This game needs a mouse driven interface. Its perfect fine on a Surface except that you can’t steer your ship.
yes
seems it gets complicated when you’ve done this 3 times
Ha. My last game carried over from Early Access, which I wasn’t expecting. Didn’t last long though, as I ran into my first Jillyfleur, which proceeded to chip away at my hull until it was all gone. Next time I won’t try to outrun it.
Ah, so that’s the downside of the bruiser mission. I guess they didn’t implement that before. It always seemed like a no-brainer, at least for as far as I got in the story. Now it’s a real trade-off.
Whelp, I’ve played this for several hours and I’d definitely recommend it now. The start is very rough if you’re new to the game. It initially comes off as a game of diminishing returns and having to make something out of nothing, which is hardly encouraging and a lot of people might burn out during the first 1-3 hours. Once you forget about “Pirates!” and stop dreaming about trade routes and min maxing it becomes much clearer what you have to do to progress the game.
I find it requires a particular mindset to play, things can get a bit abstract when you’re sailing around the “Labyrinth of eels” in search of “Khan’s Asshole” or something, but the worldbuilding is terribly convincing and it will grow on you if you let it.
I’ve found that “upgrading” your officers through their storylines has been the most exciting part of it so far.
A few criticisms / ideas:
- I wish there were more active ships than just your own. Sure there are some simple patrolling enemy ships you can aggro but it can feel a bit empty being the lone ship with an actual purpose in this huge map.
- Your “house” should have storage space so you wouldn’t need to lug around stuff you don’t want to sell but have no immediate use for either.
- Their system of weird “qualities” is not intuitive. Your quality of blue bananas is now: moderate housewife. Several hours into the game and I’m still annoyed with it, even if I understand it better.
- Some of the quests are excessively unforgiving. Getting a quest destination, that will literally mean 15 minutes of across the map sailing, should let you know in advance(or at least hint at it) that bringing blue bananas might help you when you got there.
- I highly value a game’s sound design and while they’ve done a great job I find there is room for improvement. When you upgrade your spotlight from flashlight-grade to lighthouse-grade and they use the same kinda weak sample for turning it on and off… I cry a little.
So I played this for a few hours today and I feel like I’m doing it wrong. Any beginner hints/tips?
I suggest focusing only on food and fuel and then sail straight north and straight south along the coastline to find the cities there. Make sure you do port reports for the admiral because if you get enough of them your expenses are basically refunded once you return to London. Later on you will do strategic reports that pay even better and will give you clues as to where you can find points of interest.
Don’t fight any monsters / ships early on. You’re gonna waste a lot of money repairing for little reward and you’re poor as hell in the beginning.
When you open up the map a little, always have some resemblance of a plan setting out from London. If you’re short on cash and you’re just drifting around aimlessly, you’ll run out of supplies with little to show for it. Always think about how you can convert your supplies into valuables such as precious items/stories and reports for the admiral.
Later on this becomes less important when you get real “buffer” money that let’s you explore more without the same risk of ruin. I suggest going straight east when you have accumulated a little wealth.
Then you start buying bigger guns, engines and other upgrades and a lot of the monsters become easy to kill but it seems to me that if you slaughter the small pirates they’ll spawn in even bigger numbers. I’ve had 4 of those small fuckers chasing me at one point.
edit
Also, hire officers when you can, they’ll buff up your numbers used for RNG calculations amongst other things, and talk to them dammit.
Did they get rid of the neutral merchant ships? In the last two beta releases there were merchant ships traveling between ports. You could even go pirate if you wanted and (I never tried this next bit, but based on the dialog options) send the ships with prize crews to the pirate port of Gaider’s Mourn.
I would add the following modifier: go ahead and attack the bats, particularly given how expensive supplies are now (they used to only be 10 echoes in the betas). You can also consider going after the small crabs (don’t go after the large crabs!), but in contrast to bats, which generate new supplies, small crabs food does not keep, they will zero out your current hunger bar, so they’re worth it if the bar is filling you’re getting close to eating the next supply unit, but not worth it if your crew has just eaten (although once you get a bit of your Iron stat up, either by leveling up or buying better guns, they’ll be very easy to take done with virtually no damage).
Also I rather accidentally discovered that if you have a small crew, they don’t eat much. I got in a fight with a pirate and lost all but 1 crew member. He didn’t eat much at all, I was quite a ways from London, and we hadn’t even dropped down a single supply unit by the time we got back. It can be dangerous traveling with low crew, but based on this experience, I suspect traveling with 5 crew members instead of 10 crew members will half your supply costs, which could make a substantial difference. Just be cautious.
The pacing is terrible, it’s insane that they expect you to manually navigate to all these ports. I would strongly urge against permadeath, easily 90% of this game is just dead time that you will never want to reexperience. I cannot believe the praise this is getting.
Only played the beta for half an hour ages ago so I never experienced any neutral ships moving around but they’re definitely not there now. You have static “lighthouse” ships and enemies on guard duty and that’s it.
Anyone else seeing a lot of placeholder graphics for icons in the game? I have to say I’m a bit disgruntled seeing that stuff in a full release.
In my experience I hardly ever lose crewmembers except a single dude on a failed RNG call for some event in a harbor. I’ve been banged up pretty bad and set on fire down to about 30 health and I still had 10/10 crewmembers. So it might actually be totally worthwhile to not hire new crew and keep it at something like 5/10 on the starter ship.
Yes, and I felt the same way. However, the “New Stories” button (on the startup menu) was lit up when I loaded the game tonight and after a bit of fiddling (it seems a bit wonky, I’ve had to try to login multiple times before and that happened again tonight) it downloaded some stuff and now all the placeholder graphics are gone.
I just did this after reading your suggestion. Got a lot of “error connecting” over and over again and then suddenly it just started downloading stuff. After a while it got stuck on “importing” with no progress in the progress bar ;/ Restarted the game and so far everything seems ok, placeholders are indeed gone. Fingers crossed it didn’t mess up my stuff.
Yes. The stranger part? Those things all had icons in the EA build I played the day before release.
Also consider the less crew you have, the slower you tend to do things. I’m not sure what the cut off is, but when my ship got down to 4 crew it was a significant loss of ability. When I was down to like 2, it was almost like I was playing in slow motion.
Also keep in mind any attack on your ship seems to have a chance of killing a crew member. Like I said, I lost 6 in one engagement one time. Other times I lose 0-2, but it is a thing that can happen pretty easily.
I limped in to London with 2 hull left and 1 crew member left (and 1 fuel barrel left). I did notice I could not go above speed 1 after I got shot up in combat (I did win my fight against the Crack Pirate Pinance though :-). I figured the speed limit was due to hull damage, but from what you say, I guess it was the number of crew left.
When you open up the map a little, always have some resemblance of a plan setting out from London. If you’re short on cash and you’re just drifting around aimlessly, you’ll run out of supplies with little to show for it. Always think about how you can convert your supplies into valuables such as precious items/stories and reports for the admiral.
A good plan when setting out early on is to pick up the strategic info quest from the Admiral and if you havent discovered the target yet, island hop in that direction, picking up port reports (and doing whatever story bits you can) on the way. The strategic info quest itself is worth quite a bit(100 to 300 or so) , and you’ll open up new parts of the map as you search. Just be very wary of any new enemies you encounter, and make sure you’re well stocked. Be prepared to head back if you run low before you find the target.
I’m right there with you. I was hoping that it’d be easier to carry over things and that it’d gradually get easier and easier to go further (like Rogue Legacy).
This is definitely a big fat “meh” from me.
I am still curious about the game, but this is my fear as well (not having played it yet).
-Todd
I love the pacing myself. There’s definitely a sense of exploration and discovery here that I have not experienced in any other game before. This is unique and mysterious in ways that push all my buttons. And a lot of it has to do with a pacing that puts you in a different mood than traditional gaming (you need to sit back and look around, instead of being constantly reacting to inputs).
BUT… the permadeath is weird… Normally I wouldn’t mind, but this is a looong game, and I’m not sure permadeath has the same effect as in shorter games. It does give exploring an incredible sense of danger, but probably more should be allowed to carry over from game to game. In a way this is the oppossite of Darkest Dungeon, that has the problem of the characters (and their permadeath) not really mattering at all (just a minor setback) and therefore taking a lot of interest from an already very simple game.