Is there any point in going to the Blackstone for a second time? Is there anything to be found there after the first visit?
Miss Strangeweather - Good suggestion. I’ll have to look into that.
Xiaur - Not at this time.
Floatsam card could do with a ‘move on/ignore it’ discard-type option. If you have a full hold, your only option is to waste 2 provisions using it as target practice… which is especially useless if you have no Dissent at the time. Also, you may not want to pick it up since then you’d have other goods you might not be able to sell in the immediate future taking up more space… meaning you have to burn more actions to get rid of them.
Felling trees (from the island card in Open Sky) seems to gain rather than lose me Cargo Space. That seems… wrong.
Muffled screaming I don’t want to imagine how long that error has been there, unnoticed. Thanks for pointing it, Domitia!
Yes, you should be gaining cargo space, because it consumes 2 supplies (which take up 2 space) and gains 1 timber (which takes up 1 space) – the difference is 1 space.
So in other words that wasn’t a bug, unless timber is supposed to take up two spaces.
And now that I’ve gathered Timber, my total cargo space is now 39.
edited by Arcalane on 12/30/2012
Further muffled screaming I forgot my cardinal rule: don’t develop (or bug fix) in bed.
EDIT: ARCALANE, what’s your character name, exactly? I’ll refund that Cargo Space for you.
edited by lily on 12/30/2012
“Captain Sheridan”, no quotes.
Can we do anything with thruster parts and Arkhay relics yet? I can equip them from inventory, but that doesn’t seem to have any effect.
Thruster parts can be used to repair engine damage, or can be sold at Portdown if you have a Category 1 Terrisel Retricted Trade License.
Arkhay Relics can be sold at Capital with the same license. If you don’t have that license, the Mistdown Society might be able to arrange something.
Oh, and equipable trade goods, documents and such is a side-effect of organising them under those headings. They’re not intended to do anything.
Ding ding ding ding ding!
The number of active (unretired) players in Maelstrom has today passed 2000! To mark this event, you can find a special access code on the Maelstrom Twitter account.
Hurry, though! This code will be made unavailable by the end of next week.
[quote=Lily Fox]Thruster parts can be used to repair engine damage, or can be sold at Portdown if you have a Category 1 Terrisel Retricted Trade License.
Arkhay Relics can be sold at Capital with the same license. If you don’t have that license, the Mistdown Society might be able to arrange something.[/quote]
So currently I can only sell them at the moment… unless I’m missing something where I can get engines?
Thanks, realised that after playing a couple of other SN games afterwards… thanks!
P.S. congratulations on 2000 active players!
edited by spiralx on 1/4/2013
edited by spiralx on 1/4/2013
Your ship has engines already. =) Engine damage is hard to come by at these early levels though - you need to critically fail a challenge during ship-to-ship battle, or just failing some of the worse ones.
I did wonder if that might be the case lol, I should have spent more time reading the text back when I was starting! Thanks :)
I seem to have found another problem:
Black Sails: using 20 Rumors of War, I can get Arms without consuming Cargo Space (or maybe it was that I was full already).
The Honesty: I can sell Arms and get Cargo Space back.
Thanks, James. I fixed that when I read it last night.
One day I’ll stop including game-breaking bugs in my world. One day.
I wanted to say that I really enjoy this game so far. I like the world - the Maelstrom, the politics, all these little islands, the alternative-napoleonic steampunk-inspired feel. It’s very clever. There’s only one thing I’ve previously seen that even arbitrarily reminds me of your setting, so…may I ask if Maelstrom was, in any way, inspired by a short film called ‘‘The mysterious geographic explorations of Jasper Morello’’?
I’m very much enjoying playing a discourse-larceny con-artist character. Personally I feel that I actually gain money faster by fake notes than by honest trading and it’s great! As a downside I promptly died during my first naval battle and had to start all over again due to not having any Nex. I’m not sure whether I simply overlooked the warning but I do know that I had entered the battle without realizing that failing would result in ‘‘real’’ death. I presumed that I’d simply be taken prisoner and sold back to my country after which I could regain my wealth and try again. If there was no warning regarding the consequences of having your ship splintered, then I believe there should be one. If there was a warning that I overlooked then I guess it serves me right for not paying attention to what is written in a text-based game.
I don’t know much about the inner workings of Failbetter Games, nor about how any of the programming comes together but I was wondering whether it would be possible, in the future, to actually side with the pirates instead of Terrisel Navy? We already get The Letter of Marque, which I guess makes us technically into privateers. We get the option to steal and lie our way through society, to recruit ex-pirates as our first officers and have our whole crew comprised of criminals whom the player has basically talked out of jail. With a crew of pirates, a first-mate of a pirate and a con-artist of a captain it feels like changing sides is the natural next step.
Also, I think that it would be nice if there were a few mini-quests or opportunity cards that would allow the player to get a better feeling of the first officer or some of the crew members. Flesh them out as people a bit more. I mean, the crew is obviously expendable - it might be better for the player to think of them as items, but the first officer should have a bit of a closer relationship to the captain. The ex-pirate for example. You buy him out of prison and then he effectively becomes part of the cargo. What does the society think of a captain teaming up with a pirate? Why is the pirate loyal to you? Does he have any living crew members he wants to help or harbors vengeance to? Same with the Young Lietenant. A few hopes, a couple opinions or personal goals or favors to ask…just feel that I’d like to think of them as characters not as tokens in my inventory.
And finally, unless something happens to tamper my enthusiasm I’ll attempt to draw my character, and perhaps how I imagine the airship to look. Hope you don’t mind me doing so.
I’ve been playing Maelstrom, and I’ve been enjoying it very much, but I’ve encountered a problem that I think might be due to a bug.
My character (Anne Bonney) has gone hunting pirates. I’ve boosted Battle Initiative to 22, and I have no trouble encountering pirates. Trouble is that right after I do so, the very next storylet I get is "
Escape the battle
It is a terrible blow to your pride but it may be better to flee. Better a coward than a corpse.
If successful, you will leave the battle but the enemy ship will repair all damage!
I don’t want to escape batter, though, and I’m not given any other choice! I must either select the storylet or I cannot proceed–and when I select it, I “escape” because it’s a straightforward challenge at Battle Initiative 22.
This has happened to me twice now. The first time, I was nearly out of provisions so I figured it had something to do with that, but this time around I loaded up on food, and I have 21 Provisions as of when I encountered the battle storylet.
By the way, I have fought pirate brigs before successfully with this character. My Battle Victory level is 4, my Experience Level is 3. Oddly, I still have the “First Blood” quality under “Circumstance” though I"ve fought other ships successfully and profited thereby.
Help? Please?
I’ve hit a problem which isn’t technically a bug, but is highly frustrating! My ship took too much Hull Damage, and I lost all my money. I landed at Portdown, simply because it was the starting area, but I can’t sell any of the trade goods I have here! I’m trying to grind for enough money to patch the ship up just enough to limp to where I can actually profit, but there are so many cards that don’t provide any income, and I need to actively spend money at the prison just to get rid of the card, because I have max crew and sky stories.
Bugs are more important, but if it could be possible to discard the card about the cells, and possibly have a pinned card that can earn a small amount of pound coins but is always there… well it would make this situation- if it ever happens again, to me or anyone else- less of a huge grindy chore to get out of.
I would also like to chip in that the prison card is kind of annoying when you are maxed out on crew and sky stories…I’m basically forced into spending 5 pounds for no benefit whatsoever. Granted, 5 pounds is really not all that much, but I’m still early enough in the game that I’m barely scraping a profit on each trade run once you take into the expense of buying provisions, so each pound spent needlessly is quite annoying.
Speaking of which, I found that the pre-Blackstone part of the game seems to be quite short on cash. Once you took into account the cost of provisions, I was barely breaking even on trading, so I would end up spending ~20-30 actions grinding for cash each time I made port. Luckily after doing the expedition you can start selling rumors to the Archeological Society, and they are very generous. :)
Also something I realized and I am wondering if it is intentional or not? Although repairing your ship in port does not consume provisions, once you take the cost of the repair dock ticket into consideration (£400) it is nearly always cheaper to repair in flight? (At least for hull repair) Provisions only cost £200/10 units after all. If you are in Greengrass, you can literally buy the timber and provisions you need, leave port, repair your ship, then make port again in Greengrass, and you will end up saving something like £320-£380 (depending on how much damage you are repairing)? That seems a little bit ridiculous. (and almost feels like cheating!) Additionally, if you are short on lumber for repairs it’s still probably cheaper to buy enough provisions to fly to Greengrass and buy the lumber you need vs. paying for repairs in cash at the port you are at? The amount of markup is pretty high, especially since you still have to buy a repair dock ticket on top of paying for the repairs. Perhaps in-port repairs should be cheaper (or in-flight repairs more expensive)? It seems logical that repairing your ship in a facility designed for such repairs would be a lot easier and more efficient than doing repairs on some random island…