Thanks for the advice. I am not that good at these type of comparisons but let me give it a shot based on me having 1900 baskets of rubbery pies.
Selling pies at Ealing Garden pie stand:
Use one action to sell 5 pies for 32 scrip
Total = 380 actions to yield 12,160 scrip
Scrip per action = 32
Using Licentiate Skeletons and Brass Skulls
Sell 1900 pies for 4750 echoes
Buy 76 brass skulls for 4750 echoes
Obtain 15,200 nevercold brass slivers (tough calc) but about 300 nbs per action so 50 actions
in Sunken Embassy
Create and sell 76 skeletons to the constable - takes 4 actions per skeleton including the sale to
yield 155 scrip for each sale
Total = (76*4) + 50 = 354 actions to yield 11,780 scrip
Scrip per action = 33.3
It would appear that the skeleton approach is ~4% better at scrip per action than the Ealing Gardens pie stand approach. The other advantage of the skeleton approach is that you do not have to use actions to get to the Hinterlands (ignored in above calcs) and you have access to your London card deck which is pretty good for favours whereas the Ealing Gardens card deck is lousy for just about everything. Thanks for the advice. I will rethink my Ealing Gardens pie stand approach.
Have I screwed anything up in the these calcs or overlooked a better alternative?
I am grinding for a hellworm and am a Licentiate. I spend 95% of my actions doing the “Business of a Licentiate” and will likely be doing so for the next year since I’ve been at this for ~3 months and have gotten up to only ~52,000 scrip so far. I generally grind up to about 100,000 of invoice value and then use “Payment for Services Rendered” to redeem my invoice value.
In the payment option, I first choose “In Intelligence” which pays me in “Vital Intelligence” and “Moves in the Great Game” which can be sold directly for scrip but I will typically not have that many “Services Rendered Great Game” so I can only do this about 10 times which uses up 16,000 of my ~100,000 invoice value. For the remaining ~84,000 of invoice value, I choose to receive payment in the form of “In Food” which provides crates of biscuits, solacefruit, and rubbery pies. The first two can be sold directly for scrip but the pies cannot. Hence, I have to use one of the above two methods (unless I am missing other alternatives) to convert pies into scrip.
From what I have read on the Wiki, the Business of a Licentiate grind has the best scrip per action or close to the best of any of the alternatives. Is this correct?
Change to this, if you want to grind in London as Licentiate. Add tribute grind with rat market. And bone market. Or better yet try spider popes / mammoths.
I have read the “Hinterland Scrip-Making” guide to which you link. Perhaps I am confused but it looked to me like the best scrip/action was from the “Business of a Licentiate” option. According to this guide, Section “Professional Activities (in Food)”, subsection “Improvements” - a licentiate can reach 8.12 / 8.26 scrip per action (I do not understand why there are two numbers separated by the slash but let’s just assume I can reach 8.12 SPA.
The bone market option listed in this guide is only 7.5 SPA for a licentiate. The word “spider” does not appear in this guide so I am not sure what you are talking about there. If you are talking about the document titled “A New Pope Guide” linked to inside this guide, I have also read that and, frankly, it is too confusing for me to attempt. I am a non-fate player so I only have a 20 action candle and trying to keep track of so many things as would appear to be required in this “A New Pope Guide” with just 20 actions every 3.5 hours seems just too daunting a task.
I do not see “tribute grind” listed in this guide. I used to collect the favours for all of the factions that can yield tribute and sale to the Wakeful Eye once in a while but, once the value of favours turned in in this manner was reduced a little and once the Jericho Locks option to turn in favours was implemented, I have been collecting ALL favours (except criminals) and turning them in at Jericho locks. For Criminals, I have been exchanging seven of them for diamonds on the Implausible Penance card. I have not looked to see if this is better or worse than the Jericho Locks option for criminal favors but the two human ribcage and one human arm seem unuseful for a Licentiate.
However, I have been collecting and trading in favours at Jericho Locks for quite a while and have done NOTHING with the items received from this so perhaps I should be selling these.
So the “Business of a Licentiate” option seems like the highest SPA that I can achieve.
However, I am very far from an expert. What am I missing? How can I improve on this “Business of a Licentiate” other than the super-complex “A New Pope Guide” approach?
I’d like to see a new ship type become available as a reward for considerable piracy. Something menacing (maybe with dreaded as a stat bonus). I love my zub, but this would be a fun additional goal / mantelpiece item.
Regarding the Blue Prophets: did I understand correctly that the crews they call out are meant to be permakilled, not just sent to a quick boattrip with Death?
Took me a while to get the hang of things; gotta say, been seeing Death way more often now than previously. But I do like it, makes me actually consider the cards I play more carefully.
That’s it, yes. I had understood that as well and I think this echo confirms it:
“You’ve spent some time in London, I can see, so ye know that death in the Neath can be… er, impermanent.” There’s a scatter of angry bird-calls as Blue Prophets caw their disapproval, hopping from foot to foot.
“But the zee gives us life, and it is due death in return. It’s a wossname. You know. Sacred cycle. If nothin’ properly dies, eventually we’ll run out o’ life, right? So some of us corsairs, when we 'ear the Prophets call a name, we goes out to zee and makes sure that they sink. And the Unterzee takes its due.”
I believe people who die at zee in general are killed more permanently than others in the Neath. Something about the distance from the Mountain of Light, and possibly zee-deaths falling under the domain of the Fathomking.
Which is consistent with the fact that, if you die at Zee, the Fathomking decides you’re too important to kill permanently and requests a bribe-I-mean-gift before you move on to the slow boat.
If Sunless Sea is still canon (which is increasingly hazy), you can also barter for a recently deceased crew-member’s life, but you can’t ask for your long-deceased father to be returned, so it seems that the first stop for a death at zee is the Fathomking, and if your death hasn’t been “bought off” within a certain time you’re off to the afterlife. So I imagine 99% of our corsair victims are sent permanently to death, and maybe 1-in-a-100 are as special as us, or otherwise lucky enough to be bartered back into life.
Ah, so it is as I feared. Well. Since my main is slightly RP account, I guess in order to see how sinking doomed ships looks like I have to wait until my alt levels up enough to be able to go pirating. Thank you everyone for confirming!