OK but let's say you and I both have a level 49 arc, that provides a +70% contribution bonus. Advancing to level 50 costs 2605 FP. Suppose we swap 1303 with each other to lock up first place. When it levels, the base 1st place reward is 780 FP, but we will each collect 1326 FP
Uh huh...
Now I find someone else and swap the remaining 1302, but I put on an extra point and grab 1st from them too.
You mean you need to try to sucker another player into swapping 50% of the FPs for the entire GB level, but such that you get to secure 1st place on his level 49 Arc, meanwhile you cheat him of an equitable FP swap, since he never has the chance to secure 1st place on your Arc? I doubt that any player with enough savvy to own a level 49 Arc in the first place, would be this foolish about the FP Swaps they agree to. Personally, I try to never pay more than 25% of the total FPs required for the current GB level in order to secure reward slot #2. So there is no way in Hell I would ever agree to swap to your GB as your number slot #2 winner while also agreeing to donate the same number FPs to the current GB level as the player who secured slot #1 — that is beyond foolish. Your strategy with how to get the remaining 1,302 FPs donated to your Arc is unsustainable at best, because eventually you will run out of players to dupe in this way on your server who also own level 49 Arcs.
so we make a 13 FP profit ... So I've leveled my arc and made a net profit of 25 FPs
But for the moment, let’s continue along your line of logic. First, I must point out that your math is incorrect — you would actually get 46 extra FPs if check your math again. And after adjusting the math, you would be saying to yourself: "With the 2,606 FPs that I just swapped to this level of my Arc, I scored 2 x 1st place reward packages (and lost one swap partner because of your greed), and both packages were buffed by my Level 49 Arc bonus, which means that I just scored 1,326 FPs x 2 times = 2,652 total FPs. And since 2,652s FPs - 2,606 FPs = 46 FPs, therefore I profited 46 FPs."
The assumptions you would be making here are not necessarily 100% correct. Why not? It is true that you would have scored 46 more FPs than you spent to level up your own Arc +1 level, for this specific GB level. However, is not necessarily true that these 46 FPs are actually
a profit — they might be a profit and they might not be a profit; this really depends on all of the previous FP swaps you have completed since you first constructed your Arc back once it reached level 1.
Remember, you would have had to swap FPs to reach every level below level 49 on your Arc. So even if we said you could follow the precise (unfair) swapping strategy that you laid out above for each Arc level: where you swap fairly with one player on each level where both you and your partner score 1st place on each other's Arc, and then you also screw over one sucker on each level where you score 1st on the Sucker's Arc and the Sucker only got to score 2nd place on your Arc. Let's say you did this for every Arc level between level 1 to level 49. Even in this unsustainable swap fantasy you have, not every single GB level among those 49 GB levels would have turned what you think of as "a profit". On many (if not on most) of those earlier GB levels, you actually needed to swap more FPs to level up your Arc than you could have possible scored, even with screwing over one sucker on each GB level and even after your Arc bonus was applied to every reward package that you scored. So very early on in the lower GB levels, you were actually accumulating successive losses on each level, until finally one day your Arc reached a certain level where all of sudden it "profited" in terms of you scoring more FPs reaching the next level than you actually spent on taking it up that one level. So the 46 FPs "profit" you think you made on level 49→50, and whatever "profit" you think you made on level 48→49 or level 47→48, or even those "profits" yet to come on level 50→51 and level 51→52, and so on, must all be balanced against your earlier losses you incurred, before you can actually say that you have turned a real, mathematical, profit.
Within the Frame of Reference of this one Arc level, yes you profited 46 FPs on these two swaps on this one GB level. But within the larger Frame of Reference of you owning your Arc and all the 1,000s and 1,000s of FPs you had to swap to get up to where it is, the actual point your Arc reaches a profit (and it will or maybe even already has), is a function of how many FP Swaps you have participated in, how high you scored, and the size of the base reward packages that you scored. Now certainly, by the time you reach some Stratosphere level on the Arc, it will have paid for itself. But the reality is you would have gone very deep into FP losses, before you ever reached
FP Swap Nirvana and everything started to become self-sustaining from that point forward. Players who own level 49 Arcs also own fields of SoKs, and many GBs that produce FPs per 24-hours (CdM, IT, HS, CC, and AO). A lot of land in their city, along with many GB decisions throughout the game went into them being able to work a Stratosphere Strategy.
You are focused on what I call “Profitability of Swaps and Swoops" — where you spend FPs on a GB to secure a reward slot, and you try to maximize the rewards your score, hopefully turning a profit on each and every swap or swoop. And certainly the Arc' s donation reward bonus certainly helps in this regard. There can be no doubt that the Arc is single most powerful GB in the game of FoE. However, you and I are actually having two different conversations. You don't seem to understand what I am talking about at all.
I'm talking about spending FPs in Swaps to level up GBs in such a way that the player maximizes:
- The total production capacity of our city — how much STUFF our city produces, which includes: diamonds, medals, coins, supplies, units, goods (both refined and unrefined), FPs, BPs, combat victories, PvP Tower Points, Rank Points, Guild Power, and Support Bonus. These are all the things that we, in some way, produce from our city.
- The total efficiency our city's production of all of the STUFF I listed above (measured in total value-per-tile-of land each building consumes). How much of each thing can we produce, from the same finite amount of land we have in our city.
- The rate at which a player can increase both #1 above (production capacity) and #2 above (production efficiency), through leveling up their GBs in an optimal order such that each new GB level reached helps the city produce more and more, produce more-per-tile of land, without actually adding more land to the city.
You are not even close to having the same conversation I'm having. Keep in mind that this HQS comes
before the Stratosphere Strategy — So we follow my HQS guide in order progress from a 16x16 city with no GBs to get our city set up such that we can more easily afford to participate in a Stratosphere Strategy later on in the game as quickly as possible. Read the objectives of the HQS ealry on in the proper sections of this guide, I actually mention this.
You can either build a hotrod, or drive a hot rod — it is much less effective (if not dangerous) to do both at the same time. The HQS is about building the hot rod. The Stratosphere Strategy is about cruising in the hotrod
Like I pointed out in my last post, a +1% increase in the number of FPs scored from ANY GB level (even a very lucrative GB level) is actually a trivial gain to the efficiency of our city. The FPs you scored from the swap are a function of the swap, those extra FPs you scored are not a function of the rate at which the bonus from your Arc is increasing. You are looking at the FPs that you score by swapping FPs to an Arc. I'm looking at the rate at which we increase the bonuses we get back from leveling up a GB. And I’m further comparing the value of each GB levels bonus increase, compared to how many FPs must be swapped to that GB level, at then looking at how much value we could get from other levels on lower level GBs by swapping the same number of FPs.
Let me go back to the hot rod analogy and state the difference in our two conversations another way — you are looking at the velocity of your hot rod, while I am looking at how we modify the hot rod to improve its rate of acceleration. Since by definition acceleration is a the rate of change in velocity, and I'm looking at the rate of change in acceleration, this means that what I am looking to improve is more powerful than what you are looking at improving.
So as not to confuse other players, let me expound on this.
Let's say a player’s city sits in FE with a level 49 Arc and let’s also say the same city has:
- A level 3 Capitol constructed back in the Industrial Age
- A level 6 LoA constructed back in the Iron Age
- A level 5 StM constructed back in HMA
That player has more-less wasted so much game progress he could have had as a result of the under-leveled GBs in his city. Instead, he could have: a level 49 Arc, a level 10 Capitol, a Level 10 StM, and a level 10 LoA, in the same amount of time playing the game.
Leveling up his Capitol from level 3 to level 10 would permit him to sell off 1 Arcology, which in turn would permit him to add several more SoKs and SSWs to his city, which in turn would help him get the level 49 Arc much quicker since his city now produces more FPs per-day in exactly the same amount of land.
By leveling up both his StM and LoA to level 10 he would have buffed all of his coins and supplies production going all the way back to when he first constructed those GBs, every day between then and now, his coins and supply production would have been GREATLY BUFFED, which means he could have afforded to spam more UBQs per day between then and now and thus he would have scored more FP packs per day, every day between then and now, which he could have swapped to a partner's GB and scored even more FPs packs from more FPs swapped. All of this would have been facilitated by converting highly efficient coins and supplies production into FPs.
I've owned a level 10 LoA since back in Colonial Age and my StM has been level 7 (or higher ) since then as well. StM can actually be 1-2 levels lower than LoA, for the purposes of affording UBQs, since StM bonuses are far-more efficient per level than those of LoA. Even still, I recently completed level 10 StM a few weeks ago. I've also owned a level 10 Arc since Colonial Age. My CF has been level 9 since Colonial age and is currently level 10.
GBs like StM and LoA often get overlooked by players like jaelis, because they are not as sexy as the Arc. A GB like CF might not even get constructed in many cities, let alone reach level 10. But in fact, these GBs combine to be even powerful, when all three of them are leveraged correctly as I recommend in this HQS. My StM + LoA + CF, actually combine to produce more total value per tile of land per the FPs spent to level them up to level 10, Than my Arc provides (and mine is like level 14 now, and I'm about to start Stratosphere it like discussed earlier). Make no mistake, the Arc is an AWESOME GB. But also make no mistake, we get more total value back, compared to the FPs we spend, by leveling GBs up toward level 10 than by taking GBs above level 10.
Not a week goes by where I don't purchase at least 50 FPs outright with coins. Keep in mind my next single FP will cost me 234,450 coins. This means I'm paying nearly a quarter million coins per FP. The ability to sustain affording FPs with coins is because I own a level 10 StM whose bonus is being applied to my field of SoKs, Sacred Sky Watches (SSWs), and Tribal Squares.
Not a day goes by where I don't complete at least 10 UBQs. Keep in mind that in FE where I am, 1 UBQ costs me 250K coins + 250K supplies. I can afford to spend this amount at least 10 times per day. And while I spam these UBQs, my coins and supplies stockpiles still rise each day. On some days I just sit and spam UBQs until my supplies stockpile gets down the the minimum I want to keep on hand, which is 90 million. This means I burn through at least 2.5 million coins and 2.5 million supplies daily on UBQs, and it doesn't phase me at all. This ability to sustain my UBQ habit is because of my level 10 StM bonus and my level 10 LoA bonus. GBs that players like jaelis would tend to leave under-leveled in their pursuit of that level 50 Arc.
Now these UBQs that I spam are also buffed by my level 10 CF bonus. This means that I score 13 FE goods 30% of my UBQs. I score 2,250 medals about 8% of my UBQs. I also score 5 FPs about 8% of my UBQs. I'm actually consistently producing 5-15 FPs per day from three GBs that don't even produce FPs directly, by way of converting their GBs bonuses into completing more UBQs, which lets me convert highly efficient coins and supplies production into: FE goods, medals, and FPs. Oh and by the way, the 100+ FE goods I score daily from these same UBQs are easily worth 45 FPs in trade when I trade them to a player willing to spend FPs on my GBs in exchange for my FE goods.
So yes my original statement is more than true, level up all of the GBs that I recommend to you to level 10, before you start entering a Stratosphere Strategy of taking select GBs above level 10. You will get far more total value back by doing so and you will also get that level 50 Arc sooner than a player like jaelis will. And you won't need to try to screw over some player with his unscrupulous swap strategy.