Malt Jones
Posts: 69
1/27/2012
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With the new update there has been added a new option for buying a room at The Brass Embasy (and possibly also for the 2 other high-end logdings). The price is now 600 brilliant souls, 120 muscaria brandy and 1 brass ring. It's supposedly the option gives you a discount one the usual 40.000 soul (800 action) price, if you have the right connections to unlock it (intimate of devils 1 and connected: hell 20). However, I did a little calculation and the result was somewhat surprising.
First of all lets establish the way to get the new items through crafting.
The infernal line of crafting is like this: 500 souls --> 100 Amanita Sherry - 50 Amanita Sherry --> 10 brilliant souls - 50 brilliant souls --> 10 muscaria brandy - 25 muscaria brandy --> 1(?) brass ring
As such the price of 10 billiant souls is the 250 souls, the price of 10 muscaria brandy is 1250 souls and the price of 1 brass ring is 7500 souls (as you'll have to craft 30 brandy instead of only 25, thus waisting 5 - it's cheeper than the 40 echos you pay at the bazaar though).
Thus you need 60*250 souls for the brilliant souls, 12*1250 for the brandy and 7500 souls for the brass. A total of 37500 souls - 2500 less than the normal price. The reliable way to grind souls is the "The prince of..." option from Unfinished business in Spite which yields 50 per action - so that's still 50 actions saved, which is pretty good.
However, one thing that wasn't calculated is the action cost for crafting the items. It costs 3 actions to craft 20 brilliant souls and 8,5 actions to craft 10 muscaria brandy and 26,5 to craft a brass ring. Thus the action cost for crafting is 600/20*3+120/10*8,5+26,5=218,5 actions. This is added to the 750 actions grinding 37500 souls cost for a total of 968,5 actions as opposed to the 800 actions required for the usual price.
The only other ways I know of getting these items are 1) brilliant souls from Merchant of Souls, which yields only half the number of brilliant souls per normal soul.
2) The Capering Relicker. Here you can trade 5 scraps for an average of 62.5 souls (or 12,5 souls/scrap), 15 scraps for an average of 50 Amanita Sherry (250 souls or 16,66/scrap), 30 scraps for an average of 26 brilliant souls (650 souls or 21,66/scrap) or 100 scraps for an average of 12.5 muscaria brandy (1562,5 souls or 15,625/scrap). It seems brilliant souls is the most profittable choice to supliment with, also saving you a few actions otherwise used for crafting - though the actions it takes to get the scraps hasn't been calculated.
All in all it seems to actually be a more expencive option than paying the usual price. There may be a nice piece of story hidden in the option which makes it worth it, so I'll propably try aiming for it anyway, if nothing else in the hope of meeting the Quiet Deviless again.
Feel free to check my math, I almost hope I've made a mistake somewhere. Also if someone finds another place to gain any of the items easier it will be greatly appriciated.
--
"I can resist everything except temptation"
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
1/27/2012
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>The item creation storylets really shouldn't cost an action,
A peep behind the curtain on why we chose not to make them zero-cost, because I'm sure this will come up again.
The high-level design intention for the category lines (known internally as 'himble', for reasons I'll explain some day :-) ) was to
(i) [for the optimisers:] maintain and increase asymmetry of requirements, but provide a ubiquitous, non-optimal resource for finding requirements when none others are available (providing an additional asymmetry as a basis for resource allocation decision-making);
(ii) [for the storyphiles and casual players:] provide a basic way to Just Get Stuff with a little more variety than Unfinished Business;
(iii) make requirement quantities less intimidating, and provide a range of short-term goal thresholds (x of this resource, now I can trade up, rather than just z,000 of this low-cost resource);
(iv) provide content around quality transitions (the Bazaar as a medium for quality transitions is content-free);
(v) pilot a possible long-term strategy of making all items in the game usable;
(vi) provide a straightforward mnemonic metaphor for people to navigate item creation systems.
(there's some other intentions that tie into other planned features, but these are the most relevant).
Once we'd settled on himble lines as an approach, one surprisingly thorny problem was, given engine limitations, what would be the translation threshold, i.e. the minimum quantity of a resource you needed for an exchange?
Some of the options we discussed -
- make them very small (which would eat lots of actions but make it easy to do a translate from one level to the next)
- make them larger (which would eat fewer actions but mean you needed to collect loads before you could do a translate)
- make the actions zero-cost and the amount very small (besides the problem I'll discuss below, this would often mean players ended up clicking the GO button about 20,000 times in a row, which is a problem even if it costs no actions)
- make them different depending on the level of translation, e.g. level I items in bulk, level II items in smaller quantities, level IV items in tiny quantities (which would allow us to tune to level, but make it hard to remember how many you needed unless you were there in the storylet)
- add some new tech which allowed the player to pick their own level of translation - like specify the number to translate in a text box (a whole big bag of worms that could be another post in itself around tech resource prioritisation, UI and difficult precedents)
- have a whole bunch of branches at different levels of requirement for every storylet (very hard to read, and either a big content requirement or lots of copy/paste text)
There's a more fundamental problem with zero-cost actions. From the start we wanted to tie these translations to stories, which meant we'd want to hand out story effects sometimes (there's more planned here besides the bling gains you've seen already). As soon as we introduced a zero-cost translation, it would be a game-breaking exploit if we gave any beneficial side-effect, because you can repeat it infinitely. ('Infinitely' is limited by eg the resources available if it's not a basic Bazaar good, but 'massively disproportionately frequently' is still - obviously - unacceptable).
The approach we chose in the end was to provide an additional return on each action besides the simple translation output, with exceptional successes to bring the mean reward per action up, that's lowish per action at the lowest level of translation and competitive at the highest level, taking into account the Connection costs; and to add 500->100 translation branches for the very lowest levels of translation, making it practical to buy goods in bulk from the Bazaar and translate them up the chains when there's no other way to do it. So creating higher-level items is OK in small quantities, feasible with effort in large quantities, but it's always preferable to find some or even all of them somewhere in-game - the asymmetry we wanted.
But as always, we'll iterate on the design and the numbers as we go, adding branches, addressing pain points or exploits as they come up, as priority, resource and caution allow. Every time we add content, the rules change again, so until the day we stop adding new content, the numbers will never stand still.
edited by Alexis Kennedy on 1/27/2012
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Jack Vaux-Harrowden
Posts: 245
1/28/2012
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Which isn't the issue--the problem is that he's now got ~500 rats and no lodgings, because he was saving rats and now the price is in something totally different.
Now, the rats are still usable elsewhere, but I bet it's galling; I know I'd been working towards having rostygold and such for a Whirring Contraption and then it changes, but the Sidestreets items we at least were warned about specifically.
That said, as long as that Beta banner stays up I consider us all forewarned of whatever changes Failbetter elects to make. Even if some of them are irritating.
Which reminds me; I like the new new look somewhat better, but it's still frustrating having to mouse over requirements to see them.
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Abraham Bounty
Posts: 251
1/28/2012
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Well, I finally got the Decommissioned Steamer, which I've had in my hand for weeks and never bothered to check to see if the price had changed, silly me. The old price was 6000 Whispered Secrets and is now 100 Tales of Terror!!
The chain is thus:
500 Whispered Secrets->200 Cryptic Clues (The only convertible item that has not changed in the slightest since I started playing)
50 Cryptic Clues->7 Appalling Secrets or 500 Cryptic Clues->70 Appalling Secrets
33 Appalling Secrets and 4 Foxfire Candle Stubs -> 10 Tales of Terror!!
So 6500 Whispered Secrets -> 2600 Cryptic Clues -> 350 Appalling Secrets -> 100 Tails of Terror!! -> 28 Turns
You will have left over, 100 Cryptic clues, 20 Appalling Secrets and will be out an additional 40 Foxfire Candle Stubs. This means the price has risen by 40 pence, and that the quantity of Whispered Secrets you need has risen. Of course, this also ignores the not-so rare successes you will inevitably get.
A slightly more efficient chain in terms of Echos and Secrets, if not turns is:
6000 Whispered Secrets -> 2400 Cryptic Clues -> 336 Appalling Secrets -> 100 Tails of Terror!! -> 35 Turns
Leaving you with 6 Appalling Secrets left over and also giving you more chances at rare successes.
So the price has risen slightly in terms of echos, and sharply in terms of turns.
edited by Abraham Bounty on 1/28/2012
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News in the Neath: Noted citizen of Fallen London, Abraham Bounty, has acquired six hundred and sixty six souls. Additionally rumour has it that the lion's share of those souls was from a theft of The Brass Embasy itself. We are quite certain that this portents nothing ominous for him. Well, nothing unusually ominous anyway.
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Nathalia
Posts: 13
1/28/2012
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I've been saving Whispered Secrets up for weeks to get the Decomissioned Steamer, and hanging onto Cryptic Clues, too, to sell so that I can buy Whispered Secrets (because I seem to accumulate them both at fairly similar rates and had no use for the CCs). Having sold the CCs and bought the Whispered Secrets, I've now had to spend actions grinding the Secrets back into Clues - and upwards - losing several echoes on each exchange.
I'm feeling very jaundiced at the moment. I had a real sense of achievement, but now I am less than half way there again because the narrative I was participating in has been rewritten. It isn't just the actions and the echoes. I feel chucked out of the storyline I was writing. My fault for not realising the costs had changed, I know, but what's the point of roleplaying towards goals when the goalposts move on this scale? Maybe a transitory stage with both prices on the cards would have been helpful.
Nathalia
A watchful and steamerless lady.
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