I love the new content - love it so much I am mostly wandering around Arbor trying to discover new options. Imagine my surprise then, when I realized other players have A Plan! And making echoes out of it!
So, I have to ask… what exactly are we doing in Arbor, mechanics-wise? How does the city work? And has anyone so far reached the third city?
Like you, I mostly just wander around and play whatever opportunities arise. The layout of the city (or cities) is easy enough to remember after a few visits: both Near and Far Arbor are divided into five "sections": Centre, North, Temple, South, Palace. North is where the Embassies are in both cities. Walking further North brings you to the Temple, while by walking South you eventually end up at the Palace.
The wiki has a good overview for each section and the available actions there. I mostly use them when I’m short on Attar and looking for the nearest opportunity to gain some.
Near Arbor
Temple
North
Centre
South
Palace
Far Arbor
Temple
North
Centre
South
Palace
I’m sure some people have already figured out the most profitable course of actions. I’ll leave it to them to make a more in-depth guide. For my part, I refuse to think about money in dreams ;)
edited by phryne on 8/27/2019
I wandered till I had mapped the entire place. Now, since I’ve pretty much checked out every area, my usual dip is to stay in the furthest southern area. If you have enough Attar to be in Far Arbor when you get there, immediately trade it all to the Roseate Queen for FiHP, if you don’t have enough to be in Far Arbor, immediately do Serpent Tending and trade all your Permission to Linger for Attar. Either way, it’s 2-3 actions for a deck refill, and usually 2 FiHP every other draw. There are almost certainly more profitable ways to go about it (in particular I suspect staying in Near Arbor and farming Extraordinary Implications may have a better EPA, at the cost of more actions before you drop out of Arbor and refill your deck), but this is minimal effort.
I think the ideal monetary strategy, barring cashing in on Extraordinary Implications you already own, is to hang out in Far Arbor and walk the walls every time you visit, slowly building up Attar. Eventually you trade it all in at once via the queen, as doing it in large enough batches makes the action costs for travel, switching Arbors, and cashing in negligible. For more immediate profit, grind Extraordinary Implications in Near Arbor, which is less efficient long-term but has the advantage of giving the profit up front. (And of course, since Arbor is a full deck refresh, make sure to draw all your other cards before entering.)
Either way, I’d recommend fully exploring Arbor before worrying about optimizing it. I believe the third city refers to Arbor’s physical location in the Elder Continent, which is not accessible through our dream travels, but I could be wrong!
Echoes aside, how does the place ‘work’? (Asking both to confirm my findings, and for the benefit of newcomers).
For example, what about Attar? Does what you see in each section change according to how much you have? Should you gather more of it as you go, if you are not trying to monetize the experience? And is there a way to linger more? I do remember bribing my way into more time.
edited by Jolanda Swan on 8/28/2019
If you have four or less, you’re in Near Arbor. If you have at least five, you’re in Far Arbor. The highest level you need for any option is seven.
Thank you! This explains why options kept shifting inside the same place.
If all you want is to maximize money, spying on the embassy is probably the best bet. There are faster deck refreshes, but even with an optimized deck the cards aren’t going to get you more than 5 EPA, and in fact most will be considerably less.
If you’d rather stay indefinitely, you can spy on the embassy in the north, investigate the Near-Arbori in the south for more Permission to Linger, and loop that indefinitely for some extra Extraordinary Implications and arbitrarily high Permission to Linger. Eventually you can spend that Permission on Attar, then spend the Attar profitably in Far Arbor.
The exact chance of the rare/alternate success of gifting Attar to the queen isn’t clear, but it’s somewhere around 20-30%, probably. The total EPA well above 3 if you’re willing to stay in Arbor and keep shuttling items around forever.
Here’s my attempts to figure out the EPA of some of these paths…
I believe going to Arbor to spy on the embassy gives an EPA of about 3.57. It’s 2 actions to get in and out, 5 actions to get 10 extraordinary implications, so average EPA is 10*2.5/7 = 3.57.
“Looping” between investigating the near-arbori and spying on the embassy it gives a maximal EPA of 1.875. Ignoring travel time, you spend four actions to gain 3 permission to linger for 3 implications, then trade 3 permission for 6 implications. A net gain of 3 implications over 4 actions, so EPA 1.875. Of course, to get close to that you’d have to do it A LOT of implications at a time, so that the cost of traveling between the two places is negligible. This EPA isn’t that good compared to expeditions in the forgotten quarter, so I don’t think there’s value in staying in Arbor indefinitely to do this.
Still need to figure out the EPA of investigating near-arbori → trading that all for attar → gifting it to the queen, or of becoming a serpent-tender → gifting to the queen…, or of walking the walls->gifting to queen…
“Walking the walls for attar lots of times -> gifting to the queen”:
Gathering attar: you get 9 attar for 7 actions. (1 action to get in, 5 to gather attar, 1 to leave, but you lose 1 attar every time you reenter.) Then there’s trading it to the queen… we don’t know exactly what the probability of trading it all in at once is, but whatever it is, it means there’s on average some number of actions to trade in ALL your attar for favors, regardless of how much it is. So lets say you do the gathering in huge swaths at a time, so that the actions to navigate between the centre and the temple, and to trade in the attar, is negligible… so then you get 1 favor in high places per 3 attar. So your limit is 3 favors (37.5 echoes) per 7 actions, so 5.35 EPA.
…of course, how close you can get to this depends on how many actions it takes to cash in everything. The cost to cash in is both the actions to get from centre to palace and back, the actions to trade in attar for favors 3 at a time until you get the rare success, gathering more attar to get into far arbor after you’ve cashed in once. The EPA is G*(12.5*3/7)/(G+C), where G is the number of actions you spend Gathering attar and C is the number of actions it takes to Cash in all your attar. As an example, if we say you spend 100 actions gathering attar and it takes 10 to cash it in, the EPA would end up 4.87. If you spend 1000 actions gathering attar and it takes 50 to cash it in, the EPA is 5.1.
I don’t know exactly how many actions C is, it depends on the rare success probability and on how many actions it takes to get between the two places and get back to far-arbor amounts of attar. But it seems like if you’re going for the long term, just spend all your time gathering attar by walking the walls and cash in only at the last possible moment, you’ll get decently close to ~5 EPA.
Hanging out in the palace, tending to serpents, and then trading it to the queen when you can or witnessing a trial when you can’t is pretty bad. I can’t math it out because of all the intermediate attar levels, but simulating it gives under 1 EPA because witnessing a trial is just really unprofitable, and it’s pretty easy to end up with the 3-6 attar that leaves you in that state. Unless I’ve messed up my sim…
edited by Amalgamate on 8/29/2019
Very interesting. The 5EPA grind can’t really profitably incorporate staying in Arbor indefinitely while still remaining profitable - or can it? If you keep paying up for the permissiont to grind continuously without returning to London, how much would the EPA drop?
Without spending actions and resources (Extraordinary Implications) to remain longer in Arbor (i.e., raise Permission to Linger), you’re limited to 5 actions per card draw. And since you need a high number of actions to make travel actions (and regular successes with the Queen) to be negligible, this means you’d have to play this strategy over thousands of card-draws. Being a standard frequency card, you’ll see it every few days on average. So this isn’t a viable grinding strategy.
Going with the strategy of Increasing Permission to Linger as needed to remain in Arbor for however long you want the grind to continue gives 3.125 EPA (which you can grind as much as you want when drawing the card once).
FYI - going in with pre-existing Extraordinary Implications to spend gives ~4.26 EPA (though this strategy is limited by your existing stash of Implications you can spare).
Also, regarding the rare success: for those interested, I’m tracking down this number, and for now I’ve received this rare success 18 out of 78 attempts, which is ~23%. These numbers are still too low to draw any statistically sound conclusions, but I’ll keep working on it.
edited by dov on 8/29/2019
Very interesting. Are there any EI grinds that give better than 1.875EPA? I can’t think of any, but if there are, that could be substituted for the initial looping step in the ~3EPA grind, thus resulting in something between the 3 and 4 EPA options.
On the other hand, since I’m pretty sure there aren’t (I really can’t recall any that would ever have been discussed as part of the older money-making grinds when AotB was standard and various 1.7-1.8 grinds, but with drawbacks, existed), this should now also be the best way to get Implications if they’re ever needed for anything.
Also, there’s no way to leave without expending all your Permission, is there? So if you commit to grinding and then need to leave Arbor, the only option is to shepherd serpents, undoing all the work at zero profit and giving you the wrong item to boot (Passphrases instead of Implications). That’s kinda rough, the orphans grind would only punish you with lower average EPA, but not downright wipe all your progress and force you to restart.
edited by Dudebro Pyro on 8/29/2019
I guess the question is how long it takes for walking the walls to surpass just grinding EIs, which is 3.57 EPA. Let’s say that based on your numbers the rare success is 20%, so five actions to cash in. Using Amalgamate’s formula, we have:
G*(12.5*3/7)/(G+5) = 3.57
Which by my math only requires 10 actions spent in Arbor, less than two visits, to surpass grinding EIs. That said, any indefinite-stay strategy is almost certainly better, since it makes up for a lower EPA by spending all your actions on it.
[quote=Dudebro Pyro]
Also, there’s no way to leave without expending all your Permission, is there? So if you commit to grinding and then need to leave Arbor, the only option is to shepherd serpents, undoing all the work at zero profit and giving you the wrong item to boot (Passphrases instead of Implications). That’s kinda rough, the orphans grind would only punish you with lower average EPA, but not downright wipe all your progress and force you to restart.[/quote]
This is true. But:
- It’s a problem only in the stage of collecting Permissions. Not in the stage of getting Implications and not in the stage of collecting Attar (which is retained between Arbor visits).[/li][li]You don’t have to raise Permission to Linger to 1000 to make this strategy viable. You can do it in smaller batches (like 100-200) and still have the travel steps be negligible. This will mean that if you must leave in the middle (and you are in the Permission grinding phase), you’ll either only have to spend 100-200 actions to cash-in, or at worst lose only a day or two of progress.
edited by dov on 8/29/2019
[quote=Optimatum]I guess the question is how long it takes for walking the walls to surpass just grinding EIs, which is 3.57 EPA. Let’s say that based on your numbers the rare success is 20%, so five actions to cash in. Using Amalgamate’s formula, we have:
G*(12.5*3/7)/(G+5) = 3.57
Which by my math only requires 10 actions spent in Arbor, less than two visits, to surpass grinding EIs. That said, any indefinite-stay strategy is almost certainly better, since it makes up for a lower EPA by spending all your actions on it.[/quote]
Indeed.
Given Strategy A (3.57 EPA for 5 actions per card draw), and strategy B (3.125 EPA, for as many actions as you’d like once you draw the card once), strategy B is definitely the most profitable, assuming you don’t have any other consistent way to get better than 3.125 EPA in your spare actions waiting to draw the card again.
Mein Gott. You are wizards.
[quote=dov]
Given Strategy A (3.57 EPA for 5 actions per card draw), and strategy B (3.125 EPA, for as many actions as you’d like once you draw the card once), strategy B is definitely the most profitable, assuming you don’t have any other consistent way to get better than 3.125 EPA in your spare actions waiting to draw the card again.[/quote]
Wait, what’s Strategy A? I thought going for 5 actions per draw, you’d Walk the Walls for over 5 EPA. What’s the 3.57EPA from, again?
>>>Are there any EI grinds that give better than 1.875EPA?
Cider dreams? 1.97 EpA if i am not wrong.
Echos: 30 EI * 2.5 EI cost = 75 E
Actions: 30 dreams + 3 sips + 5 to clear Nightmares with social action = 38
Might be better with Shepards, dont know.
edited by Waterpls on 8/29/2019