You can abandon progress, BTW! If you do it immediately it’s free, if you do it later it costs something.
I’m also somewhat positive on agents - it’s neat to have some use for all those secondary items.
…but I realized that I don’t think they’re not really fulfilling one of their stated roles - they’re supposed to do stuff “in the background” while you play, and they don’t really do that.
The “consignment without a contract” pays out 8E worth of stuff. It takes, as noted earlier, 9 clicks. That’s a bit under 1 echo per click. …but compare that to a grind that, in endgame, would be considered bad - 2.5 EPA for a grind where you just click “try again” and “go”. There’s plenty of those, and that’s 1.25 echoes/click! This mechanic which is supposed to be “agents do stuff for you in the background” actually takes more of your playtime per echo of reward than even a really bad endgame grind. Instead of “this is some free bonus stuff for little effort in the background”, it’s ACTUALLY “if you want to squeeze every last echo out of every action you have to do some relatively time-intensive/inefficient play in addition to spending your actions”.
I haven’t mathed out how it compares to a better endgame grind like stacks, which is ~6EPA amortized over a long time but also has some zero-cost actions in there, some outfit changes, etc. But I suspect that even though agents is obviously the best “Echoes per action” (infinite! Free echoes for no actions!) It’s quite low in terms of “echoes per amount of time spent playing the game”.
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Ah, thanks for pointing that out! I haven’t actually had any need to recall an agent so I didn’t realize they’d added that.
Your point about echoes per click is interesting, and I think also somewhat supports a preference for longer plots
I find myself playing the Agents not for EPA, but rather to fill out quantity on some items that I don’t generally accumulate otherwise. I just never seem to have enough Strong-Backed Labour when I need it, though I think they are now a little easier to come by then they used to be. It is great to just passively be able to build up a batch of 40+ or so without needing to hunt down one of the other sources. Same with Portfolios of Souls, finally I’ve got more than one on hand. And I think I saw a Book of Hidden Bodies crop up once, so hoping to eventually build up a small stash of those. If they continue to feature these sorts of harder to source items with new agent runs, I’m in!
That said, the clicking is annoying, especially when the servers are in their slow mode (which seems to be frequently during evenings on the west coast of Canada). Trying to get through Beneath the Waters when every click is a 3-8 second spinfest is an ordeal, and the resulting minute’s intrusion far surpasses my threshold for a willing quick distraction.
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The reminders and clicking are annoying enough I’m not using the Luckless Captain anymore, and I’m on the fence about the other two. The constant interruptions just aren’t worth the very small rewards. I might use them again after a break, or if they get upgraded, but I really have no idea why developers spent time on this and not the deck.
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