A) Oops, I missed the actions to actually GET the stuff from Thefts (no, wait, I had that in some of them but not all, semi-whew), was just calculating the actions to get the CP for them, yikes, thanks for pointing that out!
B) Okay, interview the dep’t is a watchful challenge, I’m not going to calculate that, people can figure it themselves, but ugh, raid a message drop isn’t straightforward at 5, how did I miss that!
Right, I’m going to fix A) and leave B) for later because that’s just beyond me this morning . . . edited by an_ocelot on 3/17/2016
Adding in the actions to cash in your Thefts brings the overall EPA down to 1.45 if you are maxed out of everything and have to grind material from scratch. Again, you might get lucky, or you might like it for variety. But not recommended as your main money-maker over time.
EDIT: dumb formula error, make that 1.58 EPA.
Again, do check my work–I expanded things out even further to make them easy to follow! (And also because I couldn’t keep it in my head otherwise…)
(Still not touching the University grind.)
(Note to self: add a tab comparing this to the University for Enigmas.) edited by an_ocelot on 3/17/2016 edited by an_ocelot on 3/17/2016
Some of the source materials may be faster from breeding hyaenas. I am pegging extraordinary implications (devils away) at 132 ppa, for example.
Maniac prayers (fungus+pious wrath) are 137.5 ppa, and therefore correspondence plaques 140.4 ppa … which also makes visions of the surface 135.6 ppa.
(FW is better than the University for Enigmas, unless you have amazing luck (or I have done something very wrong). Huh.)
xKiv, I’ve put a column for source material EPA on the Coruscating Soul tab, to make comparisons easier, since it didn’t calculate that separately before. I’ll look at hyaneas in a bit.
[quote=an_ocelot] I’ll look at hyaneas in a bit.[/quote]I just couldn’t resist.
Now, my young ones, as we continue exploring the preserved wildlife of the Fifth City in the Labyrinth of Tigers, we are to behold a rare sight: an ocelot preparing to hunt hyenas. You may wonder, how such a modestly sized feline would hunt it’s savage pack-hunting relative, but in the Fith City the nature and the order of things get distorted easily enough. Now, watch closely, as an ocelot is distracting hyena with a jar of first-class honey, snaps a collar around its neck and drags honey-mazed beast deeper, to the inner coils, where one of ocelot’s several lairs is. How does it get honey you ask? Well, why do you think it hunts hyenas? edited by Talkes on 3/17/2016
Hee. I like it, Talkes. (But the hunt will be delayed some more; I made it a true shopping list and discovered a dumb error in the use of the “ceiling” function that was overestimating amounts and dropping EPA–now 1.58 from scratch–and now I really have to stop before I mess things up further.)
I think the best way to resolve the "failure rate" issue with the Uni/Flit route, is simply to program it at 87 Clues per turn and then copy/paste the math in a note below. I’m still not sure it makes sense to add a potentially inaccessible grind, but if you decide to, then that might be the cleanest solution.
[quote=xKiv]Some of the source materials may be faster from breeding hyaenas. I am pegging extraordinary implications (devils away) at 132 ppa, for example.
Maniac prayers (fungus+pious wrath) are 137.5 ppa, and therefore correspondence plaques 140.4 ppa … which also makes visions of the surface 135.6 ppa.[/quote]
I’m not sure how you got your ppas. Breeding a hyaena, by my count, takes 13 acts (2 to travel to coil 2, 1 to capture, 2 to coil 4, 7 to increase Thwarting, 1 to breed); costs 100 drops of honey; pays out an average 18.5 echoes worth of Implications. By my math, that pegs it at 126 ppa. Did I get something wrong?
I’ve recently completed a run for 1000 tales and counting on farming all the materials via the best common methods I ended at something close to 1,22 epa. Definitely not worth it for me.
Yup, for some people the inherent uncertainty is just not congenial–me, usually, except when I need Enigmas. Thus, we provide data for people to make well-informed decisions!
(Unfortunately it’s beyond my abilities to put a plus-minus/confidence interval/whatever you call it on the shopping list . . . )
Since there seems to be a flurry of activity on this topic, it might be a good time to update the fidgeting writer simulation I wrote a year and a half ago. I never advertised it very well (I just now added a link to it in my signature), and I don’t think I ever did a super good job of describing what it does. But, before I spend an afternoon improving it, is there anyone that would actually find improvements useful? Is there any particular feature that users would like to see? I think that the biggest thing that it needs is a way to take into account the actions used in acquiring the materials rather than just subtracting their cost from the total profit. Maybe I’ll also make it less ugly. Feedback is welcome though.
[quote=MrBurnside]
I’m not sure how you got your ppas. Breeding a hyaena, by my count, takes 13 acts (2 to travel to coil 2, 1 to capture, 2 to coil 4, 7 to increase Thwarting, 1 to breed); costs 100 drops of honey; pays out an average 18.5 echoes worth of Implications. By my math, that pegs it at 126 ppa. Did I get something wrong?[/quote]
I got the “better” success rate as 85% from somewhere (I think I just kept records …). You seem to be using 70%.
They are listed on wiki as luck challenges (with pretty good odds, which means 70% or 80%), which suprises me. I remember them as just randomly having a different result. edited by xKiv on 3/18/2016
[quote=Guy Scrum]Since there seems to be a flurry of activity on this topic, it might be a good time to update the fidgeting writer simulation I wrote a year and a half ago. I never advertised it very well (I just now added a link to it in my signature), and I don’t think I ever did a super good job of describing what it does. But, before I spend an afternoon improving it, is there anyone that would actually find improvements useful? Is there any particular feature that users would like to see? I think that the biggest thing that it needs is a way to take into account the actions used in acquiring the materials rather than just subtracting their cost from the total profit. Maybe I’ll also make it less ugly. Feedback is welcome though.[/quote]Yes, I was never really sure what it was good for! So I’m not sure I can suggest improvements without knowing that. But, if there’s a way to add +/- either to the spreadsheet or via the simulator, I think people might find that useful.
[quote=xKiv]I got the "better" success rate as 85% from somewhere (I think I just kept records …). You seem to be using 70%.
They are listed on wiki as luck challenges (with pretty good odds, which means 70% or 80%), which suprises me. I remember them as just randomly having a different result.[/quote]
The storylet shows "pretty good odds" as well. And it’s true that the odds could, then, go as high as 80. Normally the ranges seem more for show, however; experimental data (both here and on individual story pages on the wiki) showing that the back-end usually uses the lower number. I assumed in this case that that was the same here as well, but I don’t really have any confidence in that assumption. It was lazy of me.
[quote=MrBurnside][quote=xKiv]I got the "better" success rate as 85% from somewhere (I think I just kept records …). You seem to be using 70%.
They are listed on wiki as luck challenges (with pretty good odds, which means 70% or 80%), which suprises me. I remember them as just randomly having a different result.[/quote]
The storylet shows "pretty good odds" as well. And it’s true that the odds could, then, go as high as 80. Normally the ranges seem more for show, however; experimental data (both here and on individual story pages on the wiki) showing that the back-end usually uses the lower number. I assumed in this case that that was the same here as well, but I don’t really have any confidence in that assumption. It was lazy of me.[/quote]
I am now on the computer where I have the records I used, and there are two interesting things in them.
First, a very old comment stating "and only gives 50% rewards 30% of the time; which is *0.85". That’s probably where the 85% thing came from.
Second, it lists 79 successes and 29 failures, which is 70.7% success rate.
That makes XIs 126.9 ppa, maniac prayers 130 ppa, correspondence plaques 133 ppa, and visions of the surface 128.8 ppa.
This is also the computer where I have my "find the best way to grind resources" script (work very in progress, needs total rewrite), which, perhaps surprisingly, uses the correct success rate (70%). And I am not very confident in its outputs, but even though it places breeding hyaenas slightly above converting JoIs (when the goal is extraordinary implications), it probably only does so because it values the spent honey as if it only cost enough actions to replenish 200 pences with AotB …
Further update to spreadsheet: columns to tell you when you can stop converting your Jade to Scraps of Incendiary Gossip (added out of personal need; wrong-way-around thinking about it now fixed); minor fix to EPA for two-item sets; cosmetic improvements.
(Now with even more cosmetic improvements, and I swear I’m done fiddling for the day.) edited by an_ocelot on 4/3/2016
[quote=an_ocelot]Further update to spreadsheet: columns to tell you when you can stop converting your Jade to Scraps of Incendiary Gossip (added out of personal need; wrong-way-around thinking about it now fixed); minor fix to EPA for two-item sets; cosmetic improvements.
[/quote]
Hello an_ocelot,
Thank you for the shout out and for your excellent contribution on the chivalrous quest of helping a poor fidgeting soul.
Somehow I have failed to understand how to receive notifications on forum topics of interest, so I had missed most of your thought process.
Haven’t investigated the Writer part, but, I must say, you did a great job!
More than a great start for someone who never did the chain, but was expecting a higher EPA (or I’m not reading it right).
GeorgeEarlslight, I’m not sure you can subscribe to forum threads? Anyway, thanks for the kind words and for getting us all started on this path!
Optimatum, whoa, really?! If you or someone could check all the values that would be awesome–we’ve been assuming they’re 70% for the first three steps, 60% for the fourth, and 50% for all the rest.