Psychic reader
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Psychic reader
Gives limited mind-reading ability, improving the user's ability to get the upper hand in negotiations and social situations. The effect is proportional to the user's psychic sensitivity.
Base Stats
- Type
- Medical Items – Body Parts
- Market Value
- 1000
- Mass
- 4 kg
- HP
- 50
- Flammability
- 100%
- thingSetMakerTags
- ImplantEmpireRoyal
- techHediffsTags
- ImplantEmpireRoyal
- tradeTags
- ImplantEmpireRoyal
The Psychic Reader gives a pawn that's been implanted with it a bonus of +50% Negotiation Ability and +10% Trade Price Improvement, both scaling proportionally with the user's psychic sensitivity. Negotiation Ability affects the speed of prisoner recruitment, impact on faction relations when giving gifts, and the outcome of peace talks, while Trade Price Improvement obviously improves trade prices.
Acquisition
Psychic Readers can only be acquired through trade or as a quest reward. They cannot be crafted.
Summary
The psychic reader applies an offset of +50% Negotiation Ability and +10% Trade Price Improvement of the pawn it is installed in. Note that this is additive, not multiplicative with the bonuses provided by increased Social skill - i.e. a Skill 10 pawn would have their TPI increased from 15% to 25%, not 26.5%.
This improvement is approximately equal to 7 additional levels of Social skill, and scales directly to the pawn's Psychic Sensitivity e.g. 200% sensitivity results in +100% to Negotiation Ability and +20% to Trade Price Improvement. Note that only the improvement to TPI affects trade prices.
Analysis
With the addition of trade price improvement offset, the psychic reader is an important tool for any colony that trades heavily. Even with a pawn with a standard psychic sensitivity, it will pay for itself over the course of selling trade goods with a total Market Value of 16600. N.b. that that is market value, not sell price prior to implantation which is almost always significantly lower. On pawns with higher sensitivity, this occurs significantly faster. For colonies that do not trade, the value of 1000 and the limited niche for its application makes it a low priority for targeted acquisition. However since there are no negative effects of having one installed, if one is available, installing it on the colony's Social pawn is a good idea, as they will likely be recruiting prisoners and be the one giving gifts when on caravan.
As both effects scales with psychic sensitivity, it performs best on pawns with the Psychically Sensitive and Hypersensitive traits and synergizes with equipment that buffs sensitivity such as the psychic sensitizer and Eltex equipment. At the maximum possible psychic sensitivity of 408%, it provides the equivalent of just over 27 levels of Social skill, meaning that a skill 0 pawn will outperform a skill 20 Legendary Master when it comes to recruitment or trade.
Should the player wish to employ a strategy involving recruiting pawns with with high recruitment resistances, such as hiring Tribal pawns as a New Arrivals colony to exploit the Anima tree for Psycasting, or hiring large numbers of pawns over the soft limits imposed by their AI storyteller then the value of the psychic reader increases.
Version history
- ? - Added.
- 1.3.3066 - Now improves Trade Price Improvement, previously it had no effect on trade prices.
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