Aotrs Commander

Only barely starting, myself (just finished the first island, I think), but a few thoughts. As usual, more negative to comment on than positive - not because I don't like it or anything (QUITE the opposite), but the proud nails and niggles show up sharper in contrast to everything else. UI and presentation generally: massive, massive improvement and it t'weren't bad before. Edér had me laughing almost immediately. Don't like not being able to scroll up (or have the conversation log) during conversations, you can miss stuff. (Now, granted, that's not a thing in say, Witcher 3 (which I finished a couple of weeks ago),b ut I'm so used it in IE games, I feel the lack. (Also feel this has come up before in one of the more recent IE decedants too.) Minor niggle. Feeling the pinch on skill points. Doesn't feel like I have much in the way of options - I can either max out one skill per category per character and hope that party assist will cover all evntualities... So no splashing around Stealth among the party (because PoE was the first and only time I EVER have made more than occasional use,w hich shows how good the system was, and the new one is even better. Or a bit of Athletics (to try and avoid those tedious scripted injuries without having to find the boosting scrolls all the time). And, to a lesser extent, talents and abilities - though that might be the former informing the latter in combination with spells - but for on priests, especially. While with mages - who also, I found, get grimoires, which pretty much obviate the issue - I can live with it, I'm used to in PoE 1 Durance having a load of buff-spells on hand to use if the situation needed it (and sometime, dangit, those situation priest spells via-a-vis fightin' vampires. The number of spells per level per encounter seems a little harsh, as well; but again, casters are my jam, and I very much like the sort of flexibility of pseudo-vancian. (I have to ask, at this point, why not just make spells a resource pool as well...?) I Actually preferred PoE 1 when you had lower-level spells as at-wills (despite meaning that meant I just held my higher level ones for a rainy day,..) New hit point system is perfectly fine, though I really liked the old one. (Here, I have not felt the need to rest, like at all; conversely, I've not touched, really, anyone of my per rest abilities.) That said, in tabletop (as a DM), I am generally a preponent of the so-called 15-minute adventuring day. (Largely because it makes for a stronger-paced, more interesting set of combats, in my personal opinion.) But that, of course, may change. Especially since I turned level scaling (up only) on (and I'm playing on classic - not actually sure why the game defaulted to... the one between classic and story). And I am emphatically NOT interested in high difficulties - easy to normal is where I live on the majority of games. On the music issue... I have - thus far - found PoE2's music as unremarkable as... More or less every other RPG's. I say that the sign of a great soundtrack is that the music jams in your head outside of the game. RPGs, in my experience, have always been very not-that, in my opinion (especially with my noted preference for combat music). Aside from Final Fantasy (to X-2), Pokémon (yes, it counts) Disgaea I and isolated tracks from PST, BG2 (and not the combat music), a few tracks from Mass Effect trilogy; and then it's stuff from C&C or Star Craft and TIE Fighter and X-Com 2. Beyond that, I can play a game for over a hundred hours, and not be able to recall the music. (Little more memorable with Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis IV, but only through hundreds of hours of repatition.) DK1 is one of my top three games of all time (PST and TIE Fighter being the others) but the music is very much a nothing, really. So, what I'm saying is, for me to classify a game as having good music (and pay attention to the music specifically), it has to be very VERY good music. Otherwise, being largely unnoticable background means it IS sort of doing the job it's supposed to, especially for combat music. Notable only by its absense. (Note: a BAD soundtrack would be very noticably disruptive.)

Useful to know, given the amount of skills you get is a bit... Underwhelming. Unless you get more than one at some levels later (I'm only up to forth.)

Just reached my first level up. Do we only get 1 skill point (for each skill grouping) all the time, or does it vary by level? I can't see anywhere that says anything about skill points per level, except for comments on the beta about being very skill starved, which seemed to imply it did. Because that sort of means that, for example, my cipher or Eder has to do either traps or stealth to keep the levels up - and nothing else. PoE 1 I had everyone do a bit of Stealth, for example, but obviously I can't do that without... Sacrifing every other skill. It would sort of seem if that's the case, the party boost would seem to be... Somewhat useless, since you'd more or less have to devote one character to each skill. Is this really how it works...?

Patch notes? Where? Edit: For everyone who doesn't know (or is so used to Paradox, where beta patches and patches are shown in the mmain annoucements!), details on the beta patch are right at the bottom of the forum, under the technical support forum section.

Well, fine. Confirms it - I'll finish my replay of War for the Overworld first before starting on PoEII. I've been waiting patiently this long, I can wait another week. (I mean, hell, compared to how I keep waiting for Stellaris...!)

Full VO? Full VO? FULL. VO?! I... What... How... When... I... I... Never... Imagined... *waterfall tears*

Aw. I liked 3.x-stye multiclassing, I thought it was one of the very best ideas in the game. That. Said. It is one of those ideas that also works better when you have a lot more stuff to play wth (i.e. compare 3.x and/or PF compared to PoE - it'd be unreasonable to expect the breadth of the former in the latter). It's never been as satisfyingly implemented in CRPG form. AD&D mutliclassing was - and is fine for this sort of purpose. (In fact, the one and only time I ran an AD&D campaign (and not Rolemaster and before 3.0), I allowed pretty much any one (races restrictions be damned) multi or dual class if they wanted. Otherwise (in my group's experience), al most no-one played a human. Contrast with 3.x, where almost no-one plays a NON human! that extra feat and skills makes all the difference...!) So, I'm perfectly okay with this. As Josh sort of implied, 3.x-style mutliclassing works best for min-max/optimisers (like me[1]!) I can see how a more robust, complex system by its very nature is a lot harder to balance, with a lot more traps or the uninitiatred (or just the more casual player). Hell, I'm initimately familiar with the problem, I just recnetly released my tabletop starship rules after fourteen years of development, and in the end - because it is an open ended system where you basically make your own races and ships - I had to include a sort of "idiot's guide" to try and explain why you pick x over y. (As you might gather, it's a sort of system for keenies like muggins, the sort of person who will spend tens of hours faffinf with rules for 3.x and such...!) [1]Spare a moment's a pity for my poor players, since I'm the primary DM..!

Unfortunate about the last goal, but them's the breaks. (Though to be honest, I was not so fond of the ideas that I was keen to up my own pledge, so..!) Perhaps a feature to look at for the expansion?

There is also the issue that if you allow the PCs to buff, you should be allowing the monsters to buff too. (Not always, not all the time, but they should be in some circumstances - e.g. especially and obviously scripted-start battles.)

Indeed. Archery - at least on the Medieval battlefield - was perhaps really more artillery before the invention of artillery - more a sort of area-effect weapon.

So, the general concensus seems to be "bad idea!" Which is fair enough; I was just tossing it out there. Being the aforementioned inveterate completionist, I really do have no idea about how much people who don't do that actually play through in a single pass; it'd be obviously something the devs would absolutely have to have some idea of before even considering trying to implement something like this.

Yes (ye gods, that was a hard fight); but to be fair, it is an RPG truism that is almost always true that the most dangerous opposition for an adventuring party is ANOTHER adventuring party. I've only (heretically) played Throne of Bhaal the once; I don't remember a lot about it, except for that fight against the monks there, which I still have nightmares about...!

A thought occurred this morning, while generally ruminating on CRPGs (been playing Tides of Numenara*), which I thought might be worth throwing out for general chewing over. The balacing of combat encounters is sometimes observed to be made more difficult, because of the disparity between people only doing the critical path, and the completionists doing all the sidequests. So... What about baking that into the difficulty settings? Such that you'd set "critical path only" or "completionist" (maybe something in the middle), which in the former case would disable either entirely the side quests (save for maybe a few short ones for colour, that did not involve combat) or perhaps rather just disable the XP rewards and heavily combat-based sidequests and configure the critical path difficulty based on that toggle (i.e. lower overall). It would mean that the critical path would require more work to set-up encounters (since you'd b effectively adding a second difficultly level to the existing ones), but that you could then work on the basis that for the not-critical-path only, the main and the side-quest and optional battles could be balanced towards to upper end of the PC power scale. Whether this idea would actually make things easier or more complex overall (though it would seem to be on the side of the latter more than the former), I don't know. (You might have critical-path-only be mutually exclusive to the topo level of difficulty, perhaps, since that is generally for the keenies anyway - though thosae of you ladies, gentleman and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri who play on Path of the Damned do please correct me if that is not the case.) It is, I feel, an interesting thought experiment, if nothing else. As a corollary then, how many of us DO play through with every nook and cranny? (I myself am an inveterate completeionist!) Those of us who don't, how much aside from the critical path do you tend to do? *[Aside]Which I think is the first CRPG to make the attempt to follow Planescape:Torment's unique feel, and does it pretty well - first time for a long time I can remember I didn't stop playing during supper. Though if you want combat (or don't want to have tons and tons and tons of reading, because if you thought PoE was verbose...!), you definitely want to stick with PoE, as it seems to have even less than PS:T. I don't consider either of those things to be flaws, but people's milage seems to vary.

That might be the case, but it really shouldn't be. Performing simple calculations like this takes a computer an incredibly small amount of time, and there aren't actually all that many to do in combat. Of course for each such roll the game has to look up various values in various locations (character stats, monster stats, ability modifiers etc.) and that might be a bottleneck, but I don't think it should be. When you look at something like, say Crusader kings 2 that has to deal with the calculations and weighted decisions for hundreds of AI characters in real time (at its maximum speed), for AI War or something that is constantly deciding what sometimes thousands of unit are doing in real time, performing calculations for maybe no more than twenty or so should be no trouble, really. The slow down for PoE when you sometims have lots of enemies and such on the screen is, I suspect, far more graphics-related (not necessarily just graphics) than dealing with those sort of simple calculations; the sort of thing even the likes of I could program into a spreadsheet. (I mean, it's a simple command, excuse my spreadsheet formula IF("damage 1" > "damage 2", "damage 1", "damage 2"). I can't imagine that would be difficult or resource consuming for the computer to run.)

I think the phrasing (and possibly even how the function works) of DoTs ought could be much improved, Don't tell me "does 100 damage over twenty seconds," tell me "does five damage per second for twenty seconds." Or, if "tick" is a unit, then tell me "does 3 damage per tick for 33 ticks" (where "tick" is a infotabbed doofer like all the other terms, which mousing over tells me "one tick is half a second" or something. If you were really, really going to push the boat out, something like "does 17 damage per [unit] for 13 [units], (221 damage total)." (Many - if not most, I would hazard - of us play tabletop RPGs, and I doubt many of us have problems grokking "does 5 damage per round for 10 rounds", whereas "deals 50 damage over ten rounds" is not something that is nearly as clear and not something you see in any set of RPG rules I have personally encountered. It would way more transparent. More wordly, yes, but one thing that has ben brought abundenly to my attention after I have spent much of the last two or three weeks revising, updating and indexing D&D 3.5, sometimes, there is no substitute for being wordier oif it makes it ultimately clearer. As there PoE is not tied to a page count, and can afford to have these little help box doofers, it seems to me that it could afford to be a bit more explicit and still not clutter up the interface or anything. (Tangentially related, I have never quite understood why some devs don't come outright and tell you the nitty-gritty of the game mechanics (Paradox Development, lookin' at you in particular!) rather than leave the community to puzzle it out. Why not just tell everyone straight "this is how this works, chaps," from the get-go?)

Exactly. Because unless you absolutely dictate when people can refresh their abilites (and that sort of thing is can push people straight to looking at the guides/forums/wiki to plan ahead), per-rest can never be more than a self-imposed limitation for the player where the cost is "tedium" vrs "have all my stuff." Which makes it very hard to balance for a computer game dev not personally there to oversee things. Make resting in the wilderness dangerous and the players will go all the way back to the inn. Make there be no save points except at the inn and the players will either grind tediously to the point they can breeze through the next dungeon or give up (like I did with Dragon Quest 8...) Make the jounrey to and from the inn dangerous, see last point. It sort of half-works on the table-top, because you don't know what's coming and the events won't be repeated and there is an intelligent individual,* who, if competant, will invisibly adjust the difficulty to the party - or is prepared to kill the party and basically write-off the adventure and/or characters. (I do not agree with this latter philosphy, since what it mostly does is add more work for me the DM and I do a RIDICULOUS amount of work already.,.! Which I should probably get back to,..) Or the PCs with disposable abilities will twiddle their thumbs for some combats, because they're saving the for "something important." (This all goes hand-in-hand with the issue of trash mobs in the other recent thread, by the by, it's part and parcel of the same issue.) So, unless you are willing to TPK on a regular basis (which then just makes your players paranoid and rases other issues, not least of which is DM-vrs-player mentality), it largely doesn't work. Whe the PCs decide they need to rest, they'll rest. Punishing them for it with random encounters only works a few times (before the start to take counter-measures) unless you want to go that far. As a final anecdote on what happens if you try to aim to apply pressure to stop resting force th sort of "husband your resources thing" and COMPLETELY frack it up: I ran the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth's official 3.5 conversion once, which was a straight (and kind of lazy, honestly) conversion of the AD&D module. It was supposed to encurage the PCs not to rest and to fight on or get corrupted, but it utterly failed by having useless monsters. (The end-boss was a Complete Warrior Samurai for frag's sake and anyone who has some inkling about 3.x mechancs should have some idea how bad that is). My party broke that module in half- part it was having access to a particular couple of characters whose unforseen interaction have them unlimited out of combat healing (which would be one thing), but the more importat half rendered even that barely an issue because the party's Crusader pulverised the module by having level-appropriate equipment. Which meant her AC was almost impossible for anything to hit. (It was not even a mega optimised or something. She had, like, magic armour and a magic shield and maybe a ring and that was it). So what you got was a long slog of utterly boring, trivial encounters, based on a false premise. (I mean, though it's not like it would have mattered anytway, because the PCs would have just rested further away if they'd had to.) There was literally teo combats that I remember: one with an Abysal Basiliks that petrified the Druid (who spent 75% of the module turning into a bear and forgetting he had spells, that's how hard they were pressed) - which was the end of one session, and by next week they realised "wait, all we have to do is close our eyes and take a 50% miss chance and this is easy" and it was (because the monster wasn't smart enough to do anything with the advantage. The second was just about the one and only time I landed a hit on the Crusader, in midcharge. "Fifteen damage," says I. "Great," says my sister. "with my damage pool class derature, now I get +3 to attack and damage on my charge!" I skulldesked. *Even most bad DMs tend to have some level of intelligence. This does not make them any less bad, of course. (Nor does "most" by all means comprise "all.")

As I've observed before, on the sex issue, this (and I believe it extends to more than one of them does it not?) and Pillar's/Tyranny's "sex with prostitutes gives you stat bonuses" does not, I feel, give them the moral highground over Bioware on that front...! They can both be equally silly about it all, if you ask me. I don't think that is necessarily wrong, but I do think it needs to kept in mind. This for example, would be fracking hilarious. (That said, I haven't played DA:O:A, DA2, (the latter two of which I even own) DAI and am highly unlikely to play the new ME game, sicne ME3's dreadful ending rather blotted their copy-book, especially after DA:O and everything prior to the last 15 minutes (except anything with Kai Leng) of Me trilogy were really good overall; so it may be they have gotten worse. But, if so, they did at least start down that slope with the best of intentions.)

I am all for more humour in things - appropriate humour, of course. Babylon 5 (which is my gold standard for writing) could be frag-damn side splitting at times and PS:T had a few gems here and there. Used right, humour can be an excellent tool for sharpening the contrast between the tonal highs and lows. Durance (since we seem to be discussing him and GM) I didn't particulalry like as a character. I took him through the game a bit on sufferance, because I wanted a cleric - BUT, to be fair, the pay-off at the end of his arc felt like I got a reward for my efforts. GM was interesting, but (aside from repeating my "bwahahahahaha, two ciphers!!" lulz) I probably wouldn't have her as a companion on a second playthrough. She was interesting, but I did feel her lack of interaction with the other characters wasn't helpful (aside from the comment once from Eder about asking that random old lady in the street for help at one point, whih was mildly amusing). I might as well have just had a hired cipher 90% of the time. Kana (who she replaced) was a ore fun character (but one I found less mechanically satisfying.)

I am personally all for doing away with "trash mobs" (almost) entirely - with the proviso that "trash mobs" equals "uninteresing, easy fights." Hell, I try to avoid them in pen-and-paper where I can (it's not always possible, as I predomiantly use Paizo adventure paths these days (mind you, it takes so long to play one we're just starting a second after the first half of one, and those are the earliest, and I think the got better!). I made the "mistake" of running the 3.5 version of Lost Caverns of Sojcanth once. Sure, it killed a few sessions, but as it was basically nothing but 3.5 versions of AD&D monsters without any consideration for adaption, it was nothing but trash mobs (i.e. things that the PCs cake-walked - hell the party's princiaple fightertype broke the game by having level-appropriate equipment and an armour class most things couldn't touch) and even I was bored and I was running the damn thing. (They also don't work from a resource-management aspect, since in my experience - both in CRPG and table-top - if the players decide it's a trash mob fight, they don't bother to spend any resources. the wizards will just stand about and twiddle their thumbs or eveyr auto-attacks or something.) Encounters where some attempt at individualising them, I wouldn't count as trash mobs. (E.g., some of Xaurips in WM2, for example - the one in the mines where half of them are on a balcony shooting down was not a truly hard encounter, but it was much more interesting than the one further up with just a cave of them). I will agree that you want some easy encounters early on (either in the game or as gateway encounter to a ne area to show the dangers of some new special attgack enemy) for a learning curve, but even then, I wouldn't entirely classify that as a trash mob (nor an excuse to have "open door, kill monsters," come to that). Tides (which I won't get to playing for a bit) supposedly did away with them as the price for wanting to do turn-based, because that was pretty much the popular statement; otherwise turn-based games get very grindy and dull (because you CAN'T blitz through them laughing). (See: a ridiculous number of JRPGs et al which I have never finished because I got fed-up of fighting the same fight slowly all the time.) But the general concept of "some monsters plonked in a room/clearing as a fight, repeated" can go die in a fire, as far as I'm concerned. That gets repetative after the first time. I mean, if you want to splatter things while laughing, you could do that by using difficulty settings (saying that as someone who never steps above normal on virtually any game ever).

"Simpler?" It very definitely wasn't. AD&D (which all the IE except IWD2 used) had a system whereby the fighters did nothing except make auto-attacks, paladins and rangers and rogue had one or two abilities that were largely irrelevant fairly early on in the fight - e.g. backstab - (if they existed at all) and the only characters with complex decisions to make were the primary spellcasters. Whether or not the difficulty bar set for PoE was too high or too low is one thing, but overall the combat engine was very defiitely not "simpler." As someone who was a huge fan of the IE games, but IN SPITE OF AD&D's game mechanics - their target market is apparently me. (As I felt I got EXACTLY the game I wanted with PoE IE style without the cludgy limitations.) AD&D, as I've said before and I'll say again, to be brutally honest, was a mechanicaly crap system, full of arbitary restrictions (mercifully, the IE games ignored most of the worst offenders). Over the years, no two DMs I played it with ever played quite the same set of rules, becaue you more or less had to houserule it to make it work. (We haven't touched it since 3.0 came out.) That you can have fun games with it is nothng to do with anything, since you can have fun with any set of game mechanics, That does not mean that those games mechanics are not bad. AD&D still carried many of the arbitary legacies of it coming from the "first." That is a historically valuable and important position. The theory of games design has improved since those early days - and a lot it is BECAUSE OF the missteps made by those early games (when they, coudn't, y'know, use modern game theory becuase it didn't exist yet). Sometimes you have to do somethng wrong to learn why it doesn't really work, and the debt that all moderns RPGs owe to the pioneers that the latter games could build on is important. But for all that, I still wouldn't want to drive a Benz Patent-Motorwagen for choice. [Aside]AD&D Psionics, on the other hand, deserves nothign but ridicule (and which mercifully the IE games never attempted) and the prize for being the most arse-backwards, ridiculously contrived nonsensical game mechanicsI have ever encountered (with the possibly eception of FATAL, but i'm not sure one can really qualify that as a game). "Roll below you skill, but if you roll a 1 it's bad, a 20 is a random mishap and your critical success if you roll your exact number." I... just... WHY. The ONLY reason for that is to keep 1 from being bad, but it would ahve amd einfinitely ore sense to have said "roll below your skill, 20 is bad, 1 is a crit and a mishap happens if you roll your exact score" which makes far more sense than (roll low, but not too low, but you really want to roll whataver a specific number is." Nevermind the minefield of mental combat that 3.0 futililey attempted to carry on and 3.5 wisely obviated. *sigh*[/Aside] (4E, on the other hand, went way too far the other direction. As a functioning mechanical system that does what it is intended to do, it does it very well. It's just that what it intends to do is a rather narrow field.) 3.x/PF is the best of the rest, but even they (which I would say are the best mechanical RPG engines), are not without considerable flaws. Vancian casting (true Vancian, as in memorising spells, not "per rest" abilities) is one of those; for my most-heavily modified campaign world, I tossed it out altogether, but its so ingrained into the system it's hard to do that unless you are the sort of person who will, of their own accord spend several tens of hours over the course of three weeks doing major rules overhauls and cateloguing and indexing thousands of spells... *twitch* *twitch*) PoE, I think, trod a good middle-ground, comabt mechanics-wise. The sadly-will-be-missed health/endurance system made it so that "rest" was not always defined - because it ALWAYS is otherwise - by "the spellcasters are out of spells" but occasionaly by "the fighters are out of hit points," which I found actually made for a nice change of limitation. While I certainly would prefer a six-party system, I can accept a five-party one, especially if the emphasis is being shifted (as in White March 2) away from there being many chaff encounters and more towards "everything is a boss fight;" because really, those are the only fights that ever mattered; outside maybe of a long string of chaff-fights back to back and that isn't usually interesting aside from the logistical angle (and rarely then).

I'm sure they will. As many people have observed, to paraphrase King Arthur from That One Film... *cut to shots of various yandere and tsundere characters singing a song about round furniture and dancing whenever they are able* ...this thread is a silly place. ... Is it bad that I now want to say a rendition of that song done with the Watcher and the companions...?

It's not like you can't level the same acusations at a depressing majority of any media, be it books, movies, comics, sit-coms (especially) or even computer games. You know what they say, 99% of everything is trash... I seriously think anime only sticks out more because it had TV-tropes-like terminology (because (for most of us) it's Foreign) a couple of decades before TV Tropes existed. On topic: I actually have no idea. Though being a sort of person naturally drawn towards necromancy... (it is my quiet frustration that all the arguments about inclusivity and what races and such, no-one ever lets ME play a Lich, fragdammit) ... I have suspicion that there is a fair possilbilty it sort of won't matter to me or my watcher...!

I'm honestly never that bothered about intelligent weapons - Lilacor was hilarious, I grnt you, especially when paired wiht Minsk (because why wouldn't you do that?) but as someone said, we've had that angle before. But... I wouldn't say no to, say, Bardiche (from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha) in Pillars form... [image would been inserted here, but apparently not on this forum. Eh, you can always google it if you ahve no idea what I'm talking about.] ... Engrish and all. Aside from being a) ridiculously awesome and b) pretty much a reasonably customisable-to-your-preferences, bonus points would be given for having the magical-girl transformaion sequence (to my male watcher...) and thus making all you companions (and possibly the enemies...) scream and cover their eyes and such. (Aloth's and Eder's reactions in particular would be priceless, even more so with Iselmyr in play....!)

No, but don't use words like ugly. Just imagine, you created this thing. That is no thoughtful criticism. Also: "I think the flavour of the game in my opinion is this and that, so it has to look like this and that" is no thoughtful criticism. I think the Obsidian art department knows best, what's the flavour of the game, don't you think? And after all this is a matter of taste, you can't criticise taste. I very much dont like a lot of things about PoE2 so far, especially the companions. I even started a thread about it. But I would never ever state that something has to be a certain way. As someone who designs wargames models for a living, I'm afraid I have to say yes. Yes, you should absolutely speak your mind. If I design something, I'd rather someone tell me what they actually think that not. Hell, I might even agree with thme, because sometimes you need that second opinion to keep your head not implanted up your own arse. But even if you don't, you can at least make an informed decision on whether or not something is good or not and whether the complainant is making a taste-based opinion or whether they have a point. Now, if PrimeJunta had just said "that is a ugly ship" and left it at that, that would be something you probably would dismiss (ditto if it was full of expletives and/or invective). But he explained his reasoning (somewthing that I, as a not-a-boat-person would not have picked up otherwise, so I thank him for providing a more knowledgeble viewpoint) at that is the very best sort of critism, because it is USEFUL. Sometimes, you make a thing you think is great and then someone says something and you stop and have a think and realise it really isn't and you have to scrap it (or salvage what you can). Just because someone spent time on it does not exclude it from harsh judgement (doubly especially so if the thing is or is part of something to be sold). (As an aside, for one thing, if someone designs a spacecraft like looks like a maritime sailing ship with a mast up to and whatnot, for example, I for one will have no hesitation saying it looks crap. (I have never seen any evidence to the contrary.))

*snorts* Throne Bae. Shall we have some romance options for the chair? Well, they often do the ship is the captain's mistress...!