Connections and math

The recent changes to connections (Namely, making the carnivals and items more effective at raising it, and giving a benefit to the conflict cards) has gotten me thinking about the math aspect of this: What is the worth of a connected quality? I’ve taken a look and notice the storylets to spend connected qualities on items seem to give 240 pence worth of goods per transaction. Now, the hard part is the other aspects of connected quality: How many change points does it cost to exchange for goods? How much does it cost to exchange for stats (and what are change points for the stat for that matter)? How much is gained or lost during conflict cards, and what are the new rewards?

The main difficulty comes in figuring out exactly where a stat begins and ends: Some math with the length of the progress bar is required to tell just how many points in you are, but there will be confusion if it goes up or down a rank: It always shows a full bar in that case from what I’ve seen, so I don’t think it’d be possible to tell the difference between it knocking you down just to one CP away from your old level, or if it’s one CP away from losing yet another level. For example, I’ve just hit 53 in a connection, and I do something to lower that connection. Result will say it went down to 52, but I have no idea if that was 1 CP change, or 50. Any smart cookies have any ideas?

Ok, so I got the card for trading Dangerous for stat points. With a dangerous skill of 58, I had to pick the 31-70 range option. This gave 6 stat points in dangerous, and took me from 12 to 11 connection with the docks. As I’m too cheap for connection items at this point, and it was above 10 so I couldn’t use the carnival, I couldn’t tell for sure what my initial value was, but the range is anywhere from 1 to 22 change points in docks.

Change points are always the same for every quality, as far as I’m aware. Connections should be no different.

Well, I figured they’d be the same for every quality, but is it always 6 change points, across all tiers of options? Also, I wouldn’t be so sure about the connections being the same: Not all cards require the same connection levels to unlock the option, so I’m betting they don’t cost the same either. I think various level of connections have different “costs” associated to them, based on how easy/difficult they are to acquire.

The 71+ persuasive option resulted in 23 CP to persuasive, and dropped my connected quality from 40 to 28, so I’m guessing it costs around 400 CP in my connected quality.

That is pretty close to my estimates of the training as well; though I think the CP towards your quality is actually a little higher than what my estimate was. 400 is the same number I have in my notes for the cost though.

As for trading them in for goods, in most cases I was estimating it at just about 2p for each CP of favor, perhaps slightly higher.

I’m fairly certain the CP I gave for the quality increase is accurate. I took the length of the progress bar in pixels, found out what % that was of 400 (pixel length of a filled bar), then multiplied by CP needed for next level (50 in this case) to figure out what the CP since last level was.

Progress bars are notoriously inaccurate. It’s only the pop-up text that actually tells you your change points that can be trusted.

What pop up text?

After you do a challenge, move your mouse over the icon for the quality/connection/whatever that’s increasing or decreasing. It tells you points.