Today we’re releasing a new set of balance changes meant to address several issues with the Unterzee. These are meant to address long-standing play issues, and also give players renewed reasons to go out to zee – something that was identified as a point of feedback after other balance changes earlier this year.

Tribute

Tribute – the mechanic of giving resources to the Tiger Keeper in London and then turning them into other resources at the Court of the Wakeful Eye – has long been a major part of the game economy, in ways that have been variously problematic. Over time, we’ve gotten to the point where we’re seeing negative feedback about it even from the optimizer players who most care about generating echos.

The major sticking point here is that logging on and having your entire play session just be getting blitzed with the Minister of Culture is not a great play experience. We’ve tried to, over time, reduce the incidence of branches that cost more than one action in the game, as they don’t generally feel great to play except in cases where they are conserving clicks (as in the option to generate Casing faster in the Flit).

The other side of this is that as you unlock more of Fallen London, you’re supposed to gain access to new elements of the economy that are supposed to be better and better than previous ones – either by unlocking new activities, or by existing activities scaling up. Tribute, however, comes along early in the midgame and then becomes a central part of players’ strategies for the remainder of the game, mostly because it’s the best way to use certain Favours.

With all this in mind, we’ve chosen to tamp it down pretty hard, placing it at a level where it’s midgame-appropriate but tapers off as you progress the game more. We’re trying a new strategy for making this kind of adjustment – after these changes, the profitability of generating and spending Tribute will gradually and permanently taper off as you do so in-game. This is intended to give players who have some amount of saved resources the opportunity to convert them at something close to the original expected rate; but also it means that, for newer players unlocking the Court of the Wakeful Eye for the first time, it’ll be a bigger spike in resources than otherwise.

Full changes:

Added three new qualities tracking how much Tribute you’ve generated from Favours, Winsome Dispossessed Orphans, and other economy items.
As those qualities go over 100 (for Favours) or 250 (for other qualities), the amount of Tribute generated begins to taper off.
- Tribute from Favours tapers off from 23 down to 11.
- Tribute from Mountain-Sherds economy items tapers off from 35 down to 22.
- Tribute from most other economy items also tapers off slightly, usually only by one point.
- Tribute from Orphans tapers off from 25 down to 20.
Spending Tribute on economy items at the Court of the Wakeful Eye now costs 1 action, rather than 4.
Spending Favours to generate Tribute now costs 0 actions.

Favours

Similarly, what’s intended as the default spend of Favours in the late game hasn’t really filled this role – partly because the value gained from it is a little underwhelming, partly because some of the items granted are too hard to turn into other useful resources.

Spending Favours at Jericho Locks now gives 30e worth of resources (was 27.5e)
Spending Criminal favours now gives Bone Fragments rather than a Human Arm.
Spending Bohemian favours now gives two Ivory Humeri rather than Holy Thighs. Ivory Humeri are now sellable at the Upper River for scrip.

Zailing

We do anticipate we might have to make more significant changes here in the future, but we don’t want to overshoot when uptuning things. First, we want to make buried treasure – a mechanic unlocked by accessing Piracy – a bit more rewarding and friendly to use. Second, we want to bring the Khanate up in line with things that unlock around the same stage of game progression.

Completing a Khaganian Intrigue now gives an additional Vital Intelligence.
Hidden stashes (from ‘A Message in a Bottle’) can now be retrieved without actually entering certain locations that lock you into a set of actions before you can leave.
Hidden stashes now have more random upside; in rare cases, they can be 10 or 50 times the normal size.
The branches in ‘Arriving at Port’, to either enter a zee location or cancel doing so, now cost 0 actions.