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[Sappho]

I threw together a quick Let's Play. It's a bit rough and disorganized, but at least it will give you a look at the game if you're trying to decide whether to buy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqOQlyfQq7M&feature=youtu.be

[Sappho]

I know the summer sales are all very distracting, but is anyone else still playing around with Sunless Sea? I've found that I can get a reasonable amount of money pretty quickly if I just scoot out of London, nab a pirate ship, send it home, then turn straight back around and gather the reward money. Slightly grindy, but much faster and more effective than other methods I've tried, and this way I can get enough echoes to bring down my terror before heading out to explore some more.

I also just found out that the "get new stories" button on the main menu is actually the update button. Now to go see what they've changed since I downloaded the game...

[nenjin]

Put probably 15 hours into this by now.

I gave up trying to do hardcore runs. There's just too much grinding, and combat still is just random enough you will get a major setback once every few battles, which can take a long time to recover from (financially.) So now I'm rolling on a merciful mode character, just so I can get somewhere.

Some observations:

It is all about netgain, in the end. The primary consumers of your profit are:

-Fuel
-Supplies
-Crew
-Hull

In that order I feel. It takes ~4-5 barrels of fuel and ~2-3 supplies to run to Venderblight and back.

So right there you've got an overhead of ~60-80 echoes to make the Tomb Colonist run, at 10 echoes per resource.

You get back 45 for 3 colonists, 10 for the Port report, and 10 for selling them Recent News.

So making best speed, you might recoup your costs for the trip. But it's unlikely.

Bat swarms are a great way to avoid having to pay for supplies, although they carry about a 10% chance of damaging your terror, crew and supplies if the AI cues up that way. Still, they're mostly worth it.

Pirate ships aren't (usually) dangerous but they will cause hull damage which is expensive as hell to repair. (40 echoes for 25 hull points, vs. 1 supply (i.e. 10 echoes) for 1 hull point doing repairs yourself.) And if you're not paying attention, they can do serious damage to already damaged ship because every once in a while the AI queue up a savage barrage and do 1/2 your hull damage in one shot or you mistakenly assume you're going to get the illumination rolls necessary to open fire but roll low. Looting the remains will on average net you 10 to 30 echoes in trade goods, rarely as high as 60....but often will get you fuel or supplies instead.

On combat....I'm still unsure how I feel about it. On the one hand, you can usually get your shot off first. On the other, the values of your illumination attacks and damage are still pretty random, and all it takes is needing another full ability wind up to give the enemy the chance to hurt you (and therefore reduce your profit value in some way.) Mirrors + Iron seems to be critically important for most sea combats. Veils....not so much, although I haven't tried keeping an enemy at range. Enemies generally have much, much better Mirrors scores than you, so unless your Veils is particularly strong, they're always going to be illuminating you more than you're going to be reducing your illumination. And since there's no (explained) relationship between Distance and Illumination/Damage, trying to fight your enemies at range tactfully, so far, seems like a losing battle. You're just giving them more time to fire a shot at 50% or more illumination and cost you money.

I'm sure there are other enemies in game that warrant different strategies, but for the early game the strat seems to be "light them up and kill them ASAP." But ultimately what I've found is this: There are certain sets of queued actions by the enemy that basically makes it impossible to avoid damage. This may be only 10% of the possible action queues the enemy could start with, but it's known quantity. Add in the randomization of combat values so you, the player, may fail to get 50 Illumination in 2 actions (happens very often at 32 Mirrors) or fail to deal enough damage to kill something in one shot (about 10% or so of all attacks against pirates with Iron 69), means there's a degree of unavoidable damage that will irritate those trying to find a problem-free farming method.

Right now I've upgraded the main gun on my ship, as well as my engine. My stats are roughly Hearts: 36, Veils: 50, Pages: 36, Mirrors: 32, Iron: 69.

And while I notice some differences in combat, (mainly whether I one-shot pirate ships, which is basically "Did I walk out of this fight taking damage Yes/No"), it's more of a gently sliding scale than dramtatic differences in effectiveness. (Since we're talking the odds of taking damage over 20 or so fights.)

Re: Fuel. Fuel consumption is whack IMO. You appear to consume fuel at the same rate regardless of what you're doing. Whether you're steaming ahead full, idling along at half-speed or sitting there without the engine running. That seems a bit unfair, considering it can take 10 (or more) fuel to reach some places along the north/south coast. With a starting Hold size of 40, it's not so bad. But in a smaller ship, your entire cargo basically has to be devoted to supplies and fuel, if you want to have a prayer of making it back to Fallen London. Fuel consumption needs to be based on what you're actually doing, so there's a trade off and you're not effectively being nickel and dimed for not pausing the game while you do stuff, or for minor changes in direction. There seems to be no point to dumping extra fuel into the engine, short of fleeing an enemy you normally can't outrun. Otherwise it's logistically expensive and doesn't end up costing you less fuel to get somewhere quicker.

Re: Terror. The indicator for increasing terror needs to be more obvious, because the line between terrified and not terrified is razor thin. Deviate from the coastlines just a little bit, and you're building 1 terror every 5 seconds....and that's in the calmest waters. Also, pro-tip, turning off the lights on your trip seems to make terror increase period, regardless of where you are. I didn't notice a ton of advantages to doing so, pirates and monsters generally seemed able to see me just fine.

Re: Exploration. All of the above taken in, there are a lot of challenges to exploration. You have to plan carefully against your supplies and fuel where you're going to go, and journeys into the great unknown makes planning difficult. (Since you'll burn fuel just trying to find a "safe" passage to the next landmark.) It wouldn't be a huge issue, were it not for the fact you're constantly needing to pay for supplies, and looting pirate ships does not seem to cover the bill all that well. So my strategy has been to build up a large cash stock pile so I can go for a while w/o making money, because it's the only way you can conceivably leave the waters around Fallen London with any real sense of security. Fallen London so far offers the best prices and the highest range of services, meaning unless there's a refuelling/refitting hub somewhere out in the Zee....you have to plot every trip starting from FL, and that means a ton of fuel.

My money-making strategy is to now just hunt pirate ships north of the entrance Fallen London's harbor. You'll get one spawn almost immediately, another slightly north of the first, and by the time you're turning around for the harbor, another will spawn and come racing after you. You've got an 80% chance of success the crew returning the ship to FL. So that's anywhere from 100 to 300 echoes. At worst, it will cost 45 echoes to refill your crew to full. So that looks like...

Ship profits = +100 to 300 echoes. (1 to 3 ships captured)
New crew = -35 to 45 echoes. (Full crew replacement)
Fuel = -10 to 40 echoes (depending on how much time you diddle around with pirates.)
Repairs = -40 or more echoes (the odds of them repairing less than 25 hull points seems low, so it's not worth the extra 20 echoes to guarantee 25 hull points.)

So in order to turn a profit that is meaningful, you'll want to successfully capture at least two ships. Taking hull damage even once means you'll HAVE to capture two ships successfully or you've lost money. If you fail to capture even one ship, that's basically killed all profit just by virtue of the crew costs, forget supplies and repair.

If you're playing hardcore, this is untenable IMO. You will eventually either a) run your profits into the ground, b) risk losing because you're skimping on paying for repairs because they're so expensive and a pirate ship that gets in a lucky savage barrage with cost you 80 echoes to repair) due to the randomization of combat, or c) will take for bloody fucking ever, as it can take a couple runs just to recover from a really bad run.

A safer and more consistent method than farming the pirates for their ships in hardcore is looting their remains while doing the Tomb Colonist run to Venderblight. If you score Parabola Linen or Spider Silk, the trip can be made profitable. But the overall profit return is lower, and it takes a lot longer.
 
Playing softcore, you can save scum to get the best results (i.e. between 225 - 235 echoes a trip) of farming the pirates outside FL. Which allows you to buy a better engine, better weapons, and recruit all your officers in reasonably short order, all while keeping your supplies topped off. But it's in no way a fun way to grind towards a new ship, and you're not seeing any of the game by doing it.

Sappho's method of just getting one pirate ship and heading back nets you between 50 (two crew buys to get back to full and 1 fuel) and 80 (one crew buy to get back to full and no fuel. Supplies can be excluded since you'd only need to buy new supplies once every other run or so to maintain your stock) echoes. FWIW, I think the # of crew you have has some sort of effect in combat as well as limiting your max speed. I feel like my "warm ups" are slightly slower when I'm understrength, vs. when I'm full strength and all pirate ships are at half strength. Subjective but sometimes, those fractions of a second have mattered.

Re: Stories. A surprising amount I've found, just visiting Venderblight. The "Explore Venderblight" option has several events, enough that I was still seeing a new one occasionally after sailing to Venderblight for the whole night. So that bodes well for the rest of the game, although I feel like there should be more to do in Fallen London. It's not the focal point of the game but for a FL player, it seems weird to do almost nothing there.

So all in all.....?

It's a fun game with an unfortunate tendency right now toward the grind. The game's lethal nature sometimes inhibits the ability to explore because there are so many factors to consider. If it's not terror proscribing where and how you can explore, it's the overhead of fuel, supplies and crew that means you have to grind to have the resources necessary for exploration. There's not a lot of variety in the early game, either in randomness of enemies, their spawn areas or in viable ways to make money. Being that London appears to have the best prices for supplies, it makes me wonder just how a body is supposed to survive out beyond the first terror parallel, where everything is more lethal, more expensive and more time consuming. If you've got a warchest of 1000 echoes, you can certainly find fuel (at a crippling 20 echoes or more per barrel at the harbor provision stores) as you go. But ship repairs, supplies and terror reduction (if you need it) aren't easy to come by. I suppose when the economy of SS is better filled out, trading will be more viable. But with all the things taken together, the simple necessity of fuel to do anything and the sparseness of available, close sources of cash is kind of a problem.

I think with some mechanical and value tweaks this could all be made a little smoother, and I hope it will be. Because right now it seems that everyone will have to play the same way, doing the same things, to get past the early game. There isn't a sustainable cash flow outside of capturing pirate ships(which is still random in its success), and even if you do find something profitable, the grind required to get the most out of it (i.e. runs to Venderblight) gets in the way of the rest of the game. Money needs to be easier to make trading between ports, exploration needs to be more profitable, looting other ships needs to be potentially more profitable (or you need to have more events where you salvage a wreck or something) and I think terror accumulation over time in the open zee could be made a lot less punishing, so people actually feel like they can explore.

[nenjin]

So there have been a couple content updates for this.

Terror is slightly more forgiving. Enemies aren't quite as tough. You now get crew back when you claim your prize money (meaning it's much easier to turn a profit in a shorter time, less grind.) Trading is starting to go in, so more ports have goods to sell and will buy goods. (The first pass of this was kinda screwed up, but the full suite of trading locations should come with the next update.)

There are surprisingly few posters in the Failbetter Community forums for Sunless Sea. (Given FL's playerbase, I thought there'd be more people posting there by now.)

So if you've got feedback, this is a good time get it noticed by Alexis who is doing a fair amount of posting and reading. I imagine once the Steam release hits, the forum traffic and volume of feedback is going to increase a bit.

[nenjin]

Bumping to say this is available for purchase on Steam today.

[nenjin]

Your posts are sufficiently long and heartfelt on this that though the detail is often useful, it's beginning to clog the thread for me :-)

I love it when developers beg for feedback, and then essentially tell me TLDR. That kind of pisses me off. Especially from a guy who makes his living by having people read his writing.

[Dohon]

Your posts are sufficiently long and heartfelt on this that though the detail is often useful, it's beginning to clog the thread for me :-)

I love it when developers beg for feedback, and then essentially tell me TLDR. That kind of pisses me off. Especially from a guy who makes his living by having people read his writing.

Huh, now that's something new. Normally, devs worship constructive feedback, no matter the length of it. More feedback is always better, in my book.

The game itself is fun, but I do hate having to keep on doing trivial fights. Zeebats, I'm looking at you. They just keep coming and even at full speed ahead, I can't shake them all the time. Same for the small crabs, they just keep popping up one after the other. It gives you something to do, but I really want to move along instead of stopping every five breaths to input the same winning combo. Other than that, I am intrigued.

[nenjin]

Still using the standard engine? I found once I upgraded to the 1000 Echo model, while I couldn't straight outrun pirates and bats, if I simply didn't slow down I'd pass beyond the length of their tether and they'd turn around long before catching me. The AI pathing is actually hilariously bad. Mobs tend to wig out when they're a short distance away from you and turn or change speed suddenly. Sometimes I've had to come to a dead stop or reverse into them because they've gone completely stupid.

So yeah, get an engine upgrade, and then just start turning. You can play chicken with the larger monsters and ships because they can't turn as well as you and tend to react to where you are rather than where you're going.

[Rakonas]

Played for a bit and felt it was pretty unbalanced. I could barely break even and there was one option at the admiralty which I could keep clicking for 75 echoes at a time, probably would have gone under without it. Risk vs. reward isn't well tuned and I can barely justify sailing into the unknown because I don't even know if I'll run into anything that's complete.

[nenjin]

They've toned down the pirate spawns near FL and cut the value of To The Victor Go The Spoils in half. That was my primary grind spot to pay off the debt for exploring.

Apparently this is a thing you can do for easy money. You're basically manipulating the trigger that makes special, high end storylets available, to get  an item you can sell to the University for 500 echoes. I don't quite follow it but returning to Fallen London basically resets the token, or something.

[nenjin]

So I've hit what I consider the mid-game of SS.

Cash is no longer a problem. I'll detail my path here for you.

You want to get both a Strategic Information mission and a Blind Bruiser mission somewhere in the mid to upper north of the Zee. If either one is at Polythreme, Cumaean Canal or Godfall, you're not going to make maximum profit doing it.

You're going to want 15 fuel and 10 supplies. (-250 echoes, some of which you'll already have.) You'll want to grab the Tomb Colonists and Recent News as well.

Head to Venderblight. Sell news and Tomb Colonists and get Port Report. (65 echoes.)

Zail north along the coast to Wither. Engage Lifebergs at your own risk. They're occasionally worth it IMO. Their loot seems like mid-tier with a small chance to be high-tier item. You get always get a Zee Story, at any rate. Get the port report from Wither. (20 Echoes)

Zail east to Codex, bypassing it and heading due east toward the Chapel of Lights. Get their port report (20 echoes).

From the Chapel of Lights zail East/South East toward Mount Palmerston and get the Port Report (40 echoes.) Buy more fuel at 9 echoes a piece (-90 echoes) and buy a handful of Eoliths for 35 a piece (-105 echoes.)

Now zail south to the Principles of Coral. When you hit them zail through them headed South/Southwest until you hit Port Cecil. (30 echoes for the port report.) You can occasionally find Colossal Flukes here.

Head west out of Port Cecil and hug the coral going south. You will eventually hit the Corsair's Forest. Bear South/Southeast until you hit Gaider's Mourn. Get the Port report. (30 echoes.)

Gaider's Mourn is a big in profit. The Corsair frigates, when killed, drop between 1 and 3 fuel and supplies every time, in addition to a medium quality loot drop. Hunting Corsair's alone can easily repay the entire trip. I can 2-3 shot them with Irons 103, and the tramp steamer. They will pretty much 2 shot me. Not the best strategy for hardcore players, but softcore players can have a field day.

When you're done hunting Corsairs, head south out of Gaider's Mourn and bear South/South East to the edge of the forest. Break out into open waters for a little bit headed south until you hit Khan's Heart. The port report there will get you 75 echoes (although it gets harder and harder to do.)

Then head to the light buoy at the very northwest corner of the Khanate, and go back the way you came. Sail west along the southern edge of the Corsair's Forest, kill another corsair or two, until you reach Station III (no port report but it has a ton of storylets and is a convenient stop along the route to save.)

From Station III, head west from the northern end of the island until you reach Abbey Rock. Grab their port report (20 echoes) but DO NOT DO THE STORYLET THERE IF IT'S AVAILBLE.

From Abbey Rock head west from the southern end of the island and hop over to Mutton Island. Cross your fingers and do the storylet there, and get the port report. (5 echoes.)

From there sail west until you hit the coast, and the back north to Fallen London.

Here's a spoil-y map: http://imgur.com/pF5D9BQ In final release with shift map tiles, it won't always be so straight forward.

Totals
Fuel & Supplies (~ -200 - -340 echoes)
Strategic Info and Blind Bruiser Missions (+350 echoes)
Venderlbight (+10 echoes)
Venderblight goods (+55 echoes)
Wither (+20 echoes)
Chapel of Lights (+20 echoes)
Mount Palmerston (+40 echoes)
Port Cecil (+30 echoes)
Gaider's Mourn (+30 echoes)
Khanate (+75 echoes)
Abbey Rock (+20 echoes)
Mutton Island (+5 echoes)

That alone gets you a profit of ~+325 - +465 echoes. But those are just the fixed profits and costs. Along that route you can:
-Get a Judgment Egg from Mutton Island (Rare) that sells for +500 echoes.
-Kill a Colossal Fluke in the Principles of Coral and get a Colossal Fluke Core that sells for +500 echoes.
-Farm Corsairs at Gaider's Mourn to not only pay back your fuel and supplies cost, but get oodles of drops from them. (Everything from trade goods like Parabola Linen (on average between 40 and 60 echoes per) to Curiosities like Outlandish Artifacts (100 echoes) and more.
-Storylets from each island can always have a chance to be one of the monetarily profitable ones.
-Identifying the Eoliths you bought in Mt. Palmerston at the University will get you between a loss of ~100 echoes, or a profit of ~100 echoes, for 3.

Doing this circuit I always come out ahead. And sometimes, I come out way, way ahead. I've made as much as 2000 echoes from one run. I usually have a few more costs though. You pick up around 20 to 40 Terror depending on your route, so that's a couple hundred to pay down depending on Terror increases or decreases from storylets. I also use Torpedos to take down the biggest monsters and ships, and those run 50 echoes a pop. Still, it's very easy to be profitable.

Alexis has said they never envisioned the game as one of merchant trading. So trade goods are really not the way to focus on getting money. They supplement your income certainly, but rarely will they be the basis for it, even when more stuff is in. The real money is in port reports, storylets and monster drops in large numbers, and you simply won't find that stuff near Fallen London. So it's in your best interests to broaden your horizons as soon as its feasible.

If you absolutely must have an early game grind, you can make the run down to Mutton Island and take repeated shots at getting a Judgement Egg. It's highly random when you get it however, and you are taking a financial loss every run until you get one (-30 to -40 echoes per run.) But if you're playing softcore and save scumming, you can reload your save. Note, storylets seem to be generated the instant you hit port, before you can save. So once you reach port, the storylet you get is the one you're stuck with.

Hope that helps some folks.

[Retropunch]

Just started playing it - sorta enjoyable but kinda messy in design. There seems to be SUCH a lot going off when you start (I've never played FL) and most of it is just not that useful or is just random little storylet things which end up mainly clicking through a few options and winning/losing by chance. Most of what you win is tediously obfuscated into all sorts of sub-currencies, which you kinda don't know what to do with most of the time.

The difficulty mainly seems to just be a lack of supplies/fuel (as has been complained about) which gets a bit tedious and the payouts from doing anything are so small. If it was a survival game that'd be great, but when the focus seems to be on exploration (finding new stories and whatever) you just never seem to be doing much adventuring compared with supply counting. This is my main problem with it really - it seems everything you do gives you such a minor payout that you just seem to be constantly clicking through random events (which don't come out to much). While this isn't too bad the first few times, the difficulty is so high that you end up having to do these same things time and time again.

The combat, whilst interesting in terms of using different actions and stuff, is kinda hard to get to grips with in terms of the whole illumination/shooting thing. I'd have preferred a strictly turn based combat, but at the very least it needs to be much better explained.

I'll probably keep having a dip into it on updates, but it doesn't seem like the kinda thing I could get excited about grinding through it. If it has a lot of work on it then I imagine it could turn into something fun, but it needs a much cleaner run up to mid/late game and some more simplified functionality.

As an aside:
Nenjin, whilst the developer might have come across a bit contradictory with his TLDR response I do sympathize in some ways. What's most useful for developers is for lots of people's general opinions (or specific problems) rather than one persons detailed account of everything that is good and bad (which yours certainly was) because they need to know the general consensus. I think that was all he was meaning, and that he was so rushed off his feet with post-release stuff that he would prefer briefer accounts. Certainly nothing to take offense at and your detailed posts are more than welcome here.

[nenjin]

There seems to be SUCH a lot going off when you start (I've never played FL) and most of it is just not that useful or is just random little storylet things which end up mainly clicking through a few options and winning/losing by chance. Most of what you win is tediously obfuscated into all sorts of sub-currencies, which you kinda don't know what to do with most of the time.

That's Failbetter's design philosophy, pretty much.

As my post above points out, being rewarded significantly in the game right now is about volume, and luck. If you haven't been as far out as Mt. Palmerston or the Khanate, you've not really gone far enough to make extraordinary cash.

[nenjin]

http://www.failbettergames.com/emerald-and-steel/

The Emerald (now the Emerald and Steel) update should drop this week.

Features:

MAP SHUFFLING. This is the headline feature. The Unterzee now feels properly uncertain on each new career. We’ve gone beyond what we originally said we’d do – not only is the map shuffled between each replay, but also you’ll see variant forms of some tiles and islands. It’s working smoothly and we’ve been careful about what gets shuffled where, but expect weird and wonderful balance stuff until it settles down.

NEW LANDS! We didn’t manage to get Rattsey or Visage in – those will come later – but you’ll see the Salt Lions, the Mangrove College and the Sea of Autumns, and especially the Iron Republic.

SHIP NAMES. You’ll begin the game with a random ship name, but you can now rename it without buying a new one.

ZEE-BAT. This now works properly, and comes with a Mark On Chart feature to make it easier to navigate to newly spotted islands.

CHART IMPROVEMENTS. It’s much easier to wrangle the chart, and it’s now way prettier.

NEW SOUND EFFECTS. Liam’s been working on making the zee much more audible. I particularly enjoy the bats, myself.

NEW CONTENT. If you’ve been using Get New Stories regularly you’ll have seen a lot of this, but look out especially for the Overheard on Deck events, the Nephrite Quarter in the Khanate and the unusual trading options in the Iron Republic. (The word count in Sunless Sea has officially passed 100,000 words with this release.)

[Greenbane]

The other chunk of the article is important as well.

AND THE FUTURE. So we’ve been listening carefully to feedback. The two biggest problems with the game are

(i) combat – too long, too frequent, not fun enough

(ii) rewards – too hard to get started and too random

As we’ve said, this is going to improve over time. But we’re going to shift the priority away from filling out each island with random events, and more towards systems and interconnected stories. It’s mostly the same content implemented in a different order – but you should find that you’ll start to see more plot arcs and routes through the game, even though the islands look a little emptier for a while.

COMBAT is a different matter. We knew it needed work – you can see it’s marked as about 65% on our progress plan – but the feedback has been very clearly that it’s the weakest part of the game right now. So our current plan (TBC this week) is to

- relabel it as 50% complete
- focus the month of August, and an extra release – STEEL – on combat, beastie pathfinding, and related issues
- slip the other releases by a month.

That’s a pain for us – and we know it’s not great news for people eager for the final release  - but there’s no point us listening to feedback if we don’t respond to it. We want to make the best game we can, and all of you are helping us do that. So – thank you all! We’ll see you on the other side of EMERALD.

I'm glad they'll be working on combat and rewards. Particularly the latter's what's been persuading me to hold off on playing until more updates are in.

From my perspective, besides rebalancing rewards, I'd make most everything more rewarding if the permadeath option is on and combat is sufficiently difficult. Slow progression doesn't help the game experience if you could lose everything at any moment. I mean, permadeath shouldn't be just a box you check to have your saves deleted if you die: there should be some design around it.