I’ve started saving money to buy some Hesperidean Cider at The Bazaar. I’ve accumulated over 3000 of the 160000 echoes needed to buy the stuff. But now I’ve started thinking something: Is it worth all that time and money? If anyone’s managed to buy this stuff, could you tell me what you think?
Well, having it essentially makes you immortal - you can take a mouthful whenever you like to completely clear your wounds. It also, I hear, grants you some… interesting dreams.
Whether it’s WORTH it is another question entirely. The Hesperidean Cider, much like the Übergoat (to say nothing of the Heptagoat) is chiefly a status-symbol, proof of your dedication to grinding and the sheer time you’ve spent in the game.
EDIT: Oh, and it’s worth noting that you can send sips of cider to friends, once you’ve got it. It doesn’t do much for their wounds, inherently, but it lets them access those aforementioned dreams… which DO help with wounds quite a bit, in addition to being quite interesting. So having a Cider to share is liable to make you… popular. For whatever that’s worth… ;)
edited by BlakeTheDrake on 7/10/2015
Of course it’s not worth it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t save up for it.
It also has, on a few occasions, been offered up for a rather large real world money price. Kickstarters, charity events, etc.
That’s how I plan to get mine, the next time it’s an option.
You could also “purchase” it via the entrance to the cave of the nadir, 50 fate and one action for ~313 echos, at 18 cents per fate, means it would cost about 4 thousand dollars. During the holidays there may be even more efficient methods I’m not yet aware of (I’ve only been online for the Feast of the Exceptional Rose)
I would guess it’s probably not worth that much to you, unless you’ve really got a lot of money to burn…
No. No, it’s not.
At least not at 3k Echoes; less than 2% of the price.
Heck, you’re only about a fourth of the way to an Overgoat.
Cider is a near impossible grind. It takes years. I’ve been playing for 4 and a half years and I’m still months away from it.
If all you’re doing is grinding echoes, you will get bored and frustrated and you will quit.
And you shouldn’t quit. Fallen London is an awesome game.
There are still a million other things to do. Find some singular achivement. Get all the newspaper accomplishments. Get a crazy high Connected quality.
Get an Overgoat. Get an Übergoat. Then PM me about it so I can add you to the list.
There is no limit to the number of accomplishments which you can achieve that don’t involve endless Ecoe grinding.
You should only really think about getting Cider once playing the game has become such a part of your daily routine that you just log-in everyday out of habit.
Which, if you’re really into the game, you will do eventually.
At that point, you won’t have to ask.
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This may be slightly off topic but how many uses does the cider have? Does it eventually run out of uses or are you able to use it as much as you want?
Pretty sure it’s infinite use.
I’d mostly echo Mr Overstreet’s comments with respect to the effort you need to put into getting the Cider. The time isn’t really worth it unless you really really really want to be immortal.
Having said that I will say that it’s a very satisfying feeling to just walk off the slow boat in one action after getting blown up by the truthbreaker turbine or burning yourself inside out studying the Correspondence.
I liked having it for the social action. I must have personally greeted a few hundred new players with it. I’ve been on hiatus with that since selling the cider while deciding what a good new player greeting social action should be. I’m leaning towards sparing bouts. But it might send the wrong message to say “welcome to fallen London delicious friend. Please accept this complimentary punch in the face, don’t worry it will make you stronger ;-)”
But yeah, if you are social and love to chat with folks it makes for one heck of an ice breaker haha.
Owning it makes gives you access to a good money grind and near immunity to several menace types due to menace cross conversion actions. But if you have a cider, it’s not like you -need- a new good money grind haha. Well not unless you want a heptagoat too. On that sense, if you wanted both it’d be good to get the cider first as it would make goat grinding marginally faster.
[quote=NiteBrite]Owning it makes gives you access to a good money grind and near immunity to several menace types due to menace cross conversion actions.[/quote]Do you mind sharing how this money grind works?
edited by dov on 7/11/2015
Certainly, when you own the cider, you can sip it to get 10 taste of the garden for one action (and a full wounds cure). Each cp of taste allows you to draw one of the cider dreams cards in your opportunity deck, high frequency. These cards give an extraordinary implication (+2.5) echoes, and 1 cp nightmares (-0.33 cp) so that’s like 1.97 epa over 11 actions.
edited by NiteBrite on 7/11/2015
Course, it’s still a crazy amount of actions to earn back the cost of the cider…
nothing personal Nite.
[quote=NiteBrite]Certainly, when you own the cider, you can sip it to get 10 taste of the garden for one action (and a full wounds cure). Each cp of taste allows you to draw one of the cider dreams cards in your opportunity deck, high frequency. These cards give an extraordinary implication (+2.5) echoes, and 1 cp nightmares (-0.33 cp) so that’s like 1.97 epa over 11 actions.[/quote] Thanks. Very interesting.
How do you figure the -0.33cp from the Nightmares gain?
Sorry that was on error. Nightmares are -0.40 echos per cp. I base this on the confess your fears social action which reduces a certain amount of cp nightmares for 1 action and 1 sudden insight (which also has an action cost). I value 1 action at 1 echo and divide the cp nightmare reduction by the number of actions it takes to perform the reduction action and multiply by 1. This tells me the value of actions lost or actions which could have been otherwise used for a more profitable action. Ideally you would value 1 action at your highest value possible such as affair of the box etc, but that Max is going to vary from player to player depending on their stats and unlocks. So I keep it simple by becoming the value of 1 action at 1 echo so that of your Max action value is more or less you can just multiply that 0.40 by your personal Max to get the appropriate adjustment. For example a high stats player whose actions are more valuable may say they have a Max action value of 1.6 echos per action if they didn’t have to deal with menace. That person would multiply 0.40 by 1.6 and see their nightmares actually cost 0.64 echo that they lost by using actions on things other than their optimal grind. Basically, a higher level players actions are worth more in terms of echos than a new players and my system makes it simple as possible to account for that. I apologize for using 0.33 as that is the value of cp connected based on the connection items such as the pewter tankard. I got off a line on my table of non-item effect costs that I use for estimating “overall” epa.
I see. Makes sense.
So let’s measure in Actions, not in Echoes (while Echoes might be the currency of our characters, it’s Actions which are the real currency of the player).
1 Action to sip the Cider, plus 10 Actions (card dependent) to get a total of 10 Extraordinary Implications, plus 10 cp of Nightmares. Each 5 cp of Nightmares are reduced with 2 actions (1 social action to get a Sudden Insight, 1 social action to deal with the nightmares).
In total: 15 actions to get 25 echoes worth of items = 1.66 epa. Marginally better than the Affair of the Box.
edited by dov on 7/12/2015
That’s a much cleaner approach. It’s tricky to account for things like menace, but if you don’t the grind looks way better than it actually is. Thank you for your help.
Being card based isn’t a super drawback as its a very frequent draw and it’s negative effects could be offset if you take advantage of its wound healing properties, but really you will never have wounds so that part is going to be wasted most of the time. Biggest drawback would be its a massive deck clog. You’ll have trouble drawing any other cards because it’s high frequency.
edited by NiteBrite on 7/12/2015
Of course, nightmares cost nothing [1] if you visit the Nadir weekly and let it rob you of your stats. Which you then grind back up (to 200 in may case) over the rest of the week.
The next question then is, is this worth it? Do I get enough profit from the nadir (with the possibilities of two different cards giving 1 cp drama, one card converting 3 second chances into ~62 echoes, and of course the garden/searing enigma card (with a bunch of worthless cards and a cople worth 2.5e))? Getting back shadowy is optimal, but the other stats require playing cards with worse epa (and not all of them can be "lethal prominence’s curiosities cashed in on tomb colonists" - because that card doesn’t appear often enough).
ETA: [1] until you reach level 8
edited by xKiv on 7/12/2015
On the other hand, if you Gawp, it takes 5 actions on average to reduce 10 CP of Nightmares, and you get 0.95 EPA at the same time, so you get a total of 10 * 2.5 + 5 * 0.95 = 29.75 Echoes per 16 actions, or ~1.86 EPA. And then all the Wounds disappear from using the Cider again.
I just want to say that I love this thread and how we can analyse the efficiency of this down to the last CP, even though it’s only applicable for about 4 players :-)
NiteBrite - excellent point regarding opportunity cost of clattering the deck and thus getting less of the more useful cards.
Hello, everybody! The goats are too far away and the Cider is in a different universe alltogather, but since you’ve touched upon the subject of grind-efficient strategies, I guess it wouldn’t be too off-topic to ask: does anybody use writing short stories for echo grind? Is it worthwhile taking into account both the epa and the price of potential boosting materials?