User:Tycho44

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Tycho Yarr Everett

There are those who claim that the shaggy beard woven with native monkeypaw charms and his "unusully affactad menner uf speeken" are simply a front, and that this coin-shuffling pirate is none other than the right honourable Tycho Everett of the Royal Academy of Turf Accounting, New Arkham division. The bookie mysteriously disappeared from Malton following a 44-1 payoff on NecroTech serum amid allegations of insider trading.
Shortly thereafter, Tycho "Yarr" Everett surfaced in The Scurvy Crew of The Hell-born Strumpet, where he marked for billiards, darts, and mumblety-peg. Tycho made odds on tomorrow's wind, yesterday's grog consumption, rats in the stew, and the likelihood of the Strumpet wrecking on the heretofore undiscovered island of Shartak.
After a particularly unfortunate instance of the latter wager left him bankrupt, Tycho marched forth into the uncharted jungle. His modest mission: To inventory, catalog, and obtain search odds for all items to be found on the entire island of Shartak. To track movement of these items through trading huts and between outsiders and natives. To locate natural resource locations, to engage in monopolistic trade practices, and to exploit arbitrage opportunities. With the help of Lord Shade's new organization, The South Shartak Trading Company, Tycho hopes to use market commerce and wild gambling excesses to form the backbone of the new Shartak economy.
  • Current wealth: 600 gold coins and 10+ gems.
  • Current wealth target: 1001 gold coins and 10+ gems.

Current kills:

  • killed an outsider-killer from Raktam who attacked me repeatedly (~April, before logs).
  • killed Armadox (July 14). The self-described "butcher" attacked without provocation and made a good effort to kill me, but friendly allies helped me out.

Significant contributions to:

As well as: Locations Terrain Skills Character Classes Items Death Hut

Tycho spends entirely too much time editing wikis. --Tycho44 12:23, 21 December 2024 (BST)

Guilder.png This user or clan supports the Identify Friend or Foe initiative.

Suggestions

Here are some of my Shartak suggestions; most of these suggestions have been made independently by other players as well.

Suggestions that appear to be implemented (or known to be in the pipeline):

  • blowpipe poison of 1 per turn for 4 turns
  • ranged weapons have a reduced chance of reactive animal attacks
  • contact home shaman for cheaper than contact roaming shaman
  • short-stock and long-stock pricing in the Trading Hut
  • less FAK restocking in the Trading Huts, especially in the Pirate Shipwreck
  • time-based item depletion in the Trading Hut (e.g. 10% per day)
  • per-trade item depletion in the Trading Hut (e.g. trader receives N items but only restocks N-1 of them)
  • Tracking Mastery (costs 0.5 AP to track)
  • geographically-specific charms (monkey claw, parrot feather, rabbit foot found in different areas of Shartak, rather than equal chance of each charm in every location)
  • Exorcism (send spirit random distance in a random direction)

Tycho44 proposal for Trading Hut pricing

Problem: the Trading Huts reward characters who sit at home, and penalize characters who travel to foreign encampments. It is well-established that a character can earn 36+ gold coins per day by sitting at home and dumping at the local trader. Since camps are several days journey apart, foreign camps have to promise +72 gold coins of extra profit -- not just trade value, but trade value over and above the trade value in the local trading hut.

Not viable: Changing the First-Aid Kit find rate in the Medical Hut is not a solution. Local dumping can be performed from the Medical Hut, the Ammo Hut, the Treasure Hold, a Mango Tree, or even by recycling the Trader's inventory. Reducing particular find rates will harm the game in various ways, but will never improve the desirability of foreign travel. (Unless certain desired items are not locally available at all, such as GPS Units, Gems, Charms, the Heavy Sword, and so on.)

Not viable: Tweaking short-stock and long-stock pricing is not a solution. Stock-based pricing makes foreign travel vastly more risky and undesirable -- characters are encouraged to stay at their home camp and take advantage of known shortages, rather than risk carting stock overland for days to a foreign camp, only to have a single character dump enough to destroy the demand-inventory. And in order to obtain profit levels that would justify a two-day journey, demand prices would have to be absolutely ridiculous -- surely 10 or 20 times the normal pricing.

Solution: Prices in the Trading Hut should reward you based upon the distance you've traveled. By directly addressing the issue, the solution is guaranteed to work. Here's how it happens:

(1) Characters who are new to a foreign Trading Hut receive a very beneficial exchange rate, perhaps for a full day or so. "How exciting! It's not often that I see a new face around here. Do you have any items that you'd like to trade?"

(2) After a character has spent several days in the same Trading Hut, even in a foreign camp, the local trader becomes bored, and the trade rate returns to normal. This encourages the trading character to move on. "You're becoming a familiar sight around here. Haven't I already seen what you have to offer?"

(3) Characters who farm the Medical Hut in their home encampment and repeatedly dump items to their own trader receive the poorest exchange rate. "You do realize that there's an entire island out there to explore, don't you?"

This entire process could be implemented using a single hidden character flag, that contains a time-stamp and a camp name. Whenever the character interacts with a different Trader (in a new camp), the flag updates. If the player is newly interacting with a foreign trader (timestamp <24 hours old), the trade rate is Favorable. If the player is interacting long-term with the same foreign trader (timestamp >24 hours) or is newly interacting with their home camp (timestamp <24 hours), the trade rate is Normal. If the player is interacting repeatedly with their home trader (timestamp >24 hours), the rate is Unfavorable.

Although these favorable/unfavorable trade values might not be sufficient to make travelers wealthy, at least implementing this suggestion will encourage travel and reward greater interaction in Shartak.

Note that this suggestion could be stacked on top of the current long/short and language-based pricing systems. Or this suggestion could fully replace the long/short pricing rules.

Here are some of my Shartak suggestions that have not been implemented:

Tycho44 proposal for rifle/blowpipe skill tree

  • basic level: 20% accuracy on firearms
    • General Marksmanship (universal skill): +15% = 35%
      • Advanced Marksmanship (soldier/warrior only): +15% = 50%
        • Expert Marksmanship (soldier/warrior only): +15% = 65%
  • base level: 1 AP to reload 1 ammo
    • Rapid Reload (soldier/warrior only): half-cost = 0.5 AP
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