Hello there. first of all, the game is simply marvellous, there’s only one, quite horrible, bone that i have to pick with it
quite obviously, it’s ship speed. i procured the merchant vessel, and even with the strongest engine i can buy in london (which barely seems to have an impact on speed anyway!), it simply takes so long to get places that it really makes me bounce off the game; real-time wise, not in-game. in-game balance of food, fuel, and supplies is great;
but the fact that today it literally took 15 minutes to do the carnelian>irem>london route - during which time pretty much nothing of note has happened - makes me wish there was some sort of "speed up time" or "fast forward" or whatever button.
i love the exploration, but when i know where i’m going and what i’m doing it’s extremely tedious and quite a chore. not fun gameplay at all. i even resorted to studying for my exams and glancing at the screen from time to time to see whether i’m moving and not crashed into some rock - can you imagine the horror?
on the other hand i imagined the smuggler vessel, having 300 or so ship weight, would be quite fast! using the 1800 power engine it still moved rather slow, it just barely consumed any fuel.
anyway, i want to see the content, the stories, not spend hours just watching my slow ship soldier on port to port; it’s quite dreadful. if i could speed this up, it’d be perfect…
I completely agree. Once I’ve got a lot of the chart revealed and know where the main dangers are I’ll often find myself alt-tabbing to either a web browser or work I might be doing. It can also make restarting after death fairly tedious too. A way of doubling, even tripling, time would be a very welcome addition.
I’m also not overly impressed with the speed boosts the better engines give. That said, the benefits are much more obvious once you’ve died and been put back in the starting ship.
I guess I disagree. I appreciate SS’s sedate pace. It’s a game I can relax with because of the speed it plays at, drink in the details, the writing, ect… At first I thought I wanted faster ships in general, but after 100 hours I find the pace is where I want it.
I’m impressed you did Carnelian > Irem > London in 15 minutes (although Compulsion is an absolute beast of an engine). If that route is too long, you may consider Adam’s Way <-> Irem as a faster route for Coffee/Parabola-Linen.
When I run my trade route, I’m usually making small detours all over the place to wrap up quests as I go. A quick stop in at Mangrove College, a hop over to Khan’s Heart, grab some free supplies at Aestival … that kind of thing. It cuts down on the monotony of "point and sail" while also progressing the story. It will also net you some port reports and give you the chance to refuel during the longer legs of the journey, so you can fit in an extra 5 or 10 units of Coffee/Parabola-Linen. :)
EDIT: Oh, as a possible interim solution, have you tried picking up an Avid Suppressor and keep hitting "boost" on your engine? How do you feel that compares to the speed you’d want? edited by Zee! on 1/29/2015
[quote=Zee! ]I’m impressed you did Carnelian > Irem > London in 15 minutes (although Compulsion is an absolute beast of an engine). If that route is too long, you may consider Adam’s Way <-> Irem as a faster route for Coffee/Parabola-Linen.
When I run my trade route, I’m usually making small detours all over the place to wrap up quests as I go. A quick stop in at Mangrove College, a hop over to Khan’s Heart, grab some free supplies at Aestival … that kind of thing. It cuts down on the monotony of "point and sail" while also progressing the story. It will also net you some port reports and give you the chance to refuel during the longer legs of the journey, so you can fit in an extra 5 or 10 units of Coffee/Parabola-Linen. :)
EDIT: Oh, as a possible interim solution, have you tried picking up an Avid Suppressor and keep hitting "boost" on your engine? How do you feel that compares to the speed you’d want? edited by Zee! on 1/29/2015[/quote]
This. This is exactly what I do.[li]
Having just started again, I haven’t got the money (or indeed the ship) to get an Avid Suppressor and go zooming around the map, but I’m finding that now I don’t have the option, I’ve gone back to going around at normal speeds and finding my way at regular speed. The problem that I’d found myself with was that I’ve been playing this for some months, so I figure I know all the different things that are out there, and as a result, was zooming everywhere to get between the different ports without thought to anything else that was out there, and to be fair, when I’ve cleared the whole map again, I might be back to zooming around again, but that’ll take some time now that so many of the easy money makers on the map have been removed from the game.
And then it occurred to me, in zooming around, I’d lost the point of the game, the exploration and the investigation, the idea that it wasn’t a good idea to go screaming into the dark places in case you encountered something that would chew you up (which with a maxed out frigate and all the heavy weapons in the world, isn’t much), and so there’s been a whole new spark of life in the game, particularly when I got killed by a Lorn Fluke (First time in four months) after getting it down to 100 hit points with one gun and the steamer as my ship, but that fight was more interesting than any ten I’ve been in before, because my victory wasn’t assured, and so it is with all of the game.
The problem occurs that if you have the option to fast forward, by extension, you will, and that gives you the same problem as games like Elite and Homeworld Cataclysm, where you could press a button and time dilation would have you there in a second, but if you encountered something and didn’t come back to real time fast enough, you’d be dead in seconds, so I have no problem with people speeding up the game, or having a “Fast Forwards” button on the dash, but I do think that the beasts should still be out there, and that they should get the free hit while you’ve got your feet up on the dash in auto pilot…