So nobody else is experiencing the problem of not being able to travel to other city's? I hate to have to request a refund but it's unplayable at the moment.
That's strange, we have 2 other reports of not being able to travel from the first town at the start of the game (the workaround is to restart and load game), but are you experiencing the problem elsewhere as well?
This is a very fun game, barring a few things. The start is a bit harsh, and it took me several tries to get into a stride of trading and actually making a profit. The lowest point at the start was that Red Baron when coming back Phiskin at the start of the game. It took me by surprise and rather pissed me off that I could be ambushed by something near impossible to kill with a basic bow near the start. Then there's the question of weapons. I haven't tried them all yet, but frankly, I am utterly flummoxed that a $500 sword would be far more useful than a $2500 fireball staff(which is very annoying to aim, thanks to the splitting attack), or a $7500 wraith scroll. Not to mention you can't really know how the weapon would act until you actually bought and tested it yourself. I think a little more details in the description of weapons(and runes) wouldn't go amiss. The damage value, cooldown for the weapons, and for the runes, I don't even know how much armor/health I will get. Lastly, the worst for my recent findings is the purchasing of your own house. There's frankly no benefit from it, as far as I can tell. Two of the tabs(treasury and inventory) we can access at any time without going to the house, which frankly means they're wholly redundant. That only leaves the dungeon, which doesn't really impress. Some silly descriptions and/or stats of the captured prisoners/monsters would at least be a point of interest. Or heck, maybe some interaction. I do the like the commerce bit, but the start, weapons, and the house could maybe use a little more touching up. Mostly the weapon bit, really. I thought I would be getting my money's worth with a $7500 weapon in my cart, but not so. On a final note, the traveling companions could maybe use a little more addition. I've seen the apple guy, and one soldier from delivering a spear quest, and that's it. And they're not terribly useful. Any mob not from the first continent pretty much kills them in seconds.
I liked my house so much I bought it twice! Bought it first time, left the game, came back pre-save (duh), re-bought :thumbs: Particularly wanted to find out what I had left to kill, though tbh it is not the most spectacular use of £30k I can imagine. Weapons, yeah. I don't really mind having some total horrors in there, tbh. They're a learning experience, ay. And I can always get 75% of my money back. The one real stinker was the £10k one-use nuke. Ouch. Shoulda read the "one use" small print before buying that... If I've got any gripes (and I've been playing for 2-4hrs every day since it came out) it is trading. And particularly the overpowered ham and mithril run, or the underpowered everything else. I really want to explore. But I feel as if I'm punished for doing so. I get that good equipment and death lie on one side of the map, and happiness and comfort on the other. But unfortunately, that's leaving a wasteland of "probably not really worth it" in the middle. My game atm is basically "grind mithril / ham til barely profitable or bored, attempt a more interesting run across multiple continents, discover I can only fit two lutes that make tuppence ha'penny each in the town where they're *wanted*, attempt compasses instead, make thruppence from town where they're *wanted*, give up and return to mithril and ham." I've yet to find a use for the desert continent, ice continent, or elvish continent (autumn wagon aside, for the last of these). They're just obstacles between good profit, and good equipment. And every time I try to make a new route pay, I feel it was a waste of time. Mithril / ham is c.2-4k per round trip. From two towns right next to each other. I can't begin to match that anywhere else. Which kinda sucks.
A couple thoughts... This is a really good game. A mashup that, for the most part, works. Even simple economic sims are booooring IMO, so kudos to the dev for the bright idea of wrapping one in a fantasy/RPG with some light battle elements, and for a presentation that makes the trade part easy to grasp at a glance. There are certainly aspects that could be improved overall, but I think the endgame needs a bit of tweaking in particular. The trade/upgrade/survive/expand... loop is really good for a lot of the game, but once you're sporting a fully-armed Autumn or Dark Wagon, it's kind of a cakewalk and the game loses some steam. Maybe I was just lucky, but it doesn't seem like the mobs scale properly to keep things challenging toward the end. I know the idea of upgrading is to make things easier, but I think the delicate balance between enjoying your new badassness and keeping things interesting could be massaged. Maybe if the game was larger you could open new elite areas that require a certain level to survive ala games like WOW. Anyhoo, great game. BTW is there a series of missions that does something with Arcadia? I accepted an escort gig, taking someone named Kai to Arcadia, but I couldn't complete it because there's no real town there and the game didn't register our arrival.
Let me walk you through a case study. I am in ICELAND with my awesome Autumn II HELL YEAH. I have made multiple runs between frostwotsit and the place above it to FILL MY GUNNELS WITH COMPASSES AND CAVIAR!!! I totes have this amazeballs nailed. My wagon stinks of posh fish and high technology; I am blitzing this mofo through the dark continent (COMPASSES WANTED AT PORT TWO STOPS OFF!!!) to Elfland (CAVIAR!!! Omfg luxury fish eggs, you blazing beauties. Take THAT, rock iron mithril merchants! I will totes pwn your derrière. Get to port. Camp for four days due to storms, sigh. Get to middle island. Camp for four days. Siiiiiiiigh. Get to PLACE WHERE HI TEK COMPASSES ARE FOOD OF GODS LOL!!!! Actually make £80 p/compass. Never mind!!!! Still have luxury fish eggs!!!! Blaze on, leaving a dark continent trail of wasted corpse behind me. Finally reach elvish continent, having spent ten compasses of profit on repairs. I didn't even have ten compasses. Sigh. Sell fish eggs for c.120 profit each. c.120. c.120. c.120. Ouch. Back to mithril and ham *sigh*
Sir, there is no other sensible conclusion. Yet still I yearn for death, glory, and profitable fish eggs. I'm properly enjoying this game. I don't only want to be yammering between two identikit towns (!)
Lol! I'm actually going to nerf the Mithril-Ham route in the patch next week by reducing the replensihment and consumption of those two goods and increasing the price elasticity. The profits will remain the same if you haven't traded there for a while, but it'll get lower fast if you repeat the journey constantly. Hearing you guys about the weapons, give me some time to buff some of the weaker ones and add a some more. Finally, while I was planning to wait a little longer before saying this, because we're not 100% sure we can pull this off and even do it in the next patch, we'll be adding iCloud support, Gamecenter achievements, and most importantly... online leaderboards!!! We're still in the planning phases, but currently I'm thinking of having two online ranking tables, one for your networth in the first year of trade, and one for your highest profit achieved in any year.
First I'd like to thank the dev for being active on this thread, and continuing to work on this game. As a gamer it just sounds bad to hear a farming route will be nerfed. It makes it sound like the game will be harder for future players. Many RPGs have farming, and exploits that players can (or not) use to get ahead. Sorry for sounding negative, but I'm looking forward to playing this once Fallout 4 loosens its grip on me. Maybe I should just trust that they know what they're doing, they created the game after all.
I sort of feel this is the wrong way to go about it. We're spamming this route because it's rewarding. We're not spamming other routes because they're not rewarding. I'm playing this game (imo) a lot. I'm still an *implausibly long way* off maxing out my wagon. I don't *particularly* want to be looking at trying to make 100,000 for a dark wagon, off compasses at 80 profit a pop... If you are going to chisel down mithril / ham, any chance you could look at making sure there are decent enough (if elastic and reactive-to-spamming) routes elsewhere...? As in, raise the bar for other goods / routes, instead of only lowering them for the one decent run. The prospect of lugging two sulphur bars across multiple continents for a semi-functional return, all of which is consumed in massive damage repairs, does not sound overwhelmingly fun.
I get you guys, I am also hesitant about nerfing anything in the current game, but I am worried that the existence of an optimal route so early would make all other routes feel just meh. Is reducing the profits ONLY if the route is constantly repeated unacceptable? Just to be clear, the initial profits will stay the same the first time round, it's just that after you bought mithril or ham, the supplied quantities take longer to refill, and prices become slightly more expensive until they do. On the other hand, when you sell mithril or ham to those two towns, their demand fills up faster, and it take slightly longer for them to want those two at the same high prices again. You'll get exactly the same as you have now if you camped a few days in between each cycle.
I think another way to soften the blow of the mithril/ham nerf and overall game balance would be to make guild missions more viable. More often than not the guild barely pays anything for long missions. Deliveries spanning continents and involving rare commodities are almost never worth attempting. The same goes for escort missions. I feel like guild missions simply do not scale into the mid/late game.
Seems a side issue, but tbh ham isn't the problem. It's just the return fodder - its profits are in line with what I can get most places. It's either the mithril that's overpowered, or everything else that's underpowered. And of those two explanations, tbh I'd veer towards the latter. I'm not unexperimental, or unwilling to explore. I've tried making a profit off sulphur, elixirs and perfume, fish (oh, how I've tried fish!), apples, livestock, durian, glass, cutlery, compasses... But, for example, that trade route I described above involved... • 4 trips from compass place (frostville?) to caviar fort. • all damage taken ^^^ there can only be recouped from eventual profits. • 2 trips to island hop to compass buying place. • 3 trips across dark continent. • 1 hop to Dominion City That's ten trips between villages. Buying where things are made, selling where they're in demand. I cleared a couple of hundred profit. And that's in a wagon with 6 base armour, two L3 armour runes (probably both equipped) and a 17,500 (iirc) weapon. It would've been total slaughter in anything less! That's pitiful and, imo, that's where the problem lies - not poor old pathologised ham and mithril. I could easily continue - after that run, I picked up perfume and elixirs in Dominion and made a run across to the desert. In absolute terms, my profits were quite good (c.700/perfume?). But they were grievously chiselled down by taking c.1,300 (iirc) in damage. At present, the dark, elvish and frost continents are not really profitable. Even if I am willing to venture there. That's what's deterring my exploration - not the fact that mithril / ham *is* profitable. To draw a weak analogy, I don't want to be a rat stuck in a rat run. But every time I try to escape, I discover the floor of the lab has been hard wired to electrocute my bollocks. Edit: I'm trying to clear 100k profit atm for a top end dark wagon. That's already difficult. If mithril / ham is nerfed without other routes being upgraded, it begins to look like a seriously unmanageable proposition.
Imo the other thing that overpowers mithril is that it's the only commodity that's a regular shape (rectangular) with a high value. Given all wagons are rectangular / square, and there rarely seems to be *much* of a puzzle element to stocking up (towns aren't stocked with a "Tetris" supply of commodities, they're supplied with things that just won't fit together. e.g. buy stone in whatsit village and you ain't fitting any statues in, regardless of how you twiddle your inventory), that skews any sane player towards regular shapes. There's no profit motive for taking on Tetris shapes - almost without exception, they're just a worse investment. Town rewards can also be quite punitive. "Win x% discount if you ship 40 lutes from thingy!!!! Two in stock!!!!" Forty massive, unwieldy lutes. Clearing a pretty pitiful profit from each. Really....? :/
