Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Fantasy
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Because that was the 'treading water' level of cultivation during the first thirteen weeks. @yrsillar advances all the other characters, and if he doesn't slow everyone else's advances we need that minimum to stay afloat, not to actually push ahead.
Source?
This assumes that other actions do nothing for us, which is silly. Taking less cultivation actions to go explore or do sect missions means we find locations or gain resources; that in turn lets us advance faster. It is like the parable about sharpening the saw - if you ignore actions that let you work faster in favor of simply working more, you are hardly getting ahead.
So, I ask again - why do we need four cultivation actions a week?
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
Our cultivation will naturally slow down though. One of the reasons we advanced so quickly is because all our targets were low so we could meet them easily. We need to do those jobs to gain more resources in order to better cultivate. It is a lot like sharpening an ax to cut down a tree. It might seem slower in the moment but it makes everything easier in the long run.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Do we really need to do this again? Because we've worked it out in the past a number of times, worked out what our averages were, seen where other characters started commenting on our progress slowing down, and so on. Like, this is a discussion we've done to death at this point. Then the next time it comes up, the 'cultivate less' crowd has either forgotten it all, or perhaps they just checked out halfway through the number crunching and lookup of all info because they found it boring, and so they can do it again in a week.
It's getting tiring at this point.
- Location
- United States of America
We also have to take in account that we will be introduced to more and more characters and we won't be able to interact with them if it means neglecting the social links we have in fear that everything will be on fire when we get back. Making them useless options in the first place
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
@TheLastOne How do you purpose to gain resources that help us cultivate? Cultivating without any drugs seems like a way to slow down quite a bit. Yah it feels bad to not take a cultivation action but it has got us an argent vent. If we do three cultivation action and a quest or explore the mountain one week then 4 cultivation actions the next week I see no problems with our cultivation. We can't base our cultivation speed on others or what they say. After all cultivation is a very personal pursuit. We simply need to be at a point where Linq qi feels comfortable for what ever she wants to achieve.
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
This doesn't assume the other actons do nothing for us. It assumes the other actions do thing for us, but in order to take full advantage of them we need a minimum of 4 cultivations actions a week, hence why it's so problematic.
Things that improves cultivation speeds, be it resources or friends or sites, are multipliers. The issue is that a multiplier is useless if there is nothing to multiply, and spiritual, physical, cultivation art, combat arts, meridians, Qi are all competing for each others when it comes to wanting those multipliers.
Ideally we would want one of each of those, but clearly it's impossible. However, even with all the maximal multipliers around 'below 4 cultivations' is where we are assured to be losing speed. 4 actions/week, with multipliers increasing constantly, are the 'we are not going slower than most others'. It's not "we are going faster".
Sure, if we don't mind losing speed and be considered one of the disciples without a future we can slow down.
@TheLastOne is not saying that we can't get multipliers, he is saying that Multipliers + 4 actions = average speed. Doing less = going slower than our rivals when it comes to improving.
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Yes, that would be the "Source" I spoke of. If you would be so kind as to link it, I'd be happy to go over the arguments therein on my own.
Also, you replied to literally one word of my post and ignored everything else. I don't suppose you'd be interested in addressing the actual meat of my post?
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
That's the issue with the proposed switch. It will mean that we have to activate whatever options gets us more major actions at the cost of minor even if we do so at a loss. 5 Major actions is more useful to us then four major and three minor, because then we do a weekly quest to earn sect points that we turn into red stones that we turn into cultivation actions, and so on. Either that, or we figure out what minor actions can get us resources and then just do those.
Because roughly 4 1/2 cultivation actions a turn are where we're had to stick, and things like powerful drugs and elixirs actually become a lot less valuable when we're only doing 3 cultivation actions. Drugs are multiplied by the number of relevant actions they effect. We wouldn't care nearly as much about the Sable Pill if it effected four actions, then what we got, where it effected seven.
Speaking of... we might want to use Sable Next week if the changes haven't gone into effect, so that we can get the full effect of the pill.
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
Personally I would expect to slow down soon even with our talent. One of the things we need to do is build up our base of resources . This was what the character creation was about. We choose a character that would advance fast when multipliers were not building up quickly and talent was reigning supreme because of the low dice numbers. Now that we need more and more success we need more and more resources. This means that we need to reassign our actions to fit a new paradigm. A new action system means that any debate about about how to spend actions from before is a questionable citation. As much as you might not want too if we get a new action system we will need to revisit how we want to spend actions.
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
Huh... Talent is more important the more dice we have, not the less dice we have. Someone like Ji Rong is much, much scarier now than before because he is only beginning to pick up speed. Likewise we are super scary to people like Han Jian with 4/5 talent because our advantages compared to him are only growing.
He had a huge advantage in speed at first, but now we do.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/posts/8596291/
Start here for the last time this blew up into numbers.
Edit:
Worth noting that the numbers have gotten worse since we discovered four arts master/eight arts total is where we need to aim at minimum for late. We have one art mastered, and it's a shallow one that certainly falls short of the standard Meizhen learned.
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Ji Rong is scarier now than he was earlier? He just got turned into a statue for a month! How can he be growing faster than Ling Qi in that kind of state? Sounds like you're just catastrophising about this.
That's a link to someone's personal ideal for what actions to get done. There's not even any calculation there.
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Could you explain why this is the case, please? As I see it, we need one cultivation action a week to take advantage of the Argent Vent. Furthermore, there are some medicines that require multiple cultivation actions for full advantage (e.g. Argent Elixir), and others that get better the more medicines we use (e.g. Sable Light Pill). But none of that comes close to an average of 4 cultivation actions a week.
A multiplier is useless if there is nothing to multiply, absolutely. But I think it is pretty clear that we aren't going to be going with "nothing" for any aspect of our cultivation. Obviously, the more actions we take that benefit from a given multiplier, the more benefit we get from that multiplier in total; but how do you get from that to us NEEDING 4 cultivation actions a week? The way I see it, it is all a trade-off between more immediate cultivation with our current multipliers and improvements to said multipliers for future actions; so it confuses me when people say we NEED certain amounts of cultivation actions instead of talking about how the benefits for said actions compares to the benefit from e.g. exploring.
People keep saying this, but I've yet to see any actual evidence. In fact, I've seen the opposite. We've been shooting ahead of our peers, even though we started much lower then them - and we certainly haven't been using more than 4 -5 cultivation actions a week on average.
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
I totally agree with you that talent does get better and better with the more dice we have. I probably made my thoughts confusing. You are right in that we are scary to everyone with less talent than us. However the only to increase our dice pool is resources. The only way to get resources right now is through actions. By slowly building up our resources pool we are able to cultivate at a good clip. We don't need to sprint ahead right now like we did before the thunderdome. We have a network of allies and have shown to be respectful to the higher ups. The only ones that would want to challenge us are ji Rong (to get an archive pass) or those below us. We have a month of pure progress head of ji rong and as long as we keep cultivating at an even semi decent clip we will out strip those below us with our comparative talent advantage. Resources however are the great equalizer. If some one has three times as many dice as we do then they will advance quicker than us. No matter how many cultivation actions we take. However if we can get those same resources then it doesn't matter how much they rail at the heavens. Ling Qi will simply be better then them because her talent will allow her to use those resources better.
One thing to think about is we might be able to use a minor action to duel people for resources. That might be risky but could work. Especially if we made it a bet where we state before hand what each party would get for victory.
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I scanned the next page and a half from where you linked, but couldn't find anything suggesting that four actions "was the 'treading water' level of cultivation during the first thirteen weeks".
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
Hah. Statues Ji Rong is best Ji Rong though!
More seriously, this was a reference to the talent thing, though obviously Ji Rong is scary enough he'll soon catch up with us just after. The guy is almost certainly talent 7, and the only thing pushing him down is him wanting to be a Xanxia protagonist.
We have, actually. We have been using 5/5.5 a week on average. Moreover, we haven't been shooting ahead of our peers. We have managed not to be scrub-ified, which is good, but we aren't beyond our peers.
I think we are talking about different things though, because you are saying "it's better to constantly improve our multipliers for later", when I am saying "It is better to both max out the multipliers and actually use them". There is a limit to the possible multipliers we can have. We can have only one site at a time for each cultivation, for example. We can only take a certain limit of spirit stone a week. There are limited numbers of existing pills we can have access to. There is a limited amount of help our friends can give. And so on and so forth. We have been maxxing out, or close to maxxing out, our multipliers. Maybe instead of throwing 30+ dice we could have been throwing 40+... Except that at a certain point we need to actually use those dice to do something.
There is a second limiter, that is we can only do, if we want to be efficient, one of a type of cultivation per week. So a "optimal" week would be Si/Physical/Spiritual/Cultivation Art/Meridian/Combat Art with all the multipliers for our level maxxed out, assuming we only have the single combat art (so, not optimal). However, the price to pay for each non-cultivation action is "pushing back by a week" when we can get the nice threshold where we can actually improve our multipliers.
Let's give another example: The Argent Vent. We couldn't take the argent vent before week 9, when we did take it, because it needed Ling Qi, Su Ling and Li Suyin to have already improved their perceptions significantly as well as be combat capable. Going after it before that time wouldn't have helped.
What you seem to be saying is somehow "It's better to always stack the multipliers for the future actions that need them", but we are actually limited not only in the numbers of actions that can use those multipliers, but we are also limited in what multipliers we have access to by our existing abilities.
The problem is we already have those same resources currently, but we plan on not using them. The whole point is to try and arrange things so we always use close to the ceiling of possible resources while taking as many cultivation actions.... But that we have seen that even with maximal possible resources, less than 4 cultivation/week only means treading water, not getting ahead .
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TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
It's the start one where people start taking numbers, those numbers get challenged, other numbers get brought in. Like, this is what I and @Arkeus are getting a little annoyed about. There isn't 'a post'. There's fifteen some odd pages of discussion that I just linked to, and people get tired of it after two. Which is why we keep having this. People tune it out or skip over it, and then we end up here again.
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I'm more concerned with what we're supposed to be "keeping up with our peers" for. Four cultivation actions a turn is apparently the minimum we can take before we... well, we don't really have anything to keep up for. It's not like failing to make Inner Sect is going to kill us. Even if it's true that we'll have to go do military service if we don't make it, as I recall some people saying, that's just a new arc of the story. And one I'm not too worried about being forced to move on to.
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
Well this is true that we haven't shot ahead of our peers we have at least matched them. In three months . Even if we take less straight up cultivation actions we will still be able to advance quicker than them. We are after all in the top percentile of cultivators in the first year since we have gotten through to yellow and silver. We don't need to feel rushed right now. Our next huge test is in 40 or so weeks. That is a massive amount of time. Resources don't have to be used to maximum efficiency to be effective. So even if we use a resources and don't use four cultivation actions for maximum efficiency that is ok because it still helped us.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Four cultivation actions aren't maximum efficiency. They're minimum. Like, we shouldn't be dropping below that unless by doing so we can make sure we don't have to drop that low again in the future.
- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
I understand that this conversation may be frustrating because it has already been beaten dead. However if a new action system is created then it has to be gone over again because all of the actions now have new values.
Edit
Minimum efficiency would be to take a pill that doesn't help our cultivation at all.
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TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Sure. The problem with what's been suggested is that it makes it so the best thing to do is go into closed door cultivation for three rounds or whatever the mechanism is for fudging minor actions into major, then come out on the forth and use all our actions on the job board, then doing it all again. It makes it super appealing to be a hermit in a cave, which is boring.