Sleuth Home - Message Boards - Sleuth Talk

Aug-19-2010 12:42

I'm getting frustrated- Noir seems to be mostly luck, especially doing harder cases. It seems SO much random that working to gain advantages and thinking seems pretty useless.

Does anyone have any good strategies that work for them or is this just kind of a game of chance.

Maybe some of my frustration comes from being a long-time Shades of Mystery player and not really liking games of chance. Maybe some people should just play one or the other. : )

Aug-19-2010 16:45

What do you mean "Noir seems to be mostly luck"?

Are you referring to solving cases? If so, there is a formula to follow that will help you solve cases...

As soon as you have one of these you can accuse:

PE (physical evidence) + false/stated no alibi = GUILTY!
WE (witeness evidence) + false/stated no alibi = GUILTY!
2 WE = GUILTY!

A clam is NOT the same as a no!

If you CANNOT get an alibi out of anyone, and you have done research, QUIT the case. It is always better to quit than take a guess and get an FA!!

I hope this helps, and you are more than welcome to send me a private message if you have any questions :)

Aug-19-2010 20:15

Thanks, these two posts have been EXTREMELY helpful!

I am doing a lot of AI cases (trying to earn skill pts and make up time as I do a lot of easy cases for TH's) and I'm sure that is part of my problem.

I did use a list of how many suspects for each level but it's been wrong a few times. What list do you use Serena?

I do have research but hadn't occurred to me to ask males first! Great!

I got Judge of Character trying to save questions but really it doesn't tell you anything you don't already know except for being an indication of which suspects are going to clam up early.

Can't quite figure out how to tackle the faction side of the game as you only get 12 games a day and I'm not sure how that works- I assume you quit games that would remove pts from faction you are trying to get. I will look at who gives Hypnotism skill and work on them.

Jas I've seen your formula and it helped me SO MUCH when I first started- read MANY of your posts to learn the game! THANKS!

Again, THANKS!

Aug-19-2010 22:45

PM sent in regards to the faction questions. Don't want to spoil things for anyone! :)

Aug-19-2010 23:51

"Sometimes it is helpful to know if a person with a real alibi matches a piece of evidence, don't just assume it's always best to ask if fake alibis match."

Serena's absolutely right on this one. It's something it took me ages to work out, but once I did it makes a lot of difference. Once you've got the right numbers for how many suspects and how many real alibis for each level of case, think about which suspects those pieces of PE have to belong to.

Aug-20-2010 09:20

I think I'm missing something. It would be good to know which PE belongs to real alibi suspect, if you already know that person has real alibi?

I think I am missing the exact reason why it's good to know when real alibi matches a PE

I don't understand about thinking which suspects those PE belong to. I see that if you have 4 real alibis established then you know the rest have false alibis (or none) so you could stop asking Townies but ultimately if your guy is guilty don't you need to ask for alibi to make sure, so you want to save question for that townie which means you can't really use those questions anyway. Am I making sense??

I think there is some deductive reasoning that may be escaping me or could be I'm just TOO much on that old SoM track!

Cordelia, I'm sorry I'm so thick-headed, could you explain the last sentence a bit more?

Oh and btw! I never have enough questions to find out much about PE anyway! Am I doing something wrong?? I load up on Charm bumps and have as many skills as I can get but when you only have 3 or 4 questions and you have to ask about 1 or 2 alibis and you have to ask about 3 or 4 suspects on 2 or 3 threads it just doesn't seem to matter! LOL The PE seems to be something that I try at the end in case I don't get WE. Am I doing this backward?

Thanks so much for your help and if you think this is exhausting just think what I've put poor Shell through-I bet her fingers are blistered! : )

Thanks guys

Aug-20-2010 09:55

Ok I'll try to go through this point by point. If you know that a piece of evidence points to a suspect with a real alibi then you have one less piece of evidence to worry about. If I have 3 pieces of evidence and I have identified that evidence to 2 suspects with real evidence then I know the third piece is the game changer. So if you know if the evidence is straight/curly or male/female etc you can remove any suspects who aren't of the type of hair/build/gender you want. It's not how a detective would do it but if you know the game mechanics then you can exploit them.

I think I get your second point...You do want to make sure that the suspect has a false alibi if you can but once again if you manipulate your way through the mechanics you can't really go wrong. I hope this answers your question.

I think what Cordelia is saying is pick the suspects which least match the evidence. If you have 3 pieces of evidence and your suspect matches only one of those suspects one question will remove them from your possible suspect list. As opposed to someone who matches all 3 pieces of evidence in which you need to use 3 questions to remove them from the list. The trick here and with the rest of sleuth is 'question optimisation' or getting the most out of one question.

You went tend to be able to milk a lot of questions out of anyone at AI 3-4 is normal. I do my PE before WE, WE is really last resort for me. But theres no right way to play sleuth so...you choose how you like it.

Aug-20-2010 10:21

Ding-Ding-Ding Lights are going off!

LOL, I get some of this and was doing some of it.

So, will each PE evidence match the guilty suspect. Only one PE matches guilty suspect and you have to figure out which that is? I've not been removing suspects as maybe I should I've just been trying to find the suspects out of the list of suspects.

I'm assuming the first thing everyone does is find the list of suspects and then figure out who has fake vs. real alibis and then does either WE or PE questions?

I graduated high school in case you're wondering ; )

Aug-20-2010 13:05

Thanks everyone for the help. Sometimes I fail to explain things properly and being the only other active player with any experience in Legends the newer players are definatley at a disadvantage.

The community is the best part of this game.

Thanks Shell

Aug-20-2010 14:58

Shell did a brilliant job, she can't help that it takes more than one brick to jar something loose in my head but she walked me through a case and with all these post and some reading that Aknas gave me I FINALLY figured that I was working the case exactly OPPOSITE! Had to get rid of the way I do things in SoM.

Now all your posts make PERFECT sense!!

THANKS! I get it!! *grin*

Aug-20-2010 23:24

Won 3 AI's in a row; it's WAY more challenging and fun this way!!

Thanks again everyone for all the great help!!