You have a "</span>" tag caught in your link, Alexis.

Sunless Sea would not be the game it is now without the kind of robust, smart, detailed responses we've had

• I had absolutely no idea that it was a bad thing for Terror to reach 100 until it actually did - at which point I got the card with two options, both of which it advised me were going to lead to my death. (Compare Nightmares in FL, where you get a warning at 5 that something bad will happen at 8, and the bad thing which happens at 8 isn't all that bad anyway.)
• Similarly, I saw a note in the "Help me!" storylet that I could click on the flame icon to go faster, so I did - a few times since it didn't seem to do very much - and whoops, my boiler exploded! Start again.
• Running out of fuel within a stone's throw of Fallen London is just as bad as running out of fuel on the far side of the Unterzee. Which isn't all that logical, but more to the point creates another sharp drop-off, which I tumbled over a couple of times before I'd learned how fuel really worked.
• The Admiralty sends you off to places that are inappropriate for starting players, before you've got the experience necessary to understand that they're dangerous. In my mind, the game had told me to sail off to a far-flung island, so I expected that was a reasonable thing to do. In fact it was a completely stupid idea, and I met a pirate ship which killed me with a single shot.
• One of the things you're (rightly) encouraged to do as a starting player is to go up the coast to Verderbight. But once you've done that, it's just natural to follow the coast onwards a little bit more... at which point you meet the giant ship-chomping snowballs of doom.

• one-time warning storylets which appear when something bad will happen soon, but before the situation becomes unrecoverable
• some nice clear "I WOULDN'T DO THAT IF I WERE YOU" signals if you sail somewhere properly dangerous - so that if you choose to ignore them, you really only have yourself to blame
• best of all (but most work sadly), a starting quest which sends you round the immediate environs of Fallen London in a narratively satisfying way - so that you're pushed to learn the ropes in safe waters.

I basically feel like there are two modes to the game right now: either you're playing it, or you're trying to make money so you can eventually play it, without the stress of actually running out of fuel or supplies while you're on the Zee.

cjo wrote:

This is a little point, but a big one to me. I would love to have the orange pips representing terror accumulation be made much more visible. [...] I still find it really difficult to both spot terror accumulation and also watch where I'm sailing.

Have you noticed there are two bright lights which come on at the sides of your ship when terror is accumulating? They don't give you as much information as the orange pips, but they're enough to tell you whether you're in a terrifying place.

• Being able to choose an amount of an item to buy/sell would be very useful instead of clicking 'Buy' 20 times.

That's a decent idea actually. A point of terror reduction for each action in London makes a certain amount of sense, even if it's just going to drydock or recruiting someone new or whatever.

• UI changes! Things are very pretty, and I really like the visual differences, especially pause having a visible impact.

• More places to see! The Khanate is pretty cool. I'm intrigued by the content, the snares are fun, and port reports from more places are a good thing!
  

• port report bugs are kind of frustrating. Lamps are very underwhelming, and are so expensive that there's no reason at all that I'd want to spend money on them, especially given that having one actively penalizes my stats. Strange energies raises terror astronomically, and there are still so few ways to effectively handle terror, especially in early gameplay that it's not worth it.
• Echoes are still difficult to obtain without a considerable amount of grind.
  

• Monsters and everything short of the megalops and pinnaces being impossible to fight, even with my iron well into the 70s. Even a steam-pinnace can illuminate me to almost 50 in one move, and I can't evade enough to make combat something I never want to do, ever. I had a lot of fun hunting pirates and beasts, but now it's not worth it, and makes me feel like I wasted my echoes getting better cannons if I can't do anything with them. The scaling was fine before, I think. This is balancing things too far in the other direction.
• Is fuel draining faster now? Because I feel like I shouldn't be losing half a barrel of it just getting out of the Wolfstack harbor, lights or no lights. This makes early game content beyond punishing, especially if you lose all the echoes you'd earn from a port report/exploration of an island refueling once you get back.
• Terror. 30 echoes for 3-5 points of it being reduced, or even more depending on where you go is really hard. Once again, this makes early gameplay prohibitively expensive, and reaching higher levels of play isn't feasible when all of your echoes go right back into undoing the damage of going out and trading/exploring to get echoes in the first place.
• The secrets being reduced to such a level of diminishing returns is still not mitigated or changed with new places to explore, for all of the reasons listed beforehand. It honestly surprises me to reach such a high level of stats as I have, and the loss of ways to improve my stats outside of them really hurts, and really makes it hard to break out of the beginning levels of gameplay.

some in-fiction explanation

A question on patching vs. updating, I don't buy a lot of games, so I'm a little unclear how it works. I bought the game from the "buy now" button on the SS blog.

When the patch is released where do I get it from? I assume hitting "get new stories" won't work? Will I be able to keep my current game? Because I've really made a lot of progress and I would be very grumpy to have to start again at this point. I know it's been explained before somewhere, but I'm still a little unclear, and I don't remember which thread it was either. Sorry!

Have the Peculiar Noises stories been altered, or am I just *spectacularly* unlucky? *Every* time I over-stoke my engines, I have not one but two or three fires in quick succession.

Chris, you are a scurrilous wretch and a malcontent and a fomenter of mutinies both righteous and un-. Good on you.

I'll agree with others here that many things (acquiring echos, using secrets, reducing terror) feel very grindy right now. Almost like a pay2win game that hasn't added its microtransaction store yet.

*Terror rises WAY too fast, given that the only options I've found to reduce it only remove maybe 5 points, and even if I spend ALL of the echoes I manage to earn on terror reduction it still rises faster than you can get rid of it.

* Because terror rises so fast there's no TIME to try and earn any echoes to upgrade anything, or find better options for reduction (I assume they exist somewhere? otherwise the game is unwinnable) It's just an exercise in frustration.

@conductorbosh sure, don't worry! feedback is massively anecdotal, but it's still our best tool for taking the temperature of a game that we've played half to death and can't black-box-test, and we appreciate your passion. And there is a tension between CRPG and roguelike that we're still working on resolving, here. I will add that though that when you find yourself posting the same opinion several times and resorting to bold text emphasis, we're probably getting to a conversation that generates more heat than light. :-)

edited by Alexis on 6/18/2014

I am your father, Spacemarine (9).

It's pretty easy to earn enough of a profit to get a few upgrades though, in my experience? It's not a grind, if you know what opportunities to look out for.

Just go for the 1000 echo harpoon weapon, the other ones aren't worth it. Also, harpoon do bonus damage to sea beasts so you can start farming hunting trophies.

• Dat combat rebalance. I can fight zee-beasts, and it's an exciting, harrowing challenge of risk vs. reward, even at the highest levels of gameplay. Lorn-flukes are appropriately terrifying, but not insurmountable, and remain the barometer for how top-tier combat should feel for me. I absolutely love the difference in AI between beasts and ships, where the difference between a war-trimaran with a navy and a heavily-armed rustbucket is apparent. Wild salvos are a fun change to the way you fight steam-pinnaces, too.
• Mt. Palmerston's fuel prices. Devilbone dice. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• New items! New methods of trade up in Whithier! It's really cool to see things that are valued besides echoes, which fits the concept of how the manifold nation-states across the zee function.
• The hidden officer at 75 terror. I was not expecting that at all.
• Cheaper repairs, and the admiralty yards. Terror reduction in London.
• A will! Relic collections and heirlooms!

• The sad, gloomy game over music plays even when you have successful, victorious retirement. That seems wrong.
• Kind of a long time between when something awaits you triggers. Exploration is not quite as fun when you don't have those options.
• Not as many places to trade, unless stygian ivory is much easier to find than I thought. I would have imagined Polythreme to be more of a trade hub. Getting echoes outside of exploration remains a grind.
• It's actually harder to starve than I would have expected. I kind of wanted to play a cannibal captain, but I really need to work to make that happen.
  

• This section would be blank if I didn't put this sentence here, and that would have made my post ugly and ill-formatted. How dare you. Grumble. Unfunny ironic fake anger and such.

I've been playing for a few days now, and after several deaths I am finally managing to survive enough to raise some stats, gain some officers, and upgrade my ship. I agree with most other people about terror, though after several tries I do find it more manageable than before(sticking to beaches, going from light to light, visiting the sisters, getting a tattoo).
I do think the changes Alexis posted about before me would help with a lot of the initial frustration regarding terror, and they are very welcome.

• Just like you can stop to repair, why not stop to fish? Drop bait and wait for crabs perhaps? At least, if your supplies run out, it would be nice to have the option to for instance, drop a sailor as bait for a beastie that might be slaughtered if you win against it.
  
• Ship components really need to say what slot they occupy. Engine is pretty clear that you only can have one, but what about guns/cannons? Can you have several somehow? All that I tried occupy the same slot, and that is not inherently clear that they always do.

Honestly I also think that early game grinders might have been too nuked as well. I recently erased my character (but made a merciful save) and restarted without any legacy.