This challenge is very interesting; thank you for making it. I don’t think I’ve found all the answers, but I’ve gotten as far as I’m going on my own.
Decision:
Take The Bloody Diamond to L13, Q6-P6-O6-N6-M7-M8-L8-K9-K10-K11-L12-L13, then (hopefully) back the same way.
(I thought about a detour to avoid whatever’s (not?) going on in L12, but decided it’s probably fine.)
Take The Orange Falcon to E8, Q6-P6-O6-N6-M5-L5-K5-J5-I5-H5-G5-F5-F6-E7-E8, then (hopefully) back the same way.
(I considered alternate routes that punch through F8 and G8 while avoiding icebergs, but decided to gamble that E7 isn’t a Kraken hex.)
Location insights:
Pirates, Storms, Sharks and Harpies seem to be everywhere; no way to avoid these, save making your journey as short as possible. (ditto Dragons, probably, but they’re rare enough that it’s hard to say for sure)
Reefs are in every sea hex adjacent to land, except for some adjacent to the ports.
Icebergs are more common further north.
Merfolk have a territory in the centre of the map, and another in the southwest.
Kraken have very specific hunting grounds, which my routes go to great lengths to avoid.
WMF occurs almost exclusively in hexes adjacent to Q1 and J8. Dragons and/or Wizards on the islands?
Ship insights:
Barquentines and Dhows have 20HP; Carracks and Galleons have 30HP. The effects of attacks are denominated in these hitpoints, so it’s worth converting percentages to them.
Dhows and Carracks handle encounters with living enemies (except Sharks, for some reason) much worse than Barquentines and Galleons.
I’m pretty sure that a Galleon is just a 30HP Barquentine, and a Carrack is just a 30HP Dhow.
As a general rule, Galleon>Barquentine>Carrack>Dhow. All apparent evidence to the contrary is because the Admirality know Dhows are terrible and keep giving them easy jobs.
The Admirality really don’t like sending ships out unless they’ve spent at least five weeks docked; they do this so rarely that I don’t have enough data to infer whether the prohibition makes sense.
Encounter insights:
This scenario is dice-based, as can be seen from the distributions of some of the simpler encounters: icebergs do 1d6 damage, sharks do min(2d4)-1, harpies do 1d6-2 or 1d6-4 depending on ship type.
Merfolk seem to do zero damage exactly half the time. If I had more time I’d investigate what this means.
Pirates never do exactly 1HP damage. I suspect that—when they damage ships at all—their damage is calculated from “roll XdY, pick the two lowest”.
Secrets(?):
Both ships are heading to Kraken territory; I don’t think this is a coincidence. I suspect their ‘cargo’ is either sacrifices or explosives.
There’s exactly one Carrack that claims to have taken 5% damage, which should be impossible. Did its’ captain lie?
It’s suspicious that L12 is so rarely visited, especially when the Kraken-infested hexes to the south are so popular. My fear that it houses a history-eating monster which causes visiting ships to never have existed is *almost* certainly ill-founded; more likely, it’s just the one hex in the Admirality’s waters that’s not obviously on the way to anywhere.
Some thoughts and insights from my notes that I somehow forgot to write up the first time:
Galleons, Barquentines and Carracks have eerily similar average planned route lengths, suggesting the Admiralty treat these three ship types as interchangeable in their planning.
This is important because it means that [number of sinkings]/[number of trips taken] is an unusually selection-bias-proof estimator of sinkability for everything but Dhow.
This estimator says pretty clearly that Galleons>Barquentines>Carracks.
However
The Admiralty keeps recklessly sending ships into hexes at risk of reefs, kraken, icebergs and WMF. Since my chosen routes dodge all of these (though I didn’t notice I was icebergproof until other commenters pointed out the seasonality effect), the main questions become how Galleons handle the remaining threats (pretty well), and how frequently they encounter them (. . . whoops!).
And also
I have to plot routes which are unusually long: if Galleons handle marathons worse than sprints, that’s a problem.
Unrelatedly:
Dhows appear to handle a lot of long-tailed encounters (especially WMF) better than Carracks, but I think it’s a statistical trick of the light. When faced with an extreme situation, they die and can’t report how much damage they took; this skews damage/encounter ratings in their favor.
The one place where they genuinely do appear to handle a threat significantly better than Carracks on a by-hitpoint basis is with Merfolk.
The ratios of average recorded damage for Merfolk encounters lead me to believe that Merfolk damage is calculated as a percentage of total hull integrity, and not in terms of hitpoints like (all?) other encounters.
Somethings more probable than a history eating monster, although not based on me looking at any data:
a) insurance fraud. (Yes, this trip is very risky, but it’s very lucrative if we succeed! Oh, no! Well insurance will cover it. Wait, they don’t? Uh… what if the ship didn’t go there? What if it went somewhere else, where it’s not our fault?) Issues: requires data showing that something is a bad idea, or stories.
b) Secrets are hidden by having people not go where they could find them. (May require centralized control, without alternatives; not too unlikely in this scenario, though.)
This challenge is very interesting; thank you for making it. I don’t think I’ve found all the answers, but I’ve gotten as far as I’m going on my own.
Decision:
Take The Bloody Diamond to L13, Q6-P6-O6-N6-M7-M8-L8-K9-K10-K11-L12-L13, then (hopefully) back the same way.
(I thought about a detour to avoid whatever’s (not?) going on in L12, but decided it’s probably fine.)
Take The Orange Falcon to E8, Q6-P6-O6-N6-M5-L5-K5-J5-I5-H5-G5-F5-F6-E7-E8, then (hopefully) back the same way.
(I considered alternate routes that punch through F8 and G8 while avoiding icebergs, but decided to gamble that E7 isn’t a Kraken hex.)
Location insights:
Pirates, Storms, Sharks and Harpies seem to be everywhere; no way to avoid these, save making your journey as short as possible. (ditto Dragons, probably, but they’re rare enough that it’s hard to say for sure)
Reefs are in every sea hex adjacent to land, except for some adjacent to the ports.
Icebergs are more common further north.
Merfolk have a territory in the centre of the map, and another in the southwest.
Kraken have very specific hunting grounds, which my routes go to great lengths to avoid.
WMF occurs almost exclusively in hexes adjacent to Q1 and J8. Dragons and/or Wizards on the islands?
Ship insights:
Barquentines and Dhows have 20HP; Carracks and Galleons have 30HP. The effects of attacks are denominated in these hitpoints, so it’s worth converting percentages to them.
Dhows and Carracks handle encounters with living enemies (except Sharks, for some reason) much worse than Barquentines and Galleons.
I’m pretty sure that a Galleon is just a 30HP Barquentine, and a Carrack is just a 30HP Dhow.
As a general rule, Galleon>Barquentine>Carrack>Dhow. All apparent evidence to the contrary is because the Admirality know Dhows are terrible and keep giving them easy jobs.
The Admirality really don’t like sending ships out unless they’ve spent at least five weeks docked; they do this so rarely that I don’t have enough data to infer whether the prohibition makes sense.
Encounter insights:
This scenario is dice-based, as can be seen from the distributions of some of the simpler encounters: icebergs do 1d6 damage, sharks do min(2d4)-1, harpies do 1d6-2 or 1d6-4 depending on ship type.
Merfolk seem to do zero damage exactly half the time. If I had more time I’d investigate what this means.
Pirates never do exactly 1HP damage. I suspect that—when they damage ships at all—their damage is calculated from “roll XdY, pick the two lowest”.
Secrets(?):
Both ships are heading to Kraken territory; I don’t think this is a coincidence. I suspect their ‘cargo’ is either sacrifices or explosives.
There’s exactly one Carrack that claims to have taken 5% damage, which should be impossible. Did its’ captain lie?
It’s suspicious that L12 is so rarely visited, especially when the Kraken-infested hexes to the south are so popular. My fear that it houses a history-eating monster which causes visiting ships to never have existed is *almost* certainly ill-founded; more likely, it’s just the one hex in the Admirality’s waters that’s not obviously on the way to anywhere.
Some thoughts and insights from my notes that I somehow forgot to write up the first time:
Galleons, Barquentines and Carracks have eerily similar average planned route lengths, suggesting the Admiralty treat these three ship types as interchangeable in their planning.
This is important because it means that [number of sinkings]/[number of trips taken] is an unusually selection-bias-proof estimator of sinkability for everything but Dhow.
This estimator says pretty clearly that Galleons>Barquentines>Carracks.
However
The Admiralty keeps recklessly sending ships into hexes at risk of reefs, kraken, icebergs and WMF. Since my chosen routes dodge all of these (though I didn’t notice I was icebergproof until other commenters pointed out the seasonality effect), the main questions become how Galleons handle the remaining threats (pretty well), and how frequently they encounter them (. . . whoops!).
And also
I have to plot routes which are unusually long: if Galleons handle marathons worse than sprints, that’s a problem.
Unrelatedly:
Dhows appear to handle a lot of long-tailed encounters (especially WMF) better than Carracks, but I think it’s a statistical trick of the light. When faced with an extreme situation, they die and can’t report how much damage they took; this skews damage/encounter ratings in their favor.
The one place where they genuinely do appear to handle a threat significantly better than Carracks on a by-hitpoint basis is with Merfolk.
The ratios of average recorded damage for Merfolk encounters lead me to believe that Merfolk damage is calculated as a percentage of total hull integrity, and not in terms of hitpoints like (all?) other encounters.
Secrets(?):
Somethings more probable than a history eating monster, although not based on me looking at any data:
a) insurance fraud. (Yes, this trip is very risky, but it’s very lucrative if we succeed! Oh, no! Well insurance will cover it. Wait, they don’t? Uh… what if the ship didn’t go there? What if it went somewhere else, where it’s not our fault?) Issues: requires data showing that something is a bad idea, or stories.
b) Secrets are hidden by having people not go where they could find them. (May require centralized control, without alternatives; not too unlikely in this scenario, though.)