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Starting out in UWO
ThreeSixty
Member UncommonPosts: 41
Decided to download UWO over the weekend, and it really harks back to the original NES cartridges (which I still have) of Uncharted Waters. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many features from the original actually exist in the online game in some fashion.
Would like some advice from those who are playing it, though. Is there any real way to seriously handicap a new player with regards to selected a job or a skill (in other words, is there some way I can screw up badly enough to where it makes more sense to just start over)?
Reason I ask is that there seems to be so many behind-the-scenes details with regards to stats and skills, it's somewhat difficult to get an initial bearing. On school chat, several (alleged) veterans asserted that the Escape skill is a waste of a skill slot, especially considering the amount of skills I can learn is limited. However, I use Escape during every single ambush or encounter I'm in, because I'm a trade trainee and have no battle skills. Therefore... for me, Escape seems pretty valuable.
The tutorial is a bit disjointed and not always easy to follow, but I did finish all 3 of the beginner schools in Venice. I then decided to wander a bit just to see things, and I can see the game could be a major time investment. There is quite a bit of content, and I haven't even left the upper Mediterranean. But while the gameplay and the community seem friendly enough to newbies, the learning curve is pretty steep just to figure out any sort of efficient gameplay planning. Using trade as an example, I started as a trade job noob in Venice, which sells glassware as its specialty... and every town that's not a mind-numbing distance away from Venice (Ragusa, Ancona, Syracuse, etc) always has hugely inflated prices for glassware, so making an actual profit from trading early on is challenging, unless I spend an entire 3-hour play session sailing across the Med and back. I'm not complaining about the travel time - more I feel like I'm "doin it rong". I'm now generally doing merchant guild "quests" instead for cash, and maybe that's what I'm supposed to do.
Curious if I'm just on the wrong track with my thinking of how this game generally operates. Change jobs to Adventure to at least get off the ground (no pun)? I'm happy to grind out trade, but concerned I'm wasting a lot of time doing it pointlessly.
Comments
Have to say I'm also a new player(only playing a week or so) but as far as i can tell there doesn't seem to be anyway to screw up your char severely. I think you'll get 50 skill points max at some point(plus some from aids and the cs if you want them) and you can always forget skills if you find you don't need them. You can also switch jobs to get the 3 that aren't available to buy. PPL may be saying escape is useless as a skill for later on when you get better battle skills and money to buy the consumable to use instead.
I also wandered about after doing the 3 noob schools before moving to intermediate(trading, exploring etc.) I think it helped to move into a flute before doing them. Have a bit more info in the inter school that may help you, also more cash as final reward(total for all 3 inter finals is 530,000 if i remember correctly(150 for adv, 80 for merch and 300 for mari)
Not sure about the glassware(made an adv), but have been doing some basic trading in northern europe reasonably well even without any trade skills. Find it rather annoying there doesn't seem to be any real way to find out if I'll make any profit until i get to a market trader to sell stuff. Although the uncharted waters wiki helps a little I think it's a case of experience here. So maybe try trading other things until you get to a big enough ship that the distance for glassware doesn't matter.
I would suggest that rather than just trading pick up quests from the mediators and buy some goods to sell aswell maybe.
About the only way to mess up a character badly enough that it's easier to just start over is if you attack another player when you're really low level and win the battle, so that you get flagged as a pirate. Sailing far, far away from where you have any port permits could also be a problem when you're very low level. Other than that, you'd really have to be aggressively stupid to break a character, as it's not the sort of thing you could do by accident.
Don't worry about picking the "wrong" job. You're not locked into a single job forever. You can and should change your job many times. You need a job card to change to a new job for the first time, but you can change to any job you've previously held without a card. It costs 20 times as much to change jobs if you don't have a card than if you do (and you can use a card for subsequent switches), but switching to the beginner jobs is cheap (typically 10k-20k) even without a card. A lot of jobs cost around 1.5m to switch without a card, and you can do that now and then, but probably don't want to do that every day. For a job that costs 16m without a card, you might want to go get a card even if you want to switch back.
I'd recommend unlocking all of the beginner jobs, just to get access to a lot of skills. You'll get some job cards from the tutorials, and then can get more from quests in the major cities of Europe. When you get a beginner job card, you might as well just use it immediately to unlock a job that you haven't previously held, and if you didn't want the other job, switch back immediately afterwards. This probably isn't obvious to a new player, but the beginner adventuring jobs you want to unlock first are helmsperson, biologist, and excavator (in any order, not necessarily that one).
A job is a collection of favored skills, together with a type (adventuring, merchant, or maritime). One advantage of a skill being favored is that you can buy the skill at half price from any noble, even if the noble doesn't normally offer the skill. Another is that the skill rank can go up to 15 rather than the normal cap of 10. This will eventually be important, but doesn't matter for new players. Most importantly, you gain skill rank at double the normal rate if the skill is favored.
The job type lets you gain experience and fame of the relevant type at double the normal rate. So if you have a merchant job, you'll gain trade fame and trade experience at double the normal rate.
Don't worry too much about taking the "wrong" skills, either. If you decide you took the wrong skill, you can drop it to make room for another. The only skill that you can't drop is your native language (Italian if you started in Venice), and you have that at character creation.
The basic idea is that you figure out what you want to do, and then switch to a job that favors the skills that you're going to gain rank in by doing whatever it is that you want to do. For example, if I'm going to go do geography discoveries, then I'll switch my job to ocean explorer, since it has the recognition and geography skills favored, which are the two that I'll rank by doing geography discoveries. (As a new player, you'd want the helmsperson job for this, though eventually you'll want either ocean explorer or cartographer.) When you decide to switch and go do something else, you switch to a different job that favors the something else that you're going to do.
The escape skill is worthless. I didn't find any clear use for it, but it does make you get crit whenever you get hit. If you want to sail away, then sail away. Don't use the escape skill while you're doing so.
Also, if you're trading or adventuring, you want a fast ship with a small crew. For trading, you want a large ship for a larger cargo hold, and for adventuring, you want a small ship for the increased acceleration. In either case, you're really not built for battle, so you want to run away if attacked. Ships that you can see may attack you; once your maritime level gets high enough, they'll stop. You'll sometimes get attacked by ships that you can't see ("ambush"), but this won't happen if you have the caution skill active. That's the skill you want if you're trying to avoid battle. You can also buy ceasefire permits, which will instantly end any battle with an NPC if you're in an area that was in the game at launch.
Don't get caught up in thinking you need to level this or that particular item purchasing skill (e.g., spice trading). There are two reasons to get those skills: so that you can buy raw materials for crafting faster, and so that you can buy goods for high value trading routes faster. The latter basically means spice trading for spices from Southeast Asia, and that's about it. El Oriente will change this, I think; art trading might be the new valuable one, but I'm not sure. You can also buy goods without having the relevant trading skill; it just lets you buy fewer at a time without the skill.
The best online data source for the game is the Japanese wiki:
http://gvo.gamedb.info/wiki/
The problem is that it's in Japanese. Google translate can mostly fix that, though the word order is often scrambled from what it would be in English.
I appreciate the time you took to craft a response here. Netmarble should really consider putting you on the marketing payroll given the information you've already provided in this forum.
Now that I know I can undo any minor stupid decisions I make I'll just stick with it for now. Escape has been useful in one instance - without it, I tend to get run down by rowing ships, and if they outnumber me, I have no chance. I got 90% of my cash looted by an NPC (about 200k) and they took my special ship item too. I know 200k isn't much later on, but at the beginning it was pretty devastating, especially since they carved my hull in half and killed my entire crew. I did have a lifesaver, so I spent 30 minutes limping back to port with 1 sailor on board, but the "death penalty" suggests this is a game where one will do everything humanly possible to avoid risk. Good simulation; somewhat bad for raw "fun". It was virtually the equivalent of starting over.
I'd argue this comment applies to everything in the game. Nothing is really obvious to new players. Again, that's interesting game design, because it means you need to spend quite a bit of time through trial-and-error and chatting to figure out how just about every game convention works. Downside, I'd wager, is that the game's burnout rate is pretty high among new players.
When you say "switch jobs", are you referring to the "guild booklets" or whatever I got from the three intro tutorials? I have some items in my inventory that don't have a clear purpose, so honestly, I wasn't sure how to even go about switching jobs. Plus, right now my job is something like "Trade trainee" - it's not specific like helmsperson or biologist. I'll need to go wander Venice and see if I can figure that out. Some of these things remind me vaguely of games like Wurm, where you have these nested menus hiding what you're really looking for. It took me almost 15 minutes just to figure out how to equip a new ship - it's not intuitive that I have to talk to an NPC to switch which ship I'm using, for example.
If you had insurance, you can go to a bank and they'll give you back the money that was taken from you.
Go to a guild office of the job type you want to switch to and talk to the guild master. One of the options is to switch jobs.
Alas, I'm on team Eddie here, I couldn't stick with it either. Still great write-ups and advice here though, thanks. I just don't have the huge amount of time this game is going to require, and I don't have the patience to google-translate a Japanese wiki anymore. Just getting too old. For the college student gaming on a Pell Grant, it'd be great - there's a massive amount of content to the game.
I popped into POTBS just out of curiosity (it's free and I have a metric ton of Station Cash), but that wasn't even remotely fun. First time I shot up a ship's crew assuming it would disable an enemy, then went after another, came back and found out all of the crew I'd shot up had magically "healed"... no. Not playing a game where it looks like ships tank, dps and heal, sorry SOE.
The trick is to play UWO while you're doing something else at the same time during the less active parts. Start sailing, then tab to a different window and read something or whatever.
It's the same skill that you need to play ATITD. Maybe that's why it's a niche game.
I played Pirates of the burning sea for a few months and it was a great game. Only thing that I didn't like was the wind gauge has no effect upon ship battles like it should. Don't get me wrong, but the mechanics are messed up, there is no wind advantage because of how they coded it. I liked how Sid Meyers Pirates made it so you had to use the wind properly during battles in order to win.
Attempted to download client or test game with play now. Links took me to: http://uc1.gamestotal.com/p/?/en/game/&ref=adshizmoo
Which is a space based game.
So I ask where can I locate this game for review?
http://www.ogplanet.com/download.og
you need to download the oggplanet launcher first then get it through there now i think(I got it through netmarble so am not completely sure).
P.S. I didn't read any any dodgy clauses in their terms & pp if that's an issue, but u should still probably check for yourself.