I'm not sure if this sort of analysis counts as a fan work, but if so: 2,003 words by the forum post word counter
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Okay, I'm going to try and do an exhaustive analysis of possible Decimator's Affliction mitigation builds, and what they get us.
First, we need to talk about what it does by default. By default, we strip 10% of the remaining life force from a large region (size determined by our power level). That means, for a normal human population, reducing their (remaining?) lifespan by 10% per year. Furthermore, if there isn't enough life force in range (criteria for this are uncertain!) it will start to consume us, body and soul. For each level of mitigation, I'm going to give the time it takes for us to strip 50%, 90%, 99%, and 99.9% of the life force in range, and the builds that will let us get to that level.
Even a drain of 50% has an immense human cost, reducing a thriving healthy population (lifespan of 80 years) to a sickened and dying one (lifespan 40 years). 90% is enough to destroy a human population, killing everyone in under a decade. As even the children won't live to see adulthood, it's unlikely that a population subjected to this will ever recover, short of the most drastic and well organized intervention possible. At 99% drained, the human population is already dead along with almost all animal and plant life. At 99.9% we'd just be consuming the last extremophile bacteria or something.
For our kingdom to survive to the end of our rule, we must stay
at least above the 90% threshold. If we should have any care for those beneath us, rather then becoming a Doom far worse then the Tyrant ever was, we should keep above the 50% threshold. Even if we should find a region we care nothing for, we will likely be forced to move on before the 99% threshold is reached, though the criteria for this are unclear.
I am also going to assume, that since we need to be powerful enough to conquer this realm, we will end up with a Decimation field of size similar to the kingdom we need to subdue. We might be able to get out of this by e.g. getting in the robot and relying on its power instead of our own, but since the whole point of this exercise is for us to become powerful it doesn't really make much sense.
So what options do we have to prevent this?
Major Mitigations
Actual direct mitigations to the curse. These become more costly on a super-exponential scale, which effectively limits us to 1 choice for the duration of our time here. Getting a second mitigation requires more then the total energy output of the universe, and we shouldn't expect to acquire such levels even given 2,000 years.
- Direct mitigation - gain 1 level of mitigation (12.5% reduction) permanently
- Huntress' Moon - No direct mitigation and impairs future Direct mitigation by 40%, but gives us many more chances to acquire A Hunger Sated. The exact size of the increase is uncertain, but is stated to be "dramatic", so probably somewhere between 2x and 10x.
A Hunger Sated
By default, we can kill and consume one mini-boss tier enemy to suppress the curse entirely for 1 month. We currently have no idea how common such enemies are, except that we found one on our second(?) day here. Also reduces progress from Hunger by 10%, but that's a trivial price to pay.
- Quelling - Spend 2 Arete, reduce the mitigation to 50%, but extend it to 6 months
- Note that, despite costing Arete, this is not strictly beneficial. It increases the duration of the effect, but reduces the strength. For infrequent hunts, this is net beneficial, but it caps the maximum effort we can put into mitigating Decimator's this way.
- I'm going to assume this stacks multiplicatively with Direct mitigation, so Quelling+Direct gives us a 56.25% reduction, not 62.5%
- Conclusion - Spend 7 Arete, increase the progress penalty to 25% and the duration of mitigation to 2 years
- IMPORTANT NOTE: I only just noticed on re-reading this, but this is still a complete curse mitigation
- I calculated the effect of keeping this up X% of the time as (base drain)^(1-X)*(reduced drain)^(X). This gives a percent drain per year. The values below for how often we need to hunt to get different levels of mitigation are approximated via trial-and-error.
Finally, we were once offered
Feast of Lives, which allowed us to mitigate Decimator's by 5% at the cost of an intense carnivore lifestyle. This option is no longer available, and trivial compared to the rest, but we can generally expect to be offered chances to feed our curse in other, smaller ways. I doubt any such options will stack up to either of the above though.
No mitigation
50% Drain: 6.6 Years
90% Drain: 21.9 Years
99% Drain: 43.7 Years
99.9% Drain: 65.6 Years
Build Options:
Anything goes
This isn't really an option, but it's worth setting out our baseline scenario. Here we essentially can't be in our kingdom at all. For the minimum rulership of 50 years, we would have to spend just 1/10th of our time here, and less then that once you take into account the time taken to conquer it to begin with. At this level I'm honestly not sure it's possible to complete our quest before the Human Sphere is destroyed by the Decimator's Affliction.
1/8th Mitigation
Reduce the rate of drain by 1/8, to 8.75% per year.
50% Drain: 7.6 Years
90% Drain: 25.1 Years
99% Drain: 50.3 Years
99.9% Drain: 75.4 Years
Build Options:
- Direct mitigation, no hunting required
- No upgrades, hunt once every 7.5 months
- Quelling, hunt once every 2 years
- Conclusion, hunt once every 15(!) years
- At this level, we probably don't need Huntress' Moon to supply us with enough mini-bosses
This doesn't really change the situation compared to no mitigation. We still have to spend almost all of our time outside of our target area, and it's still unclear that we can actually take control of it within that constraint.
2/8th Mitigation
Reduce the rate of drain by 2/8, to 7.5% per year.
50% Drain: 8.9 Years
90% Drain: 29.5 Years
99% Drain: 59 Years
99.9% Drain: 88.6 Years
Build Options:
- Direct mitigation, hunt once every 7 months
- Direct mitigation+Quelling, hunt once every 1.75 years
- Direct mitigation+Conclusion, hunt once every 14 years
- No upgrades, hunt once every 4 months
- Quelling, hunt once every year
- Conclusion, hunt once every 8 years
3/8th Mitigation
Reduce the rate of drain by 3/8, to 6.25% per year.
50% Drain: 10.7 Years
90% Drain: 35.7 Years
99% Drain: 71.3 Years
99.9% Drain: 107 Years
Build Options:
- Direct mitigation, hunt once every 3.4 months
- Might run out of enemies, and can't take Huntress' Moon to compensate
- Direct mitigation+Quelling, hunt once every 10 months
- Direct mitigation+Conclusion, hunt once every 6.75 years
- No upgrades, hunt once every 2.6 months
- Quelling, hunt once every 8 months
- Conclusion, hunt once every 5.2 years
4/8th Mitigation
Reduce the rate of drain by 4/8, to 5% per year.
50% Drain: 13.5 Years
90% Drain: 44.9 Years
99% Drain: 89.9 Years
99.9% Drain: 135 Years
Build Options:
- Direct mitigation, hunt once every 2.3 months
- Direct mitigation+Quelling, hunt once every 7 months
- Direct mitigation+Conclusion, hunt once every 54 months
- No upgrades, hunt once every 1.95 months
- Quelling, hunt once every 6 months
- Conclusion, hunt once every 47 months
At this point we can just about stay in the Human Sphere, assuming we don't care that they will all die shortly after we leave. Note that the benefits of Direct mitigation have been sharply eroded by the multiplicative combination with hunting. While it gives us a better base, the benefits of the hunt are scaled down, so we still need to hunt almost as often.
5/8th Mitigation
Reduce the rate of drain by 5/8, to 3.75% per year.
50% Drain: 18.1 Years
90% Drain: 60.2 Years
99% Drain: 121 Years
99.9% Drain: 181 Years
Build Options:
- At this point, Quelling is not longer sufficient. No amount of hunting can make it work.
- Direct mitigation, hunt once every 1.7 months
- Direct mitigation+Conclusion, hunt once every 41 months
- No upgrades, hunt once every 1.57 months
- Conclusion, hunt once every 38 months
6/8th Mitigation
Reduce the rate of drain by 6/8, to 2.5% per year.
50% Drain: 27.4 Years
90% Drain: 90.9 Years
99% Drain: 182 Years
99.9% Drain: 273 Years
Build Options:
- Direct mitigation, hunt once every 1.38 months
- Direct mitigation+Conclusion, hunt once every 33 months
- No upgrades, hunt once every 1.32 months
- Conclusion, hunt once every 31.5 months
7/8th Mitigation
Reduce the rate of drain by 7/8, to 1.25% per year.
50% Drain: 55.1 Years
90% Drain: 183 Years
99% Drain: 366 Years
99.9% Drain: 549 Years
Build Options:
- Direct mitigation, hunt once every 1.16 months
- Direct mitigation+Conclusion, hunt once every 27.8 months
- No upgrades, hunt once every 1.13 months
- Conclusion, hunt once every 27.2 months
At this point we could actually stay in the Human Sphere full time with out even destroying it outright. But if we've come this far, why not go for...
Complete Mitigation
Completely eliminate the lifedrain
50% Drain: ∞ Years
90% Drain: ∞ Years
99% Drain: ∞ Years
99.9% Drain: ∞ Years
Build Options:
- Direct mitigation, hunt once every month
- Direct mitigation+Conclusion, hunt once every 24 months
- No upgrades, hunt once every month
- Conclusion, hunt once every 24 months
The holy grail of any Cursebearer, complete elimination of one of their curses, and for a remarkably low price!
Conclusions:
The benefit of Direct mitigation depends very heavily on how much mitigation we want. At 1 tick it takes us from needing to periodically hunt to doing nothing, but as we push into higher levels of mitigation the benefits get ever more tenuous. At 50% mitigation the benefits are a barely noticiable reduction in hunt frequency (maybe 15%), and if we aim for 100% mitigation there is
no benefit at all. On the other hand, Huntress' Moon has ever greater benefits as we strain the local mini-boss supply ever more. At low levels we probably don't need it at all, at high levels it probably becomes mandatory, though exactly where that threshold lies is unclear. While it does reduce the effect of Direct mitigation by a lot, it's a fully effective path for mitigation in it's own right. Presumably going down this path further would mean decreasing mini-boss difficulty and increasing the benefits from winning, but even with just this single step we can get much more then the Direct path allows as long as we're willing to put in some ongoing work.
Also, holy shit is Conclusion good, it may be the single best option we've been given this entire quest. For just 7 Arete and one mini-boss fight every 2 years we can
completely eliminate a major curse! Or, really, turn it into the Curse of Minibosses, but the Apocryphal Curse is already that so it's good enough until we can really cut into Apocryphal over the next however many worlds.
I would strongly argue that we need high levels of mitigation to make our quest viable. Even at 50% mitigation, we would seriously damage our kingdom in just 1/4 of the required control time, not to mention the toll inflicted on our companions. It's possible that we don't actually need to take a Major mitigation for Decimator's at all to get this, we could just subsist of one hunt every 2 years with Conclusion, but I would advocate for taking Huntress' Moon anyway. It doesn't cost much relative to our resources, since we can only mitigate each curse once anyway instead of being able to save a mitigation here to use elsewhere, and it essentially guarantees we won't run out of minibosses to feed Hunger with.
