I had a lot of fun with this one. There were a lot of things I missed, and I could have spent a lot longer looking for patterns if I’d had more spare time. The 2d + time meant a lot of room to search, but this was partially offset by sensible real-world structure (e.g. northern icebergs, reefs near land, etc.) I agree with Yonge that this level of complexity was nice for a change but would be a bit excessive as the norm. I used a combination of Excel and Python and didn’t have as much trouble with the data format as others seem to have had.
As far as my strategy, I started with routes that avoided previously dangerous hexes (my eastern route was a bit long, but I was hoping that the two ships sailing together could support each other or at least increase the joint probability by correlating encounters). I missed the migrating merfolk, so I avoided the shorter northern route.
I didn’t spend as much time selecting ships. I noticed that Dhows had better survival rates but missed that they were assigned easier voyages. I didn’t notice the captain effect on reef encounter rate and chose Dhows to avoid the high per-encounter damage given that I had a lot of unavoidable reefs on my routes. I chose ships that had a long history of successful voyages and did manage to get two seamanship-3 captains.
I had a lot of fun with this one. There were a lot of things I missed, and I could have spent a lot longer looking for patterns if I’d had more spare time. The 2d + time meant a lot of room to search, but this was partially offset by sensible real-world structure (e.g. northern icebergs, reefs near land, etc.) I agree with Yonge that this level of complexity was nice for a change but would be a bit excessive as the norm. I used a combination of Excel and Python and didn’t have as much trouble with the data format as others seem to have had.
As far as my strategy, I started with routes that avoided previously dangerous hexes (my eastern route was a bit long, but I was hoping that the two ships sailing together could support each other or at least increase the joint probability by correlating encounters). I missed the migrating merfolk, so I avoided the shorter northern route.
I didn’t spend as much time selecting ships. I noticed that Dhows had better survival rates but missed that they were assigned easier voyages. I didn’t notice the captain effect on reef encounter rate and chose Dhows to avoid the high per-encounter damage given that I had a lot of unavoidable reefs on my routes. I chose ships that had a long history of successful voyages and did manage to get two seamanship-3 captains.