Your crew groan as an island heaves into view, guarded by a mouth of snaggling rocks. Your ship could endure their bite on better days. Today, you have no room for mistakes.
A lost ship has been sighted off Wolfstack Docks – again! It is absent its crew, but very much contains a hold full of improperly stored, highly unstable explosives. The Admiralty is once more calling for inadvisably fearless zee captains to transport the cargo to a decommissioning site.
Arrange to pick up your own shipment of volatile cargo from Your Cabin when moored in London. Try not to blow up.
Surely this time the Admiralty has found a spot to dump these explosives that doesn’t have a giant sea urchin from space sleeping at the bottom, right?
I’ve alternated between the two, but I think the middle one is marginally more profitable.
…Going up from middle to top option increases payout by 1 puzzling map and 11 tales of terror, so a total of 18 echoes. So the question is, how many more actions does the top action take? If it takes 0, 1, 2, or 3 more actions, that’s effectively 6+ EPA. If the top difficulty takes 4+ more actions than the one below that, then it’s under 5 EPA and so those actions are less profitable than other things I could be doing.
When I’m on the top difficulty, I don’t play “Now, Now!” to skip to the end because it’s only a 50% success chance. There’s usually at least a few more actions from when “Now, Now!” appears to when I reach the end, plus there’s a chance for a failure at least once along the way (sometimes twice, depending on luck and what gets drawn) so I tend to think that top difficulty will take me 4+ more actions than middle difficulty on average. But it’s close and depends on draws.
I don’t have a particular need to focus on puzzling maps or tales of terror, so I’m not going to take an under-5-EPA source of them. So middle difficulty is probably my best option. …but sometimes it’s fun to take some unnecessary risk so I play the hard one too, especially since I’ not sure.
People on land will see that the first time they return from another bomb delivery.
Seriously though like how bad must the Admiralty be at bomb disposal to keep using the same bottomless pit that has two different city-erasing threats at the bottom? Don’t tell me this is “just bad luck” and “no one could have seen this coming,” I’ve seen lots of bottomless pits in my day and most of them have 1 calamity at the bottom at most!
They wouldn’t have to be near. A faraway explosion of this magnitude could plausibly affect spiders, who are very sensitive to pressure waves/vibrations in the air. It could’ve felt like an earthquake to them, sitting in their webs! And maybe, because it was the third time, they decided enough was enough and something had to be done.
In the negotiation text, they mention a competition, and in the ship-sinking text it sounds like they’re all trying to become the mega-spider council. So… is it actually because of the explosives? Or is this more that they wanted to have a tournament among spider councils and this was convenient?
