Is the Pneumatic Ratsender Useful at ALL?

Sunless Sea
21

Well, that’s just not true[/quote]Yes it is.

[quote=MisterGone]…since the Ratsender isn’t functioning at all.[/quote]Which has absolutely nothing to do with being able to do normal repairs using supplies while in combat.

[quote=MisterGone]Functionally, the Rattusses are health potions.[/quote]No they aren’t. Health potion functionality is meant to restore you to full health, not just keep you alive and in some games you can’t even use them during combat. In the ones where you can they’re sometimes imbalanced allowing you to amass large amounts of them, bind them to a hotkey and spam them for the kind of game breaking invulnerability discussed above. Ratusses are emergency measures to keep you from dying. They’re not meant to be able to sustain your ship hull at full or near full capacity.

Your hypothetical combat situations simply don’t reflect actual combat situations in the game unless your idea of combat is to charge into enemies head on instead of outmaneuvering them and staying in their blind spots as much as possible while outgunning them. You shouldn’t be taking anything even remotely close to constant hits requiring you to spam deploy Ratusses. You should be deploying them in bursts for those occasions where you occasionally get outmaneuvered in combat but if that’s the majority of the time then you shouldn’t get an &quotI win&quot healing item to make up for inability to fight effectively in a game with fairly rudimentary combat mechanics.

[quote=MisterGone]From a meta game perspective this makes the rats progressively less useful as the player gets better ships. They’re GREAT for the starter ship.[/quote]I disagree. If you’re using a Steamer they’re of little benefit for combat. You’re better off running away from anything that might require use of the Rattuses and relying on them to keep you alive while running away. The only reason to use them is because without a larger ship there’s not much else you can place in auxiliary slot during the early stages of the game that’s of any benefit.

[quote=MisterGone]10 points of repair is worth a LOT less[/quote]It’s worth it if you use it and you finish a battle with 10 hull points. It means it kept you from dying.

[quote=MisterGone]To play it safe in the frigate when you’re fighting, say, a Lifeberg that does 30 damage per hit, you’re going to be blowing through Rats and completely destroying your bank balance in the process for only minimal healing.[/quote]If you need Rattuses for a Frigate to defeat a Lifeberg the cost of Rattuses to repair your hull in combat is the least of your problems.

Your hypothetical combat situations simply don’t reflect actual combat situations in the game unless your idea of combat is to charge into enemies head on instead of outmaneuvering them and staying in their blind spots as much as possible while outgunning them. You shouldn’t be taking anything even remotely close to constant hits requiring you to spam deploy Ratusses. You should be deploying them in bursts for those occasions where you occasionally get outmaneuvered in combat. It’s really not a useful Auxiliary for larger ships in general as there are more useful Auxiliary items for larger ships including We Are Clay with the much larger minimum crew member requirements to operate the ship at full efficiency. It’s more suited for a ship with smaller quarter capacity and hull points, e.g. the Corvette. Just because it doesn’t serve a Frigate well doesn’t mean it should be morphed into an &quotI Win&quot button so that it’s of use to larger vessels.

[quote=MisterGone]Sure that extra 10 hull might come in handy as a last ditch save. But you’re talking about a really RARE occurrence here that most players are unlikely to ever see.[/quote]Once again it’s not 10 hull points. It’s 10 hull points every 3 seconds. How rare it is depends on what kind of ship you’re using and what you’re trying to do but that’s what insurance is about, uncommon or rare occurrences that could lead to death.

[quote=MisterGone]Then make supply repairs work on a percentage basis as well. This would make more sense anyway.[/quote]No it wouldn’t. It would devalue dry dock repair. Ratusses and repair at zee are meant to be emergency measures.

[quote=MisterGone]I don’t think it is - in general, but especially once the player gets to the Corvette or any ship after that in the progression.[/quote]A Corvette only has 200 hull points. That may be fine for many of the encounters at zee it is not that great for others which involve enemies with much higher health and higher damage.

[quote=MisterGone]But I argue that the whole idea behind the item is for conservative players who want to maximize at least one element of safety - their hull. That is literally the only point of the item - to play it safe.[/quote]I disagree. I think it is for players that aren’t interested in trading for revenue or other things that benefit from large cargo space such as sunlight smuggling and want to hunt with a Corvette which is otherwise more fuel efficient and generally can outmaneuver enemies more consistently than a larger vessel and less time consuming in general for getting around. Going after bigger tougher enemies however is far less forgiving for Corvette than it is for a Frigate anytime a player makes a mistake or gets outmaneuvered in combat. It’s not as if We Are Clay is going to be a more useful Auxiliary item for a Corvette and the stat boosting ones will become less useful the further your character progression is in the game.

22

Per the actual item description: &quotNo rat will submit to doing this more than once.&quot That implies they do, indeed, survive, but refuse to be used in the same way again.

[li]

23

It’s enough for Mt. Nomad (risky maybe, but enough), so I’m guessing it’s probably enough for any other enemy you might encounter.
edited by Olorin on 2/24/2015

24

10 HP per 100 echo is outrageous (unless you’re che- ahem swimming in unnatural amounts of cash).
10 HP is rarely the difference between life and death. Most of the time, if you are getting pounded to death it means that you have something else horribly wrong with your ship, and that something else has stopped you from escaping or from properly fighting.
Now add to the mix the fact that each hit below 50% of HP also depletes your crew, and no amounts of rats can compensate for that.

So in the end here’s a picture - for them to be useful you need a situation where all of the following holds true:

  1. Either:
    1.1) Your ships isn’t otherwise doomed - in other words, the hull you’ve bough can actually mean something.
    Or
    1.2) Your hull isn’t your only combat problem - in other words, you’re above 50% HP and the enemy is of the kind you’d normally be able to take down, but you can’t afford to let the hull drop below 50% or you’d be doomed via crew lack.

  2. You can’t afford to waste a barrel of fuel to get away on the &quotnitro&quot. Which means that at least one of the following is true:
    2.1) Your hull is so low that the explosion can kill you.
    2.2) Your crew is so low that your ship is crawling and can’t get away even with nitro.
    2.3) Your fuel reserves are so low you should turn your back on the enemy and head for port or else you’ll drift.

  3. You are a cautions and relatively rich captain which is why you are zailing with a substantial amount of rats stockpiled for an emergency.

While I can imagine a few theoretically possible combinations where this is useful, practically, in most cases, captains either have no need for rats because they are safe enough, or they have no use for rats because the rats can’t help them anyway.

A cautious captain would not even get in these kinds of situations much in the first place. High crew count, high fuel stores, adequate repairs, and a few extra supplies used in cases of exessive strain on the hull during journey should save you from having to rely on rats in the vast majority of cases. Of cause caution will cost you, but if you can afford the rats you can afford this cost too, and it’s in fact both cheaper than rats and more effective.

A risky captain trying to skim a few echo at every damn opportunity wouldn’t want to waste it on rats anyway, but even that aside, such a captain is a lot more likely to run into complex sets of trouble, and the rats can’t save you from complex trouble. They can save you from lack of crew if you’re close to 50% hull, and they can save you from death if you’re about to explode from the engine explosion, but that’s about all they can help you with.

They definitely don’t work well enough to bother with.

But, if you ask me, the whole concept doesn’t really fit the game.

You can’t buy an &quotemergency crew pack&quot to use at zee at the right moment.
You can’t buy a &quotself-extracting spacebending pack of fuel/supplies&quot that you can hog around without taking up the cargo space and use at the right time to save yourself from drifting or starvation.
You can’t buy a &quotportable anti-terror kit&quot, well, you CAN, but it’s not exactly efficient either. Takes space, takes money, worth no more than a straw. Still better than rats though…

The whole game bets your survival on careful planing and preparation a lot more than on your ability to buy your way out of an emergency (which is what consumables are about in most games) and, if you ask me, it’s a welcome change of pace and an excellent way to approach difficulty.

So my opinion - away with the rats. Even a working emergency restoration consumable wouldn’t be a good addition to this game. This one isn’t even working so it has even less reasons to be left in.

And for crying out loud WHY RATS? Can’t we use anything else for emergency repairs? Please? Pretty please? Pretty pretty please? …

Dunno about others but I find the idea displeasing for dual reasons. On one side we’re using living beings for repairs… And on the other side they aren’t exactly pleasant living beings… No matter which position I take about it, I’d rather be using something else.

25

Rats are the perfect choice for this item. Some of the best mechanics and tinkers in Fallen London, or the Neath for that matter, are rats. The real question is why don’t we have a rat engineer yet.

IMHO aside from the Ratsender doing nothing, this mechanic is working fine. They’re only there for expensive emergency repairs, and just like emergency terror reduction (between 1000 and 1500 echoes for -25), this is far from the cheapest way to do it. If you’re using them when above 50% you’re either doing it wrong or out of supplies.
edited by Olorin on 2/25/2015

26

Actually, that post made me think on something that might make rats useful in a different way.

When using a Rattus Faber as an engineer, they’re filling in a for a crew member aren’t they?

I agree with Red about the Risky versus Safe Captains and their overall need for these items, but he brings up a good point - when Rats are most needed is when your ship is below 50% Hull and you start taking damage to your crew as well. Their primary value comes in at this point, as they’re the only way to heal up the ship at sea once this threshold is reached.

But at that point, I think he’s right that the combat must be going very wrong for the player in some other way - likely they can’t escape because of fuel or crew limitations, or they’re somehow stuck on the geometry - but the most common way is likely going to be a diminished crew and lowered speed that’s really messing the player up. Worse, even if the player sends out the rat and they save the hull just like everyone’s saying (though I still counter that in a tougher ship fighting a tougher enemy the chance of that happening at 10 hp increments is ludicrous) in the clinch save moment and the player’s foresight to install the sender rather than any other item . . . now the player’s won or escaped at low hull and half speed. Effectively screwed and twice as vulnerable for another encounter.

So, what if using a rat gave you a temporary crewman, in a way? It could work like WE ARE CLAY, and actually just give you a temporary crew requirement reduction for . . . to throw out a value, like 60 seconds (or however the length of getting a SAY would be)?.

That way, even if the healing they do is terrible and less useful in the ship class progression, they can still maintain some use as a booster to get back to a port where you can hopefully hire on more crewman, and they get off.

(This is assuming the Sender doesn’t kill them. There’s been some debate on what actually HAPPENS to the rats after the player &quotuses&quot them in another thread).

It would make sense. They’re basically sent to get inside your engines and fix them. Assuming the process doesn’t kill them, they should be able to keep them running for a while as well. As long as the engine is running and the captain is at the helm, you should be able to keep the ship moving with fewer crewmen (the logic behind the WE ARE CLAY item from what I can tell, since they’re feeding coal and doing grunt work other crewman would otherwise be doing), since the rats are operating in roles that would normally take crewmen.

This functionality would make the rats TOTALLY worth the cost. Not only are you getting 10 HP, but you’re getting a temporary crewman who can keep your ship running in tip top shape for a little while in an emergency situation where you suffer crew losses. Which is the most likely time to use the rats anyway. This would make them fit further into that &quotclinch save&quot role of using them when you only really need them (though some outrageously rich captain who farmed sunlight for a week can blow 10,000 Echoes to basically have their own impromptu Rat Barge if they want, I guess), but give them another reason to be used well into the late game when their healing bonus is negligible.

On top of this, it would give a little bit of clarity to the fate of your rats - if the next time you pulled into port you got a tiny storylet or text burst in the log about &quotX # of Rattus Faber’s get off at Y port, grumbling that they need to figure out a new line of work&quot because they obviously lived and worked on the ship for a bit after they did some repairs. Hell, maybe there can be a whole other new shop with different contracts for Rattus Fabers. Each contract buys different types of contracts for the rats that exchange amount of Hull they’ll repair for amount of time they’ll work on the crew.

The base Assistant would be what we have - 10 HP, 60 secs of Crew Work.
The Rattus Faber Engineer would be - 50 HP, 20 secs of Crew Work.
The Rattus Faber Mechanic would be 30 HP, 40 Seconds of Crew Work.

So you could have different options to fit different Captain’s needs and they’d have the kind of dynamic use that would be both interesting and fitting.

27

I don’t care how they fit into the setting.
They. Are. Rats.
At the very least they aren’t “items”. Do we use expendable humans for repairs in RL? Well, humans ARE the best available engineers in RL aren’t they?

Also, IMHO the main thing used for repairs is supposed to be materials. Spare parts for any damaged equipment, spare sheets of metal and/or spare wood (and whatever else they use in ship construction in SS) for the hull.

And I still don’t think that “potions” have their role in SS. Every other beeping game has them, and even if it works “properly” (both helpful (HELPFUL not “ultimate panacea”) and affordable (AFFORDABLE not cheap)) it usually just casualises the experience by letting you buy your way out of a problem instead of using the game’s better developed mechanics in the intended way to solve it. Really, a penalty of potions cost as a punishment for failure is nowhere near enough of a detriment to make the game challenging and subsequently fun.