I softballed the proposal somewhat because I really don't know what relationship Asuma/Leaf has with the daimyo, or how big an issue a dead/hostile daimyo is.
IFF Asuma approves it, I'd go for more severe measures, like mutilating a hand(or EN equivalent) and threatening execution on repeat offense.
I'd rather not kill for the first offense, for (at least) two reasons:
It's Bad Communication: We didn't make the threat in advance, and the daimyo didn't expect us to care about skimming extra taxes, let alone care enough to execute people. A reputation for killing people for seemingly no foreseeable reason is often a Bad Thing[1].
Turnover is costly: I don't know how daimyo succession normally works, but I assume it will take the new guy a little while to figure out the ropes. a newer daimyo with a less stable powerbase will have a harder time forcing the administration/tax collectors to behave.
I don't necessarily disagree, but we aren't executing everyone who cheats on their taxes. Just the worst offenders. Given the state of MfD, I am 100% sure that the worst offenders are reprehensible dudes who more-or-less deserve death.
Killing a couple will make everyone terrified of crossing the line. Especially if we keep it ambiguous where the line exactly is.
The point is to scare them enough that the worst abuses are curbed, and I think this is legit our best way to do so. Just crippling them with no forfeiture of property ain't doing it.
Maybe crippling them, confiscating all their property and forcing them out into the street as beggars would do it.....
On the topic of notes, I would recommend we buy MedNin 10 (55 XP) at the next earliest convenience and start doing the MedNin/MedKnow notes. It's ~1000 XP for a tenth of the cost, which gets them both to 33ish, and having two more 30s is helpful for pretty much any direction we want to take our build, as the 10s/20s are very cheap to acquire while 30s are where supports start getting pricey.
Yeah personally I support getting PS to 25ish (wherever exactly we max out on the bonus from sealing) and then leave it alone for a while, while we get some skills for necromancy
Given that it will take another 28 levels or whatever just to break even, I'd rather maximize rift delving skills
If I recall correctly, Hidden Villages are the head rulers of a given nation, and any Daimyos that exist within a country's boarders all swear fealty to their respective Hidden Village.
Hidden Villages train ninja, and bring in first generation ninja from the countryside into the Hidden Village to be trained up as ninja (also adding genetic diversity to their ninja population, preventing inbreeding, and allowing for the discovery of new Bloodlines).
Ninja then fight off a never-ending tide of chakra beasts (and enemy ninja), suffering the casualty rate that is inherent in that. And it is this sacrifice which is what allows civilian hamlets to settle down and grow crops, mine ore, and other basic things such as this.
(Side note: according to Yuuma, a well-trained civilian can kill some of the most basic chakra beasts, but it's a close call. And "bards" were once a thing, but are not any more. But these are fine details, irrelevant to the overall point.)
A Fire Country Daimyo that is upset at the Hokage really has no recourse. What are they going to do? They rely on Leaf for protection against the Death World. They require Leaf's service to survive.
What leverage do they have to wield against the Hokage? Withholding taxes? Civilian hamlets are taxed to near-sustinence levels. If a Daimyo decides to withhold their land's taxes, then the Hokage will order that Daimyo killed, and replaced with a more cooperative one.
Are they going to send a messenger to a neighboring country, and ask to be conquered? Remember, even before the creation of Till'n'Fills, Leaf treated their civilians the best out of any country in the Elemental Nations. In Leaf, civilians are at least given basic rights.
Then you must remember that the position of the Hokage is a military position, a legal title, and a religious mantle. The Hokage is Dictator, King, and Pope, all in one. The Hokage's word is the Will of Fire, and he can easily order the execution of a few uppity civilians who aren't properly supporting Leaf ninja, who throw themselves into the world's meatgrinder to buy civilization a few more decades' worth of existence.
Not to mention the punishment that might befall the innocent farmers/miners under the Daimyo's leadership, who had no say in the decisions of their traitorous Daimyo. They might receive an increased amount of "attention" from Leaf, or even be refused Till'n'Fills. So these hamlets especially have a vested interest in keeping Leaf happy with them, now that Hazou has kickstarted/funded the Till'n'Fill movement.
Yeah personally I support getting PS to 25ish (wherever exactly we max out on the bonus from sealing) and then leave it alone for a while, while we get some skills for necromancy
Given that it will take another 28 levels or whatever just to break even, I'd rather maximize rift delving skills
Yeah, IMO we should get it to 25ish right away, with a possible break dumping 55XP into Mednin, and then get back on the Alt train, take that to 50, Ath to 49, and probably Tai to 49 as well, then reassess.
taxes are definitely worth owing Ami a major favor for. Maybe even worth giving her FOOM for.
We should get some farmer inputs on the tax system. Any economists working on it will either be ninja with prejudices. Or educated civilians with prejudice against the uneducated. Making a blind spot of thinking to ask the farmers
If I recall correctly, Hidden Villages are the head rulers of a given nation, and any Daimyos that exist within a country's boarders all swear fealty to their respective Hidden Village.
Hidden Villages train ninja, and bring in first generation ninja from the countryside into the Hidden Village to be trained up as ninja (also adding genetic diversity to their ninja population, preventing inbreeding, and allowing for the discovery of new Bloodlines).
Ninja then fight off a never-ending tide of chakra beasts (and enemy ninja), suffering the casualty rate that is inherent in that. And it is this sacrifice which is what allows civilian hamlets to settle down and grow crops, mine ore, and other basic things such as this.
(Side note: according to Yuuma, a well-trained civilian can kill some of the most basic chakra beasts, but it's a close call. And "bards" were once a thing, but are not any more. But these are fine details, irrelevant to the overall point.)
A Fire Country Daimyo that is upset at the Hokage really has no recourse. What are they going to do? They rely on Leaf for protection against the Death World. They require Leaf's service to survive.
What leverage do they have to wield against the Hokage? Withholding taxes? Civilian hamlets are taxed to near-sustinence levels. If a Daimyo decides to withhold their land's taxes, then the Hokage will order that Daimyo killed, and replaced with a more cooperative one.
Are they going to send a messenger to a neighboring country, and ask to be conquered? Remember, even before the creation of Till'n'Fills, Leaf treated their civilians the best out of any country in the Elemental Nations. In Leaf, civilians are at least given basic rights.
Then you must remember that the position of the Hokage is a military position, a legal title, and a religious mantle. The Hokage is Dictator, King, and Pope, all in one. The Hokage's word is the Will of Fire, and he can easily order the execution of a few uppity civilians who aren't properly supporting Leaf ninja, who throw themselves into the world's meatgrinder to buy civilization a few more decades' worth of existence.
Not to mention the punishment that might befall the innocent farmers/miners under the Daimyo's leadership, who had no say in the decisions of their traitorous Daimyo. They might receive an increased amount of "attention" from Leaf, or even be refused Till'n'Fills. So these hamlets especially have a vested interest in keeping Leaf happy with them, now that Hazou has kickstarted/funded the Till'n'Fill movement.
I understand the overall dynamic still has them under the Hokage's heel.
I think it's pssible that there are subtleties to this relationship that give the daimyo some power, or make them costly to replace.
A clever daimyo seems encouraged to try to do an excellent job, while finding a way to make replacing them costly to the tower.
taxes are definitely worth owing Ami a major favor for. Maybe even worth giving her FOOM for.
We should get some farmer inputs on the tax system. Any economists working on it will either be ninja with prejudices. Or educated civilians with prejudice against the uneducated. Making a blind spot of thinking to ask the farmers
Madness.
Even if that was an acceptable trade(opinions may vary), we can totally fix this on our own, at much lower cost.
We can ask Asuma to send Haru on random audits. We could even just wait and let MARI and the NFF mostly deal with it.
Don't go out of your way to offer Ami massive favours for things we can easily do ourselves. Because favours have value, so giving them out for free is dumb. And because accruing debt like we think it's costless is the behavior of someone who plans to welch on thier debts, which hurts our relationship with our creditors(Ami).
I'm not confident random audits will be enough, but willing to try them and see first. I'd want Mari and the NFF to say they think they can fix the problem before relying and waiting on them. However we haven't done any of that yet, suggesting the hive mind isn't interested in directly engaging with taxes. If the hive mind is not averse to whatever they think Ami would call in her favor on, that allows us to deal with taxes without directly involving ourselves in it
Also, if you think it is easy. Then you should be willing to trade a minor (not major) favor to Ami for it. Because comparative advantage means it would be even easier for Ami
We have the GED, who are educating hundreds of civilians at an unforseen rate. We could funnel a few of them to the Tower, and help Asuma build up a team of mathmatically inclined auditors.
Hmm. Just looked over the character sheets, and noticed/pondered a few things.
The definitions of the combination stunts aren't given, and they aren't listed in the stunt doc. Most of them are able to be guessed if you're familiar with their suite, but it still seems like another barrier to engagement for newer players. Maybe having them at the bottom of the stunts document or something?
Kei has noticeably more XP invested into shadow element than wind element. That kinda threw me, because I guess I'm so used to her being the wind party member, and the shadow element being so new. Not itself a big deal, I will update my mental model. But, it does paint the idea of not having details of those Jutsu and Kei not really being able to use them for secrecy reasons. Like, a thousand XP investment for a secret holdout set of skills isn't necessarily bad, but it's definitely a THING, and unfortunately we can really help with optimizing it.
Also when thinking about the Shadow element, it raises really interesting questions. Is it just enter element, and could be learned by anyone? Are there really more than 6 learnable elements, but most just don't have enough investment to be worth it? Are some Nara actually born with the shadow element, or are they all taught it early, and then "learn" a second element (their original one) later on? Can Kei learn it due to her being part of the 5? Is there some other process for acquiring it? Could there be other clans or villages that have other learnable elements? Heck, do people ever get born with bloodline elements without being part of a set clan with that element, and if so, do you just have to discover it was yourself?
What I'm saying is, I'm increasingly on team "Let's get that lore (for my own entertainment and desire to see world mechanics)."
Despite Noburi having a lower stat total than the others, he's possibly the most "sensible" and effective build. He has an element that he's leaned into and has developed up Jutsu well (as opposed to Hazou, who has a 50 Earth stat (same as Noburi's highest), and the next highest is a 20 right now, a result from a mad dash to the new sealing paradigm). He has a non-combat specialty, with good stats and a gradual(ish) progression of skills (as opposed to Hazou, initially being perceived as really talented but with actual lower stats, and then jumping up massive amounts at a time). He doesn't have the massive resolve, which does sometimes prove very useful, but he has a reasonable social stat build (even if we need to get his rapport up to 80 to do him justice). Add in his summoning, and he's a very reasonable chunin with a good projection to eventual jonin-hood (minus being so well-adjusted). Noburi is great, and deserves a lot of respect. The fact that we are able to run around and get a lot done with multiple instances of ourselves and he can't... Really is kinda sad.
Gosh Hazou hasn't improved as a fighter in a LONG time. But also, dang, his build has been so dictated by all the different crisis and emergencies (and the whims and inconsistent nature of the quest voting priorities). ES and sealing are both really useful, especially while staying at the estate, but both take time to get good use out of. That gives him lots of things to do with clone hours, which is really useful to us, though it does slow down the grinding for XP. I'd love to firm up his combat fundamentals... But it's REALLY hard to argue for doing it in character given necro and dragon priorities. And we've already seen one or two small moments where our meta OOC desire to remove stagnancy has clashed with what characters see as sensible.
I think we have to face two facts. One, Hazou will always have the messiest build, because the plot demand skillsets end up getting put on him most, due to being the main character (and the broadest use skillset, I'd argue). And two, getting Hazou close to a finished build will take a LONG time, and he's probably going to be squishy and an easy target, until we have a period of no emergencies in which to work on the basics. Which, uh, I'm not expecting before the quest ends, short of a "you have 3 months to train for the final fight, what do you do to prepare" type thing, though historically we've had a couple of those and not fully used them anyway.
The definitions of the combination stunts aren't given, and they aren't listed in the stunt doc. Most of them are able to be guessed if you're familiar with their suite, but it still seems like another barrier to engagement for newer players. Maybe having them at the bottom of the stunts document or something?
Also when thinking about the Shadow element, it raises really interesting questions. Is it just enter element, and could be learned by anyone? Are there really more than 6 learnable elements, but most just don't have enough investment to be worth it? Are some Nara actually born with the shadow element, or are they all taught it early, and then "learn" a second element (their original one) later on? Can Kei learn it due to her being part of the 5? Is there some other process for acquiring it? Could there be other clans or villages that have other learnable elements? Heck, do people ever get born with bloodline elements without being part of a set clan with that element, and if so, do you just have to discover it was yourself?
What I'm saying is, I'm increasingly on team "Let's get that lore (for my own entertainment and desire to see world mechanics)."
We've speculated and Snowflake accidentally confirmed that the Nara are using Yin release. It does seem like an element anyone can learn, but its existence is not widely publicized for one reason or another. It also doesn't seem like anyone is born using exclusively Yin chakra. That's why I speculate that neutral chakra, which everyone can use from the beginning in addition to one of the 5 elements, is an even mix of Yin and Yang, and it is only using the two separately that requires training.
We will be needing some of those skills (especially Alertness) to effectively pull off necromancy, which requires dedicated exploration of another dimension, not just high sealing and opening a door. I think it was also implied human souls are not the only thing living in the pure lands forest too, and we will possibly need to be able to fight without using much or any chakra (IE Taijutsu.)
His Substitution skill also went to 20 from the previous score of 7 lmao
Also CR has been bumped and so has PEA. But it's true that he's not really that much stronger stat wise than he was at the chuunin exams, which was like 2 years ago. OTOH his Sealing kit & summoning selection keeps getting better and in that regard he's undoubtedly pretty far ahead of where he was at the CE, where he had no scroll and practically only Macerators
They are on the character sheets if you hover over them, only works on desktop though, not mobile.
We've speculated and Snowflake accidentally confirmed that the Nara are using Yin release. It does seem like an element anyone can learn, but its existence is not widely publicized for one reason or another. It also doesn't seem like anyone is born using exclusively Yin chakra. That's why I speculate that neutral chakra, which everyone can use from the beginning in addition to one of the 5 elements, is an even mix of Yin and Yang, and it is only using the two separately that requires training.
We will be needing some of those skills (especially Alertness) to effectively pull off necromancy, which requires dedicated exploration of another dimension, not just high sealing and opening a door. I think it was also implied human souls are not the only thing living in the pure lands forest too, and we will possibly need to be able to fight without using much or any chakra (IE Taijutsu.)
Ah, I usually participate in mobile, so thank you. And for the Yin info.
I think my issue with needing those skills for necromancy is the time element. Are we not going to do it once we have a way to open it just to train? Probably not. Are we going to give XP to that, rather than stopping work on Dragon war? We probably shouldn't. How much XP would we even want/need, anyway, for stuff like taijutsu? I agree being stronger is good, I'm just thinking about it from an opportunity cost perspective.
Doubtful. I think we'd just use whatever XP we get in that time to improve our chances of success. But given that we still seem to be months out, that's a pretty qualitative difference.
I'm not really sure what you mean here. I don't see a reason not to go all out on succeeding at necromancy, since having Jiraiya back improves Dragon odds significantly more than getting ES 60 like a month sooner or whatever.
Leveling PS to 25ish (650 XP) maximizes our bonus from Sealing, since it can never increase PS to higher than our base sealing. After that, to see any more improvement we will need to go to PS 54+ which will take an additional 2320 XP, which is like 200 days of max FOOM no stagnancy no clones working on Sealing (AKA, overly optimistic), way past when I expect us to start making our early necromancy forays. Eventually, we can take a look at that after we've got Jiraiya back and can start raking in a Sannin sensei base rate (either from him or one of the other two bozos after he asks them to help out)
How much XP would we even want/need, anyway, for stuff like taijutsu? I agree being stronger is good, I'm just thinking about it from an opportunity cost perspective.
So I think the order of importance there for necro specifically is Alertness > Athletics > Taijutsu
After PS ~25 which is probably our next big purchase, we just need a 20 -> 30. There are three social skills that make sense here IMO: Deceit, Presence, and Rapport. Deceit has the advantage of already being above 20 and therefore being a bit cheaper to raise, it's a useful skill to have, and it improves Roki which we'll probably be using at least for this adventure. Rapport has the advantage of FiF, so getting it to 30 means Hazou would have 42 effectively, which is a really solid score. And Presence is useful for the types of plans we tend to run, and IMO I think it will be useful for getting afterlife shades to cooperate with us. I think any of these three make sense, personally I prefer Presence but would not disagree with raising any of them. A 20 -> 30 is 255 XP, Deceit would be slightly less but we'll just go with 255 for now.
Once that is raised to 30, we take Alertness all the way to 50. That would cost 609 XP.
This (PS + social + Alertness) takes like 4 months, so I imagine we will be getting ready to enter the rift pretty soon after this point, and wouldn't have time to raise much more. But if we do somehow, it would take an additional column to get Ath into the 40s.
Something along the lines of:
Intimidation -> 10
Empathy -> 20
Rapport -> 30
Athletics -> 49
This would take an additional 2 or 3 months. Raising Taijutsu to 49 would take a single month or less, but as I said I think it's also the lowest priority for this specific expedition.
I think my issue with needing those skills for necromancy is the time element. Are we not going to do it once we have a way to open it just to train? Probably not. Are we going to give XP to that, rather than stopping work on Dragon war? We probably shouldn't. How much XP would we even want/need, anyway, for stuff like taijutsu? I agree being stronger is good, I'm just thinking about it from an opportunity cost perspective.
We can't really spend more XP on dealing with the the Dragons till we fix our pyramids. So that means alertness is free to be leveled to 50. After that getting taijutsu 49 and athletics 39 is only around 40 more days.
Isn't that the skill who's AB will apply to all social rolls once we finish Asuma's apprenticeship? Becomes even more useful if so. Possibly applies to the Roki roll too, but that's less certain.
Isn't that the skill who's AB will apply to all social rolls once we finish Asuma's apprenticeship? Becomes even more useful if so. Possibly applies to the Roki roll too, but that's less certain.
And two, getting Hazou close to a finished build will take a LONG time, and he's probably going to be squishy and an easy target, until we have a period of no emergencies in which to work on the basics.
If we successfully revive Jiraiya, I propose we do a training arc that does exactly that. Get Hazō high Alertness and Athletics and then raise Presence and Deceit.
If Jiraya is back and we can afford to hold back on raising Primordial Sealing, I say we spend four months doing exactly that.
@Inferno Vulpix@Shrooms (or any of other other build exerts), would that time-period be sufficient to reliably survive jōnin encounters?
There is a link in my bio to a 'hazou/MW jonin whiteroom' post, which has some errors but I think is close enough to be a good benchmark. If by "Survive" you mean "win", Alertness 50/Athletics 49/TJ 49 is enough alongside MARS debuffs + seal bullshit to beat some jonin opponents, mainly the far more common variant of 'new jonin', but I wouldn't say he 'reliably' does so. If by "survive" you mean get away, I think he can generally manage that already, but it does mean abandoning teammates which he isn't going to want to do. If by "survive" you mean "don't get one-shot and die Round 1" I again think he can already manage that pretty reliably with his current loadout.
This isn't accounting for gaining any new Summons or Seals besides Reusuable Rocket Boots since I don't know what we're going to make in 8 months.
Leveling PS to 25ish (650 XP) maximizes our bonus from Sealing, since it can never increase PS to higher than our base sealing. After that, to see any more improvement we will need to go to PS 54+ which will take an additional 2320 XP, which is like 200 days of max FOOM no stagnancy no clones working on Sealing (AKA, overly optimistic), way past when I expect us to start making our early necromancy forays. Eventually, we can take a look at that after we've got Jiraiya back and can start raking in a Sannin sensei base rate (either from him or one of the other two bozos after he asks them to help out)
Based on my calculations here, it seems like the best option for raising Primordial Sealing isn't actually to raise it directly to 51 (the point where it would start gaining value from its own levels again) but by raising our base Sealing so our PS can be buffed to a higher cap. If we follow the Balanced route listed here, we continue gaining eff PS levels at a steady rate (albeit much slower than when the initial PS burst getting it up to 26).
Alright, spreadsheeting done! I made four strategies for how we could approach Primordial Sealing, and crunched them out to 10k. That is to say, how far we'd get with 10,000 XP invested in sealing stats from our current position. Note that Hazou's character sheet has about 14,000 XP total: this covers all the way up to endgame, not just our next steps.
The four strategies I used can be described as follows:
"Ignored" - Never invest anything in Primordial Sealing, dump it all into Sealing instead.
"Mostly Ignored" - Level Primordial Sealing to 26 (the point where it caps out) and then ignore it in favour of Sealing.
"Balanced" - Keep Sealing higher than Primordial Sealing, but keep leveling Primordial Sealing whenever it is not "capped out" by the 1/3 bonus from Sealing.
"Full PS" - only invest in Primordial Sealing from here on out.
To clarify about Balanced, the way the 1/3 boost works our effective skill in Primordial Sealing will plateau once we hit 26: the boost cannot bring us past 51, so it doesn't matter if our base PS is 26, 30, 40, or even 50, we wouldn't be getting any better. If we raise our Sealing to 60, however, our boost will increase by 3 levels (+25 to +28) but our cap will increase by 9 levels (51 to 60). Thus there's room to level PS again, pushing it to 32 so the +28 boost from our Sealing brings it all the way up to 60. In this way our Primordial Sealing keeps pace with our Sealing, exactly matching our base Sealing at all times.
But how does this look in practice? I'll include a link to the spreadsheet at the end, and it includes charts that really help visualize the progression of the different routes, but here's our status (only the effective skill, not the base skill) for each route at a few key intervals:
Ignored (Sealing)
Ignored (PS)
Mostly Ignored (S)
Mostly Ignored (PS)
Balanced (Sealing)
Balanced (PS)
Full PS (Sealing)
Full PS (PS)
1000
83
29
77
52
77
53
75
51
2000
91
32
86
55
84
59
75
51
5000
110
38
106
62
99
75
94
70
10000
135
46
132
70
120
96
108
99
It should be noted that I have not accounted for pyramids in this at all. The "Ignored" and "Mostly Ignored" route live in a la la land where we can just push Sealing up past base 100 with no worries. "Balanced" and "Full PS" are far more reasonable, however: Both of them push one stat up into the 80's, while leaving the other hanging around the 40's and 50's. Given the timeframes involved, building a pyramid to support this sounds difficult but not ludicrous like the first two routes were.
I can't guarantee that the images will show up (apparently SV is picky about that), but I may as well try: within the following spoilers you'll be able to see all the data in chart form, which really helps track how they all stack up against each other:
As for my actual analysis of these results, I'll first start by saying that we can discard "Ignored" and "Mostly Ignored" altogether. They mostly serve as references to compare the main routes against, and as mentioned they live in the no-pyramid la la land.
Between "Balanced" and "Full PS", Balanced is hands-down the best strategy for the first 8,000 XP investment. It outperforms Full PS in terms of our Sealing level, but it even outperforms Full PS in terms of effective PS level! Past about 8,000 XP investment, Full PS takes a slight lead in terms of effective PS level that ever so slowly starts to widen as the investment approaches 10,000 XP. Its Sealing level is still dramatically worse than Balanced, however.
Personally, I feel some affinity towards the Full PS strategy, because it does exceed Balanced at the truly high tiers and that may just be what we need for the Great Seal... but it's hard to say that in the face of our eff Sealing trailing so far behind. Not to mention the huge start-up investment Full PS needs to start paying out anything, during our prime working hours of the next few years. Even from the perspective of the Great Seal, I don't think I can condone letting our PS level languish for so long even if it leads to a slightly higher score later on. Balanced will result in more better work getting done now, which helps us do more better work later, and the strong lead it has in paper Sealing cannot be denied as well.
I also noticed, while making the graph, that the ABs don't play nice with the 1/3 boost. Because the 1/3 boost doesn't contribute to AB, Full PS actually rolls a little higher when using prep days just from the extra ABs at our disposal. So I redid the whole thing to calculate what roll we could expect to hit after full prep days, and made graphs of those results too:
The results aren't all that much different. Between Balanced and Full PS, Balanced's lead in the Sealing comparison is even wider than before, but PS now catches up to Balanced at around 5k investment instead of 8k. And instead of the 10k endpoint being only a few points apart, 10k Full PS beats 10k Balanced by around ten points, not insubstantial.
...But in the end, I think I'm still sold on the Balanced scenario. It just hurts so much to plateau out in the short term, when we should be most productive. I'm not willing to bet that we have that much time to solve the Great Seal, enough that we can safely sit on our thumbs and spend 5-8k XP (of pure research stat investment, ignoring all the other stats we need to level!) before even matching the productivity the Balanced path already provides.
Anyways, here's the spreadsheet for anyone who wants to take a closer look. In the short term, I recommend pushing PS to base 26. As you can see in the graphs, it's a dramatic increase in our eff PS level (up to 51!) for only 700 XP, substantial but still manageable. With a PS level like that we can get a lot done, and from there we can evaluate where we want to continue.
edit: had to slightly tweak some of the numbers in the table because I forgot the 1/3 bonus rounds up instead of down. It's only a difference of 1 point at most, so nothing of substance changes in the analysis, but now it's more accurate.
Faflec did his own analysis, however, factoring in our pyramids and non-research growth requirements, and corroborated another part of my analysis: the longer the time horizon, the higher we need to push PS, it becomes more and more worth it to have invested in full PS along the way.
I have no fucking life. The Balanced Build:
Our next pyramid building will require at a minimum 2 more skills in the 10s; 1 20s; 1 40s; 1 50s; and 1 70s (Sealing). This is a sample build I have pulled out of my ass. Note I leveled Primordial Sealing to boost the pyramids: it's going to be leveled further later anyway and it'll help balance things out for this mild hypothetical.
Skill Being Leveled:
Level From -> To:
Pyramid:
XP Spent Here:
Total XP Spent:
Primordial Sealing
01 -> 26
17-6-6-4-3-2-1
700
700
Sealing
Primordial Sealing
51 -> 59
26 -> 31
17-6-5-5-3-2-1
1178
1878
Deceit
Medical Knowledge
24 -> 50
10 -> 20
17-5-5-5-3-3-1
1130
3008
Sealing
Primordial Sealing
59 -> 68
31 -> 37
17-5-5-5-3-2-2
1566
4574
Earth Pillar Jump
Hiding Like a Mole
Spine of the Earth
Bleeding River Impalement
Examination
Intimidation
Empathy
Living Roots
Stealth
Presence
Rapport
Medical Knowledge
Chakra Reserves
Alertness
Primordial Sealing
Taijutsu
Calligraphy
Earthshaping
Sealing
Just shy of 10k XP and we have effSealing 101 and effPS 77. The Full PS Build:
Skill Being Leveled:
Level From -> To:
Pyramid:
XP Spent Here:
Total XP Spent:
Primordial Sealing
01 -> 68
16-6-5-4-3-2-2
4690
4690
Headhunter
Earth Pillar Jump
Hiding Like a Mole
Spine of the Earth
Bleeding River Impalement
Examination
Intimidation
Living Roots
Empathy
Stealth
Medical Knowledge
Presence
Rapport
Substitution
Chakra Reserves
Athletics
Alertness
Taijutsu
Earthshaping
Primordial Sealing
The key differences in pyramid building here and in the Balanced build are:
In the Balanced Build, Calligraphy and Sealing get leveled (Sealing capstone). Primordial Sealing also gets leveled a bit.
In the PS only build, it's PS that gets leveled as the capstone. Substitution, Athletics, and Headhunter also get some levels to make up for lack of Calligraphy/Sealing levels (though it may be worth leveling Sealing a bit, I dunno though.
tl;dr PS only gets expensive as time goes on; I am getting the feeling that it and the Balanced build will increase by about the same after this point, but who knows.
I'm tired as fuck and my math is probably wrong. Have mercy.
EDIT: I WAS WRONG I DID A MATH ERROR
PS got mildy cheaper than the Balanced Build. This changes things slightly; at the 15k and 20k mark I would begin to anticipate PS leveling be cheaper in the thousands-range of XP, and it may be worth doing the PS-only build if we are expecting to need PS 80-90.
So the answer isn't really clear right now. The balanced route outperforms early (as in, within the next couple years) while the Full PS route outperforms as our capstone stat rises into the 70's and 80's. Depending on how long we have left to fix the Great Seal, either of these routes could be the more optimal one. Personally, I lean balanced, on the suspicion that the PS projects we'll be able to complete in the meantime will make up for falling slightly behind on bignumer years from now, but I'm not confident about it.
The only thing every route has in common is that the best thing to do initially is push PS to 26, where it caps out at eff 51. But after that, we could have the total stall for years that you described or we could have a slower (about 30%-50% as fast as the end of our initial burst) but still consistent and immediate growth.
