![]() Terror is supposed to be the cost of running dark it mangles both the mechanics and the fluff to let you get the peace of running light and the economy of running dark by strobing. I don’t do it myself, but “if you think it’s dumb don’t do it” is a poor excuse for your game incentivizing a dumb annoying playstyle where your ship’s lights are only on for 300ms every 4s or whatever. With a good sense of time (or a key macro) you can run mostly dark, flicking the lights on for a split-second to prevent the skull counter from counting up, ficking them off again for several seconds to save fuel. ![]() Lights tick discretely every few seconds, not continuously. This will not cause Terror to decrease if all the skull counter lights are off. Lights around the skull tick slowly down if you are hugging a coast and have lights on. When they’re filled, the red bar ticks up Terror proper by 1 and the lights reset. Lights around the skull tick up over time, one by one. There’s an incremental sub-ticker for Terror. If you are hugging a coast and have lights on, Terror does not tick up. It ticks up faster if you have lights off (lights consume fuel and aggravate monsters), and ticks up faster if you are out of sight of land. It starts at 0, and ticks up over time when you are out on the Unterzee. And any sensibilities you may have about abusing the hospitality of the Riddlefisher. This is prodigiously abusable by “leaving port”, waiting 60 seconds right outside of port, and “docking” again to get more resources and more mental health for free… well, the cost is in player time. “From time to time a captain gets lostĪnd comes up here, and we always feel bad for them.” They offer you fuel and supplies before you leave. The flavor text on a repeatable Frostfound interaction reads in part: Or, again, different port.)Īnd then you have Frostfound, a port in the frozen north. (Proposed alternative: Faster engines should reduce the SAY timer. If I’m running a simple trade route that takes 62 seconds to sail, buying and selling goods and spending my SAY at each end, and I buy a faster engine which reduces route time to 56 seconds… no SAY for me! So I spend another four seconds idling just outside port, waiting for the timer to tick over before I get SAY and can officially announce “We are docking now”. SAY also winds up devaluing fast engines. (Proposed alternative: Condition on having visited a different port.)Ĭriticism of more SAY, Terror and sunlight mechanics below the cut. The game will then display dialogue as though I’d been off sailing the vast undersea. Some chains of interactions consume SAY multiple times underway, meaning you can’t bull through them all at once, but should sail off and do something useful in another port before sailing back here.Īt this point you may see the first potential wrinkle in execution: if I’m in a long port story that I want to continue without interruption, I can push my ship 3mm out of harbor, wait 60 seconds for SAY, push 3mm back in and continue the story. Some rare port interactions require high SAY values. ![]() Even some repeatable interactions consume SAY, like a crew recruitment action - sensibly enough, there won’t be more crew available for a while, come back later. Many port interactions consume SAY to perform. SAY is granted and the internal value (re)rolled every minute you spend at sea. To encourage you to travel from port to port while consuming game content, there’s a mechanic called Something Awaits You (SAY). Sunless Sea is a game where you play a captain of a ship visiting ports on the Unterzee (Undersea), doing a bunch of the usual shipgame stuff: trading trade goods, fighting other ships, fighting sea monsters, performing fetch quests, exploring unexplored islands, and smuggling contraband. ![]() It lacks what I might call antifeatures, so I could tolerate playing it for hours. It has an interesting premise, a unique setting, and colorful characters.Īnd the competence floor: SS doesn’t crash on exit, doesn’t corrupt my computer memory, doesn’t alter my screen resolution, doesn’t lie to me about my character resources. Let’s look at a poorly executed game today: Sunless Sea (2015), from Alexis Kennedy and Failbetter Games, so bad in parts it could have been done better ten years earlier.įirst to acknowledge the good bits: Sunless Sea is well written. I cheer Master of Orion (1993) a lot for being a very well executed video game and doing so many things right that it still overshadows modern 4X. ![]()
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