Illyrian engine crazy fuel useage

Sunless Sea
21

[quote=Mica]It’s like the more expensive engines in the neath just get bigger not actually getting better.

&quotLook here, the new engine, 3x times the size, 3x the fuel, 1.2x the speed!&quot

So yeah, shops sharing info will probably make them bankrupt.[/quote]
1.2x the speed would still be better. That said, in the case of the Admiralty Special (the only one that is actually 3x the fuel usage of the starter engine) it’s actually 1.5x, at least on 5000 Weight ships, and you really shouldn’t be putting it on anything smaller. That additional 50% speed reduces both terror and supply consumption, allowing you to reach locations further from London before Terror becomes unmanageable. On larger ships supplies are also generally consumed faster than fuel even with big engines (and are always more expensive), so the speed is even more valuable.
edited by Olorin on 2/25/2015

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And &quotstrictly speaking shouldn’t be sold to civilians&quot because it’d be a scam. :)[/quote]
Add &quotat 10x the cost&quot and you have a firm grasp of how government contracts work.

23

[quote=Gregg Johnson]
1.2x the speed would still be better. That said, in the case of the Admiralty Special (the only one that is actually 3x the fuel usage of the starter engine) it’s actually 1.5x, at least on 5000 Weight ships, and you really shouldn’t be putting it on anything smaller.
…
[/quote]

A couple of days ago, I did a simple comparison on how weight affected engine speed. I used the the supply bars as a substitute timer, pressing screenshot on the 3rd tick.
This was the result. http://imgur.com/a/BpQ1v#0

Take note of the differences on the edge of the screens since the camera is focused on the ship. Both engine types, the starter and compulsion ended with Steam > Frigate > Merchant.

It was only a one time test and for sure there are human errors, but that’s what I ended up with.

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But which engine are you using? It’d be interesting to see the same results with a Fulgent Impeller.

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It was the starting engine first and then 5k echo one, the Compulsion.

26

ah, sorry. I didn’t realise it was 2 sets of results for 3 ships. Thought it was 6 ships. So presumably the 5k engine is the first 3 images?

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Ah, yes. I’m sorry about my previous post. It’s the 5k engine first, on the images where London isn’t visible anymore.
edited by Mica on 2/25/2015

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Don’t apologise! Entirely fault for not actually reading your post properly, and also not noticing in the images.

This is really useful. So essentially, the steamer is always the fastest, which completely throws my belief/perception that bigger ships have a higher top speed. Although, perhaps allowing for acceleration, it might change. But then, 3 hunger ticks is 30s. Hrm. Anyway, very interesting datapoints. Thank you.

I’ll play around tomorrow with some video (I can match frame by frame) at top speed and maybe update here if I discover anything useful.

29

Yeh, bigger ships definitely don’t have a higher top speed. What they do have is a larger speed jump from one engine to the next (because the starter engine is that much slower). I think you need to let them zail a bit longer though, over such a short period acceleration will distort the results.
edited by Olorin on 2/25/2015

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I’ve done yet more video testing since posting my last batch of results - I haven’t yet uploaded those videos, and I don’t have the numbers to hand, but they’ve reinforced my conclusions that A: lighter ships are always faster than heavier ships with the same engine power (though the difference is comparatively slight with the most powerful engines), B: that acceleration time is minimal and can generally be discounted, and that C: the fuel efficiency bonus on the Impeller is crazy good, and makes it nearly as efficient as an engine half its speed.

One of these days, I’ll just take all the ships and all the engines to the same stretch of zee and record all of their speeds and fuel consumption rates, and upload them all to the most tedious and analytical YouTube account in the world!

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In fact, exactly as efficient. 5k with 50% reduction!

Exactly what I was thinking of doing!

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See, that’s one thing that’s confusing me. If going to 5000 power doubles your speed and doubles your fuel consumption (which, presumably, the Impeller would without its special bonus), why are we talking about a smaller engine increasing your speed by 50% and tripling your fuel consumption?

33

Ah. Yes. Sorry. I meant fuel efficiency, not speed. Speed increase is never efficient compared to engine power.

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[quote=Mica][quote=Gregg Johnson]
1.2x the speed would still be better. That said, in the case of the Admiralty Special (the only one that is actually 3x the fuel usage of the starter engine) it’s actually 1.5x, at least on 5000 Weight ships, and you really shouldn’t be putting it on anything smaller.
…
[/quote]

A couple of days ago, I did a simple comparison on how weight affected engine speed. I used the the supply bars as a substitute timer, pressing screenshot on the 3rd tick.
This was the result. http://imgur.com/a/BpQ1v#0

Take note of the differences on the edge of the screens since the camera is focused on the ship. Both engine types, the starter and compulsion ended with Steam > Frigate > Merchant.

It was only a one time test and for sure there are human errors, but that’s what I ended up with.[/quote]

Oy vey.

That test really makes it seem like there’s no way upgrading your engine is at all worth it until you have a later ship (and larger hold) at all to support all of the fuel costs, and really makes the weight aspect seem so minimal as to be pointless.

I mean, the speed increment is there, but for 5k, and 3x fuel drain? You should be almost out of the London homewaters.

I still maintain that the game would be better served if the size of the sea were increased, so then they could make stuff like the rate of speed more noticeable and have a greater effect.

(By this I mean keeping the size of the islands and land masses the same, just increasing the size of each sea square by a percentage (10-25% would be my estimate) so that there was more sea relative to the amount of space the islands take up - there would have to be some addition to the coasts to make up for the increase, but as an art cost that would be relatively minimal).

Because I get that currently, if they made the 5k engine put you out to edge of the London &quotsquare&quot in the same time as the starter engine, it would mean that you could cover the map so fast that supplies and terror gain right now would be trivial matters completely gotten rid of, which thematically would be a problem (not that experienced captains don’t figure out the best ways to minimize these concerns over time - they do, but if the rate of speed were significantly increased, it would make them so trivial that the end-game would basically have two core mechanical elements relegated to after-thoughts).

So if they even wanted to increase the rate of speed in any major way so people get better game feedback/tell/signposting on investing in these costly new engines (because I still think the problem is one of perception, that the players aren’t seeing enough notable speed increase to think the purchase was valuable), they’d have to also increase the distance you’d have to travel or the game would feel super duper tiny. It already does after a while. I’ve gotten a lot of random island placement where it 's like 5 islands right next to each other with only tiny gaps - right now I have my Abbey and Station 3 ports to the west of the Khanagate at a distance about the same as between the Khanagate and Khan’s shadow, and the Khanagate is just south of Frostfound and the whole area is super dense.

But that’s a lot of potential work, so I get why it may not be considered as important or impactful enough to warrant the amount of work that would go into it.
edited by MisterGone on 2/26/2015

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TBH - Before we (as a community) can judge engines &quotfor sure&quot we need a clearer indication of what the heck is going on with time and consumption.

The general rule that the bigger engines aren’t justified on smaller ships is more or less obvious, but we can’t make an educated decision about the results that engine power and speed has on our expenses without excessive testing.

You don’t expect an average new gamer to back-up his game and go into excessive testing every time he wants to upgrade an engine do you?

We aren’t given the speed difference, we aren’t shown consumption rates of supplies and fuel, we aren’t given increase rates for terror, we don’t see the SAY refreshment progress either.

Most of the time we just have to guess all of this. MAYBE that works for the game in it’s own way (not going to go into details on this argument), but it definitely doesn’t help us with giving thoroughly considered feedback.

I don’t think even the most well-studied scholars of the underzee’s engines could easily say just how much more &quotthat&quot engine saves in terror and supplies over &quotthis&quot engine on a given ship.

Add the fact that costs aren’t proportional to generations/consumptions (for example a certain amount of terror can be dealt with for free) and we have an incalculable mess.

36

Which I imagine is working as intended.

[quote=MisterGone]I still maintain that the game would be better served if the size of the sea were increased, so then they could make stuff like the rate of speed more noticeable and have a greater effect.

(By this I mean keeping the size of the islands and land masses the same, just increasing the size of each sea square by a percentage (10-25% would be my estimate) so that there was more sea relative to the amount of space the islands take up - there would have to be some addition to the coasts to make up for the increase, but as an art cost that would be relatively minimal).[/quote]
YES PLEASE. The 'zee feels way too cramped at present, especially with the Impeller, and anything smaller feels too slow (though really it’s just right given SAY and the aforementioned crampedness). I am a little concerned that just expanding the 'zee without adding any additional content in between islands might diminish the experience somewhat, however. It needs to be larger, but there also needs to be more out there. More things like the Eye that aren’t tied to any specific tile, but migrate around and shock you out of your reverie at the most inopportune times. Floating masses of something darker than black (is it kelp? can we eat it?) etc. Or just discoverable flavour like the Wreck of the Mikko. On the one hand doing this properly is a lot of work, on the other hand the longer it is delayed the more work it will be.

The coasts in particular are a bit underdeveloped right now, especially the Tomb Colonies (which by the lore should include more than just Venderbight).

37

So, uh, has anyone else played the new updated stories and notices the engines feel a bit . . . zippier?

Or is that just my impression?

Mica, can you try your test again with the 2/26 stories?

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It’s like the weight penalty is a fixed amount, leaving bigger impact on weak engines. Eg. if 3000 weight reduces engine power by 150 (wild guess), 800 - 150 is more noticeable than 3500 -150.

[quote=Red-XIII]TBH - Before we (as a community) can judge engines &quotfor sure&quot we need a clearer indication of what the heck is going on with time and consumption.

…[/quote]
What I do believe is that the benefit of increasing engine power through generic shop engines is currently not worth it unless taken to the extreme (big ship with full crew for some reason?).

A switch from the Starter steam ship to a Merchant ship will double supply upkeep cause of the minimum crew requirement. And the best engine you can buy will not get you anywhere near double speed and will even triple your fuel upkeep. The engine itself costs nearly as much as a new ship. In the end, it will be better to just use those echoes for more supplies/fuels instead of reducing the supply upkeep costs by 20-30%. This is just how &quotengine upgrades&quot feels for me right now.

There’s so much unconventional ways to reduce terror that I don’t even know how to include it.

And there’s also the Avid Suppressor &quotabuse&quot. Spamming full power, nearly double speed for only double the fuel for 800 echoes? Best deal out there.

I can’t use the same method to compare speeds from different versions. It was just a simple &quotLaunch > count > reload&quot.

39

Is it just me or does Full Power play oddly with efficiency? With the Impeller, I use about 3% (s/b a little less than 2.5%) per second, but at Full Power it’s more like 9-10%, which would be double the consumption sans Efficiency.
edited by Olorin on 2/27/2015

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I guess it’s possible it ignores efficiency. If you’re ok tweaking game files, you could change the milestone efficiency to 100% and play around to see what happens.