The “Shake Hands” method of gaining a Favour from the Rubbery faction card gives +3 CP Scandal. Most Scandal cure actions remove 3 CP of Scandal or less, while the social action removes 4, but presumably will require you to spend an action to reciprocate with your fellow Londoner on some other matter. A piece of Warm Amber essentially saves you an action, then, and gives you 50 deep amber as a bonus with your Favour. I hesitate to assign it a specific monetary value, but it is definitely valuable.
As a side note, the present usefulness of Warm Amber is a welcome change of events from the days when it would just sit in your inventory and add a card to your deck if you happened to get Connected: Rubbery Men. It has made those low value bundles associated with some actions a bit more welcome.
For me, the impact of Scandal is whether I side with the Church or with Hell on their conflict card (which I treat as basically ubiquitous). Since the choice is two options on the same Opportunity Card, and I value the Connections equally, the choice ends up being no net change in Actions or Cards. The tradeoff is -3cp Scandal vs +1cp Scandal and 1 Echo of Brass. Based on this, I value Scandal at 1 Echo per 4cp, or 25 pence per cp.
From this point of view, Warm Amber is worth 1.25 Echoes (including the 50 pence of Deep Amber you receive). edited by PSGarak on 4/11/2017
I haven’t done the exact math, but what Kaigen said seems accurate. I’d rather save ~100 actions elsewhere and gain bonus Amber in the process than get 12.5 echoes and a Rubbery Favour. Of course, this doesn’t take into account any incidental scandal reduction from using the Urchins/Hell conflict card for Favour tradein. edited by Optimatum on 4/11/2017
I will mention that I had thought that it is more efficient to spend Warm Amber on the option which gives regular-ass deep amber on the Rubbery Men’s card. After all, 100 Warm Amber Nodules are a lot, and there would seem to be a lot of opportunity costs from that option.
Yet, I have recently noticed that some of my characters have been accumulating crap-loads of Warm Amber, mainly from the Thieves’ Cache expedition. I realized that by the time one character has spent 100 Warm Amber Nodules on the more efficient option, he/she/it would have accumulated far more Warm Amber than had been spent.
Considering that there are so few other worthwhile uses for Warm Amber, I say that you should just dump a hundred of them if your character already has hundreds more. edited by Rostygold on 4/11/2017
Drawing many cards per day and with two extra Dock Favour income (Zailing and Pet) gets you more than enough Amber for the Rubbery card; getting The Gift will boost these numbers.
Just want to add few more observations from my collected data of DBH:
Starting rare success is around 20%;
Eyeless skull is around 10%;
Considering that I’m looking for E for a Cider I did the math regarding materials for Noman (Airag and Whisper) and one in about 16.5 expeditions yield one of those. I’m better off with AotB, Society cash-in (when needed), The High Castle, Young Stags and A presumptuous little opportunity cards.
Because I have a long list of achievements that I’ll pursue, Fidgeting writer will be a to-do specially because I’m looking for ways to improve the system of it, but I also want to collect data. :)
Oh, and I would like to thank you all for the entertaining and stimulating discussion! edited by Skinnyman on 4/11/2017
Completely off-topic, but since a lot of you seem interested in Warm Amber:
If you rob “An anonymous wretch” in Spite you have a 1/3 chance of getting 2x Warm Amber. Just saying…
Also, for the zailors out there, there’s an option on the Corpsecage Island carousel that nets you 10 nodules of warm amber. It’s not by itself reason to stop at Corpsecage, but if you’ve got business there anyway, it’s a good thing to remember. As I am a lover of research, any given Zee voyage will leave me with enough amber for weeks of Rubbery favors.
Speaking of the Fidgeting Writer, I believe I have found an opportunity for improvement in collecting the materials for that grind. To copy from where I was discussing it elsewhere:
By my math Thefts of a Particular Character is 2.45 Plaques per action, but breeding Somnolent Hyaenas through Fungus and Pious Wrath and upconverting the Prayers gives ~2.6 or ~2.7 Plaques per action (depending on whether the luck challenge is 70% or 80%). Those numbers are a little low anyways; each Hyaena needs 100 honey and I calculated using Unfinished Business, but factoring in the rare success and ideally using A Merry Sort of Crime instead would make it even better.
Ok, so this was more complex than I anticipated. Apologies for the delay. My original plan/hope was to provide a comparison between the two expeditions without committing myself to an explicit EPA computation (which depends on lots of variable inputs). But as the above discussion has shown that’s trickier than I had assumed. In the end I had to commit myself to explicit EPA computation in order to give a meaningful comparison.
In trying to address the concerns raised above, I’ve come up with the following spreadsheet.
Assuming there are no mistakes, the idea is that you can enter your own assumptions about the chances of rare successes, the action costs of criminal favours and supplies and the echo value of criminal favour trade in. Then the spread sheet calculates the EPA for both expeditions and (subject to a caveat below) the Spirifer approach to Thieves’ Cache.
Caveats:
The spreadsheet wouldn’t be able to calculate accurately scenarios where you cash in criminal favours in bulk. You can still use it if you want to have approximation of course but the maths behind it assumes that you cash in one favour at a time.
The Spirifer strategy is an approximation. The accurate calculation would have been unfeasibly complicated, I think. Broadly it calculates the EPA of the non-Soul component of the strategy and “souls per action”. Then it computes how many actions it would take to get to 1000 souls using that rate and approximates the total echo rate from there.
From quick playing around with figures it still looks to me that DBH is more efficient than the Cache, although the difference is quite a bit less stark than I had imagined. Assuming the trade-in with Humbugs!, DBH is also more efficient for Spirifers although fore most other trade-ins Spirifers are better off doing Caches.
This has already gotten a bit long but if anyone wants to discuss the nitty gritty of the spreadsheet, I’d be happy to.