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Even Further Beyond [Complete]

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Rihaku said:
That particular update didn't see an unusual level of BP production?
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Nope. From what I gather, we normally average 1~2 BP/update, more if a shiny option is in reach.

This actually suggests we should go for a form of strategy where our options are *just* out of reach, that we might be motivated to reach them. In this regard, low amounts of BP is actually useful...
 
UBR said:
We can always forge an artifact for an exotic attack vector later on. If we are powerful enough, we can also bring along a few hired helpers with such capabilities (such as Huai who could use Fist Counter). Then there is of course also the option of killing her repeatedly.
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Artifact+Diagram>Artifact, however, and it seems that Arch Terrorist is number one when it comes to fucking shit up.

Also, if his forte is direct Diagram attacks, we'd counter him somewhat fierce.
 
Tally incoming
Adhoc vote count started by Conjured Blade on Mar 25, 2018 at 1:43 PM, finished with 195 posts and 42 votes.
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Hmm, Xylitemmeral also has that rad flying orichalcum tower (Artifact or Stone Grand Diagam?), which would be pretty cool to have too. Still, I don't like the idea of quitting midway or trying to chase after two rabbits at once.
 
One thing that I've realised is implied by the last update is that just as meta-Diagram Magic exists, the Fellborn's essence theft trick suggests that meta-artifact artifacts might also exist. If so, making an artifact to enhance the Forge is yet another item for the list.

For now, we know that good plans discussed in the thread enhance our chances of success. If we are going after the Bleak Ravens right away, we should consider what we could so.

There's several scenarios that we should be prepared for. The main ones I see are:
  1. There is a special cultivation region in/right at the entrance to the Vault
  2. The lich is surreptitiously in control of the Bleak Raven sect/trying to possess the sect leader./has captured him.
  3. The lich is allied/part of with the Bleak Raven sect.
  4. The lich and the Bleak Raven sect are enemies, and they've gone to war.
  5. This is all actually just a coincidence, and the subterranean realm is actually just really defensible.
  6. The Sect Leader is actually dead.
  7. The lich has a spell that can heal a damaged cultivation base
  8. The Bleak Ravens may be trying to break into the Vault for shinies.
These each have different implications for each of the options
  1. Negotiation might be the most fruitful here. Promise based on the credibility of the Clan of Yong, with some form of redeemable and transferable credit note issued by the local Bank of Yong they can conditionally draw on if we break a promise to only pass through the Cultivation Zone and not disturb anything.
  2. An approach might be based on rescuing the Black Raven Sect Leader or freeing them from the lich's thrall.
  3. This is both a prime blackmail opportunity, and a prime trade opportunity as something like Beyond Quickening would be an amazing tool for a lich to use on allied cultivators.
  4. The Bleak Raven can't admit to their weakness here, and need to end the war as soon as possible. If it's the case we might want to recruit the other sects to put a lot of pressure on them, and then offer our help, claiming to have a dispelling artifact.
  5. An approach similar to 1
  6. Ha ha, they're utterly screwed. We rally the other local sects and crush them.
  7. See 3
  8. We can offer our assistance with breaking in, after stirring up the other sects to put pressure on them.
Now the major options we have here are whether to go in hard or soft, and whether to take our allies with us on the soft approach. Now, having Xiaoling around on a diplomacy mission can only help, particularly as you'd have to be particularly insane to threaten two great clan heirs. On the other hand it could get very messy very fast if they're stupid.

We should also be completely to do things like turn up, use our status to insist on being invited in as a guest, and then to abuse the combination of illusion and teleportation so that we can make it seem to any watchers that we're meditating for the night, while actually teleporting out and gathering information while looking like one of their disciples - or one of their rival sects' disciples. The old classic of faking being attacked (or better, Xiaoling being attacked with dishonourable motives) unprovoked by one of their members is also available. Once they let us inside the place, the battles half won.

On the other hand, we should also take their own divination and teleportation abilities into account. If we ever do sneak around them, it has to be while under an illusion, and preferably a mundane disguise as well. They may be restricted to a limited power set, but it's quite possible that a Dao Cleaving or Reality Forming Cultivator's powers in those areas are superior to our Diagram Magic, as generally Cultivation seems much stronger at what it does, but a Cultivator has a much smaller set of abilities.

The important thing, as Nameless' father taught him, is to be flexible. He should go in with all these options in mind and be prepare to pivot.

Other considerations:

To help find out what it is, Nameless should wrack his Determination assisted brain and try to remember the heraldry of the local Diagram Houses/nations, to see if there's one similar to the Bleak Ravens'. He should make sure that what he's seeing, for example, isn't a crypto-Diagram House that assimilated to use Cultivation techniques to try to preserve something of their heritage under the sponsorship of their original leadership. This would be a very rational option for any Diagram Magi that saw the way the wind was blowing in the conflict, as House Vane itself did. The way that they can replicate two classic pieces of Diagram Magic, Divination and Teleportation with Cultivation is suspicious, but not deterministic. If this is true then their research would all be very useful to use as part of developing into a Philosopher King. Pretty unlikely though.

Nameless' archetype isn't just as the Overlord, it's also as the Lord of Gifts. He should consider gift giving as being one of his go to methods of persuasion, but this shouldn't simply be base bribery. It should be all about gifts than eventually damn the recipient, or put them in his thrall, or turn out to be far, far too much of a good thing.

If we do awaken Suizhen's eyes, that gives us something else to potentially offer the Sect her help. The Eyes of Kong are presumably well known and much exaggerated. That could cover up our own divination magic.

With our illusion magic it should be reasonably easy to kick off conflict between the sects.

What's up with the exsanguinated Bleak Raven disciples? I could see a Blood Sign Diagram spell developed to allow Diagram apprentices to donate their strength to their master when spellcasting being repurposed to allow the theft of a sect's disciple's foundations to strengthen that of a higher stage cultivator that studied the same Forbidden Art. I would have through they'd have hidden the bodies better though.

Or, a botched breakthrough has turned the Bleak Raven Sect leader into Bleak Ravenacula. Nameless needs to keep a close eye on his waifus to stop them being turned into the Brides of Bleak Ravenacula.

Or vampires are the chosen race to dominate the next age and prey on humanity like sheep after the end of the Age of Man.

Wordcount: 1,061, if essays count
 
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Don't know if it's been brought up but going into negotiations with the reality forming cultivator might not be the best idea because while we do have the Pearl to barter with we also happen to be wearing a ring that causes people to notice how super magical awesome it is, considering that the guy is stronger than us and this is xianxia we'll probably run into a situation where he tells us if we want to get at the Lich we'll have to give him the pearl AND the ring which isn't exactly going to work for us.
 
Wolfy said:
Artifact+Diagram>Artifact, however, and it seems that Arch Terrorist is number one when it comes to fucking shit up.

Also, if his forte is direct Diagram attacks, we'd counter him somewhat fierce.
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In terms of sequencing, if we focus on getting Cultivation multipliers now it is much more likely to mean that we'll have the time spare to research exotic attacks later.

However, if we do it the other way around, that's very much not the case, as we'll have much less time and the Cultivation boosters themselves will be worth much less.

The way the multipliers work mean that even if exotic attack spells take several times as long to develop as Cultivation boosters it's still worth getting the Cultivation boosters first for free and then developing the Exotic attack spells ourselves. And it's a big assumption that any given liches exotic attack spells will scale with Cultivation or Artifice. If they're like Mordant Flame, they may not. We need a very particular kind of exotic attack, ones so specific that we may actually be better creating our own. Most people don't have to bother with destiny defiling or erasure from the timestream incorporated into attacks that can hit an enemy as powerful as a high level cultivator, and that includes Diagram liches fighting Cultivators. The only people that strong and fast don't need esoteric means to kill them, and the people that do need esoteric methods aren't that strong or fast.

The way on BP income works also means that we don't want to be going after multiple liches in quick succession anyway. We really can't afford to go after the Arch Terrorist now, blow our BP on a shiny because there's nothing else interesting on the table at that point, and then lose out on an amazing Cultivation enhancing spell because we can't afford it in the subsequent update.

Particularly when Rihaku has outright told us that our current Cultivation multiplier is too low.

Unelemental said:
Hmm, Xylitemmeral also has that rad flying orichalcum tower (Artifact or Stone Grand Diagam?), which would be pretty cool to have too. Still, I don't like the idea of quitting midway or trying to chase after two rabbits at once.
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Do we even know if Grand Diagram's stay working after their creator's death? It would be very annoying if we went after him for that and then it crumbled to dust.

If it's an artifact, we can try to scam it off whoever has it. I don't think we need it though. We'll be making our own Vault, and we don't generally need to besiege cities.

titanofearth said:
Don't know if it's been brought up but going into negotiations with the reality forming cultivator might not be the best idea because while we do have the Pearl to barter with we also happen to be wearing a ring that causes people to notice how super magical awesome it is, considering that the guy is stronger than us and this is xianxia we'll probably run into a situation where he tells us if we want to get at the Lich we'll have to give him the pearl AND the ring which isn't exactly going to work for us.
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And then we laugh and walk away and incite his competitors to attack then and there, having previously driven them into a hair trigger state of anxiety about how they may need to kill him now now now. Then he has no ring and no pearl, and knows that we'll be backing his enemies, when his other choice is to have the Pearl and the deterrent factor with being allied to a member of the nuclear family of Yong and Ming. Negotiation isn't our only tactic here.

Also, Charmed Life should help with gift giving, as it's thematic for our arcetype.

He's powerful enough that Grandpa Yong is a shield. He doesn't want his sect annihilated.
 
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[X] Save It
[X] Confront the Bleak Ravens

Note, I'm only voting for this for the chance to use it to get through without fighting. Since it apparently boosts Cultivation instantly, we can eat it ourselves after the fight starts if one does. My preferred outcome is we use it convince the minions to let us through, somehow manage not to give it to the Patriarch while still getting the Lich, and then taking it ourselves and using it to make a Cultivation-boosting artifact that drops us back to Organ Refining, and gives us a speed boost to going Beyond on it.
 
beowolf said:
Note, I'm only voting for this for the chance to use it to get through without fighting. Since it apparently boosts Cultivation instantly, we can eat it ourselves after the fight starts if one does. My preferred outcome is we use it convince the minions to let us through, somehow manage not to give it to the Patriarch while still getting the Lich, and then taking it ourselves and using it to make a Cultivation-boosting artifact that drops us back to Organ Refining, and gives us a speed boost to going Beyond on it.
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That's actually a pretty cool scam. Even better would be if we can somehow get the lich to kill him off while he's weakened. If they are in league it should be possible to sow paranoia that as soon as the Reality Forming Cultivator has stabilised, he won't need the lich anymore, and then the lich can tell the Sect Leader that he needs to wait until a certain stage in his recovery to use the Pearl (if the lich is helping). We then learn what we need from the lich, before pushing him over the edge and getting him to try to kill the Sect Leader. In the confusion we can then use an illusion to make it look as if the Pearl was destroyed. If we've learned the Vault by that point a bit of sleight of hand might allow us to throw it in there in the confusion.

A bit complicated, but it's the kind of thing we'd have in our back pocket if the chance came up, not a dedicated plan. There are multiple steps of modification to make it le4ss complicated and have less failure points..
 
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beowolf said:
Note, I'm only voting for this for the chance to use it to get through without fighting. Since it apparently boosts Cultivation instantly, we can eat it ourselves after the fight starts if one does. My preferred outcome is we use it convince the minions to let us through, somehow manage not to give it to the Patriarch while still getting the Lich, and then taking it ourselves and using it to make a Cultivation-boosting artifact that drops us back to Organ Refining, and gives us a speed boost to going Beyond on it.
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This idea is interesting and funny and I'm going to support it, under the condition that the pearl can works as quickly as this plan assumes.


[X] Save It
[X] Confront the Bleak Ravens
 
Rask said:
This idea is interesting and funny and I'm going to support it, under the condition that the pearl can works as quickly as this plan assumes.


[X] Save It
[X] Confront the Bleak Ravens
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That's a fair point.

@Rihaku

Does the Pearl actually boost our cultivation level instantly upon consumption? As in, fast enough to work mid-combat? Because that's what the description implied, but may be an overestimation.
 
Sure, this bandwagon also seems reasonable. Approval voting for getting those eyes though. They seem very useful.

[x] Confront the Bleak Raven
[X] Give to Suizhen
[X] Save It
 
Alectai said:
Uh, you can't save it and give it to Suizen you know.
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notgreat said:
Approval voting
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Yes, I know. I'm just going for all the viable options that aren't Consume Personally.
Alratan said:
Cosnider that if we save it we can still give it to Suizhen later when it's more valuable to her.
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I highly suspect it takes some time to get used to the improved eyes, or at least to understand what they're not telling you.
 
runeblue360 said:
Took a look and this and had a question regarding the multiple submissions clause. Since I'm assuming it exists to reward the increased marginal effort of creating fanworks, what about single fanworks of exceptionally high effort? For example, if an artist did a full page spread of the entire cast or a writer did an exceptionally long omake, would those also receive some kind of bonus?
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They would be inherently worth more if they are both large and enjoyable, but there's no explicit bonus per se. That said, if a normal fanwork earns 5-10% and an amazing one earns 20, 30, or even 50%, it is already granting many times more Beyond Point progress.
 
It looks like you guys are almost at 2 BP.
beowolf said:
That's a fair point.

@Rihaku

Does the Pearl actually boost our cultivation level instantly upon consumption? As in, fast enough to work mid-combat? Because that's what the description implied, but may be an overestimation.
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You are not sure, you only know what you have heard of in various accounts which promise 'immediate power.' Whether this is on the scale of instants, seconds, or minutes is difficult to say; those who acquire such Pearls typically tend to consume them on the spot and have not written in detail about their experiences, as far as you know.

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Something you guys may have noticed - Xiaoling's independent information-gathering was very effective this turn. Her wealth and family name give her outsized influence in this backwater, and she is presently highly motivated to assist you, but you will need to improve her Loyalty and personal power both to get similar results in more cosmopolitan areas or against more difficult targets. She can be a very powerful social operator given the right tools.

You may also want to consider some form of battle artifact or foundation revision implant for Suizhen in the medium to long term. She Cultivates rapidly, which has some anti-synergy with your Philosopher King progression. Your Lackeys can help you hold together parts of the Empire while you are busy, if you invest in them. But take care not to compromise your personal power too steeply.
 
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