What exactly is the use of collecting piles of a Collection of Curiosities for grind purposes? I’ve heard that people hoard them to sell off on the Tomb Colonist related faction card, but all that does is give the player 5 Puzzling Maps. With each at 12.50 echoes, that means that you’re using an action to receive a total of 62.50 echoes worth of maps when the time and cost of making one exceeds that and most opportunities to receive one could easily be substituted for a better, faster reward worth just as much. Is there something I’m missing? Is the wiki wrong and there’s some other benefit to doing this? Or are the maps used elsewhere where the overall gain makes it worth the cost and the actions used?
edited by Sir Joseph Marlen on 1/31/2016
The wiki lists the puzzle map trade as a 62.50 "sale" price so people know how to get the most value out of it. According to the same page, selling the collection at the bazaar is a mere 6 echoes.
EDIT: This reply no longer makes sense after your edit, so uh I’ll go with "I dunno," not having done the math.
edited by TheThirdPolice on 1/31/2016
The Collection of Curiosities’s sale price at the Bazaar is just 6 echoes. By trading with the Tomb Colonists you get 62.5 echoes’s worth of Puzzling Maps. (there are very few usages currently for Puzzling Maps, other than to sell them)
As a grind, if you can 100% all challenges of the War of Assassins, it takes 34 actions to get a CoC, plus one action to trade it when the cards comes up, for a total of 62.5 / 35 = ~1.78 echoes per action.
edited by dov on 1/31/2016
edited by dov on 1/31/2016
Ah, thanks. I’ve edited my post to rectify that error. But still, it seems in most situations that it would be much easier to receive the same amount of echoes worth much faster and easier or the cost of time and resources to make one wouldn’t be worth the cost.
[quote=dov]The Collection of Curiosities’s sale price at the Bazaar is just 6 echoes. By trading with the Tomb Colonists you get 62.5 echoes’s worth of Puzzling Maps.
As a grind, if you can 100% all challenges of the War of Assassins, it takes 34 actions to get a CoC, plus one item to trade it when the cards comes up, for a total of 62.5 / 35 = ~1.78 echoes per action.[/quote]
Ah, okay! That makes a lot more sense. Much appreciated, thanks for the answer!
The reason it seems bizarre is because we don’t hoard CoC by crafting them in the side streets; if you play the war of assassins carousel to build dramatic tension you can cash in your DT for a CoC in your lodgings. The EPA is better than the affair of the box, but obviously you’re dependent on the card showing up.
Edit: whoops! Thanks Dov.
edited by Màiread on 1/31/2016
Sometimes the forum feels like a chat room :-)
Indeed. I expected to wait an hour or two for an answer, and yet hear we are messaging back and forth and editing previous messages to better fit the current topic. How lovely! :D
Even crafting CoC at side street is a net gain. Well, there are sth problematic about it but still net gain. If you have fosils, rats and coins for some reasons, advanced(hoarder) players will probably have the rest just sitting in their inventory. Then it is a valid use of two actions to get 12E.
Well… Having traded boxes for several months now, I’ve a hoard of the rats for collections - they don’t have any other use, I believe. And, I’m Ambition: Hearts Desire, so coins are readily available. Fossils are probably the rarest of the components for me, and those are easily findable in expeditions. My problem is currently the Storm Theordies as I’ve only a few left fro buying pails.
Oh I’m perfectly aware that I don’t need them anymore. I just only have one or two left of my original stash.
The cave of the nadir has two opportunity cards that each give +1 cp of dramatic tension (one of them is fate-locked, though), so the math works out as follows:
-
3 actions to get dramatic tension to level 2
-
1 action to cash in the dramatic tension for a CoC
-
1 action to trade the CoC for 5 puzzling maps
62.5E/5 actions = 12.5 echoes per action!
[quote=Olivia Coburn]The cave of the nadir has two opportunity cards that each give +1 cp of dramatic tension (one of them is fate-locked, though), so the math works out as follows:
-
3 actions to get dramatic tension to level 2
-
1 action to cash in the dramatic tension for a CoC
-
1 action to trade the CoC for 5 puzzling maps
62.5E/5 actions = 12.5 echoes per action![/quote]
Yea, but that could be more than 3 weeks to get all those dramatic tensions from Nadir. Hardly the most grindable option, if needed the money.
Best to get your 1 dramatic tension from Nadir and continue to raise it through war of assassins.
[quote=Olivia Coburn]The cave of the nadir has two opportunity cards that each give +1 cp of dramatic tension (one of them is fate-locked, though), so the math works out as follows:
-
3 actions to get dramatic tension to level 2
-
1 action to cash in the dramatic tension for a CoC
-
1 action to trade the CoC for 5 puzzling maps
62.5E/5 actions = 12.5 echoes per action![/quote]
Yes, but that’s time-locked and penalizes your stats, so the viability is dubious- or, well, not dubious, but it’s a bonus, not the main course. (plus, whenever possible, the end of battles is better- though that card isn’t precicsely common, so it might not be worth thinking about.)
Here’s how I think of this:
Using the options in the Nadir to get one point of Dramatic Tension in a single action, means I save 11 actions to get that same point of DT via the War of Assassins.
Each action, for me, is worth ~1.64E (Affair of the Box grind), so 11 x ~1.64E = ~18.07E.
So, if I encounter an option in the Nadir to get 1 CP of DT, this action is worth to me 18.07 echoes.
[quote=dov]Here’s how I think of this:
Using the options in the Nadir to get one point of Dramatic Tension in a single action, means I save 11 actions to get that same point of DT via the War of Assassins.
Each action, for me, is worth ~1.64E (Affair of the Box grind), so 11 x ~1.64E = ~18.07E.
So, if I encounter an option in the Nadir to get 1 CP of DT, this action is worth to me 18.07 echoes.[/quote]
But CoC worth is 62.5 / 35 actions = 1.78E
So that 1 CP of DT is worth to you 11 X 1.78E, not less.
Yeah, you’re right, of course. I was thinking of general action worth. 1.78E should apply here.
[quote=Gonen][quote=dov]Here’s how I think of this:
Using the options in the Nadir to get one point of Dramatic Tension in a single action, means I save 11 actions to get that same point of DT via the War of Assassins.
Each action, for me, is worth ~1.64E (Affair of the Box grind), so 11 x ~1.64E = ~18.07E.
So, if I encounter an option in the Nadir to get 1 CP of DT, this action is worth to me 18.07 echoes.[/quote]
But CoC worth is 62.5 / 35 actions = 1.78E
So that 1 CP of DT is worth to you 11 X 1.78E, not less.[/quote]
The problem with this grind is that you can wind up with far more CoCs than you need. Still, unless you want, say, max empire’s kingmaker, it should be your first go-to grind until you have such a stash.
I try to keep around 5 or 6 CoC. That’s usually the number of Tomb Colonists cards I get in a week.
Then I go into the Nadir (possibly get a point or two of Dramatic Tension), and take a hit to my stats. I then use the War of Assassins to regain my lost stats (alternating actions) until I again got hold of 5-6 CoC. That’s usually most of the way back to max stats anyway (the rest is taken care of throughout the week by regular playing).
This way I don’t have an overabundance of CoC, and grinding for them serves a dual purpose of regaining Nadir-reduced stats.
I slow down my CoC grinding by doing a more profitable grind that, like selling the CoC, is also card-based. This means earning Dramatic Tension via "Doing Business at Wilmot’s End," which also nets you an extra 0.45 echoes, on average, every time you grind enough DT for a Collection – raising the EPA to about 1.8.
If on top of that you also wait at Doing Business at Wilmot’s End 4 and, instead of grinding in Wilmot’s End, wait for the "A New Move in the Game" card to appear, you’ll complete a Collection of Curiosities in somewhere between 29 and 35 actions, since that card gives you double CP 20% of the time. If you only relied on that card, you’d average 32.5 actions for an EPA of 1.94 – but you’re likely to have to pass up multiple Tomb-Colonist cards if you do that. So I keep my DBaWE at 4 as much as possible until a Tomb-Colonist card shows up, and then finish a Collection. It means my Collections don’t pile up, and I end up with around a 1.83 EPA. (Unless I draw Old Bones or Woods in Winter in the Nadir, which boosts it a bit, once a week.)
edited by metasynthie on 2/1/2016