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KickStarter Sunless Sea - an undersea trading and exploration game

DarkUnderlord

Professional Throne Sitter
Staff Member
Joined
Jun 18, 2002
Messages
28,343
Yeah, doing the Sphinxstone missions now which has really made a difference. I can actually afford to refuel and re-supply! Which has made it good to explore further to get more cash from some of the higher end reports, which has all led to upgraded engines and guns at long last. Now things are a little easier and it's not so painfully slow to get everywhere. Just a pity there's not a step between the Merchant vessel and my current (other than upgrades) hold-wise, and everything is so London-centric.

I'm enjoying it so far. But it's definitely one of those games that could do with some expansions. If they added in a bunch of stuff, spread some things out, it'd be a cool little trading / exploring game.
 

hello friend

Arcane
Joined
Feb 26, 2012
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I'm on an actual spaceship. No joke.
An expansion is in the pipeline, adding a z-level to the whole game. I don't see how that would fix the base game, but it's a start.

As you say, it's a shame all upgrades pre-merchant vessel are just filler. Even the more expensive ships aren't worth it before you start farming Mt. Nomad, which is as close to an endgame as this game gets. There's a special ship you can get through a quest, which is much more of a hassle to acquire than the merchant vessel, but it's pretty much useless. It'd be a good idea to get the clay men as soon as you can, by the way. You get increased engine power, and they fill a couple crew slots without needing to eat. Another way to decrease food consumption is to have less than a full crew. The ship speed is halved if your crew count goes under some percentage. With clay men + merchant vessel, I only needed 14-15.

There is a bit of a gap between sphinxstone runs and red honey/filled mirrorcatch boxes. Doing coffee runs to the surface is a good interim trade. Fill up your hold, grab some extra crew (as you always lose some on the surface), and make sure you have 14-23 fuel.

Gotta go, happy new years.
 

DarkUnderlord

Professional Throne Sitter
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Jun 18, 2002
Messages
28,343
Yeah, I'm doing the surface runs with Coffee now. It's horribly gamey and woefully designed. The only reason you make money is if you "get lucky" clicking the "Sail the Mediterranean" button. If you're unlucky, you only get enough to cover costs. If you're lucky, you make a meagre $300 profit. I find I can only do 2 sails of the Mediterranean in a row even if they're both "Lucky" just because of the crew you lose, and 2 Unlucky's in a row is enough to make the entire surface journey unprofitable - because you only get enough to cover fuel and supply costs, and then have to spend your $300 from Coffee resupplying to get back below and then re-crewing.

And ho boy is there nothing better than scroll down, click buy fuel, ok. Scroll down, click buy fuel, ok.. Repeat 30 times. Why have a good shop mechanic and fuck it up with this nonsense? And why even have the Sail the Mediterranean option in the first place? Why can't I just make a decent profit out of the Coffee? Which incidentally, you'd be able to do if you could buy a fucking ship before the $8k (+costs) of the Merchant Vessel? There really needs to be another ship in there with an extra 10 - 15 holds just to make that more worthwhile in the interim, rather than the boring and repetitive as fuck BUY CLICK SURFACE CLICK RAIL CLICK BUY BUY BUY bullshit.

The fact you can only bring 10 Coffee (at best 12) with you because the rest of your ship needs to be full of fucking fuel and supplies to get there is just ugh. And it's really great that there's no way on the surface to see how much crew, Fuel or supplies you have without basically buying more or risking them. Why lose your core game mechanics like that?

Not to mention there's nothing better than sailing back with 4 crew at 1 speed after your Crew died from Skin Cancer. Chug. Chug. Chug.

Funnily enough I got so fucking bored of two flat-out loss making surface trips in a row (so much for 60% Luck) that I sailed North, got too close to the edge, bugged the game somehow that I triggered the terror event TWICE, lost most of my crew, sailed into a wormhole because fuck it at 1 speed from Frostbound and no supplies or fuel left, figured out all they do is stick you there - full powered out, got fucked over by an iceberg and died. Then restarted and was doing Sphinxstone runs... only to somehow or another run into a Pirate ship (which previously have posed no challenge what-so-ever as I happily circle behind them in a game of LET'S JUST CIRCLE BEHIND THE ENEMY FOR A WHILE)... which then fired 3 rapid shots in a row and killed me.

That said, the stories are nice. The world is nice, but fuck me backwards it's another case of game developers not having any business sense. Some tard thought "Oh, you sell it for more than what you paid for it so that must be profit right!" without factoring in: Time, re-supplying costs, re-fuelling costs and all the shit you have to go through to keep your terror low.

It's a pain in the ass that after however many hours, I'm still sailing around in the starting vessel doing the same runs again and again and boring myself to tears while the meat of the game sits there untouched because I don't want to risk again running into clusters of Lifebergs that'll sink me, or Bound Sharks that I can't escape again or that one pirate ship that turns out to be the one to fuck me over because for some reason it's nastier than the others even though it doesn't say it or look it.
 

hello friend

Arcane
Joined
Feb 26, 2012
Messages
7,847
Location
I'm on an actual spaceship. No joke.
There are four or five faction quest chains you can do, that lock you out from the other ones. Apart from that, you choose at the very beginning what your goal is. Other ways to end the game is to retire and send your shit to your heir - getting a new heir is the #1 most important thing you can do at the start of the game if your previous game passed on anything at all. You want to set things up so you never end up in the same situation you spent your first few hours in the first game. In a sense you could say you grind to avoid the grind.

You can also sail off the map, there are multiple ways to do this, with different outcomes, ranging from just sailing off the map to completing a longish quest chain.

Some quest chains give permanent bonuses to future playthroughs.

The game is best the first few hours the first time, when the world is still thick with atmosphere and mystery. On later playthroughs it's just grindy because you know the meta and the procedural generation isn't up to snuff, so instead of fun gameplay you're just going through the motions. Once you've read all the stories the atmosphere dies, and with randomisation not extending beyond a very slight reshuffling of port locations, the mystery evaporates as well.

+MJust realised atmosphere and mystery is the same thing. Point still stands.

I love what I remember of this game from the first time I fired it up. Too bad it quickly turned into a bad fedex sim.
And ho boy is there nothing better than scroll down, click buy fuel, ok. Scroll down, click buy fuel, ok.. Repeat 30 times. Why have a good shop mechanic and fuck it up with this nonsense? And why even have the Sail the Mediterranean option in the first place? Why can't I just make a decent profit out of the Coffee? Which incidentally, you'd be able to do if you could buy a fucking ship before the $8k (+costs) of the Merchant Vessel? There really needs to be another ship in there with an extra 10 - 15 holds just to make that more worthwhile in the interim, rather than the boring and repetitive as fuck BUY CLICK SURFACE CLICK RAIL CLICK BUY BUY BUY bullshit.
It's amazing they never bothered to code the changes the UI so desperately needs but took the time to keep releasing regular content updates. Nice of them to do but it says a lot about their priorities.

Failbetter is a company of writers and artists, not game designers. Last game they made was an online X-actions-per-day CYOA game. It's also not good.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,980
Eh, I had fun with it. I don't think it was that expensive was it? Don't bother with the grindy shit, just keep exploring, find secrets and shit to trade to that one guy for cash, do various quest chains like trying to find all the colours or explore the eastern ruins. Do favours for your crew. There's no need to grind sphinxstone and coffee and shit at all, you get more than enough money to get by as quest rewards, and theres tons of quests to do, by the time you run out you could have won the game 3 times over already.
 

fastjack

Augur
Joined
Mar 31, 2004
Messages
347
Location
the south bay
I'm cautiously interested in this due to its superficial resemblance to Pirates! In screens. Will I disappointed if I go in hoping for something similar?

As someone who also was hoping for something like Pirates I can say that I was terribly disappointed with Sunless Sea. I think it is an awful, awful game and that staccato sentences about gaseous ermine waifs are not a substitute for gameplay.
 

IHaveHugeNick

Arcane
Joined
Apr 5, 2015
Messages
1,870,123
I'm cautiously interested in this due to its superficial resemblance to Pirates! In screens. Will I disappointed if I go in hoping for something similar?

Yeah. This game is just...smaller then sum of its parts.

A lot of things are done expertly, but somehow the whole experience rounds up to total borefest. Mindless grind and mindless flipping through endless pages of banal shit. Ultimately a narrative driven rouge-like is a bizzare idea, because you have two elements that are in complete contradiction.
 
Joined
Apr 3, 2013
Messages
2,071
Location
Siberia
Not really, there are just no solid mechanics in place to support the idea, hence the boredom. Everything is made with cheapest, most streamlined approach in mind. It's a shame really.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
That, and in order to do anything, you have to grind like Korean. Most stat checks require ludicrous levels in the 150-200 range, which is quite steep considering that a typical player might start with 50-odd at best. That means you're looking at grinding hundreds of levels before you can tackle the story. You really have to heavily metagame this.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,980
I don't recall that at all. Most of the checks were pretty reasonable as long as you focused on a particular stat. There were only a handful of really crazy ones for things you weren't really meant to do (like breaking that one dude out of prison.) And you get a lot of free stat points from crew and completeing various quests. I do wish the metagamey bonus stats for your heirs thing was revealed to the player better though, I would have done a half dozen playthrough instead of one really long one where I saw 80% of the content but couldn't get at the rest. Now I've already seen most of the shit so I'm not terribly inclined to go through the motions to reach the parts I couldn't before. I'll probably come back to this some day though.
 

orcinator

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 23, 2016
Messages
1,704
Location
Republic of Kongou
Oh the expansion isn't vaporwave.

Wonder if they'll try fixing some of the base game's flaws (for example, everything about the gameplay) or just give us more of the same with the same problems.


I'll probably give this a pirate either way but now I'll know to edit the ship speed and give myself loads of money.
 

Arrowgrab

Arbiter
Joined
Jan 20, 2016
Messages
602
I'll probably give this a pirate either way but now I'll know to edit the ship speed and give myself loads of money.

If you don't particularly mind a somewhat contemplative gameplay, you could try reducing the rate of fuel and food consumption. Have to say it really made a difference for me.
 

Fug

Educated
Joined
Jan 22, 2016
Messages
87
Location
Finland
I'll probably give this a pirate either way but now I'll know to edit the ship speed and give myself loads of money.

If you don't particularly mind a somewhat contemplative gameplay, you could try reducing the rate of fuel and food consumption. Have to say it really made a difference for me.
Changes to the game that are necessary:
  • Slower consumption of food and fuel, you run out way too fuckin fast
  • Significantly improve the combat, offer more options early on, every fight turns into the same 'circle around the enemy and shoot them'
  • Improve the explanation of the heir system
 

Grimwulf

Arcane
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Oct 1, 2014
Messages
4,045
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Kodex Kommunistic Kastle
The game gets only better with time. They even fixed the weakest (imo) part of the writing - the Pigmote Island questline. Redone it from scratch, adding a bunch of new content to it as well.

That, and in order to do anything, you have to grind like Korean.

You don't have to grind at all. I never do.

Most stat checks require ludicrous levels in the 150-200 range, which is quite steep considering that a typical player might start with 50-odd at best. That means you're looking at grinding hundreds of levels before you can tackle the story. You really have to heavily metagame this.

No. Some challenges are supposed to be out of your reach. Your first captain is a pioneer who can't do anything late-game related. His primary goal is to give birth to a successful lineage of zee captains. His heirs will be better at everything, their stats will be waaaay higher than his own. IF you do the stuff right, of course.

Slower consumption of food and fuel, you run out way too fuckin fast

There are methods to increase fuel efficiency. Special engines, mods, and officers. Also, stick to light-weight ships like Corvette for the early-mid stages of the game, and use your lamp properly. It increases fuel consumption radically.

If you don't have a lot of crew on board, try sailing at first speed instead of second. Usually it is more expensive due to food consumption. But if you don't have a lot of mouths to feed, 1st speed is good.

Significantly improve the combat, offer more options early on, every fight turns into the same 'circle around the enemy and shoot them'

- Sometimes it's possible to kill an enemy without revealing yourself - just keep a max distance during initial fire; then sail backwards at full speed.
- Fat enemies like Lifebergs can't move through tight spaces (like salt icebergs) - you can pew-pew them with starting cannon from there, if you have the time.
- Blue Scintilac allows you to insta-reload all weapons, and you can aquire it pretty early in the game. Using it properly, you can instantly kill half of the ships and sea monster, no "circling" involved.
- "Circle around" won't get you anywhere against sea monsters. Against ANY of them.
- Also mostly useless against high-speed ships like Corvettes, unless your speed is even faster.

The game is not about combat. It isn't supposed to be rewarding in any way. I find it useful to reduce terror (every kill reduces it a bit), but overall prefer not to waste my time chasing random ships and creatures.

Improve the explanation of the heir system

What is there to explain? I am genuinely confused.

 

Fug

Educated
Joined
Jan 22, 2016
Messages
87
Location
Finland
When I originally played the game, the only tactic that worked was circle around the enemy ship or monster and shoot it up the ass.
Food and Fuel also go away painfully fast in the early game, and even in the mid game, forcing you to have more than half of your cargo just be food and fuel.
The heir system is not explained too well in game, it isn't mentioned anywhere that you can find permanent lineage stat boosters.
 

orcinator

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 23, 2016
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1,704
Location
Republic of Kongou
"You don't grind in the game but to do endgame you have to play however long it takes to get a decent amount of bonuses for your descendant then start over"
 

Grimwulf

Arcane
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Vatnik
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Oct 1, 2014
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Kodex Kommunistic Kastle
"You don't grind in the game but to do endgame you have to play however long it takes to get a decent amount of bonuses for your descendant then start over"

It's a roguelike-ish game. You are not supposed to see everything in a single playthrough. Why do you think they constantly add new stories? Why make several branches to most of the quests? Hidden ambitions? The game is designed that way, so that it will always have dark corners you never explored.

Playing it munchkin-grind style is bad taste. There are other games of the genre that reward grind - try Space Rangers or Vangers.
 

Fug

Educated
Joined
Jan 22, 2016
Messages
87
Location
Finland
The problem is that everything is really fucking expensive, and you lose most of your stuff on death.
 

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