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Combat with the proper enemies can pay out well, but otherwise yeah, it's easier to avoid it if possible. The ship is pretty much the last thing to upgrade. I got the first housing upgrade first (so I could take care of my child) and the best deck gun second, as both can be passed on to your next captain should you die. The majority of money ends up coming from completing quest lines, while most of the rest of the rewards in the game basically help you break about even. I keep a big written list of things that are required to advance stories at each port, and try to do at least a couple of things on each trip. Sometimes they pay off, others they don't. There are several quest lines that pay off on the order of 5000 echoes though.

 

That being said, there are definitely huge troughs where it feels like you're not getting anything accomplished and are just barely holding on. They can be miserable.

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That being said, there are definitely huge troughs where it feels like you're not getting anything accomplished and are just barely holding on. They can be miserable.

 

Yeah, I have a dozen-hour game to which I haven't gone back since getting sick, probably because when I left it I was at the point of saying to myself, "Well, maybe I should retire. I'm not sure I'll be able to afford fuel if the next few missions keep going like the last one." It's a very weird feeling to say that to yourself hours upon hours into the game. I'm getting strong messaging to move forward with the Khanate, but it's an outlay of several thousand echoes that I can't count on having an immediate payday.

 

I don't know. I like the design and writing of this game a lot, but I'm having so much trouble getting in tune with it, and I'm trying not to blame it on (possibly deliberate) bad tuning.

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This is a game in which I was quite happy to turn off iron-man and just do manual saves. I won't save-scum through story stuff, but I'll manually save and reload to prevent myself being killed in zee combat.

 

I think after enough repetitions the early game stuff becomes a bit tedious (especially because it's heavily story-based, whereas with something like XCOM which is more mechanics-focused I'm happy to do iron man games) and I decided to just keep going without the stress of losing all my progress.

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Finally, after plugging at it for a few hours here and there, I have managed to assemble the Zong of the Zea and retire. Unfortunately, I had to start looking stuff up in the wiki, because even my copious notes just weren't enough to figure out where to get certain items. They also patched a while back to make the Zong of the Zea assemble from a bunch of sub-parts, making it easier to not accidentally spend the various items you need to collect and giving you some minor bonuses on the way to keep you going.

 

Well worth playing as long as you're ready for how slow it plays. 

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Oh God, I had a bloody disaster with this game last night.  

 

First time I've played the game and after 8 hours, I was doing very nicely.  Hadn't died, got myself a nice girlfriend and a swanky townhouse, uncovered 70% of the map.  Aaaand I was just about to complete my best ever trip.  I'd visited 6 new islands and my hold was full of rare snippets of information and rarer gems.  As I turned for home, plenty of fuel and supplies, I had it all planned out; I would create a will and ensure I had a safety net - I was going to keep whatever I earned in this bleak world.  

 

1/3 of the way back to London's docks and I was filling in bits of map during the route home.  I sent the Zeebat out to stretch his wings (more out of habit than anything else) and found my curiosity piqued by an unknown island just to the north.  Ah well, I can fit one more adventure in and be back in Blighty in time for tea and crumpets.

 

Well, to cut a long story short, I ended up working for some rats in a post office, explored the basement, saw my terror raise to 100, left, undocked, lost a challenge - game over

 

I lost everything - my map progress, my boat, my crew, my poor wee son, my bachelor's shag palace, my cargo and 8 hours of my fucking life.  Screw you R Zacny and F Brown for yet again making me buy and play a game which has led me to the brink of despair.  I'm not trusting either of you or playing this game ever again.  

 

Mind you, I am curious about what was out there in those black areas of the map.  Hmm, maybe I'll have another go.  Just 15 minutes.  Yeah, just one 15 minute voyage....

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Ok so I tried this recently, since I picked it up in a steam sale a while back...

 

What the hell am I supposed to be doing? I explore, talk to people...and that's it. I don't really know what the goal is! Can someone explain to me how to play this game? I really like the setting and the odd little stories, but I feel lost constantly.

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You define the goal for your playthrough at the start of the game, I forget the terminology but I think it's Ambition.

 

In terms of actually getting going, you want to explore until you find islands, work out what good routes are for your map layout (because you want to be getting Port Reports at a regular clip) and push east to find new stories and opportunities to advance stories back west.

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Main profits in the game come from completing story lines. The money you make from trading, smuggling, or killing things is more for keeping your fuel reserves stocked until you get the next big score.

Edit: Your first goal should be to get a child (scion.) As that will allow you to pass a few limited things to your next captain.

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You can go back to port every time you get the message (and corresponding buff) that "Something Awaits You." Basically you can advance one story in one port each time this happens.

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I finally picked this up and I'm ready for it now. I haven't read much of the thread because I'm still very early in the game and I want to discover stuff before I read about it.

I'm finding Sunless Sea to be inspirational in a couple of distinct ways. The way information about the world is presented to the player in snippets that assume knowledge keeps me intrigued. I have no sense of how to do this well in my own writing; I find myself having to explain everything and how it relates in detail in order to communicate my speculative-fiction worlds. I wonder how Sunless Sea manages to maintain a consistent enough sensibility that I can feel like it makes enough sense not to be completely absurdist. I want to be better at doing that.

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I wonder how Sunless Sea manages to maintain a consistent enough sensibility that I can feel like it makes enough sense not to be completely absurdist. I want to be better at doing that.

 

Sunless Sea is an extension of the world of Fallen London, a writing-focused browser game by the same people (check it out if you decide you like Sunless Sea, although it has even simpler mechanics and a bit of a grindy energy-system thing going on, it's worth it to get to the writing). I've followed them long enough that I think I can answer the question. It's a huge help that it's a game made first and foremost by writers, instead of the usual "a bunch of game devs make a big ol' gamey gamey then call in a writer to paint over it with a layer of story", but there's also a particular technique they used that I think is very important.

 

They wrote an extensive lore-bible first, and wrote the actual stories second, drawing from the content of the lore-bible. The presence of a lore-bible, and thus the feeling that this is a world that exists beyond the content you're being shown, comes across very strongly in FL, and I think it's a product of the way you'll encounter a mystery somewhere, then hours later, in an entirely different area, you'll get a hint about the mystery, which is the way it ought to work in a real, plausible world. Having done some similar stuff, it's what happens when you write a lore-bible, then just write a lot of content while keeping the lore in mind: eventually clues and details accumulate naturally, cluing the audience in.

 

There's an overall design philosophy of "fill out a world, let the player roam around in it freely". That way, you the player exploring the game is similar to your character exploring Fallen London: There are mysteries out there, they have answers, but finding them is a matter of stumbling onto them organically rather than following a linear plot progression and "go this way" quest markers like most games.

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This is having a free to play weekend for the next few days for anyone (like me) who hadn't bought it but wanted to check it out. 

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The pacing takes some getting used to and at first you might expect new text to pop up more frequently than it will.

-Returning to your port of origin will reduce your terror-level to 50.

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There's a buff that appears after a little while at sea called "Something awaits you...." You can basically do one quest stage each time this pops up, so if it feels like a place has nothing to do, you might want to come back when you have that buff. It's basically how this game keeps track of turns.

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Looking forward to having a look at this on the free weekend. Half thinking about it for an episode of History Respawned, though it would take some thinking. Looks like a fun alternate history.

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I am super, duper glad I played this on a free weekend.  Wow, did this game not click with me at all.  Which, in hindsight, I suppose isn't super surprising.  I found Fallen London to be an interesting, but ultimately off-putting, experience and this feels pretty much exactly like that.  But instead of having to deal with limited turns per day, you have to deal with steering a super slow ship from port to port, and then you get to do that again and again reading the same text because you're going to die a bunch as you learn where things are and figure out how to play.  Permadeath doesn't feel like a good match for the rest of the structure of this game.  It doesn't look like anything changes from death to death, or at least not right away?  Props to those of you who dig this, but it ain't for me. 

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It's a good game for me to play when I'm half-way watching a movie or show with my wife. It doesn't demand a lot of attention and I find the flavor of the text intriguing for the same types of reasons I enjoy Porpentine's writing (super dense and evocative of surreal circumstances). So I kinda develop a plan in port, aim my ship, keep glancing over and pause it if anything interesting is happening on the television. Reading the same narrative over and over becomes less of a problem once you get used to where and when the new text will appear. It would be really nice if the text changed every time you revisited a port, but ... you know, it's whatevs.
I think I like this game for the same reasons that other people like idle-games.

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There is a non-permadeath mode you can turn on, but I can definitely understand why it wouldn't click with someone. I was so very close to deleting it from my machine when it finally started to make sense, and then it ended up as my game of the year.

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I thought about that, but the permadeath thing feels like it's playing it the way it was meant to be.  And I can see why it could click with someone, I just think it would probably take me bashing my head against it for 10-20 hours to get there, and that's not something I'm interested in right now, not with XCOM 2 around the corner and currently having a couple of other games to play. 

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