[li]for the love of Duh! can’t believe i didn’t think of this earlier.
what part of this makes sense?
go to a port just a couple miles up the coast, get a secret message, and i’ll pay you 150 bucks. did that? great - now go a thousand miles into oblivion, burning chuckloads of gas and food on your way, and stop at this militarized police state that hates people like you. pick up a spy message, risk capture, death, loads of suspicion you can’t dump even if you pass a near-impossible skills test … and if you ever get back alive, i’ll pay you another 150 bucks. deal?
no, of course not. and yet this is exactly the kind of arrangement we run in Sunless all the time. equal pay for inequal work. a trip to Venderbight - a total cakewalk - pays the same as one to the Khanate, a place far more distant and perilous to manage.
port reports reflect a sensible pricing table, generally paying more based on distance from home port, but many of the assigned missions don’t. it’s a fixed-price deal that doesn’t reflect anything about the particulars of the mission itself. just a simple rejiggering of the pricing payouts could do a lot to advance the game.
and just for wishful thinking … it would be nice if those strategic reports and soul-smuggling missions were themselves part of some larger wheel turning in the background. at present, they just feel like busy work, like you’re being told to fetch coffee or run photocopies while the grown-ups talk.
I would say that in-universe, it’s probably the Admirality having a flat rate for delivering important information to keep themselves from being price-gouged. The Zee is dangerous, after all, so it’s not hard to imagine captains concocting stories (Lifebergs working with pirates! Two Mt. Nomads!) in an attempt to get more Echoes per trip. By having a set payment rate, everyone knows what they are getting in to.
Re: the Cheery Man’s deliveries, I just chalk that up to them being criminals. "We’ll pay you what we pay you, and if you don’t like it, we’ll stab you", basically.
Funnily enough, not all Admiralty contracts pay the same – some pay less.
The Whither contract costs you a bunch of fragments if you don’t have high mirrors. The Codex contract will cost you a curse if you have a full crew. The Khan’s Heart contract costs you some (expensive) suspicion.
Mechanically, it would be tough for Failbetter to have different payouts when turning them in – so how about little payments at pickup? A tale of terror from Gaider’s Mourn, some Zee Ztories for Khan’s Heart. Seems like it would be an easy add.[li] edited by MEngland on 8/16/2014
The codex contact doesn’t always curse you if you turn her down. Though I certainly wouldn’t risk it if my crew wasn’t full.
It really should give you an option for "I would but my crew is full" like the random people you can meet that do Salt rituals though edited by WormApotheote on 8/16/2014
[li]not too hard at all. scale the payouts based on distance from London with an additional factor for locations with special issues, such as Khan’s Heart.
the issue of fixed pay (with very minor downward mods, as noted) might become a more pointed one as the zee expands, and missions might stretch to the far eastern edge of perdition. then you’re stuck trying to kill yourself to play nice and run the mission … or you give up on the admiralty’s charge and likewise surrender a crucial cash spigot in the early game.
As another thought, you could limit the locations and slowly increase the area as admiralty’s favor or time the healer grows to push people to explore further.
I have had the same character since before the chart-shuffling has been implemented, but I hope that the rewards you get for the port reports increases with distance from London like they did before shuffling began. A report for Hunter’s Keep is like €10 but Mt. Palmerson is something like 4 times as much.
Try to navigate along coasts so you can dim your lights periodically to save some fuel as well as hit up numerous ports along the way to help build up some additional coin(are they coins?).