I'm going to use this question as an opportunity to peel back some layers of the onion and show everyone some of the inner workings of HQS.
First, you must keep in mind that when I say that I scored as many as 600 goods on a single day, that would also mean that I didn't score as many medals packages nor as many 5- Packs of FPs on that same day. So when the frequency of scoring one prize goes up, it means the frequency of scoring other prizes will go down, assuming the total number of completed quests remains constant. Now sometimes we get very lucky, where it is the frequency of scoring: coins, supplies, or blueprints goes down and not the frequency of scoring: FPs, medals, or goods.
Here was my final Colonial Age city plan before I moved up to Industrial Age.
View attachment 4741
NOTE: The game of FoE has changed since back when I was in CA; in today's version this city could actually be expanded further eastward than what this plan shows.
By the time I first got to CA, I had heard so many of my non-HQS guild mates who were up in the later eras (ME through TE at that time), constantly complain about how they never had enough supplies on hand for conventional game play, especially after a major city remodel. This is when I first started studying the entire tech tree, and I noticed that the supplies cost of
everything (tech and regular building construction) gets much more supplies intensive in the later game than it was in the early game. This is also when I figured out that a long stay-over in CA, working mainly the "Produce Supplies" quest and "Collect Supplies" quest (in the 2nd recurring slot) had a lot of value, not only for the quest reward loot, but just for the extra large supply production. Most of my later-era guild mates were constructing RAH on top of LoA, in order to meed the demand for supplies that the later game put on them. (However, I must point out that most of those yahoos didn't have their LoA up to level 10 before they constructed RAH, which IMO was wasteful—level up the cheaper and smaller LoA to level 10 1st, then consider whether or not you still need to dedicate the massive 6 x 7 plot of land to own the RAH on top of your level 10 LoA.)
So with all of this in mind, I made raising my LoA to level 10 a priority; and in fact, LoA was my 1st level 10 GB and it reached level 10 about 1/3rd of the way through my long stay over in CA. (FYI, HS was my second level 10 GB about the same time.) About this time is when I decided to take the plunge and add CF to my city (HQS was just starting to form into a mere wisp of the strategy we have today.) And once I saw the CF in action, I had much the same response as many other players, some of whom have posted their testimonials throughout this topic. That was when I first started thinking about how to afford spamming UBQs and how this could best be leveraged, while still stockpiling millions of supplies to have on-hand for the later eras when other players typically run out of supplies. I wanted to see if we could progress through the game without ever constructing RAH, and scoring boatloads of quest rewards while doing it. The answer of course is: "Yes, We can!" To this day, I still only own a level 10 LoA in FE and no RAH. And I have stockpiled enough supplies to take me through the end of the tech tree plus have several million supplies left over for city remodel or two.
But when I started playing around with spamming UBQs, it became apparent that coins, not supplies, was the limiting agent. So I raised my StM up quickly to level 08 in Colonial age. Since I was relying on Gambrel Roof Houses for population and coins production, level 8 StM bonus was enough for my coins to keep pace with supplies. I kept my StM at level 8 all the way until FE; in fact, it wasn't until about 2 or 3 months ago that my StM hit level 10. But by the time I was mid-way through my stay in Colonial Age, I had stockpiled several 10s of millions of both coins and supplies, with my coins stockpile being about 1/5th to 1/3rd the size of my supplies stockpile on any given day. (I often purchase 100s of FPs with coins which is another reason for our supplies stockpile to outpace our coins stockpile.)
Once my CF reached level 6, which was about half way through my long stay over in CA, I started to pay closer attention to the size of the coins packages and supplies packages that quest rewards paid out. I finally realized that owning a level 6 CF wasn't just good for turning a base package of 5 goods into a package of 10 goods, but any time I missed FPs, medals, or goods, and scored coins or supplies instead that I as getting back anywhere from 20% to 50% of my cost of 1 UBQ quest. And half the quests we complete in CA are
not UBQs, they are: "Collect Coins", Produce Supplies", "Collect Supplies", and "Spend FPs". In fact, most of the time, UBQs are no more than 50% of total quests we complete per day.
So follow some math here:
- First let's assume that coins=supplies in terms of value. One might argue this, but IMO their relative value is close enough, since they are both about as easy to produce or score from a quest reward. In HQS, we are really comparing the value of coins and supplies (money that jingles like dimes and quarters) to the value of: FPs, Medals, and Goods (money that folds like 10 and 20 dollar bills).
- My city had a level 6 CF, which gives a bonus of +100% to the packages of: coins, supplies, medals, and goods. The numbers I list later have already factored in the CF bonus.
- My city plan shown above could complete around 80 quests per day: 35 x "Produce Supplies", 35 UBQs, 6 x Collect Supplies, 3 x Collect coins, 1 x Spend FPs. Sometimes, I could complete more Collect Quests, but these numbers are conservative enough and consistent enough to work some math around.
- On Average, 30% of all quests rewards are going to pay 20%-25% of the cost to spam 1 UBQ. This would be either the small coins package or the small supplies package, which after they are buffed by +100% CF bonus, are between 20%-25% of the cost to pay to complete 1 UBQ.
- On Average, 20% of all quests rewards are going to pay 45%-50% of the cost to spam 1 UBQ. This would be the large coins package or the large supplies package, which after they are buffed by +100% CF bonus, are between 45%-50% of the cost to pay to complete 1 UBQ.
- 80 total quests x 30% small packages x 22.5% average of both packages = 5.4 Free UBQs per day from quest rewards.
- 80 total quests x 20% large packages x 47.5% average of both packages = 7.6 Free UBQs per day from quest rewards.
- 5.4 + 7.6 = 13 Free UBQs per day
- 35 Abort-Cycles (1 UBQ per cycle) - 13 Free UBQs = I only actually pay for 22 UBQs per day out of my city's production, or my coins and supplies stockpiles.
This is why I constantly harp on players to never neglect leveling up the
"The Holy Trinity" of HQS GBs, which are: CF, StM, and LoA. This is how they feed into the system. The higher level these three GB are, the more affordable spamming UBQs becomes. And bonus! The higher level CF is, the larger the package size is whenever we score: diamonds, medals, and goods.
Now, the HQS (and in fact the entire game) has changed dramatically since I was questing back in the Colonial Age. I understand HQS far better now than I did back then. For example, I never constructed Innovation Tower back when I was in CA. Instead, I relied on Gambrel Roof Houses for dense population and coins production. But the trouble is that GRHs are near the end of the CA tech tree, and eventually I had to leave CA. It was one of my guild mates that I coached through an earlier version of HQS that added the Innovation Tower to our playbook. We learned that IT (or any pop GB) must be balanced with ultra-efficient coins production buildings (SoK, SoA, The King, The Queen, Ziggurat, Haunted House, and so on); but if we had enough coins production, we could drop all houses and add even more quests. And this also meant we no longer needed to race to GRH technology in order to maximize our total number of quests per day — just construct and level up IT instead and save the technologies to remain in CA longer. And after I saw my guild mate's progress, I realized that the resource that had really held me back from spamming more UBQs back when I was in CA was not my supplie —I had 70 Clockmakers, 40 of them buffed by a level 10 LoA bonus. It was was coins production capacity that really held back UBQs. And when I was in CA I had only raisied my StM up to level 8, not to level 10 like I recommend today. At the time I did that because STM bonuses were so much more efficient than LoA bonuses. But I ended up handicapping myself by not pushing StM and CF both up to level 10—mine were only 8 and 6 respectively. So all of you Noob Minions who come into HQS now, should be able to produce as well as I did, or better. (However, you also will have GE eating away at some of your goods if you negotiate.)
But more importantly than understanding my own mistakes in CA, I realized that all of this could actually start back in HMA, if we just adjusted the GB construction priorities optimally. Thus the HQS has evolved multiple times between when I was in CA and where you all are now. Today, we have you focus 5 and only 5 GBs for HMA: CF, HS, StM, LoA, and CdM. These GBs all lead to scoring more daily loot in some way. And we limit the list to only 5 GBs in HMA because: land is scarce, goods are scarce, and FPs to swap to our GBs are scarce. If we had you construct more GBs in HMA, they would consume far more land, they would consume far more construction goods, and they would all level up much slower since you have the same number of FPs to swap per day. But the 5 GBs we prioritized, are the: Power Rangers / Justice League / Avengers / Voltron / A Team of the FoE universe. Only one of these GBs is actually expensive for an HMA player to construct, which is of course CF. Trading HMA goods up 1:2 for the LMA goods to construct CdM is not so bad; and the other GBs all cost HMA or earlier goods.
In case any of you are wondering why the Arc is not on this list, it's about math. The Arc buffs donation reward packages, which sounds great (and it is great). But except when paying FPs for CF goods, an HMA player is much more likely to swap FPs with a player near his own age and total game progress. (Most later era players want to swap FPs with other later era players, who own higher level GBs.) This means the GBs an HMA player is more likely to swap to are both: lower level GBs, and also earlier age GBs. And this means that the donation rewards paid by any reward slot that an HMA player is going to score in, will not pay a very large base package of: BPs, FPs, and medals. So even if these donations rewards were buffed by an Arc bonus, it would not produce much more additional rewards. The FE goods to construct Arc cost about 2 to 3 times as many FPs as the goods to construct the CF cost. So it makes far more sense to delay construction of the very expensive Arc until the Colonial Age. By then, a player has: a larger city to accommodate more GBs, the ability to complete more quests per day to produce more FPs per day, and all of their HMA GBs will be around the level 5 to 7 range and their swap partner's GBs should be around there as well. Now, when we add the Arc bonus to the donation rewards scored on a GB that is between level 5 and level 10, that Arc bonus starts to add up to something significant. So it makes much more sense to spend a large pile of FPs to construct The Arc in Colonial than it does in HMA.