[quote=Gillsing]
I also play the two bronze cards that give 3 x Memory of Distant Shores to PoSIs (The Cities that Fell and The Seekers of the Garden), because 1.50 Echoes worth of usable third tier goods is worth at least as much as 1.79 Echoes to me. Or maybe I’m just telling myself that because I like playing opportunity cards in general?[/quote]
This quote from another topic has reminded me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask for some time: how valuable ARE some of the higher-tier items, really? Ostensibly, they have a sell price to the Bazaar, but I’ve heard them mentioned enough that I know they’re more valuable than they at first seem. Things like Memories of Light and Zee-stories are mentioned commonly as optimal rewards among multiple choices, while Storm-Threnodies seem to show up just about as often as Searing Enigmas, even though they’re monetarily worth far less. Not to mention how absurdly rare everything in the Luminosity category seems.
The same thing goes for Connections–the Docks and the Widow seem to be far harder to raise than most other factions, but how does their cash-in rate compare?
Part of this comes from opportunity cards and storylets that allow for unusual conversion rates that are better than converting from the inventory, but part of it seems to come from rarity/difficulty to acquire as well. So what is the true value of the items in Fallen London?
For example, the Use of Villains that I grinded for my Ship costs a mere 6 echoes, but cost me 30 echoes worth of items or 34+ turns worth of actions.
As for the connections, well I’m going to watch this thread for that. Most connections can be traded for items through certain storylets like “Call on your Bohemian friends to return a favour” (that’s one prisoner’s honey (0.02 E) for every connection CP).
I believe that the 1.79 echoes / action is the maximum non-fate-locked repeatable average return per action in Fallen London, being the worth of siding with the revolutionaries in the Affair of the Box.
Connected: The Widow is extremely easy to grind; you can do so in Spite with several permanent storylets. Connected: the Docks is harder, but nowhere near as hard as, say, Connected: The Great Game.
Memories of Light are valuable because they are safety nets against losing all of your dreams at the end of the Royal Bethlehem menace area. They may have other uses that we’re not aware of.
[li]
Actually, 1.7857 Echoes per Action is what I’d get by grinding Dramatic Tension for 3 x 11 Actions, then cashing it in for a Collection of Curiosities in The Treasures of War (Enemy: a Former Lover), and then selling it for 5 x Puzzling Map (62.5 Echoes) on the Bandages and Dust: The Tomb-Colonies card. Since this depends on a card it might not be possible to do this as much as one might want, but I do other things as well, which allows for the card to ‘catch up’ if I have managed to accumulate a few Collections of Curiosities. The Puzzling Maps are mostly useless as items, and pretty much only good for selling when I need Echoes.
I quite like this grind, because I still have 11 levels to go before my Shadowy hits the cap, and Playing the Game at Wilmot’s End offers 8 Shadowy challenges per 11 Action cycle. Fighting a War of Assassins offers only 7, but also 4-11 non-Shadowy challenges in case that would be of interest. (And I guess the actual pay while I’m keeping Shadowy at 180 is 1.66 Echoes per Actions, since I do fail 10% of the 8 challenges in order to get Shadowy +2 CP on successes instead of just +1 CP with 100% chance of success.)
I think it should be quite easy to calculate the "real value" of a given item. It suffices to find an economy which is not under the control of the Masters, but under the control of Characters.
That is, not Echoes, but actions.
This said, i think it could be quite easy to find, for each item, the most remunerative storylet(s) in term of such item gain, and calculate how many actions are needed to gain (for example) an echo of such items.
Not all 3rd tier items are more valuable than lower tier items: for example, i am actually trying to grind "Nights of the town" for my wedding.
Nights of the town requires:
-Compromising documents, which you can grind at 1.25 Echo / Action via the box. (You gain 35 documents in 14 actions)
Intriguing gossip, which you can grind at a much lower rate via unfinished business. The payout is around 53 for 11 actions (if you do not get exceptional successes), so 0.96 echo / actions, which makes them definitely more rare than Compromising documents.[li]
P.S. if you need memories of light, the most convenient way is still the affair of the box (Compromising > Memories.) edited by Mizr. Edlaine Saphburgh on 2/21/2014[/li][li] edited by Mizr. Edlaine Saphburgh on 2/21/2014
Via the Affair of the Box you can get 35 Compromising Documents (0.5 Echo each) for a round of 14 actions (+6 Correspondence Plaques if you side with the revolutionaries).
This means you get 2.5 Compromising Documents (1.25 Echoes worth) per action
Damn! You’re right. I took it out from my memory for some reason i do not really know. I correct it. (There should be some nice grind worthful 1.73, but i do not remember wich.)
[quote=Andrea Serafini]I think it should be quite easy to calculate the "real value" of a given item. It suffices to find an economy which is not under the control of the Masters, but under the control of Characters.
That is, not Echoes, but actions.
This said, i think it could be quite easy to find, for each item, the most remunerative storylet(s) in term of such item gain, and calculate how many actions are needed to gain (for example) an echo of such items.[/quote]
Most storylets provide a mix of useful/desirable things (e.g. items to sell for echoes, items to use, CP of a quality), however, so the weight you place on each one is crucial and often contextual. For example, you can make an average of 1.56E worth of Compromising Documents through the Fisher-Kings in the Flit plus 0.3 CP of suspicion per action, or 1.32E of Compromising Documents plus no menace through Entertaining the Topsy King (even a hypothetical average of 2.25E for someone whose stats were in just the right place), but most people would prefer AotB anyway for its other benefits, I think.