While @Razgon speaks (types?) very fluently, I don’t believe English is his native language. I’d just chalk it up to a parsing what you said slightly differently. It was clear to me what you meant.
Played some more last night. Getting munched on by the sea monster WAS the end of the tutorial. After that you’re pretty much dumped into the main map in a new, smaller ship. I couldn’t tell if it was just a generic thing everyone gets or if it was the ship I captured during the tutorial, but it had a far smaller crew and none of the improvements. Anyway, the game doesn’t just leave you hanging, right away you get a quest that mentions missing crew members from the sinking of your original ship, so I set out to find them.
So far I’ve run the main quest line far enough along to recover three of my original crew. What’s cool is that these three guys aren’t normal crew like you hire in port, but NPCs whom you can assign to sections of your ship to provide bonuses. Two of them provided me navigation and speed bonuses, the other grants a bonus to my ship’s cannon. I also took on a quest out of the Pirate port to fool a merchant into paying me money that he owed to a pirate captain. That earned me a good sum of coins very easily, and then when the aforementioned pirate captain found out and came after me, I sunk his ship and collected more cash and loot. There are several quests like this at every port, and you gain favor with the faction that owns the port for completing them.
The only issue I seem to have so far is that I can’t figure out how to trade properly. I see that some ports will have a green “%” symbol, which indicates that you can buy goods there at a discount from normal price (but selling goods will also be lower price than normal), and others have a red “%” meaning they’re paying more for goods (and buying goods costs more as well). You would think that buying green and selling red would be all you need to do, but unfortunately the percentages don’t work out for some reason. I’ll have to look at the Steam forums for the game. I suspect you need to wait until you have higher reputation with the port factions and the discounts/premiums will increase, making straight trade profitable.
So, is this merchants and marauders:the video game?
I found a very nice player made guide that has current information (the game has apparently changed A LOT over the past year) here : Tempest Players Guide
Damn, nice guide. Thanks!
If you missed out on the great Wumpus Tempest Giveaway, you can still grab the game and a bunch of other very interesting games by Herocraft in the new Winter Sale Bundle at CublicBundle.
$3.49 for 10 Steam games including Tempest, Seven Years War, Warhammer 40K : Space Wolf, Strategy & Tactics Dark Ages and King of Dragon Pass. I’ve played Tempest (obviously), Strategy & Tactics : Dark Ages and King of Dragon Pass and they are all entertaining. I also know Warhammer 40K : Space Wolf was well received.
As for Tempest, my playthrough continues. I am really starting to enjoy this game now that I feel like I know what I am doing. I restarted a couple of nights ago to put my knowledge to better use from the start, and it’s paid big dividends. I quickly built up some cash flow doing easy repeatable entry-level missions for the Trade faction and the Pirates. I added all my “lost” crew to my ship, and picked up a couple of new people by completing quests. I hovered up even more cash and some items by getting into fights near areas with large amounts of reefs and rocks, places where random treasure can be found on the waves once your battle is finished.
I put all that wealth to use by quickly upgrading my hull to fortified wood, my sails to high quality and my cannon to long guns. I can outsail and outgun pretty much all the smaller ships in the encounters now. I even took a couple of xebecs and a bark as prize ships, after upgrading my crew with accurate pistols of course. The lower tier ships only fetch a few hundred gold in prize money, but every bit helps. I found a compass that added bonuses to my navigation skills and 50 spaces to my cargo hold, so now I can buy loads of Silverware at green 10% discount ports and sell them at red 15% premium ports and make a decent profit per trip.
I also ran into my first sea monster in open water, a thing that looked like a cross between an Orca and an alien face-hugger. It surprised the shit out of me when it leapt out of the water and narrowly missed crushing my ship. I sailed away as fast as I could firing my aft cannon, and it seemed to lose interest in me. Whew! I’m going to need a bigger boat!
So now I have to check all the weird game threads I don’t care about to see if that’s where the real action is happening?
There’s an all-time great series of posts touching on gay cinema in the 2070s United Federation of California, kangaroo meat jerky, milking penguins, the worst places to buy a used jeep in inner Mongolia, and (as usual) videogaming journalism going on in a thread that you would never read in a million years right now. Too bad, 'cause your input would be greatly desired-- many of these people are wrong and hold anti-Lantz viewpoints and stances!
Sometimes I worry that there is awesome stuff going on in that “things that are technically food but you should never eat” thread but I’ll never know because ain’t no way I’m clicking on that.
I had thought that my life’s work was completed with my project to deliver Windows 10 laptops running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835. I guess I will hold off my ascension to pure energy a little longer.
You wouldn’t believe what some of those people are willing to do with penguin cheese! Scandalous!
You missed out on the Yard-O-Beef.
Topics are like a box of chocolates
And the McDonald’s make your own pizza.
Still playing Tempest. Every time I get close to having enough money to buy a bigger ship (trying for the 50K Frigate right now) I end up with a mission or a combat where I get jumped by multiple much larger ships and end up sunk. It happened three times so far. Getting sunk doesn’t end your game, but it does cost you a lot of gold and some cargo…which is a real pain in the ass if you’re doing a cargo hauling mission like “Small Inheritance” because it means you have to sail around to ports that sell the types of cargo you lost and purchase replacements for the mission to succeed.
Part of the problem may also be that I’m jumping too far ahead on some story quests and faction missions. I’m going to try to stick to the entry level missions for now, and lay off the story quests, until I can save up the 60K to purchase and outfit the Frigate.
Still totally addicted to this game. Managed to purchase that Frigate II that I was after…then outfitted it with 3 rows of high quality sails, 3 rows of long cannons and 2 rows of reinforced wood hull. Man, what a difference! I also had to hire a bunch more crew, but I’d saved up some XP to level them (after visiting the Black Flame ports for a little free leveling) so now I’m running a 105% efficiency crew on sails and guns with 9 out of 11 fighters on deck. Using my frigate to board is so easy. 1 or 2 rounds of bar shot is enough to cripple most ships, then a round of shrapnel softens up the crew, then I board with 9 experienced men (and myself) and it’s over quickly. I’ve made a small fortune (100K) and gained a fearsome reputation from all the boarding and reselling of ships.
I’ve also been trading a lot more now that I have over 1500 hull storage. I’ve been running faction quests to get my rep up with each one. I have no factions with a negative rep at this point. I advanced a few more story quests, and it’s interesting, but I can tell I am going to need another ship upgrade before I progress to the “end game” part of the storyline, so now I am saving up for a Battleship II, the best ship you can purchase.
Tempest is quite grindy, you always need to save up money for something, either a bigger ship or more fun stuff for your current one. The magical devices you can put on your ship are expensive, and maintaining a large ship, crew and all their outfitting costs quickly adds up. Smart captains use everything at their disposal to stay ahead, from grinding faction quests for rewards to boarding ships to taking a few extra minutes after a battle to look around the nearby rocks and reefs for treasure just floating there, waiting to be claimed.
There are some annoying bugs, but nothing game breaking. For example, I had to abandon one quest to kill giant crabs because whenever I would try to enter the area the crabs are located in I’d find myself surrounded by 4 of them, a fight far too difficult to survive. There is also the problem of VERY sparse instructions or documentation. Much of the game is trial and error, figuring out things on the fly. I still don’t know how the hell you’re supposed to do the “Treasure Lands” missions the DLC adds. You have all these little landing icons everywhere, and you’re supposed to fight through an encounter on land, but it’s a chaotic mess when I zone in and there is no helpful text to explain what you should be doing, so I’ve just been ignoring them.
Overall though, I am really enjoying it. It’s not a masterpiece by any means, but it’s good enough to merit the hours I’ve poured into it.
Now I’ll be honest and say that I still haven’t played this game but I just wanted to point out that this, this stuff right here, is one of my favorite things to come across on this forum. Just someone who started playing a game, discovered they love it, and write in detail and with real feeling why. This is what Qt3 is all about, to me.
Instead of liking those posts I will now post words that indicate in the affirmative. Enjoy these words that you see on your screen. Process them. Put them in your mother flippin’ mind grapes.
I think I may be entering the home stretch with Tempest. After much sailing around, gaining of faction and wealth, and boarding of ships I had more than enough money to purchase a Battle Ship of the Line II, the best class of ship in the game. I then spent some time outfitting it with the best sails, guns and hulls I could purchase, plus some additional items only obtainable from quests, then dropped a Strong Stone of Shielding and a couple of other choice “magic” items on the deck as well. The result is a ship that at this point pretty much rules the waves, even against multiple ships and other Ships of the Line.
I really only have two objectives left in the game now. First, I want to figure out what the deal is with the Treasure Lands areas. I still don’t understand what I am supposed to do, but I did discover a quest line that I think may hold the answers. Secondly, I want to reach max faction with the Seekers, as they are the faction that holds all the knowledge of The Returners, who seem to be the ultimate enemy in the game. As you raise your reputation with each faction it unlocks additional quests you can run for them. For the Seekers, the top two quests (only for Allies) look like they could have something to do with unlocking the mystery behind the Returners and probably the end game (if there even is an end game).
In any event, I’m tagging those objectives as my jumping off point. Figure out Treasure Lands, Defeat the Returners (if possible), and rule the waves on my awesome ship. Seems like a good way to sail off into the sunset.