Chess is rediculous

Fallen London
1

The social actions are, far and away, the best way to improve your stats. But chess is truly in a league of its own.

Lets consider the case of two friends (or someone and their alt) who have just started playing, but know they will want 100 x Chess: Mastery of the Game eventually for London’s Nerves. What will that look like? We’ll assume an even number of 200 games, although in practice a perfect 50-50 record isn’t possible, so a few extra games will be needed.

Well, (assuming you’re picking the Watchful options) every game generates a (mostly) fixed amount of gains, split among the players depending on who wins and loses. There are +4 CP Watchful and 2 Sudden Insights from playing, and +7 CP Watchful and 3 Sudden Insights for concluding, and also 4 Making Waves (which we’ll ignore, since our hypothetical players are new and thus not PoSI). So total: +11 CP Watchful, +5 SI per game. Overall amount: 2200 Watchful, 1000 SI.

But, there’s also the non-fixed quantity: Each player gets +(Mastery of the Game)/2 CP Watchful, which rapidly becomes huge. The effect of rounding this is complicated, but we can mostly ignore it, and treat the sum amount as something that goes up by .5 per game (since one side or the other always wins, and thus gains +1 Mastery). So this is a triangular quantity: 200 games * 100 CP (maximum gained per game) / 2 = 10000 CP.

Lastly, we’ll want to convert Sudden Implications to Watchful. It takes 1 action to convert 5 SIs to a random range of +1-50 Watchful, meaning 10 SIs take 2 actions and average +51 CP Watchful. So 1000 SI -> 200 actions and +5100 Watchful. The chess itself takes 5*200=1000 actions.

Grand totals: 1200 actions, +17300 CP Watchful, 14.42 Watchful/action. The CP gained per person is 8650, enough for 123 levels. And each player is putting in 600 actions, so you can do that much of the grind in a week.

But wait, there’s more: once you’ve maxed out Mastery, you can sprint to the finish in no-time, because at that point you’re getting +136.5 CP Watchful every 6 actions (counting the SI turn-in), for 22.75 Watchful/action. Also, the Mastery bonus CP also works for gaining Persuasive (when you choose the other option), so Chess can be used to power-level that much more effectively than Coffee. All told, you can easily max out two out of the four stats in just a few weeks with this one superpowered action.

2

So what? Shadowy social action is also 20+ CPA for receiving player. Dangerous is 20+ for receiving player if he manages to lose every time.

3

Loitering (Shadowy) is +3 Warning Notes and +10 CP Watchful; for the receiving player that becomes 25.3 CP / 1.6 Actions or 15.81 CPA.

Being on the receiving end of Sparring is more complicated because it depends on your dreams. I’ll guesstimate What The Thunder Said: 10, because that doesn’t take too long to get, and if you have significantly higher than you likely don’t need to level. So, assuming you always lose, that’s +35 CP Dangerous and +4 Hard-Earned Lessons, which becomes 55.4 CP / 2.8 Actions or 19.79 CPA.

And of course, losing every round is impractical; my numbers above are assuming you lose exactly half the rounds, and are on the receiving end half the time. With Mastery: 100, if you can win every time and be on the receiving end, chess is 28 CPA: So good that it actually hurts, on average, to cash in second chances. (Since cashing in an infinite number of second chances is &quotonly&quot 25.5 CPA.)
edited by d0sboots on 4/11/2020

4

Pretty much of what you can expect from an asymmetrical game. I’m glad that FL doesn’t dress any stat and action with a different coat for a so called variety that many other games offer.