hours and hours&quot). The combination of those makes me wonder if you might have something wrong with your game installation or savefile or both. I touched on this before, but, in balder terms: It should cost you one barrel of fuel to travel from Wolfstack to Venderbight, in the starting ship with the starting engine, at forward speed ‘2’ (caveat: I don’t remember if this is with the lights on or off). And it should take only a minute or two (the SAY timer goes off once a minute).

If you’re using significantly more fuel than that, or it takes significantly longer, and you’re still in the starting ship with the staring engine, something is wrong.[/quote]

Turning speed is already known to be tied to GPU framerate. Sooo… there’s potential here for time passing in game to not actually be uniform across platforms.

You had a beta, right?

p.s.

It’s already a known that engine power - fuel consumption is just plain silly broken in the name of “balance”. The most probable explanation is that s/he upgraded her engine as much as possible on the starting ship. Which is logically what most new players would do, given the options.

And yeah, that destroys your fuel efficiency with no real bonus to speed. 30 years into the biz, and I’m still trying to think of a game mechanic where “upgrades” actually mean “more resources used”. It’ll come to me, I remember one or two from the 1990’s, but really. Stupid mechanic.

[Edit] Remembered the game(s). But it always came with a significant speed boost. And the ones I’m thinking of were a) a mech warrior game and b) a space flight sim. Neither of which capped speed so heinously.

So, yeah. Broken.
edited by ZeaCat on 2/14/2015

Well, as much as it’s ‘more than breaking even’, I still feel like it was barely worth the time I put in to it. When I first started this thread, I was around 1200 Echoes. Now, after having hit the Sphinxstone frequently and followed the questline to its abrupt and pointless end (and having used the opportunity to explore a bit of the actual east), I’m now at 1500 Echoes. A profit of 300. Woo.

Yes, I realize that at the end of this quest chain I was handed 1000 Echoes. Somehow most of that got spent buying fuel and supplies (those highway robbery prices) to keep me afloat and moving. I made it back to London with only 4 or less of each, like always.

Again, you have the benefit of hindsight. Every possibility I mentioned is a possibility, and none are more likely than another. So no matter how much I have or have not discovered the locations in question, when I visited them the presence of the color at that location did not jump out at me, marking it as the ‘obvious’ choice… not that that would have mattered. I’ve explored every location as deeply as I could at the time I visited it. If there was a color jumping out of them, I’d have it by now.

I got lucky and won ‘enough’ to advance whatever it is that quest is supposed to do. I think. Now I need to go get the attention of some god, not entirely sure how, since a particular house is now cinders. I have an idea of how, but I don’t doubt that traveling up there will only show me that I need some resource that I’ll have to track down, further burning precious resources.

Yeah, that’s why I avoid combat now. Combat is bad, combat kills. Even avoiding combat, I very nearly just lost my ship, dropping down to 20HP on my last trip out about twenty minutes ago. Not a pleasant feeling, nearly dying despite trying to avoid combat.

I don’t have attention, and I’m not entirely sure how to get it, but I know it’s not just to remove curses. I have a vague idea, but if that idea doesn’t pan out, then it’s just another illustration of my objection to this game’s narrative design. Quest goals shouldn’t be something you’re forced to blindly stumble across or luck into. You should have an idea of where to look for the answers.

The particular place in question is only accessible under a very difficult to obtain set of particular circumstances. I very much remember that in great detail, and there is no chance of me entering it any time soon. I honestly don’t have a clue how I ever will enter it.

And I sincerely doubt I’ll recognize the gate with the more sunless sea, unless it’s a literal gate with literal clouds of darkness seeping out of it.

Yeah, I’m aware. I tried Nethack/ADOM/etc for years, never achieving anything.

Two fuel and one supply is not worth the trip out of the way. If it’s in the general direction I’m traveling, I’ll try to swing by, but it’s not that great of a port.

[quote=zwol]Moleculor: You keep saying that traveling relatively short in-game distances is prohibitively expensive and very slow (&quothours and hours and hours&quot). The combination of those makes me wonder if you might have something wrong with your game installation or savefile or both. I touched on this before, but, in balder terms: It should cost you one barrel of fuel to travel from Wolfstack to Venderbight, in the starting ship with the starting engine, at forward speed ‘2’ (caveat: I don’t remember if this is with the lights on or off). And it should take only a minute or two (the SAY timer goes off once a minute).

If you’re using significantly more fuel than that, or it takes significantly longer, and you’re still in the starting ship with the staring engine, something is wrong.[/quote]

Many of my ports are precisely 60 seconds distant, and I frequently dock with the port both forgetting about waiting for a SAY and getting that SAY the moment I hit E to dock.

I can’t tell you if it’s only taking me one unit of fuel to travel north to Venderbight, but that sounds closeish, but two is close to one, too.

I think part of the problem is the sheer, stark boredom that sailing involves. I just played for two hours (barely made any financial progress or quest progress, but I did rule out a small region for where the Chelonate might be), but it felt like four.

Jesus fucking tapdancing Christ, are you telling me that upgrading my engine to a +1500 engine may have screwed me over? That upgrades are downgrades, upgrades are traps, and I wasted my money? ****. I mean, I knew there were a gun or three where they were far more expensive than their stats suggested they should be, but I had no idea that green, bigger numbers meant fucking myself over.

I haven’t seen game mechanics that broken since Shadowbane. That was a game made in 2003, and not a very good one.

[quote=Moleculor]

Jesus fucking tapdancing Christ, are you telling me that upgrading my engine to a +1500 engine may have screwed me over? That upgrades are downgrades, upgrades are traps, and I wasted my money? ****. I mean, I knew there were a gun or three where they were far more expensive than their stats suggested they should be, but I had no idea that green, bigger numbers meant fucking myself over.

I haven’t seen game mechanics that broken since Shadowbane. That was a game made in 2003, and not a very good one.[/quote]

That is 100% correct with current game mechanics.

When I write the words “badly balanced”, I’m not doing it from the usual Game Reviewer perspective: I actually broke open the game files and checked the math.

Which is why you should never trust a reviewer who can’t crack open game code, but there we go.

These days the majority can’t even distinguish between XML, LUA and C++ while they’re writing their political screeds. It says a lot: back in the days of BBC 32k micros and Elite and Exile (not the RPG, the other one), we actually knew what was going on.

These days? Well, let’s just say there’s about two game journalists at the moment I’d trust to be able to build / configure / purge and keep clean a decent PC rig.

C’est la vie. Whores they wanted, whores they got.
edited by ZeaCat on 2/14/2015

ZeaCat is correct on one point. There’s no particularly good reason to upgrade the starter engine until you get a larger ship. Fuel consumption scales linearly with power, but, just like in the real world, speed doesn’t. Beyond that, he most certainly did not “break open the game files” to check the math, as none of the math is there to check. Only constants that tell us nothing of how speed is related to power. That is apparently handled by the physics engine. At this point he’s just grandstanding because he’s finally found an audience that will accept his unfounded claims.

How’s the progress on the grand unified theory of ship stuff, by the way? I feel like the endeavor is scattered across multiple threads, and I’ve lost track off all but one of them thanks to the recent spamstorm.

We narrowed fuel consumption down to Power/1000 % per second at 2-speed (half at 1-speed), but I haven’t done much work on it since.