Bluebeard
Posts: 25
11/23/2014
|
Am I mistaken or tomb colonists don't work anymore? I re-installed the game recently. I distinctly remember Colonist runs being the sure way to make some money in the early stages. Now I can only get one colonist at London and when I unload him I am told I need to do some random quest which is really hard to do. How am I supposed to do that without money? How am I supposed to earn money now?
Please help me 
edited by Bluebeard on 11/23/2014
--
Dark Blot - A not very gentlemanly gentlething
|
|
|
0
link
|
Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
11/24/2014
|
I can see the temperature on this thread rising. A few points:
- stay courteous, please, folks, we've got a nice tradition on this board.
- very profitable runs (like sphinxstone) will be time-limited and dry up over the course of a game
- there will be basic trading; it will never be the best way to make money, because if it was, people would never do anything else.
- all (or very nearly all) of the items available only from random events will also be purchaseable, somewhere.
- the new legacies system (that you may have seen teased today) will make it easier to maintain progress between games.
Thanks for your patience: it's been tricky balancing the needs of the future story with the needs of the current player base, but the pieces are coming together.
|
|
|
+3
link
|
Nenjin
Posts: 171
11/25/2014
|
Honestly, I feel the prices just need to diverge a little more.
Take the Brass Embassy for example. What they will buy souls for is painfully and obviously balanced against what London sells them for. We get as gamers why it is this way, but it seems so draconian. I think the prices could diverge more and it wouldn't honestly put game balance in that much of jeopardy, or entice otherwise "honest" players to start bottom-dollar trading.
For everyone but the Cargo and Dreadnought captains, cargo space prevents you from making money on trading in bulk in most cases anyways. So when your "take" from selling 10 Mushroom Wine at Venderblight is 30 echoes...it just seems like it doesn't need to be that restrictive.
Also if SS was willing to have stores hold actual quantity, instead of unlimited purchases of all items, you could play a lot more with pricing levels and have the same overall impact on the game.
Because I think the main problem with trading in SS is perception. Players don't feel like the effort they put out to do X is being rewarded adequately. (Researching prices, making room for goods, spending the resources, ect...) A better return on a less farmable set of transactions I think would improve people's perception of both trading and how the game treats trading. If in the end you still can't make that much money, but in individual trades you can make an appreciable amount (enough to at least come close to covering fuel and supply costs) people wouldn't be so bent out of shape about stuff like changes to Tomb Colonists.
---
Note, I come from the camp of "let the player ruin their own game if they want to." So to me, preventing people from grinding a trade activity to stop bottom-level play has the adverse of effect of punishing everyone else by making what seems like an obvious way to play infeasible. So I'd rather the game say "Buy 1000 souls from London and sell them to the BE at 6 echoes profit a piece if you want", than rigorously try to keep prices balanced across the whole world. It'd be even cooler if prices could be dynamically generated but I know that's wishful thinking at this point.
edited by Nenjin on 11/25/2014
|
|
|
+2
link
|
MidnightVoyager
Posts: 858
11/24/2014
|
Desiderius wrote:
I think that this is to stress the central idea of the game's economy: That you are not supposed to trade goods. Rather, the game intends for you to use that bit of fuel/supplies you start out with and just explore! Just run for it and find something! Maybe you'll profit! Maybe you'll die! Then use the return to buy a little more and go explore a new area again! Everyone who complains that this game is "too grindy" is purposefully trying to grind against the will of the game itself! What the heck even possessed you to try and grin money anyway?!!? Why would you do something boring like that??? Just explore!!!
It's almost like I have to go to the goddamn Tomb Colonies FIVE THOUSAND TIMES to ever get Viric or advance the Magician's quest and I STILL HAVE NOT DONE EITHER because I have never gotten that RNG event ONCE in this round of the game and maybe I'd like my constant trips there not to be 100% a drain on resources. I've sailed up Adam's Way and come back alive. I've visited every currently available place in the game. I hit the colonies every chance I get and I STILL CANNOT GET THAT GODDAMN EVENT. I've gotten every other color, still not that one!
...Or, barring my frustrations, that "Trade with strange new lands" and "Trade silk and souls, mushroom wine and hallucinogenic honey" are actually part of the blurbs advertising the game. Chill out, man, some people want to trade. The game advertises trade. If trade is really difficult and unbalanced, they need to know about it so they can fix it.
--
Midnight Voyager - A blood-cousin to predators. Collector of beasts. Affably mad.
|
|
|
+2
link
|
Diptych
Administrator
Posts: 3493
11/24/2014
|
If memory serves... Alexis has, in the past, talked about the problem of having easy grinds in your game. Now matter how tedious and low-profit the grind is, compared to actually going out and adventuring, it will always attract a huge crowd who never see anything of the game proper. I gather that conventional trade routes - especially easy-to-predict and -navigate trade routes - are being de-emphasised for that reason.
edited by Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook on 11/24/2014
--
Sir Frederick, the Libertarian Esotericist. Lord Hubris, the Bloody Baron.
Juniper Brown, the Ill-Fated Orphan. Esther Ellis-Hall, the Fashionable Fabian.
|
|
|
+1
link
|
Avian Overlord
Posts: 62
11/26/2014
|
Bonus points if checking the news in London explains the price changes. "Sorrow Spider infestation in Spite! Silk prices plummet!"
Actually, I'm pretty sure the game has the tech to randomize at least London's prices. Just have "Collect messages from the Harbormaster" work like the Iron Republic or Khanate. Except using Time the Healer.
--
The Principled Dectective-http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Corvidae
Open for social actions of all sorts.
|
|
|
+1
link
|
Nocculi
Posts: 22
11/28/2014
|
Oh! Since I haven't seen it mentioned: swinging by Avid Horizon and returning what you find there to the First Curator seems to be a pretty good way of getting some early starting capital.
Certainly, it's faster than sailing circles around Mutton Island in search of valuable floatsam, or ferrying tomb-colonists back and forth until you feel like one yourself.
(Though, I do wonder: is the new Tomb-Colonist storylet meant to refresh eventually? Or is it really only doable once?)
|
|
|
+1
link
|