CarolusMagnus
Landlubber
So after a lot of playing modded COAS I am once again back at playing TEHO (at normal difficulty).
After having sunk 80 hours into TEHO I can now savely assume this game does not want you to have fun whatsoever. All Sea Dogs titles have a their issues because of RNG, bugs and bad game design, but I never had the impression this was by design. But with TEHO I really think the developers don't want you to have fun with it.
Here are some points that really made me think why the devs decided to put that into the game:
Basic Game Mechanics:
This is basically shared with all sea dogs titles but I think TEHO is the worst offender here.
Everything in this game is RNG and influenced by your stats. Your stats in the beginning are so low that you basically cannot do anything at all. This means for example that you need to get extremely close to be able to hit anything with your cannons. At that range enemy ships will switch to grapeshot and kill half your crew with a single shot. (whilst your grape shot hits will only kill one or two crew men at that range).
This makes finding officers crucial at this point because you will suck at everything otherwise (see above). However officers are expensive and extremely rare to find and even then you cannot control what kind of officer you will find. Either way you will be in absolute desperate trouble starting a game.
An obvious solution would be to grind your skills to get better. But having low skill inherantly prohibits you from grinding them since every action you would take would inevitably kill you. Want to get better at firing cannons? Fire cannons at enemy ships! Problem? Enemy ship is going to sink you because you need to get far to close to hit your shots in the same ocean as the enemey ship!
Missions:
Missions in the beginning are crucial to make your first money since you don't have the skills / ship yet to do pirating.
When taking an escorting mission 70% of the time you won't get the money but instead the captain tells you a "great" secret. That being a ship that can be "easily" attacked. This means that you now lost time and money because of that mission. The only way to get that money back is by following that quest and attacking that ship. Too bad when that ship a) has already sailed and you are too late b) is to strong for you to fight c) is from a faction that is allied to you or d) you can fight the ship but not keep it because you have no navigator to put on that ship. This basically renders escorting missions useless because most of the time you will loose money on them. Even worse still you even cannot take your revenge at that captain who betrayed you. He just plays not paying you down as it was not a big deal.
When taking cargo delivery missions there is a huge chance part of the cargo will be spoiled by rats. This is RNG and out of your control. If this happens you don't get the money for the missing cargo but still have to deliver it. This means sailing again to some other port which has it in stock, buy it and deliver it without getting money for it. If that happens it is most likely you didn't make any money on that trip. But even worse your reputation as a captain will sink because of it and there is nothing you can do about it.
Quests:
When doing quests you will need a walkthrough because there is only ONE specific way how you can go about these and it is completely arbitrary. Also the game sucker punches you quite a few times if you don't know ahead of time what is coming. A good example is you loosing all your money and weapons in the beginning. Loosing everything in the beginning could be seen as part of the storyline but you are absolutely screwed without these things and thus you are forced cheese the game by hiding these away. (forcing the player to cheese the game will be a pattern here)
The Carribbean in a Nutshel questline lets pirates/spaniards chase after you which you cannot avoid. (their map speed is increased so they will always catch you even if you manage to outrun them on the battle map) These fights are hard to do properly theoretical possible. Problem is that you will loose crew doing so which you will need at a later point in the quest and cannot restock. The game does not tell you this but lets you play the questline for a good hour or two (if you get lucky and manage without having to reload a hundred times) before making it obvious you need more crew. If you try to get more crew immediatly after the fight before you go on with the quest, the game does not let you even though there is no reason for that given.
The only way to go about it "properly" is to cheese the fight by leading the pirate/spaniard to the bastion so you don't need to sink him personally.
I think when a game makes save scumming / cheesing a nessecity and punishes proper gameplay there is something deeply wrong with that game.
This is not everything I have a gripe with. But it summarises the great picture I have of the game.
Anyways I wish all of you a merry christmas!
After having sunk 80 hours into TEHO I can now savely assume this game does not want you to have fun whatsoever. All Sea Dogs titles have a their issues because of RNG, bugs and bad game design, but I never had the impression this was by design. But with TEHO I really think the developers don't want you to have fun with it.
Here are some points that really made me think why the devs decided to put that into the game:
Basic Game Mechanics:
This is basically shared with all sea dogs titles but I think TEHO is the worst offender here.
Everything in this game is RNG and influenced by your stats. Your stats in the beginning are so low that you basically cannot do anything at all. This means for example that you need to get extremely close to be able to hit anything with your cannons. At that range enemy ships will switch to grapeshot and kill half your crew with a single shot. (whilst your grape shot hits will only kill one or two crew men at that range).
This makes finding officers crucial at this point because you will suck at everything otherwise (see above). However officers are expensive and extremely rare to find and even then you cannot control what kind of officer you will find. Either way you will be in absolute desperate trouble starting a game.
An obvious solution would be to grind your skills to get better. But having low skill inherantly prohibits you from grinding them since every action you would take would inevitably kill you. Want to get better at firing cannons? Fire cannons at enemy ships! Problem? Enemy ship is going to sink you because you need to get far to close to hit your shots in the same ocean as the enemey ship!
Missions:
Missions in the beginning are crucial to make your first money since you don't have the skills / ship yet to do pirating.
When taking an escorting mission 70% of the time you won't get the money but instead the captain tells you a "great" secret. That being a ship that can be "easily" attacked. This means that you now lost time and money because of that mission. The only way to get that money back is by following that quest and attacking that ship. Too bad when that ship a) has already sailed and you are too late b) is to strong for you to fight c) is from a faction that is allied to you or d) you can fight the ship but not keep it because you have no navigator to put on that ship. This basically renders escorting missions useless because most of the time you will loose money on them. Even worse still you even cannot take your revenge at that captain who betrayed you. He just plays not paying you down as it was not a big deal.
When taking cargo delivery missions there is a huge chance part of the cargo will be spoiled by rats. This is RNG and out of your control. If this happens you don't get the money for the missing cargo but still have to deliver it. This means sailing again to some other port which has it in stock, buy it and deliver it without getting money for it. If that happens it is most likely you didn't make any money on that trip. But even worse your reputation as a captain will sink because of it and there is nothing you can do about it.
Quests:
When doing quests you will need a walkthrough because there is only ONE specific way how you can go about these and it is completely arbitrary. Also the game sucker punches you quite a few times if you don't know ahead of time what is coming. A good example is you loosing all your money and weapons in the beginning. Loosing everything in the beginning could be seen as part of the storyline but you are absolutely screwed without these things and thus you are forced cheese the game by hiding these away. (forcing the player to cheese the game will be a pattern here)
The Carribbean in a Nutshel questline lets pirates/spaniards chase after you which you cannot avoid. (their map speed is increased so they will always catch you even if you manage to outrun them on the battle map) These fights are hard to do properly theoretical possible. Problem is that you will loose crew doing so which you will need at a later point in the quest and cannot restock. The game does not tell you this but lets you play the questline for a good hour or two (if you get lucky and manage without having to reload a hundred times) before making it obvious you need more crew. If you try to get more crew immediatly after the fight before you go on with the quest, the game does not let you even though there is no reason for that given.
The only way to go about it "properly" is to cheese the fight by leading the pirate/spaniard to the bastion so you don't need to sink him personally.
I think when a game makes save scumming / cheesing a nessecity and punishes proper gameplay there is something deeply wrong with that game.
This is not everything I have a gripe with. But it summarises the great picture I have of the game.
Anyways I wish all of you a merry christmas!
