A thread for little questions

[Barleyman]

Does the Offerings to Purple Bloom thing have any useful purpose? You need to have 69 heroes blessings to get it but it doesn't seem to have any special qualities except it's worth $62k. You can't activate it that I know of and the research project doesn't tell you anything useful except that now you're hungry and horny...

Should I just hang on to it? I couldn't find anything on google about it.

[legionof1]

It gives you 33k money each month. and 10 storage space.

[RSSwizard]

wait... so you can get multiple purple bloom offerings?
wow i hadn't gotten but 1 because i figured something else would require them later on like glamour does. I didn't know it had those other benefits, just figured it was a research score thingy.

also what does the Memorial Stele thingy do?
its a fat target for selling it (like 1.5M)




just started a new game (NOT in the new revision) because I got bored looking for implosion bomb parts and merc commanders. I may upgrade after I dump like 6000 casino spins.

after a rough month (2 Conversion Missions from what I can tell - ouch) I crowned queen on Green Codex and managed to get like 1K score in the end.

I had to cheat a Wrench and Stapler into my save because I accidentally sold them not understanding they're required for workshop at this point.

one awesome cool thing thats really helped was a Knock Knock event giving me a Robo-Parrot... which has a little laser and is pretty rugged... quite a help and ive even delivered grenades a couple times with it.


question -
do people really care for the spin the wheel changes or are they generally okay with it. Im fairly sure I can quickly churn out a mod that puts it back just like it was.

[legionof1]

You can get multiple offerings.

Stele is just a trophy.

I think the changes are good personally. Before gambling was was too stupidly profitable, i ran maths on a sub-optimal usage of just selling off the results without redeeming coupons and it was an average of 26x your input in income, an optimal useage is more around 70 times input. Which is insane for a task that take 1 or 2 runt hours per cycle.

Now at least there is a pick and chose because the token cost is up front, and not getting stuck with half a prize(cupons you lacked the tokens to redeem) is nice.

[RSSwizard]

Before gambling was was too stupidly profitable, i ran maths on a sub-optimal usage of just selling off the results without redeeming coupons and it was an average of 26x your input in income, an optimal useage is more around 70 times input. Which is insane for a task that take 1 or 2 runt hours per cycle.

Not really. It costs you in other ways besides flat money since you cant click "sell" on the production output. It also costs you Blue Chips, not money, and you cant just buy blue chips even though its supposed to be money. So you run out of those pretty quick (emphasis on quick) and then you're boggered. Similar to Apples for the Chateau.

And that can cause gameplay decisions like robbing captives for blue chips to feed the gambling addiction instead of enslaving them. And luring you to go on Mansion Robberies and Burning Towns in search of Bags Of Cash to empty out.

Later on when you have a Mint to convert Purple Chips you'd have 100$ Plastic Chips too which is probably at least as profitable.

(In my experience the junk from Copper/Iron and basic spins barely matches input value, and then you have the agony of Smelly Rags and selling 100s of bottles of stuff. Yeah there is a profit when it comes to higher end prize tokens but its something like 1.3x what you put in. This compared to Contraband which is annoying but you can always order more of it)

There is also the counterbalance when it comes to Casino and cashing in Zortium/Neutronium that, if you have used up your jack's tokens and you want the Gadgets & Gizmos you will have to spend through the nose (10,000 per jack token) in order to claim those prizes. With perhaps a dry spot in jack's bounty missions where you're not getting any it will cost you 1,300,000 to claim a Neutronium prize.

Either way one thing Neutronium does is makes the Plasma Blades prize irrelevant since you can take those (5000?) jack tokens and spend them on gambling, then savescum the Neutronium output so you just get the Plasma Daggers (hey its something you can do if you really want it). There really needs to be additional bounty prizes above that to make you spend on Plasma Blades. Kinda like the Persuadatron which costs 5000 and has nothing beyond it and the device doesn't even work so that just becomes 50 Slave Taskmasters for +800 storage total.



Anyway I went ahead and put a mod for it on mod.io just in case anyone else wanted the old dynamic back. I think the Persuadatron ought to have a mod to make it actually useful (its supposed to have 2500 voodoo power from the item description) but thats another story.

[Barleyman]

Can you actually see the item income somehow? Slaves are also listed in moneymakers but I can't figure out how to see how much..

Speaking of slaves, I asked earlier if there's any downside to slavery. You do have to pay wage to workers but frankly that's complete peanuts after couple of months unless you go crazy, bigger difference is that they require living space. Workers "work" 4x harder than male slaves and 5 1/3 harder than female slaves so there's that. 

How do the "special" slaves work, do they make other slaves work harder? I.e. the bank slavemaster has a work stat of 8 or 2x of a worker, does that affect other slaves at all? I guess not? Considering they want a proper bunk you might as well as hire 2 workers instead..

[legionof1]

Can you actually see the item income somehow? Slaves are also listed in moneymakers but I can't figure out how to see how much..

Speaking of slaves, I asked earlier if there's any downside to slavery. You do have to pay wage to workers but frankly that's complete peanuts after couple of months unless you go crazy, bigger difference is that they require living space. Workers "work" 4x harder than male slaves and 5 1/3 harder than female slaves so there's that. 

How do the "special" slaves work, do they make other slaves work harder? I.e. the bank slavemaster has a work stat of 8 or 2x of a worker, does that affect other slaves at all? I guess not? Considering they want a proper bunk you might as well as hire 2 workers instead..

Slaves give you money equal to the space they grant, so a basic slave is 1 space and 1k cash per month, Greater work stats just increase this, so an 8 work rate is 8 space, and 8k cash. No additional slaves are required. That just fluffy text.

[Greep]

I'm guessing the gambling nerf was more aimed specifically at mint->gambling which was quite insane.  It wasn't just the money, but it also generated infinite zaxx and wizbiz tokens (i.e. infinite slaves and arcane tombs), glamour and a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff from copper/iron coupons.  I did the math once and plastic chips were only marginally better, and probably worse when considering those infinite bank slaves.  That's a little underwhelming for discovering civilization.

There was also the issue that early game high end coupons were always sold since you wouldn't have the jack tokens to reclaim them later anyways, so I guess there's a tradeoff to pawning them off early now.

In any case, if that's the main reason, maybe a 30% chance to get 1 blue chip + 2 jack tokens should be added (essentially making it cost 0.4 tokens, a similar mechanic exists for coupon redemption) since that maintains the mint nerf while at least letting you gamble a lot more early game. Depends on why the change was made.  Gambling was also very profitable early game on higher difficulties since you have more captures generally so maybe that was also a factor.  But now higher difficulties have a sell nerf too so it shouldn't be such a big deal.

On that topic, I haven't started a new game yet, but I'm wondering how much the sell nerf affects manufacturing for profit... It seems like plain plantations would be much better relatively given they work via negative maintenance, right?  And weed plantations don't really make anything until you can turn them into canteens.  Back to making money the really old way then xD  Undefended plantation spamming wheeeeeeeee!

Edit: oof, yeah -30% sales means -50% grog profit/month. 

[RSSwizard]

Can you actually see the item income somehow? Slaves are also listed in moneymakers but I can't figure out how to see how much..

I usually would run like 1000 spins at a time (1 Million worth) and in the end id usually make more than that selling it all off, if I sold the high end coupons, but its highly random and dependent on whether neutronium pops or not, maybe it pops twice, or how many zortium you get. It isnt usually too much more.
But like you can get lucky with 300 spins and pop a neutronium and a zortium and may end up making 600K off of the run. So its definitely nowhere near 70x profit and legionof1 has gotten his math wrong. Maybe +70% but like I said Blue Chips are a finite resource. When the Apples run out so does the Chateau.

Point of fact you also have to save back several thousand Blue Chips to even construct the Casino to redeem high end tokens. Which you pay through the nose for, and you pay even more if you dont load the chips up on a transport and ship them manually to the other base (you're crazy if your Casino is in your main).

[Barleyman]

Point of fact you also have to save back several thousand Blue Chips to even construct the Casino to redeem high end tokens. Which you pay through the nose for, and you pay even more if you dont load the chips up on a transport and ship them manually to the other base (you're crazy if your Casino is in your main).

1000$ blue chips are not the real problem but getting those red chips you need 7-8k of are a bit. I'm not aware of a way to buy the chips so you pretty much have to have your own forging operation to get casino running. If you could buy the red chips it'd be something like 1.5 mils or so, which wouldn't be a huge deal.

[legionof1]

Snip
So its definitely nowhere near 70x profit and legionof1 has gotten his math wrong.
Snip

I did say Average, as in the mathematical term. Add up every-things sell value, adjust for probability. Of course the actual outcome can be vastly different because of the high variance within the set. Please do not automatically state my work was wrong without concrete examples, i spent 3 days working on it. It's insulting. 

[Greep]

I think there must be a decimal missing there.  I've done the math on spin the wheel and got about a 2.5x-3x return on blue chips when selling everything before sell nerfs and coupon nerfs, I've had 1000s of runts running mint->gambling in industrial printers in L3 so I know the value is somewhere in that region.  ~3x also gets in the region of "just barely worth rob->gambling" which has been my experience, back when coupons were worth more anyways

Some quick maths covering only the big ones from here on what it is currently https://www.xpiratez.wtf/en-US##STR_SPIN_THE_WHEEL:

Neutronium: 200k(value)*0.0015(percent)/1k(spin) ~= 0.3x just from neutroniums
Zort: 65k*0.003/1k ~=  .2
Trit: 20k*.0075/1k ~= .15
tit: 7.5k*.015/1k ~= .1

I know from empirical evidence from zilliions of spins that a large chunk of the money is from coupons and adding those only come to break even,  and glancing at the chip values shows a lower return, so ~3x sounds about right.  Being off a decimal place would make your results match that so I think that's what happened.

[legionof1]

Looks legit to me, Greep, i did do the work with older values, before the coupon nerf. So your work matches up for there on current values.

To be clear the x70 average was with all coupons redeemed and all possible outcomes included from vegges to nukes, part of why it took so very long to do. The rare prizes defiantly do skew a pure average well away from the median output. Also old sell values for some versions ago. But since the vein of discussion started about gamble nerfs i thought it relevant. At no point did i claim they where current values.

[Rallehop]

Hi guys, i'm pretty new to this mod and i've been having trouble dealing with Armored Cars. They show up sometimes super early in the second month and nothing i do to those things seem to harm it. I only have black powder bombs and molotovs at this stage and ive tried throwing several of each, also several HE Grenades aswell as arrows, musket fire, shotguns and other weapons. I can't even tell if the Armored Car takes damage. Most enemies blink red on hit if you harm them, the vehicle seems completley unresponsive.

Am i doing something wrong? What should i be doing? Should i just ignore those pogroms and tank the -100 ? Any input appreciated

[Greep]

Pogroms are mostly for fun tbh, they don't particularly give much rewards.  If you see armored cars the best thing to do is just blast off, but the pogroms without armored cars are doable early game if you really want to do them.  However, it's generally not worth the risk since you don't know which one is going to spawn, the money is lousy, and there really isn't any tech you won't get elsewhere.

They're pretty analogous to terror missions really, I never bothered with those sectoid superhuman ones.  Turn 1 mind control and cyberdiscs with rookies with laser pistols? NOPE.

The first decent sets of anti-tank weaponry you get are High explosive and panzerfausts, both from krazy hannah (or church bootcamp) and they're both a ways off.  Before then, you pretty much have to smash them in the face with a hammer which is pretty suicidal, or repeatedly shred their armor with crates of violence.

There's actually quite a few missions that are designed to be traps:  the pogroms are one, a few of the undersea ones or pretty obnoxious, most zombie missions, the spartan variation of "the truth is out there" etc.