In the recent heist-analysis thread, Optimatum brought up Wounds-mediated profit. Rather than clog up that thread any more than I already have, I figured I’d bring that part of the discussion here.
The question is a somewhat exotic one: "What are actions which become profitable (or more profitable) if you don’t have to care about wounds". You may think it doesn’t apply to you at all unless you’re in the Cider Club, but there are a few other circumstances where a more general audience might be interested, such as Hallowmas.
So far, I’ve come up with:
Gawp in the Labyrinth, which surpasses the Doctor Schlomo card as the best nightmares cure.[/li][li]Refereeing unsportsmanlike KnC bomb-makers on the difficult to acquire KnC lodgings card.[/li][li]Drinking the potions of a Wines-employed aunt (no link due to fate-locking)[/li][li]Turning in bulk favours on the Rubbery/TC conflict card .[/li][li]Curing suspicion when you have Counting the Days 12 or 13. Lots of caveats to this one, but if you a) have an eligible Closest To b) can profit from the favours which result from a 2 full cycles of CtD c) can cycle from 1-12 while only using opp cards other than the wounds card and d) are super patient, it’s worth it.
Somehow did not know about Gawp. Trading Nightmares for Wounds is a deal I’d take any day, especially with a side of Appalling Secrets/Tales of Terror. Thanks for that!
Deal with Mirror Smugglers + Take the Goat Demon Alive at 30% success already has excellent EPA with regular wounds reduction methods. With only one action to go from 8 to 0 wounds, it becomes one of the best in the game. My guess without doing any actual math is around 2.40 EPA.
The big caveat is you can’t have progressed too far into the labyrinth or Deal with Mirror Smugglers goes away. edited by Kaijyuu on 9/21/2016
What fortuitous timing! I just drew A Dream Of Blood…, and am in need of a good way of making use of it. Unfortunately, my wounds are at 1, and my nightmares are only at 2. Aside from Gawp, what options are spammable? Otherwise I’m just going to breed monsters with a moderate failure rate. edited by PSGarak on 9/22/2016
For Feducci, if you duel as soon as you possibly can (15 RB), that’s 120CP. The fastest possible gain is 6 cp/action with the exchange of 1E of Foxfire Candles via an Alliance with the Big Rat, solidly superior to either outside duel arrangement at 3 cp and +.2E/action and the more exotic hunting advertisements which requires not finishing a story and gets you 3 cp and .5E per 1.16 actions best case.
So it’s going to take 120/6=20 actions and 20E of goods to produce the minimum RB.
Which means that even if we succeed 100% of the time, we would earn 40E and spend 20E over the course of 21 actions for an underwhelming earnings rate of .95EPA. And that’s assuming you succeed at a 50% check 100% of the time.
Similar math holds for Chi Lan, where the awkward need of a minimum 13RB means we do 15 actions of Big Rat Alliance RB gain and 1 of Outside arrangement for a total of 16 actions and -14.8E. So, again, even if we succeed 100% of the time at the 50% check, we end up with 17 actions and -14.8E to earn 30E for a net of .89EPA. With cider and a bit of patience, it’s actually possible to arrange for a 100% success rate at the cost of 3 additional actions and 5 Carnival Tickets (Heart’s Mirror, draw cards until you become a Courier for the Dead, then have a word with the Boatman), but that only worsens the EPA further.
My logic for looking at it was that Chi Lan failures are more or less costless with Cider and Feducci failures become an incidental way to acquire Courier for the Dead at the cost of only 2 actions, but as you can see, even assuming you NEVER fail, the EPA is pretty disappointing.
Deal with Mirror Smugglers + Take the Goat Demon Alive at 30% success already has excellent EPA with regular wounds reduction methods. With only one action to go from 8 to 0 wounds, it becomes one of the best in the game. My guess without doing any actual math is around 2.40 EPA.
The big caveat is you can’t have progressed too far into the labyrinth or Deal with Mirror Smugglers goes away. edited by Kaijyuu on 9/21/2016[/quote]
I remember looking at this previously when I was doing some math about Duelling the Black Ribbon, Thefts of a Particular Character, and Assisting Mr. Inch, all of which have the same structure of being something you accumulate CP toward until you reach a minimum, try the action at the minimum probability (it nearly always works out this way because of the expanding number of necessary CP for each quality level, suffer a menace and CP penalty if you fail, and go back to the first step of the process upon your first success.
I started out summing probability trees, but that gets to be a very cumbersome approach for low success probabilities ‘p’. Happily, it turns out that if you express it as m=p+(1-p)(1+m) it simplifies to m=1/p where m is the number of tries on average and p is the probability for each discrete event.
So the average number of tries it takes to capture the goat demon alive is 1/.3=3.3333…
Which means we need 11 RB plus enough extra to make up for our expected 2.333… failures, which is to say 66 + (2.333…*10)=89.33333, which we’ll round up to 90 which is fine since 90 is the nearest integer we’re going to be able to achieve at a rate of 3 cp of RB/action anyways.
So we’ll expect that we’ll spend 30 actions to gain 90 cp of RB and 32.4E of Rostygold, and spend a further 3.333… actions on attempts which will result in 32.76 of Primordial Shrieks and 2.333…*3=7 cp of wounds.
Grand total, that gives 65.16E/33.333… actions for 1.95 EPA for cider owners for whom wounds cures are incidental to drinking the cider every time they run out of taste of the garden anyways and 65.16E/34.888 actions for 1.87 EPA for the hoi polloi assuming they have friends willing to unilaterally cure their wounds. edited by Wiwo on 9/22/2016
One warning, for those who come here looking to profit when earning Scars from Seeking, make sure you finish Staining your Soul first. It inflicts a tremendous amount of wounds, especially if you are unlucky. I wouldn’t recommend any of these until you have all 7 Stains.
I think you’re a wee bit low with Mirror Smugglers + Goat Demon. Rather than doing all the statistical math I wrote up a script that simulates an enormous number of attempts, and I consistently get ~2.00 EPA with friendly wound healing. I plugged in the numbers with a cider and it’s a disappointing ~2.06; the loss of actions from healing wounds isn’t all that significant. Even with a cider I believe it’s beaten out by expeditions. Profitable way to raise dangerous to 200 though.
Higher than that! I get ~4.8 attempts per success (or a little under 4 failures per success). Over half one’s successes should be within 2 attempts, but long failure streaks are common, shooting the average up (nearly a 3% chance of 10 failures in a row, for example).
EDIT: Further looking at my numbers I’m inclined to believe your ~1.85 is actually accurate. Still looking over my math but I think I got the ppa calculation wrong (everything else should be good).
EDITEDIT: Yeah, I did get it wrong. ~2.00 is the average of PPAs, not the average PPA. There are a lot of high PPA attempts that shoot up the mean. ~1.85 is the correct average PPA.
EDITEDITEDIT: Well this is embarassing, there was also an error in calculating the number of attempts per success (it’s 3.333 as you said), since I was incorrectly adding the wound reduction actions to that number.