Hey everyone, [li]
I’ve played the Sunless Sea beta a couple of hours today, probably about 2-3 hours, and while I’ve run into a large number of bugs, which I already did a bug report for, I wanted to warn some people of stuff and discuss things with those who have already played.
First off, I love the art style, the idea of the combat system and the way it all flows well with the world of Fallen London. The big challenging thing right off the bat in this game, other than bugs, is supplies and money. You are supposed to be able to save enough money to buy better equipment on your boat, buy new crew members (nameless and unique characters), and to get supplies to feed your crew and to afford fuel, but it’s quite hard to do so. I find the current rate of food/supply usage to be rather extreme. I went on a successful tour to the north of Fallen London, defeated a ship, several crabs and received a bunch of supplies, but I still found myself low on fuel, low on supplies and with little money to show for my travels.
I’m aware this is beta and it isn’t supposed to be balanced, but I just wanted to bring this up for discussion because I just don’t see how to progress at the moment when it is a constant battle to just have your people stay fed and to keep your ship fueled. If you managed to get your ship damaged then you are really in trouble because manually repairing it will use up your supplies very quickly and to repair at a port costs a fairly large amount too. I realize all of that is proportional, probably, and that at some point you will start being able to save large amounts of supplies and will have a lot of money (based on how much some of the upgrades for ships are or individual luxuries), but the beginning of the game does a really good job making that seem implausible. Anyone manage to get past all of that and actually thrive a little?
The warning I wanted to discuss has to do with fuel and docking. This may or may not be a bug, but every time you dock someone (which you need to do to save your game) you use up all of your remaining fuel. When I say remaining fuel, I don’t mean your extra fuel, but how much is currently in the tank and is represented on the bar that sets 70% left or whatever you have. I only just realized this on my last playthrough when my game "ended" because I got stuck at an island right next to Fallen London but suddenly not having enough fuel to make it back there. I don’t know of any way currently to get yourself out of a bind if you run out of fuel, but docking really devours your fuel quickly and it is hard to find since you can only buy it from ports, most of which sell it for 20 echoes or more. So, basically every time you dock you lose 20 echoes and that worries me if I’m going to start thinking about every possible port in terms of cost to benefit when it comes to fuel and money. That’s it for now.
I do have plenty of fond things to say about the game, but this is rather long already. Been good fun so far though despite all of that. After I wrote all of this I realized I should have just added this to the other thread about first impressions, but I hadn’t read through it all yet. Most of what I said has already been echoed on that thread. [/li][li]
edited by Lokai on 4/30/2014