What? That’s astounding. Parked where, exactly? As a right dishonorable campaigner I crave things luminous like a snuffer craves candles.
I posted a little guide on how to do it in this thread: http://community.failbettergames.com/topic4344-grinding-watchful-and-persuasive.aspx#post42554 It’s still a slightly gamble but you can expect 30 Memories of Light probably 8 runs out of 10 and an Antique Mystery about, oh, two-thirds of the time?[li]
edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 12/10/2013[/li][li]
edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 12/10/2013
Thanks for the pointer!
The ivory frame is playable in the mirror marches with Mouse: So Little Time 6-3 if you’re on the deranged medium case.
So when your nightmares starts getting up there take the case and play the storylet in ladybones road four times. Now when you go to the mirror marches the ivory frame is available and gets you through the middle portion of cat and mouse with no risk.
edited by Sackville on 12/10/2013
Huh. I didn’t realize that A Place of Some Confusion no longer totally wiped dream qualities. That’s a relief.
And…I didn’t realize the Mirror Marches were a menace area! :D I’ve been deliberately going to them!
Oh, and good point about buying in the first four after your first failure. I’ve only had one run" where I failed in the first four more than once, but yeah, basically there’s one free failure in the first four.
Hm… the Mirror Marches wasn’t that bad. If anything I want to go back there soon.
Totally! Mirror Marches are great.
We… We really dislike the SOSC. It’s very well-written, and the Mirror Marches are excellent, but the SOSC eats away at your stats like a termite, and I’ve found that Nightmares are drained there slower than any menace at any other location.
We’d recommend having a small store of Memories of Light on hand, just in case. There’s even a place in the MM that lets you grind Watchful without any penalty on failure!
I’m torn on A State of Some Confusion. It eats my dream qualities, and that’s bad, but it’s just ever so much fun. And I find that you can get through it very, very quickly and reliably - whereas death is much slower. The Mirror-Marches is very pretty, but not necessarily as fun. I do very much like that there’s an option to gain Unaccountably Peckish there, though, so there is that. Prison can be fast, but you have to sacrifice items if you want to be out at a reasonable pace, and the opportunity cards will eat at your stats. The connections, however, are rather nice.
I’ve only been to the tomb-colonies once, and that was on an alt, so I can’t really form an opinion.
[quote=Laluzi]I’m torn on A State of Some Confusion. It eats my dream qualities, and that’s bad, but it’s just ever so much fun. And I find that you can get through it very, very quickly and reliably - whereas death is much slower. The Mirror-Marches is very pretty, but not necessarily as fun. I do very much like that there’s an option to gain Unaccountably Peckish there, though, so there is that. Prison can be fast, but you have to sacrifice items if you want to be out at a reasonable pace, and the opportunity cards will eat at your stats. The connections, however, are rather nice.
I’ve only been to the tomb-colonies once, and that was on an alt, so I can’t really form an opinion.[/quote]
[li]
You can get out of New Newgate through a daring prison escape without losing connections, stats or items.
For us:
Mirror Marches (No stat-damaging cards; very few opportunities to better yourself but in the ruins there’s a storylet that lets you grind Watchful infinitely).
New Newgate (Lots of nice, clean connections).
Slow Boat (mostly because of the option to grind Watchful).
Tomb Colonies (very dull; several cards raise Nightmares. That said, many cards also grant second chances, especially if you’ve dealt with a certain ratty infestation).
State of Some Confusion (Takes forever to get out of, lowers your stats all the time, and leaving devastates your Dream qualities).
My preference:
The Mirror Marches (beautiful cards and not too much damage to dream qualities).
New Newgate (you can avoid the cards that damage stats, if you remember which they are in time, not very time-consuming to exit, good place to pick up some Connected: Criminals, helpful to bring back the Repentant Forger if you’ve lost his Acquaintance).
Tomb Colonies (mostly just dull, and expensive if you try to hurry the process).
Slow Boat (I only got killed once so I don’t remember it well. Important to stock up on Bats, Ravens and/or Weasels before you go).
State of Some Confusion. Not bad from a player perspective but very creepy. I don’t remember (ironic, that) how badly it damaged my dream qualities, but then I encountered it before I’d built those up very far).
Our luck varies, then. I have been to New Newgate many times, and only once did I pull an escape - which happened to be when I was down to 2 Suspicion anyway. And conversely, in A State of Some Confusion, I’ve only ‘succeeded’ the Nightmares check once. shrug
Apologies for the necro, but is there any way of getting from A State of Some Confusion to the Mirror-Marches? My alt’s ambition (Light Fingers 18) seems to require I go to SOSC, and since I already visited SOSC once as a newbie, there isn’t much atmosphere/story reason for me to want to weaken my dreams and stats there.
No problem with necro-ing! There is, or at least was last time I checked, a way to pass from the SOSC to the Mirror-Marches, though it requires at least one level of The Fire Sermon, plus 11 Fate.
I love the State of Some Confusion to a mildly embarrassing extent, and have been there something like eight times on my main – I think I’ve gone insane nine times but spent at least one incident entirely in the Mirror-Marches – in my attempts to suck out every last drop of content. (The Mirror-Marches are cool too! But in a different way.)
I have also spent a large amount of Fate on Honeyed Laudanum since I started playing. Because I also love the dream storylines.
I find the Tomb-Colonies pretty fun, although I was starting to get bored with them after… I lost count, about five visits probably. But they recently overhauled them so now I’m excited for the next time I get exiled.
Death is, as a previous poster mentioned, a grim slog. I do love the intensely gloomy atmosphere of the slow boat, but the game mechanics are quite unfriendly. (At least I’ve never been forced to hammer away at the dice game for eight levels of Wounds. I’ve met people who hate dying because of that mechanic.)
I’ve never been back to New Newgate because I’m fussy about making my in-game actions reflect my character as much as possible and they seem to have been quite traumatised by the place (I failed that opportunity card where you go back there as a consulting detective to track down an escapee enough times to go "wow that’s a lot of flashbacks") so I diligently keep my Suspicion under 5 on my main. My alt took it much better, and will probably spend a lot of time behind bars since I created them with Seeking Mr Eaten’s Name in mind, but has never actually been Suspicious enough to get sent back to jail. There were a couple of close calls, but I found menace reducers in time to prevent it from reaching 8.