[li]1,250 bucks in coffee bribes (plus shipping) just to get the ring.
[li]got ‘suspicion’? - another 1,000 in coffee (or drownie pearls, which don’t exactly drip from Salt’s eyes).
[li]and that just lowers your numbers by 2 sus. points?
[li]
[li]so over two grand just to say ‘hi, can i buy a lump of cheese & coal’ and if i dare explore Khan-town ever again, it’s another grand?
[li]ouch-ouch-ouch.
[li]
[li]just a couple misadventures and you’re talking about boat-buying money there, not to mention all the time it takes.
[li]and i had just 9 points of suspicion when i got the license (and fell circumstance put me one point over right after).
[li]i didn’t even visit them much; largely avoided the place just because i knew i needed to keep suspicion levels low.
[li]
Dealing with the Leopard isn’t the cheapest way to reduce suspicion. Better to hang around Gaider’s Mourn or the Khanate itself, letting their privateers pick fights with you, trouncing them, then letting them go. Also, the Mourn includes a random event where you can earn a horsehead totem, worth another point of suspicion reduction.
Well to gain the 5 points of Leopard Condescension you need I advise you to go to Khan Heart and Wander the Quarter, when you get the option of helping or ratting out the fellow who is escaping help him: helping him will give you an Outlandish Artifact or 3 points of Leopard Condescension!
As per the suspicion: never use the option to pay the Storyteller, never buy food there, and attack every Khanate ship you encounter, but let them go. Usually you’ll find 2/3 of them around Gaider’s Mourn, and sometimes in the water around the Khanate proper. It’s one point down of suspicion less for every ships! And you also lose 2 points of terror, as a nice bonus.
At the Mourn you can also help the Khanate privateers when you find them fighting the Chelonate hunters: they’ll give you an Horsehead that you can cash at Khanate to lose a point of suspicion.
I never used any pearls to lose suspicion, and I had to buy only 5 coffee to get the License (got the rest from pirates).
And, it’ll be worth it in the future, as the Khanate will be used as a staging area for supplies and fuel to explore the South of the map.
Hope it helps.
see, i would never have expected that ATTACKING Khan ships would be a way to reduce their anger/suspicion.
that seems more like a direct path to a (^% -you card than anything else.
was totally going out of my way to avoid them for that very reason.
i did pick up the chess piece, but only hit that encounter once so far (& spent it on Magician’s Q).
and i think the option of helping the guy in Khan’s quarter to score favor illustrates the point -
you’re going to have to wander about a lot for a random event that rarely hits, all the while getting jacked up on sus. points while trying to do so (the very stuff that nailed me in the first place).
haven’t had as much luck scoring coffee off pirates & 'bergs.
have gotten some, but Leps demand cases in fives.
also have limited cargo space…
would be nice if you could stash some goods at home or in a port warehouse w/o having to fence them at market all the time.
If you loot the Khanate ships you do gain Suspicion, you have to let them go, but they are tough opponents so be careful. If you get them hold on to another Horsehead they give an option to flee the ships if you are not strong enough to take them on.
Gaider’s Mourn for Horsehead Amulets, defeating Khanate Privateers for lowered suspicion, and Angler Crabs (butchered) for pearls. It worked out very well for me I should say.
i put crab on the menu and pearls just don’t pop up that often.
at all.
i’ve scored ‘captivating treasure’ more often.
best luck seems to be from harvesting Elder Crabs, but still no guarantee and one off-roll takes half your ship.
as for the Khan, their warships really live up to the name.
i’m averaging about 1 for 3 in their favor at the moment, and ‘winning’ leaves me with hull points in the single digits.
granted, i’m still running the steamer, but she’s fully up-gunned and my battle stats run 70s-90s.
that’s a far cry from early or even "mid"-game stats.
so, despite repeated runs, extreme bloodfests, and a few near-hopeless battles, i’ve only managed 1 condescension.
… and need another 2 to score a 1-point reduction with Tiamen.
[li]
so i’m still hostage to random events on the one hand and restricted from the other by stats.
which brings us right back to massive bags of cash until i hit a stat level that makes me a godslayer.
at which point, "condescension" nothing, i ought to be able to invade, conquer, and subjugate all to the love of The Great and Merciful Deathlord, May His Kindness Betray Us All.
so it’s like, grind cash to grind coffee to grind favor or save-scam the bejeebers out of ship battles and grind the clock.
Getting your Iron up a little more should help. A pair of Carminus Yards weapons gives +40, and the Irrepresible Canonneer + Brisk Campaigner + Wretched Mog will give you an additional +13. It shouldn’t take much work at that point to raise your Iron significantly above 100, which I find really helps take out the Khanate Warships before they can get in a shot.
Use Potent Flares with the Khanate warships; if you can’t usually illuminate them in one turn with a Potent Flare, you might want to go work on your Mirrors for a while before you mess with the Khanate again. You want it to be an occasional piece of very bad luck for them to be able to hit you before you take them down.
And Horsehead Amulets in Gaider’s Mourn are free, so if nothing else, you can cruise around Gaider’s Mourn hunting pirates while you wait for SAY to recharge so you can keep trying for Amulets. Because the pirates always drop fuel and supplies, you can pretty much keep hunting them until you run out of hold space for your loot or get bored. edited by penknife on 8/7/2014
First I’d like to say, that’s the point. You are wedging the Khanat, a seclusive, isolationist and foreigner-hating society, open for business with you, a representative of their fiercest competition, the Reduced Empire.
Secondly, relax, you’re not missing out on much at that time. You dont need it as a supply port for exploration down south because if Trimarans are a problem to you, you’ll be a snack to everything lurking down there and the trade options are only really rentable if you have 60+ hold and cash to spend on the luxury goods.
Come back when you can flens those buggers of their warships in two shots and send them home in dingys. Pay of your suspicion with pearls you can get most reliably from Lifebergs as 1 in 3 drops them and they don’t count as cargo.
If I remember correctly not everything in the Khanate raises suspicion, there are some SAY events that do and getting a Port Report does as well. But you don’t have to do those things. Using the Taiman or Leopard connections are the most expensive ways of reducing it. Fortunately the SAY event that gives Horseheads turns up quite frequently in Gaider’s Mourn and that is what I use to reduce any suspicion.
But I just don’t go there unless I have to and, in my current game, it is just south of Mount Palmerstone so it won’t be much use for exploring further south. To the east maybe.
random events - Cecil is on my regular route, and i’ve even port-farmed 'em a few times.
despite dozens of SAYs, i’ve only ever gotten the Chel/Khan event once.
[color=#c2c2c2]so it’s just not an option my game is leaving on the table, which forces my hand to bribe & battle.
and neither of those options are cheap or even feasible unless your ship & stats are advanced.
you can avoid suspicion-gathering activities, but the game often has occasion to force your hand.
and it doesn’t take long to gain a dangerous level of heat.
and if you get locked out of the Khanate, access to a large (and critical) area of the gameboard is also effectively locked.
true, the south is dangerous, but so is most of the zee.
if you go by the standard ‘don’t go unless you can destroy all like a god of doom’ you restrict yourself to London Docks.
point is to get out there and explore and live the terror of knowing that this is a dangerous place that can kill you.
that’s the risk that makes it fun.
trouble with Khan is that the game wants you to engage at an early level, but then severely punishes you if you aren’t a god.
personally, i’ve hit threshold with stats and have entered if not a ‘god’ status then at least a demigod, or higher demon.
so i can (very suddenly) tangle with the best of Khan and smack them up in a pair of hits.
my point is that the system, as it currently stands, is very unbalanced.
it’s too much pain at start, too much easy after a sudden-break threshold.
and the dodges they offer for starter players (Cecil chess piece) are hostage to a randomizer that can spam you good - or bad.
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Eh, the events for the Horse Head isn’t at Port Cecil, it’s at Gaider’s Mourn and it is fairly regular. Gives a nice terror reduction along with suspicious reduction too.
[li]i gotta go by what i’ve experienced.
and it wasn’t Gaider’s, it was Cecil.
and it was once, never again, despite many many hits to all these ports.
one of the common themes that’s come out of these discussions is that some hit, some don’t. [/li] [li]
Magician, chess piece, some colors, station 3 longboxes, Khan Heart chases …
it might be random, but some games get heavy favor and others play like they’re sabotaged.
and again, it underscores a fundamental balance issue with gameplay.[/li] [li] edited by Psst! on 8/8/2014[/li][li] edited by Psst! on 8/8/2014