Word of trust
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Word of trust
Speak to the prisoner while using psychic suggestion to reduce their resistance to recruitment. This can only reduce a prisoner's resistance, but cannot recruit them.
Base Stats
- Type
- Psycast
Ability
- Psylink Level
- 1
- Psyfocus Cost
- 60%
- Neural Heat Gain
- 0
- Casting Time
- 120 ticks (2 secs)
- Caster Must Be Capable of Violence
- False
Word of trust is a level 1 psycast that reduces a prisoner's resistance to recruitment.
Acquisition[edit]
There are two ways to acquire the word of trust psycast:
- Upon reaching psylink level 1, a random psycast of level 1 is granted regardless of how this level up is achieved. This won't apply if the psycaster already knew one or more level 1 psycast.
- Word of trust can also be acquired from a psytrainer naming it. See the psytrainer page for further details.
Summary[edit]
Upon casting, Word of trust will reduce the resistance of a target prisoner by −12. Valid targets for this psycast are any prisoners of your colony, disqualifying those that are psychically deaf, unwaveringly loyal, incapacitated, or those with 0 resistance. Note that the resistance reduction of this psycast is unaffected by Psychic Sensitivity, despite psychically deaf pawns being untargetable. Like all other "Word of" psycasts, the caster must be directly adjacent to their target in order to use Word of trust.
Analysis[edit]
Word of trust is a highly effective tool for speeding up the recruitment of pawns. Most useful when one lacks a skilled warden, and provides a preferable alternative to slavery for the expedited recruitment of prisoners. Additionally, as a level 1 psycast, Word of trust can be acquired fairly early into a colony's lifespan, which is when it also happens to be most useful - that is, during the period where expanding the number of colonists tends to be a primary goal, and where the overall Social skill of the colony is at its lowest. Additionally, as most early-game raider types have a maximum resistance of less than 12, Word of trust can make prisoner recruitment instant, though this becomes less true as more dangerous and loyal raider types appear. Additionally, once skilled wardens or sufficient pawn numbers have been acquired, the use of Word of trust becomes largely extraneous, as the prospect of acquiring a 9th or 10th pawn somewhat faster is significantly less impactful than the prospect of increasing your numbers from 3 to 4, for example.
Word of trust becomes significantly more useful in colonies using the Inhumanizing precept, as the staggering −12 offset to Social incurred by all affected pawns makes recruiting prisoners by traditional means painfully slow, unless one is able to prevent a socially-capable pawn from becoming Inhumanized for the purposes of acting as a warden. Meanwhile, Word of trust provides a method to recruit pawns not dependent on Social skill, only requiring a level 1 psycaster and sufficient psyfocus, though obtaining Word of trust itself can be a matter of luck.
Lastly, Word of trust faces some competition from Brainwipe ritual as a tool for expedited prisoner recruitment. While Word of trust can only reduce a prisoner's resistance by a maximum of −12 in one sitting, at a significant psyfocus cost, Brainwipe can completely reduce a pawn's resistance to 0 with a single use, taking only a few in-game hours. However, as Brainwipe ritual is a reasonably late unlock, requires a fairly valuable resource in a single shard for every use, incurs a coma with a variable duration depending on ritual quality, and has several other unique uses besides such as removing unwaveringly loyalty and inhumanization, the two tools have very little overlap in practice, and fulfil separate roles in a colony.
Version history[edit]
- 1.2.2719 - Added.