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Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

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PrimalShadow said:
If we fail, the failed effort will also be doing nothing for us. I would much rather fail on week 40 then week 32, because a week 32 action is more valuable then a week 40 action. Succeed or fail, doing the action earlier means that we have to do it with a more valuable earlier action instead of the less valuable later action.

The only benefit of breaking through earlier is that it helps us manage the timing of our breakthrough better. However, even then, this is something we want to start doing a couple of weeks before are ready to breakthrough at the earliest, because doing otherwise wastes the time-value of our actions.
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That's only accurate if every action we take is a net benefit. Sadly minor like Su ling's music does absolutely nothing for Ling Qi's growth (arguably CRX too). Using some of those actions for early Breakthrough rolls is a net benefit from all points of view.

[edit]Damn it, edit ate my post :(


Nemonowan said:
Neither will CRX's minors. And the first step into this whole decision is to determine whether vassalhood with anyone is a viable option or not. Of course, WE have more or less decided that it is probably the best path for Ling Qi, but SHE hasn't, and she doesn't even know enough to make an informed decision. That is why this week she should talk with Meizhen and maybe Han Jian too, to get more information about what we can expect from vassalhood in general.
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Arkeus said:
This is why we must take our time with it. Talk to people, think about it, see Cai from time to time, and so on. Not try to cram every possible meeting about it in one week. We have something like 10 weeks to think about it, and rushing our decision won't help.
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Only talking with Meizhen will not decrease the amount of info we get from GG or CRX herself, but NOT talking with them all this week will decrease the total amount of stuff we know about vassal-hood and CRX herself for next week's CRX Minors.


[edit] thanks for the quotes under:
Pushing back the CRX minors will help even less. Every week we spend not doing those minor is a week less were we could do the following ones.
Meeting once with CRX is not going to be enough, heck even meeting her half a dozen times is hardly optimal.

I don't see how talking to Meizhen changes the amount of information we'll get from GG or CRX herself.
On the other hand not talking to them will lower the amount of info we'd get from a CRX Minor the following week.
 
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Nemonowan said:
Neither will CRX's minors. And the first step into this whole decision is to determine whether vassalhood with anyone is a viable option or not. Of course, WE have more or less decided that it is probably the best path for Ling Qi, but SHE hasn't, and she doesn't even know enough to make an informed decision. That is why this week she should talk with Meizhen and maybe Han Jian too, to get more information about what we can expect from vassalhood in general.
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I wouldn't call that vote yet, as I'm fairly certain a good chunk of people aren't sold on committing to a vassalage under Cai when we breakthrough.
 
drake_azathoth said:
While we're sitting at peak any spiritual cultivation bonuses are wasted
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Fair, if true. But are you sure those don't just overflow to Qi?

Arkeus said:
Well, another benefit is being able to begin the work on our stronger arts in green. It's not impossible Zeqing could give us FVM successor if we finish FVM6 early enough, nor is it impossible to grab SCS+.
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No; that is a benefit for breaking through earlier. We aren't alking about an earlier breakthrough; we are talking about moving some of our non-final breakthrough rolls back.
 
Honestly, the option to be a vassal to CRX, since vassalhood seems inevitable, is so good it sets off my game-balance alarms. But maybe the advantages are just offset by equally stronger enemies?
 
Ayashi said:
I don't see how talking to Meizhen changes the amount of information we'll get from GG or CRX herself.
On the other hand not talking to them will lower the amount of info we'd get from a CRX Minor the following week.
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Because it comes from not only a slightly unbiased source but also from people ling qi actually trusts? Not only that but by confiding in certain individuals there's a higher chance of becoming even closer.

Take Su ling. Obviously she wants to stay low key in the future but because of our efforts and help there's a much higher chance she herself will become green in the future . Possibly early enough to get a noble title. If that happens what will she want to do? She says she wants to become a hermit but we know that's something heavily discouraged against. Talking to our friends gives us ideas and let's us know we aren't alone in making this decision .

Bai will give us info based on a high nobles perspective on what vassals are and what they do.

While Gu will give us another different info dump from her perspective as a vassal herself.

It will allow ling qi to be more prepared for future vassal and have her thoughts in order if she chooses said route. THEN she can focus on actions with cai to see if she actually likes the person or believes she can grow to like them before she makes any true decisions.

It won't be completely one sided after all as cai has stated she wants to prove to us she is worth being friends with *cough cough* I mean being our Lord commander
 
PrimalShadow said:
So I'm having trouble imagining an actual situation where this Tech would be useful.
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The point is less 'is this set of numbers actually threatening 'enough' for this scenario' and more of a refutation of the idea that the worms need to equal the threat of Ling Qi to be worth using. Combat adds like the worms don't need to have the same number of base dice as an enemy cultivator to benefit Ling Qi—them hitting their grapple should be considered the best case scenario, not a required baseline. Even without connecting they're useful, since they are another attacker and another vector for the projection of Ling Qi's buffs and debuffs.
 
Ayashi said:
Pushing back the CRX minors will help even less. Every week we spend not doing those minor is a week less were we could do the following ones.
Meeting once with CRX is not going to be enough, heck even meeting her half a dozen times is hardly optimal.
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That's kind of a matter of opinion. OOC, a lot of people are willing to go with Cai because there are obvious advantages and we HAVE actually seen quite a bit of her- I think her and the big guy have been Big Damn Heroes for us three times now?

Now, yeah, it would be very Ling Qi to hem and haw and spend weeks trying to feel Cai out before making a decision. But I am dubious as to how much this would actually assure us of Cai's personality when she is not 'on stage'. At some point, you trust people as decent or you don't. We knew jack and squat about Bai Meizhen when we chose her as a roommate.

And while Cai could be lying, she's never shied away from stating her ideals- ideals we can either appreciate or dismiss as empty excuses for tyranny.

I think that extending trust toward Lady Cai without knowing everything about her and having to be cajoled into it would say a lot about Ling Qi's character development- and I think there's a strength in having faith in people even when you aren't 110% sure of them. I'd like to see maybe one or two scenes with Gan Guangli and Cai that further explain their ideals and then for Ling Qi to just say 'Life on the streets taught me not to believe in anyone or anything- but I'm stronger than that now, and maybe this dream for a better world is worth some trust...'
 
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Mr.rodent said:
Because it comes from not only a slightly unbiased source but also from people ling qi actually trusts? Not only that but by confiding in certain individuals there's a higher chance of becoming even closer.

Take Su ling. Obviously she wants to stay low key in the future but because of our efforts and help there's a much higher chance she herself will become green in the future . Possibly early enough to get a noble title. If that happens what will she want to do? She says she wants to become a hermit but we know that's something heavily discouraged against. Talking to our friends gives us ideas and let's us know we aren't alone in making this decision .

Bai will give us info based on a high nobles perspective on what vassals are and what they do.

While Gu will give us another different info dump from her perspective as a vassal herself.

It will allow ling qi to be more prepared for future vassal and have her thoughts in order if she chooses said route. THEN she can focus on actions with cai to see if she actually likes the person or believes she can grow to like them before she makes any true decisions.

It won't be completely one sided after all as cai has stated she wants to prove to us she is worth being friends with *cough cough* I mean being our Lord commander
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Except the choice is not between "objective" sources and our friends, it's whether or not we try to gather said info.


The leading plan atm (Meridians) has Ling Qi only talk with Meihzen in favor of going play music and look at shinny mystery bag, while we could pump three sources of info this week instead, Meizhen, CRX herself and GG. (i'll point out that neither Han nor Xuilan are even mentioned)
We are dropping two major sources of info on CRX vassalhood so we can go play, instead of: pushing the play-stuff to next week, take care of the serious stuff right now, and have the options to tackle the CRX/Vassal question with much more info next week.

It's like training a single Art in a week instead of three. Because we can always train the other two next week ?
 
PrimalShadow said:
If we are fighting against someone at Late Yellow+, the worms are basically useless. They have on the order of 10-15 dice, whereas I expect our enemies to have 20-25 dice at the very least. If you add a 2-autosuccess advantage, I don't think our enemies need to fight this thing at all; they could just ignore it and wait for its duration to expire
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I... don't think that is true at all. If we summon the worms, the opponent must deal with them before they attack. Assuming that the worms have 11 dice for offense naturally (6+5), then we need to calculate the opponent's defense. With FVM up and running, the opponent will lose 12 dice to their defense (Diapason, Dissonance x3, Elegy), and then we add in Stygian's depth is another -2 to opponents defense. This means that they are at -14 defense. Then we add in the multi-attacker penalty which is -2 defense for each extra attacker. AE is (probably) an attack, and Dissonance is an attack. That means their defense is reduced -16/18 before the worms even attack.

This is added to even more if we have Zhengui attacking, which will put the dice at -18/20 to their defense. If we have only one worm, that worm will be attacking an individual with -18 defense. This pulls a defense of 30 to around 12 (+autos). At this point, there is a good chance that the worm will get a point of damage in (especially if we are using encircling wind), which means that they would do damage and reduce the defense by another -4.

They must deal with these creatures because if we summon 2 of them, and the first one hits, the second one is attacking a person with -24 defensive dice.
 
Also, can I just say how amazing this week is? We've usually gotten one to two qi a week from our bonuses, but this week got a total of TWELVE qi from all the cultivation we did. That's just amazing.
 
Ayashi said:
Except the choice is not between "objective" sources and our friends, it's whether or not we try to gather said info.

The leading plan atm (Meridians) has Ling Qi only talk with Meihzen in favor of going play music and look at shinny mystery bag, while we could pump three sources of info this week instead, Meizhen, CRX herself and GG. (i'll point out that neither Han nor Xuilan are even mentioned)
We are dropping two major sources of info on CRX vassalhood so we can go play, instead of: pushing the play-stuff to next week, take care of the serious stuff right now, and have the options to tackle the CRX/Vassal question with much more info next week.

It's like training a single Art in a week instead of three. Because we can always train the other two next week ?
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Again, you are assuming that it's more beneficial for Ling Qi to talk to Cai rather than keep thinking about things, and are assuming that Li Suyin/Han Jian/Su Ling/Shaman bag are 'nothings'.

They aren't 'nothings'. Han Jian has consistently been our best source of information when it comes to politics, Li Suyin is a good friend that needs help, Su Ling's minor is about deepening friendship and increasing our ability to appreciate music (extremely important now that we got music element) and Shaman Bag is extremely important to open before our next heavy drug week.

We aren't going to 'know' what we want to do about Cai before the break through, and we have 10 weeks for that. This means going and learning about what vassalage means, talk to all our friends about it, try to learn more about Cai personally, and maybe see her too. It doesn't, however, means only doing Cai minors for the next ten weeks.

Even dedicating 10 overall minors to Cai over the next 10 weeks is a lot more than needed, let's not pretend we'll need to do 30 of them to learn enough to have a rough idea of what we need.
 
Arkeus said:
Again, you are assuming that it's more beneficial for Ling Qi to talk to Cai rather than keep thinking about things,
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This isn't an either/or. Talking to Cai doesn't mean we give her an answer. People have said more than once that what we really need is to be friends with her if we are going to work for her. We won't become friends by talking about her rather than talking to her.
 
tricholysis said:
The point is less 'is this set of numbers actually threatening 'enough' for this scenario' and more of a refutation of the idea that the worms need to equal the threat of Ling Qi to be worth using. Combat adds like the worms don't need to have the same number of base dice as an enemy cultivator to benefit Ling Qi—them hitting their grapple should be considered the best case scenario, not a required baseline. Even without connecting they're useful, since they are another attacker and another vector for the projection of Ling Qi's buffs and debuffs.
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They are only useful if they provide value somehow, either by soaking enemy actions or by hitting them. Furthermore, to be net-positive for us, the inconvenience this provides our enemies have to be more valuable then the Action and QI we spent on said worms. Looking at the numbers, I don't see any setup where our enemies are weak enough that the worms can do anything to them at all but also strong enough that the trade would be favorable.

The summons don't need to be as good as Ling Qi to be useful, no - but they need to be good enough to help against some reasonable opponents.

Thor's Twin said:
I... don't think that is true at all. If we summon the worms, the opponent must deal with them before they attack. Assuming that the worms have 11 dice for offense naturally (6+5), then we need to calculate the opponent's defense. With FVM up and running, the opponent will lose 12 dice to their defense (Diapason, Dissonance x3, Elegy), and then we add in Stygian's depth is another -2 to opponents defense. This means that they are at -14 defense. Then we add in the multi-attacker penalty which is -2 defense for each extra attacker. AE is (probably) an attack, and Dissonance is an attack. That means their defense is reduced -16/18 before the worms even attack.

This is added to even more if we have Zhengui attacking, which will put the dice at -18/20 to their defense. If we have only one worm, that worm will be attacking an individual with -18 defense. This pulls a defense of 30 to around 12 (+autos). At this point, there is a good chance that the worm will get a point of damage in (especially if we are using encircling wind), which means that they would do damage and reduce the defense by another -4.
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Fair enough. At the point where the debuffs we apply to our enemies approach -20, the Worms might be able to hit them.

On the other hand, by that point we could probably just beat them all with a Meteoric Shower; at the cost of 6-(2+1)=3 Qi, we hit up to four people for probably our max of 7 or close to it.
 
PrimalShadow said:
Fair enough. At the point where the debuffs we apply to our enemies approach -20, the Worms might be able to hit them.

On the other hand, by that point we could probably just beat them all with a Meteoric Shower; at the cost of 6-(2+1)=3 Qi, we hit up to four people for probably our max of 7 or close to it.
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Yeah, i don't see the worms being useful now.

In the other hand, we just got the first level of AE. The worms have ample space to be improved.
 
Klaus said:
This isn't an either/or. Talking to Cai doesn't mean we give her an answer. People have said more than once that what we really need is to be friends with her if we are going to work for her. We won't become friends by talking about her rather than talking to her.
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Talking about her is needed to see if talking to her is even worth it. It's also needed to not overburden Ling Qi about Cai, and instead to have multiple things she thinks about and be interested about.

This is a marathon, not a spring, so we should purposefully limit the new informations we get about Cai (or talking to her) to make sure we can digest it fully before getting more.
 
PrimalShadow said:
On the other hand, by that point we could probably just beat them all with a Meteoric Shower; at the cost of 6-(2+1)=3 Qi, we hit up to four people for probably our max of 7 or close to it.
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By comparison, the worms (if we're fighting with just them and Zheng) cost 10 (base)+6 (second)-6(discount)+4(ignore AE mist)+2 (ignore FVM)=16.

Potentially they auto-ignore AE's mist, in which case they 'only' cost 12 qi to use. Of this, 9 isn't discountable, meaning you can't really get that cheap no matter what we do for gear.
 
PrimalShadow said:
Fair enough. At the point where the debuffs we apply to our enemies approach -20, the Worms might be able to hit them.

On the other hand, by that point we could probably just beat them all with a Meteoric Shower; at the cost of 6-(2+1)=3 Qi, we hit up to four people for probably our max of 7 or close to it.
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Beside hitting them with our max of 7 not being our best possible action even then and rather just waiting for the enemies to die, isn't our Qi reduction for FSA only -2? 1 from Pin, 1 from Bow?
Shadell said:
By comparison, the worms (if we're fighting with just them and Zheng) cost 10 (base)+6 (second)-6(discount)+4(ignore AE mist)+2 (ignore FVM)=16.

Potentially they auto-ignore AE's mist, in which case they 'only' cost 12 qi to use. Of this, 9 isn't discountable, meaning you can't really get that cheap no matter what we do for gear.
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FVM as far as I know is 'free' for spirit beasts of allies/ourself, so is probably 'Free' for Qi construct of ours.
 
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Klaus said:
This isn't even a real problem. You're making this up. Cite me an actual example.
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I am making up... that it's better not to be cramming stuff?
PrimalShadow said:
2 from bow. Our bow is better now. :)
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Cloudskewer Bow:
A bow shaped from molded cloud, made solid by intricate formations, it thrums with the energy of the open skies. Adds two dice to the use of offensive wind and heaven arts. Reduces the cost of wind arts by one, to a minimum of one. Armor Penetration 1. DV 7. Range 250 meters
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Am I missing something?
 
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