Quick query about reducing Khanate suspicion

Sunless Sea
1

I’ve just tried - three times - to reduce suspicion with Taimen’s Mercy, and got zero reduction in suspicion each time.

Firstly, is this a bug? I’d like to know before I try again.

Secondly, if not and I’ve just got a bad deal from the random number generator, I would gratefully request this is changed so it’s at least one point reduction. Reducing Khanate suspicion is very expensive (in echoes or time) and therefore requires quite a lot of grind. My real life time is quite precious, and I feel like it’s being wasted to relativey little purpose.

2

Yeah, the Random Number Gods were having fun with you.

3

Had the same happen to me, thought it was a bug too. Then traded for some moon-pearls and got all three different results in the next go.

As far as I can tell the RNG outputs 3 different results there:

Lowering Suspicion by a large amount (3 or 4)
Lowering Suspcion by a Small amount (1 or 2)
Not Lowering Suspicion at all

You can just get screwed by the roll sometimes -repeatedly - which sucks, and I think should be at a lower chance considering how often I’ve gotten it (or at least related to the total number of favors earned with the Taimen, which it may very well be and I’m unaware of).

4

I think it’s merely a roll which lowers 0-3 suspicion.

I agree that it should be changed to at least 1-3.

5

I feel like anything which khanate supremacy should also significantly lower suspicion

and it’s a random 0-3. no weighting.

6

Weird, I was almost entirely sure it’s 1-3, not 0-3.

Anyway the Khanate suspicion is THE pain in the rear of a cargo hold. Compared to them, revenue men are white and fluffy.

With the boarding being practically impossible due to balance (aka broken). The only &quotreliable&quot way to drop suspicion is this action.

You can only get the reputation required for this action by either lugging an insane amount of coffee (30 units per 0-3 point of suspicion)(costing no less then 630 echo), or wasting 15 drowning pearls.

You can only get drowning pearls reliably by trading with the Fa-king, and you need 7 units of scintillack for 30 pearls (0-6 point of suspicion)(costing no less than 490 echo you’d get by dumping the scintillack on the London market). (Fun fact - the &quotangry and demanding&quot looking rats in a random event are offering you a better deal for the pearls than the b___dy king of the b___dy underwater… I hate that greedy piece of seaweed, especially after dealing with him on a certain ambitious quest)

You can only reliably get scintillack at the principles, 1-3 per SAY. Or even less then that. And you CAN’T dump it anywhere until you get all 7 (honestly this is ridiculous, we can get a b___dy mansion, but never a warehouse).

Personally I’ve resigned to gathering pearls though random events, dumping the scintillack on the market, and not touching the khanate with a ten-foot pole if I can help it. NO port report is worth that amount of trouble.

That said, try doing the &quotwonder khan’s heart&quot action there’s a chance to drop a point of suspicion that way.
And there’s also a chance to help khanate in some random scirmish on another island, that can also get you a free point.
edited by Red-XIII on 2/25/2015
edited by Red-XIII on 2/25/2015

7

Thanks for the advice, guys. I guess I’ll just have to heft a lot more coffee to the Khanate and hope for the best.

But it makes me hope I have an option to burn that corrupt carbuncle of a city to the waterline and put their leaders’ heads on spikes by the end of the game.

8

Consider gaining some pearls as well. Nuncio has a nice chance of getting you 20 pearls (parcel on the shore), and beach combing can get you some (&quotsomething glinting&quot option).

That’s not a complete solution, but It’ll save you some coffee trips here and there.

Also, I’ve hinted at this already, but let me drop a second tip here - there’s a method in this game that lets you get crates of coffee while only spending 21 echo per crate.

It’s a bit trickier (a bit better hidden, and a bit less likely to come by, a bit more likely to be forgotten, and a bit less accessible) than the rest of what I’ve named up till now, so I’m a bit reluctant about spoiling the exact way.

Otherwise it’s 38 echo per crate. 1140 echo per 6 Leopard condescensions which’ll buy you 3 Taimen mercies which’ll buy you one plead which is apparently 0-3 points (Could have sworn it was 1-3).

P.S. Yep, sometimes I wish I could compromise their zee position at least to the point where they’d stop spawning their b___dy nagging trimarans. What’s their deal anyway - they shoot on sight and then get suspicious if I fight back. Jerks…

That’s another one of SS problems - once someone raises you can’t do squat about it, even though you can easily raise people to supremacy you can’t bring them back down. You can dump London somewhat, and you can dump khanate a bit but that’s about it. The dawn machine is b___dy unsupressable. And almost nothing actually changes at zee regardless of any supposed supremacies.
edited by Red-XIII on 2/25/2015

9

Khaganian Suspicion isn’t a huge deal if you evade War Trimarans and collect Khan’s Heart port report. Other than that, there’s really not many events which increase suspicion.

Gathering 7 scintillack for the 30 drowning pearls the Fathomking provides is only slightly time-consuming. It’s not great, but it’s better than buying tons of coffee to have the Leopard inefficiently intercede with the Taimen.

And yes, there’s also the random event from the Wander Khan’s Heart option, which lowers I think a single point of suspicion directly.

But anyway, it’s somewhat tedious to lower suspicion, but it’s not particularly difficult to keep it down if you know what you’re doing.

10

Are you aware of any reliable ways to gain scintillack that I’m not? Beacuse 1-3 per say in principals is ususally more trouble than gathering the pearls directly. Not to mention that pears don’t eat cargo space, while the scintillack does. There’s a quest that gives you boatloads of it, and in the right numbers, no less, but that’s not a reliable method since the quest won’t last forever.

Also, are you running an intell network in khan’s heart?
Based on your approach (and luck) it could generate quite some &quotheat&quot. There’s a lot to do at khan’s heart, and a lot of &quotuses&quot for suspicion, but not enough ways to deal with all of them. Especially if we only consider cost-efficient ways.

Like I said, you can keep it down, but the largest part of that process is just avoiding dealing with khanate altogether. Maybe it’s realistic, and maybe that’s how it was intended, but it’s still sad (IMHO).

And the part when the most sensible thing to do is to run from trimarans that aren’t worth a squat in combat is the most ridiculous part of all the khanate deal. Either thier leaders should understand that an order of &quotshoot foreigners on sight&quot can lead to the death of his own troops and it’s their own damn choice and fault, or they should start investigating their own people on the topic of following orders.

11

It’s a great deal faster to gather the 7 scintillack than it is to gather 30 pearls, even if you have terrible luck. For one thing, you’re guaranteed to have that option every time SAY is available. Beachcombing has a chance to give you fragments instead (not a bad thing, exactly, but not what you were looking for), and Nuncio has many other parcels that might show up.

And of course doing the Principles quest buries you in the stuff. If you convert most of that into pearls right away, you should have more than enough to deal with any future suspicion.
edited by Olorin on 2/25/2015

12

[quote=Shadow]Also, are you running an intell network in khan’s heart?
Based on your approach (and luck) it could generate quite some &quotheat&quot. There’s a lot to do at khan’s heart, and a lot of &quotuses&quot for suspicion, but not enough ways to deal with all of them. Especially if we only consider cost-efficient ways.[/quote]
I maintain mature, pervasive intelligence networks in both Khan’s Heart and Port Carnelian.

While failures can increase suspicion, if you’re patient you can maximize your chances of success to the point of certainty. There’s enough risk-free ways to strengthen the networks, and at level 7 you can extract Vital Intelligence from them without a chance of being caught.

Sure, if you do more frequent extractions without strengthening the network afterwards, you expose yourself to an increasing probability of failure. But that’s the price you pay for a faster flow of valuable items.
edited by Shadow on 2/25/2015

13

One parcel in nuncio gets you 20 pearls.
That’s 9 times per 180 pearls.
Only 1 out of 4 visits to nuncio will get you the pearls though, so that’s 36 visits per 180 pearls on average.
Nuncio results:
20 per SAY.
5 per journey.
36 minutes of say-farming per 180 pearls.

One SAY or one visit in principles get’s you 1 or 1-3 scintillack.
That’s 14 times per 60 to 180 pearls. Or 14 to 42 times per 180 pearls. 28 SAYs or visits per 180 pearls on average. (If we’re talking about a captain who never fails the principles mirror challenge. 104 for 100%, afaik)
Plus you will need to waste a 6 more SAYs to turn your scintillack into pears at the Fa-King Hold.
That’s 20-48 SAYs in total. 34 SAYs on average (If we’re talking about a captain who never fails the principles mirror challenge. 104 for 100%, afaik)
Principles->hold results:
5.2941 per SAY
6.4285 per journey.
34 minutes (plus the time spent lugging 42 crates from cecil to FK hold) of SAY-farming per 180 pearls.

SAY at beachcombing->something glinting gets you 1-4 pearls OR 10 - 100 fragmens. That’s 10 pearls per 8 SAYS. However, if we’re talking about circling the map, and not just SAY-farming/SAY-spending, then the impact of beachcombing on your pearls can potentially double (since you can comb 2 beaches per voyage, well 2.25 really).
Beachcombing results:
1.25 pearl per SAY.
2.8145 pearl per journey.
144 minutes of SAY-farming per 180 pearls.

Principles obviously have a nice impact on pearls per journey, but the principles only give scintillack and any amount less than 7 “crates” will have to be lugged around.
And there are no positive side effects to their influence.
Dunno which part of that you meant as “faster” but neither one of them is notably faster than nuncio. Never mind “great deal faster”

Nuncio gives you most pearls per SAY spent. Slightly less per journey. And take almost the same time SAY-farming BUT it’s worth considering that SAY-farming there will cost you less terror and leave you with some additional fragments and outlandish artefacts compared to cecil->hold combo.

Beachcombing is rather unimpressive on all fronts, but it does have it’s own benefits. You can grab an occasional ship-wreck instead, or when the planets and stars align you can actually nail a soul egg.

Anyway, ignoring scintillack gathering does cut down my pearl-gathering per journey by about a half, and maybe I shouldn’t be complaining about nasty khanate while not doing this, but having to lug all that scintillack around just irritates me too much to do it. I prefer dumping it on the London market and being rid of it.

And resorting only to safe methods in khanate is also a major pain. You can re-roll your networks need by wasting a SAY, and by personal experience - one “stable” option to increase the network strength comes about once per 3 rolls when you’re getting lucky and rarer than that when you’re not.

In any event - what I was trying to get across is that khanate is so much of a hassle that most of the time dealing with it is not worth dealing with it’s suspicion. If that doesn’t change naturally when the capturing starts working than I’d strongly suggest to change that artificially.
I get the idea that they are supposed to be difficult to deal with, but when content is so difficult that all but the most “spend-happy” players prefer to keep their distance, I call that a wasted content. IMHO there needs to be a good enough reason to go through all those trouble, and currently there’s no such reason.

14

My issue with the Khanate isn’t that they’re difficult to deal with, it’s that you gain very little for dealing with said difficulty.

I mean, the only truly unique item on offer is Romantic Literature, and at a price where shipping it off to the only other port that buys it is at a pretty low margin. You can get a better margin trading Wine with the Khanate.

Past that, the Nephirite Quarter offers some convenience sometimes, but is mostly not very good. Especially with Khan’s Shadow so close by offering supplies, fuel and mirror-catch boxes at the same prices.

One of the better ways to improve the Nephirite Quarter access would simply to raise the costs of any shared items between it and the Shadow at the Shadow. That way there’s much more benefit to unlocking the place.

Past that . . . entering the spy game doesn’t factor in Suspicion much once you get your first agent in, and if you wait till you have a mature network before you start harvesting vital info out of them. I’ve yet to run into any great random events there, and while it’s nice to have a port to stop by to get some crew if you’re desperate for it, there’s simply not much there that’s super awesome that makes lowering your suspicion either necessary or worth the hassle.

15

Erm… buying an idol, a &quotstation box&quot, or violant ink for 77 echo is a great event if you ask me.

So is the one that drops your suspicion by one point, but that’s only because it’s so beeping hard to drop in the first place.

As for khanate’s suspicion has it’s factor in the spy-game in A WHOLE CREAKING LOT of cases. It even matter in carnelian to some extent. AND if it gets to 20 &quotsomething will await you&quot next time you land in khanate…

Also khanate IS the only place that sells the romantic literature (although you can trade for it elsewhere) and, for what that’s worth, it pays double for parrot feathers. Also, for what that’s worth, it’s the closest-to-Irem place to get a crate of coffee. Buy yeah, it’s not all that great as a trade joint.

EDIT: Oh, and as of recent update khanate is where you sell the aquarium.
edited by Red-XIII on 2/26/2015

16

I think you’re exaggerating to a certain extent. The network needs choices in Khan’s Heart are more varied than Port Carnelian’s, and in my experience, you get a risk-free option on every roll if you’re lucky, and something approaching your alleged once every 3 rolls if you’re not.

There’s also the fact Khaganian Suspicion has to reach 10 points in the first place to become a hindrance, so there’s plenty of room to become careful before that happens. I’ve only had to actively farm (7) scintillack for pearls for suspicion reduction once, and coupled with some pearls I had from my previous travels, I could plead to the Taimen twice and lose three points. I later lost two more from two instances of that event you can trigger wandering Khan’s Heart.

So as I said earlier, while Khaganian Suspicion is difficult to lower, it’s not particularly easy to raise. And while I play the spy game a lot (as hinted at by my signature), the Khanate is only one of the many ports I visit, so if my networks need something inconvenient, I move on and try again later. I only rarely &quotfarm&quot SAYs.

However, I do agree that the Khanate needs more content in general. Considering it’s London’s great rival, there should be more to it than a few ships, a shop and a small handful of events.

17

Just let me confirm this. When you say that khanate suspicion doesn’t become a hindrance till 10, do you mean that it doesn’t add the difficulty to related checks till 10 as well? Afaik, it affects your chances at increasing network strength in quite a number of methods both in the khan’s heart and in port carnelian.

18

I don’t know. I’m still just not seeing it ever being a problem unless you either: kill a lot of Trimarans and sift through their wrecks, or don’t know which options raise suspicion and do silly things like explore Khan’s Glory. The 60 pearls you get from converting just two of the Principles’ rewards should be more than enough to deal with what you get from Port Reports and Network building.

As far as whether unlocking the quarter is useful, the main things I buy in the Nephrite Quarter aren’t Romantic Literature or even Fuel/Supplies, they’re Candles (for Mangrove College, Godfall, Saviours’ Rocks) and Coffee (for Irem). Obviously whether this is a better location than Adam’s Way for this purpose depends on where these locations spawned on your map.

19

I tend to kill anything that:

  1. Can initiate combat and has a chance of noticing my ship.
  2. Doesn’t pose a threat.
  3. Wouldn’t overload my hold.

Except the b___dy trimarans. For that EXACT reason that they technically COST something when looting them. Though I haven’t considered ignoring the wrecks… Still, it’s not right to kill it if you aren’t going to eat it… ;P

And the problem with spy game is that it’s really not SAY-effecient to only stick to sure-fire spy-fare. But try doing that with khanate around and you’ll quicky get your operation down the drain as more suspicion = bigger chance to get caught = even more suspicion.

Funny, In ALL my games khanate was/is the closest “coffee shop” to Irem. I was almost sure it can’t happen any other way.

20

lol yeah, it’s definitely the closest for Coffee. It’s Candles that might change, I just couldn’t be bothered to make that post even more verbose.

And eh. I almost never kill anything unless I have to. Waste of fuel, supplies, and time. Probably why I never have problems with suspicion… ponders
edited by Olorin on 2/27/2015