I like the pace. Also, depending on the layout of the tiles, I sometimes even have to slow down between ports to get SAY. There are a few longer stretches but keeping an eye out for beasties or pirates or unwelcome weather means that I always keep an eye on where I am going :)
I’d say a good option would be the ability to plot your course using the map. While in a port, or stopped, or perhaps at any time, you could pull up your map, and use your cursor to trace a route through the zee. When finished, your ship will cruise along the route, unless you interrupt it, blithely plowing through any enemy or obstacle you ignore or forgot to factor in. It’d be risky to leave unattended, and if you don’t factor fuel and supplies spent, you might run out along the way, but it’d take a little of the tedium out of long runs, at least in my opinion.
And it wouldn’t necessarily need Blue Prophets to sink you in no time then… a couple of Bats or one Jillyfleur will happily wreck your unattended Steamer while you’re on the phone or at the coffee machine :)
If anyone of you pipes up with "additional disadvantages" for autopilot for "game balance" I will stab your scions
Like some others have said, I think adding a lot more events that occur at sea would go a long way toward solving this problem. It’s not really that your ship is too slow, it’s that you have to spend so much time going back and forth over areas that you’ve already explored and know are safe. You just need a few conditions to fire them at the right times, like…
[ul][li]the tile is already fully explored[/li][li]there are no monsters around[/li][li]nothing has happened for 30 seconds (or maybe just checking if you have SAY would work)
[/li][/ul]It would add some more tension to the monotonous parts of the game if there was at least the possibility of an event happening at any moment.
I’m pretty confident that this would work because in old games like Sword of the Samurai and Darklands they were very successful in using random encounters to keep travel interesting. In fact the bulk of those games was actually made up of the encounters you run into as you travel. It takes good writers to make up these events, but Failbetter has the best writers.
Finally I think it would add a lot to the atmosphere of the game. It’s supposed to be about the sea but almost all of the stories actually take place on the islands. The ship should be a setting for stories, not just a vehicle for moving between them.
I like this idea especially if it tied in with a "Navigator Aboard" quality, so that at the very least, you have to have a Navigation officer to do it.
For all backgrounds except the Poet, this means you would learn about the feature a bit later than immediately on startup, and thus you’d slow down the info dump the player gets in learning how to play the game a bit more. Which is always good for player training - a steady progression of new information rather than just "HERE’S EVERYTHING, HOPE YOU REMEMBER IT ALL".
too many events will also make the travel tedious tho if you are just trying to grind around or get somewhere fast… I would say… some stuffs that worth watching while you sail…?