Got back to playing this. Steam says I've played 51 hours total (so more like 70 when you add in my non-Steam install time.) In this build I've put in close to 20 hours I think. So I've put in an appreciable amount of time, after the tragic loss of my previous Captain, to get back to approaching where I was.
In my hubris, I didn't make a will for him either. But I was able to pass a part of his legacy on to his grandson, Jacob Toomes, in the form of his Pages skill. I rationalize it as the younger Toomes reading his grandfather's old journals, full of esoteric knowledge and lessons about the Zee. In a meta sense, my second full character benefits from my near exhaustive knowledge of the early and mid games.
Like his grandfather, Jacob Toomes was a former soldier, giving me a good Irons score out of the gate, and a great Pages score. In retrospect there are much more useful stats I could have chosen, but this felt flavorful and Pages tends to help with some important storylets.
Anyways. Here's my take on the current state of the game.
COMBAT: It's feeling good. At first it feels awkward and a little unfair, because enemies are pretty good at spotting you and plotting firing solutions. But then you learn about
stealth. You turn off your lamps and your visibility instantly drops by a huge amount, allowing you to zail past enemies without being seen, or shake off a pursuing ship. Or you creep up on a ship unseen, plot a (slower) firing solution, and basically get a free attack AND the first attack of the initial fight. The downside is, you max out your terror gain. So you're essentially spending money to avoid combat or win combat. There is a pretty huge gap between the starting enemies (1 to 2 hits to kill with an ok gun and a decent Irons score) to the midgame enemies (4 to 5 shots with the same, up to 10 shots on the larger ships and monsters.) Damage scales up slower it feels like (1 point of extra damage from Irons per ~5 Irons score) and new ship limitations prevent you from going all out combat early on. Still, overall, the combat rework was successful IMO. You get the tension of sneaking past or to enemies, combat has some back and forth, skill matters, piloting matters, enemies can still occasionally surprise you. Beasts require a lot of finesse because not only will they charge at your at a high rate of speed and ram you, many can submerge, ruining your firing solution and closing the gap to your ship in safety. Doing this all in the early and beginning of the midgame isn't hard, but it requires attention and snap piloting decisions. Later game where the enemies can't be sunk before they can retaliate, I imagine it gets much dicier. All in all, this is good.
TERROR GAIN: It is definitely way down, for several reasons. First off, your average Terror Gain while zailing in the dark with your lamp on is slower than it once was. Secondly, you seem to lose a few points of Terror every time you make port in Fallen London with Something Awaits You. Maximum Terror gain is still pretty rapid: a point every few seconds. So if your're good at keeping terror down by plotting good routes, Terror is not an issue anymore. That said, you're generating more Terror more often due to combat and all the maneuvering it takes, and turning off your lights. So there's some balance there depending on what you're doing. Short runs with no combat see you overall losing terror. Long trips see you come home with an amount that needs to be paid down. Generally though, it seems like recklessly doing storylets with Terror gain is what will push you over the edge. You have to be fucking up pretty hard in general gameplay for Terror to become a real issue now.
SHIPS: The real change here so far is that the starting ship doesn't have all slots available to it for guns and equipment. It has no Forward slot (for Forward weapons with Torpedos and what not) and it has no Aft slot (for rear Weapons or a Secure Hold.) So you're basically required to buy a better ship before you can really take on the midgame challenges. No more loading down the Tramp Steamer with the most expensive weapons in the game and LOLBLASTING Life Bergs and Corsair Frigates. On the one hand, it's good for balance and pacing. On the other hand, it sucks for pacing because new ships that are worth a damn are really, really expensive still. I expect more changes are coming here.
FUEL USAGE: Still feels about where it was prior to the combat update. Maybe a little slower. The rules about how speed and fuel consumption work were made a little clearer. Higher Engine Power = Higher Fuel Consumption & Higher Speed. Higher Ship Weight = Slower overall speed. For the default, it takes about 3 or 4 Fuel to go from Fallen London to Venderblight. The real trick, I've learned, to managing fuel is to have enough cash on hand to buy what you need when you're out on the Zee. Only relying on Fallen London, or places like Mount Palmerston or the Iron Republic, to buy fuel really curtails your options, due to hull space. So having enough cash on hand to pay for the ~120 to ~140 average refueling cost in most places with vendors and not sweating it is key to getting shit done.
ECONOMY: Still pretty difficult at the beginning, particularly for a newbie. They changed how Tomb Colonists work, so no more ~100 echoes just for sailing north to Venderblight. Now, taking a single tomb colonist is a storylet of sorts, with some quality that prevents you from trying it again, and no real known way to me remove it. (It implies its a thing on a timer like Time the Healer. But it doesn't change.) So I think the new game has gotten even more oblique for new players as how to successfully make money (i.e. keep playing the game.) That said, as more storylets go in there's more rewards to be had. Here's what I've done early and mid game to make money. Extreme spoilers.
It's all about Mutton Island and Dat Judgement Egg. It costs roughly 2.5 to 3 fuel to sail from Fallen London to Mutton Island and back. That's 20 to 30 per trip basic fuel cost, and perhaps 10 to 20 supplies. So call it 20 to 50 per trip. It takes about 3 and a half minutes to make the full round trip. The only shorter trip is to Hunter's Keep, and you don't make money going there. The storylet you want is "Explore the Shore" which shows up when you have Something Awaits You. There are 4 core storylets that can show up. The Riddles Storylet, the Let Me Tell You Something storylet, the Crew Lounging Around storylet, and the Search The Beach storylet. You want the last one. This storylet can be one of two variants. The first variant has 4 options. The option you want to pick is the one with the "Something Awaits You" quality next to it. It yields a Judgement Egg, which the guy at the University in Fallen London will buy for 500. The other variant is exactly the same, except it lacks the option which gets you the Judgement Egg. The other storylet options can get you an Outlandish Artifact, Moon Pearls, Fragments or some other junk, none of which is worth what the Judgment Egg is, but is still worth a little something in the grand scheme of things.
The Judgement Egg storylet is not as uncommon as you'd think. The most times I've had to visit Mutton Island to get it is like 6 times, which if you do the math still leaves you with a substantial profit, compared to what else is readily available. Getting this storylet twice in a row doing quick runs basically gives you all the starting cash you need as a buffer to start really exploring. What I do is run to Mutton Island until I get a Judgement Egg, then do an actual run across the Zee for the storylets and Port Reports and Strategic Information assignments. Then run Mutton Island again for a Judgement Egg. Rinse and repeat. The regular Judgment Egg helps turn a run that barely breaks even without luck, into a profitable run overall. Even when you have to run to Mutton Island several times to get one, you still will break even. And it's absolutely the shortest and easiest (and therefore cheapest) way to make quick, reliable cash in the game.
Salt's Favor is a quality that you can earn from a couple storylets like the "New Crew Member" storylet, or you can buy at Whither House of the Question for 1 Secret and 1 Zee-Story. From there you go to the Salt Lions, and take the storylet marked with Salt's Favor when you have SAW. You get a Searing Engima, which the guy in the University buys for 1000. Essentially, you are converting experience into cash with this method. You're making less than 1000 while doing it, because of the fuel and supply and terror and repair costs. But on top of a run that is breaking even, this turns it into pure profit. While I could spend that Secret on raising stats or other storylets, there's many storylets that raise stats and Secrets are essentially farmable. Doing this, I've got about 14,000 Echoes right now. I'm going to keep farming and buy the Maenid, new guns, new engine and some equipment, plus supplies and and crew for the larger ship, with some cash left over. It's also worth noting that there's lots of storylets now which yield Captivating Treasures, which the University storylet will pay 1000 for too. They're not repeatable in a lot of cases, but they're also generally pure profit on top of a normal, well-executed run.
On the trading front, there's still not a lot of potential out there. Sure, you can find something significantly cheaper (~20 o ~30%) than normal at one site for special reasons, but a) the amount you'd need to buy and sell to make a realistic profit still way too high and b) the sometimes esoteric prices confuse what you're really paying. They've introduced a new storylet in Fallen London kind of geared toward trading, but some of the numbers are a little silly. x21 Spider Silk for 1500 echoes? Yeah, let me get right on that.....when I get a bigger ship that can actually carry that much shit. Especially when the place with storylets for getting Spider Silk are on the
otherside of the goddamn Zee. Ahem. What new trading has been added seems geared toward converting resources into other resources, rather than providing meaningful opportunities to make echoes. For example, there's two new shops that I've seen, one in Fallen London, one in Khan's Shadow. The one in FL lets you buy Memories of a Distant Shore or Zee Stories ect...for Memories of a Distant Shore or Zee Stories. The one in KS sells Outlandish Artifacts!.....for almost the same price you get for selling them to the University. They sell Capitvating Treasures for
exactly the price you'd get for selling it the University. I get all this stuff is clearly aimed at being a money sink so you can make Heirlooms to pass on to your descendent. But for people looking to buy low and sell high, it's confusing.
I know I sound like a broken record, but again this is Fallen London-style content and how they're used to making games. Alexis said he didn't want Sunless Sea to be a trading game, so things are deliberately not profitable despite the wealth of items already in the game and the variety of ways to get them. Items are for what storylets require, that's the gig. And converting one thing into another thing, so you can do a storylet? Another key part of Fallen London's gameplay. FL gets around this issue because stuff doesn't need to fit into the hold of a ship. Everything in the game points to trading despite trading factoring into things very little.
I respect their decision to not make this a game about trading. But Sunless Sea, in presenting FL's style of gameplay, gives new players the completely wrong idea about how to go playing the game. And I mean, if you look at my early game spoiler.....I'd rather have fun figuring out what's a profitable thing to try to trade from time to time.....then hammering the same storylet looking for the most money for the least possible effort. I'm going to do that
anyways, so you might as well embrace real trading so it's semi-functional.
MAP RANDOMIZATION: Pretty cool, all in all. Can have a big impact on how you need to play the game, since travel = money and where things are in relation to other things is where all the calculations for profit begin. Here's my current game map:
Note how f'ing close Polythreme is to the Khanate. There's no meaningful trade you can do between them that I've seen yet, but I haven't gotten my permission to trade in the Nephritite Quarter yet. But most sites (read as: stuff out on the Zee, not coastal ports) beyond home waters are random. So it adds a nice bit of dynamism, since the location of Port Palmerston can have a big impact on your logistics. There's still some pretty empty spots in the Zee, and while I don't want every square inch to be filled, I don't really like that giant empty zone between Nuncio, Godsfall, Gaider's Mourn and the rest of the map to the west and North. It's a complete deadzone of interest, and while it may save on fuel, would generate a ton of unnecessary terror to zail through. It almost might as well not be there.
But all in all it's well done and I enjoy a new game and getting the lay of the Zee even though I know what's out there for the most part. The right island spawning in the right place and have a big, big impact on gameplay.
CONTENT: Several new islands have gone in since I last played. I won't go into them, but generally....there's three types of designs I've seen in storylets for Sunless Sea. There's the ubiquitous "visit the port and get the random storylet for that port while you're there" style. Maybe that island has another storylet that's an economic option, like House of the Question or The Poissonnier's Restaurant. Then there's the actual story storylet, which you sometimes but not always have to visit the island multiple times to finish, while others you start and you finish in one go, success or not. Then there's the sort of grand storylet, with multiple branching options, several layers of interaction, combos of different types of storylets. That's about the order of the frequency in game.
So, for example, the Island of Cats is a new island totally focused on Red Honey and Smuggling stuff into Fallen London, avoiding customs, ect....there's like 6 storylets that all play into your activities at the Island of Cats, not all of which you can do immediately, some evolve as you continue to do them...but there's no "drop by port and go wander the city" storylets. So if you're not interested in smuggling, there's almost no reason to visit. Storylets really come down to the intent and who is writing them, as Sunless Sea now has several writers producing storylets. The practical effect it has, is that there's places you visit to make money, refuel or do the casual storylets, and then there's places you only visit to do the deeper storylets. So you're either actively trying to make money and casually do the stuff you know along the way, or you're exploring and in "do shit" mode. That said, the content is fairly engaging when you are doing it, well-written and all the things that make Fallen London fun and interesting.
TEH FUTURE: A couple weeks ago Failbetter announced the full release of Sunless Sea would be Feb. 2015. That's all they've said. So take what I say with a grain of salt. While I love Sunless Sea and I think they've done a great job, I don't know if it's really going to be as fleshed out as it could be by then. For example, there's
still islands out there with art and trading and shit that don't have their storylets. They clearly are meant to do something and still do very little months after their inclusion. Like Khan's Shadow. You don't put that much work into something just to be almost useless. There's still typos, truncated text, windows that need sliders but don't have them, broken storylets, bugs, half a dozen crappy default traders at ports only selling Fuel and Supplies (otherwise known as the only way to get fuel while out at Zee for the most part) content they've said they need to rebalance, half the monsters in game still only have place holder loot.... and there still several items on their dev list that aren't there yet. (Ambitions that aren't "be rich" and "collect a ton of everything", Weather, phenomena and hazards.) There's supposed to be neutral AI and ships out there too. All of exactly two random events can occur while at Zee that aren't directly related to having too much Terror. There's several features people have asked for (Storage for the epic shit tons of stuff they want you to acquire, with a tiny hull unless you're buying a 20k+ echo monster of a ship; additional gear for the ship besides Repair Rats, Secure Storage, almost useless lamp upgrades and completely useless torpedo nets since no one has ever shot a torpedo at me) for months. I'm not sure if the Unterzee was originally promised with the full release, but if it was it's an expansion now they're going to work on after release. This is all in addition to the rest of the story content they need to develop, test and release. Half of the stories for officers still aren't in. That's a lot of shit for ~2 to 3 months of time. And based on my experience with Fallen London, Failbetter has a
bad habit of starting stuff, making it look like it will get updated then forgetting about it for years. Sunless Sea is basically set up for the same thing. That's why the "Get New Stories" button exists; so they can update stories they left unfinished. Finishing Ambitions in Sunless Sea? They haven't even finished Ambitions in Fallen London, FFS. So there's a definite potential for this game to release with a lot of stuff still unfinished. In fact, I'm counting on it.
And more to the point....there's a lot of places where there's now a good framework to actually add a lot to gameplay. But my sense is they're rushing to finish what's left and that the game isn't going to evolve much past where it is now. For example. When you destroy a ship and loot its remains, you're likely to get the same option which yields 1 of 3 or 4 different resources. It's different ship per ship/monster type, but loot is a really known quantity in the game. It's a place where numerous small storylets, from good to bad, would be a smart move. I'm not saying their time was misspent, but when your lead game designer and writer has been "working on a secret project for Bioware" for months when their first non-web game is in the heart of production, racing to finish the last leg of development, having people guest write storylets, it does make you wonder how much better this product might have been without the distractions. And it's a fine product, don't get me wrong. Worth every echo of $20. But it's the potential difference between "good" and "great."
They haven't said much about their post-release plans other than the Unterzee expansion, which I assume Kickstarter backers get. With the "Get New Storylets" button I assume they'll do a mix free storylet updates and paid expansions too. Failbetter are consummate monetizers due to their experience with a free web game, so I doubt they're done with the game after release. I just hope they're still willing to continue to improve the core game experience beyond storylet updates. I don't know what the mod potential is, but I'm hoping they're open to it because there's a lot of places fans could help fill in the holes.
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So
TLDR, game is in an improved state from where it was 4 months ago. More content, better combat, the flow of gameplay is....better. Ish. I'm wishing it had put out a little more umpf in development before it neared completion, but the combat rework threw a monkey wrench into the works I think. We'll see what they can get done in the last couple of months, and what they're strategy is post-release. If you really want to know what this game is like, go play
Fallen London. Take away the action-point based system, add in some sailing and naval combat and usual PC game features, you've got Sunless Sea.
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Topic: Sunless Sea: a steampunk survival roguelike RPG in a Victorian Gothic underworld (Read 40965 times)