Chapter 6. Middle HMA stage: Growing your GBs and FP production
Duration: once you have CF, StM and LoA until you are ready to start lvling arc past lvl 10.
Chapter score: 4.5/5. The only reason I'm not giving it a 5/5 is because there are some things that I'm 99% sure they are correct, but I haven't math-tested enough.
In Middle HMA stage you have a good base of recurring quests and have build the roots of your FP production. Now the goal is to further increase your FP production to be able to fund the lvl 80 arc project in a reasonable timeframe.
After you have just a few levels on CF you should be able to finish all 64 encounters in GE. If you haven't before, get in a guild that opens lvl 4 each week ASAP.
You might also consider removing your friends from PE and adding friends from FE for extra arc BP. If you do so, be courteous and write a good goodbye note (remember the no asshole rule
).
By the end of Middle HMA stage we will have the following GB:
-Arc (lvl 10)
-Inno Tower (lvl 1). Optional but very recommended if we can find a nice goods seller.
-Frontenac (??). Probably 5-10. At least enough to negotiate all GE4.
-LoA (lvl ??). Probably lvl 2-3
-StM (lvl ??). Depends a lot on the number of SoKs and SSW that we can get.
-Cape Canaveral (around lvl 4). Optional, only recommended if we can find a very nice good seller.
-Temple of relics (lvl 1). Build it when you have the BP, but don't level it.
-Hagia Sophia (lvl ??). Situational. Build only if the useful buildings from the special events + roads don't cover your happyness needs, and you are using (and will keep doing so in the near future)
more than 27 tiles, roads included in non-events-cultural buildingsultural building to offset it. If you build it, keep it at lvl 3.
-CdM (lvl ??). Optional. This one is actually on the edge of being worth it or not. The reason is that it competes with alchemists for FP production, but CdM requires FP investment, and alchemists don't.
If your guild has a rule to put FP on GB platforms, don't have access to cheap goods for Inno Tower and expect a long lvl 80 arc project (because there aren't lvl 80 arcs in your server, or you couldn't make good deals with them) build it until lvl 3. If not... don't build it until you have finished your lvl 80 arc project.
So, where these levels come from? What should you build and level first? The answer is very simple for some albeit frightening for others: math. Yes, you guessed right, it is math time, and you are going to be the one who does it! I'm sorry but I am not going to do this for you. Firstly, because every player has different buildings and conditions. And secondly because the goal in this guide is to provide a method, not to give you the fish (remember when I said guidelines, but not instructions?)
Now, get to work! Start an excel file, input your CF, LoA and StM bonuses, as well as your number of alchemist and special buildings, and calculate the average number of RQ you do each day. Shouldn't take you longer than 1h. I realise what comes next will not be user friendly for people with non-engineering backgrounds. I'll listen to any posible questions and try to improve it.
I recommend you to organise it in the following way, which is a simplification of what I did. If you have another way to model the problem and works for you, go for it (and share, I'm interested to know).
First calculations
- Total gold produced. Make a row for each different building you have. One column for the name of the building, another with the base daily production, a 3rd one with the number of buildings of that type you have, and a last one for the real production (that includes happyness, StM and motivation bonuses). Then, the total gold produced is the sum of that last colum.
For the motivation, you could consider a motivation %, and distribute it evenly among all your buildings. But don't make the mistake of ignoring motivation priorities: SoKs, Lord Manor, SKW will always be motivated, and marajás palaces can't be motivated.
- Total supplies produced. Make a row for each different building you have. One column for the name of the building, another with the base daily production, a 3rd one with the number of buildings of that type you have, and a last one for the real production (that includes happyness, LoA,
tabern and motivation bonuses). Then, the total supplies produced is the sum of that last colum.
Here, it gets a bit tricky because LoA bonus only affects 40 buildings, and you will have more than that. The simplest way to do that (althought not the most elegant) is to consider 2 different buildings (thus 2 rows). First row will have 40 alchemist (less if you have special buildings like palaces) and you will include LoA bonus there. The 2nd row will have the rest and no LoA bonus.
Quests calculations
- Produce 2x saltpeter quests = number of alchemist/2, rounded down.
- Gather 25k coins = coins produced/25k. It is not 100% accurate, because you can't make perfect packs of 25k coins with your buildings, but it will be good enough.
- Spent FP. Set an arbitrary number here. It depends on the way you do your FP swaps, and if you can do batches of 38FP
- UBQ. Pay 8k coins, 8k supplies = min (total coins produced, total supplies produced) / 8k
- Feedback UBQ. This is the term I use to describe the extra quests you are able to do by reinvesting the coins & supply rewards from the other quests, until you are left with 0 coins and supplies. It depends on the "base number of quests", a factor that depends on your CF level, and the era you are in.
For HMA and CF lvl 10, the "feedback factor" is 1,365; so
you can ignore the Feedback UBQ term and consider that your coins and supply rewards are 0, and all the other rewards are increased by 36.5%
FP calculations
This is were it gets most interesting.
For converting the recurring quests into expected FP returns, you need to know the
% ocurrences of each RQ reward. So 100RQ (including feedback UBQs, base amount was 73,21) produce 35,71FP 447 goods, 535 medals and 7 BP per day.
Now, make a row for each source of FP, like this
Congratz! This should have taken you around 2h, but that time is much better spent than in atacking neighbours that don't have anything useful to plunder. Now that you have everything about your city written in your excel sheet, you can change the cells that define each GB bonus (for example, the %coins of StM) and see the impact on your FP production.
The next GB you are going to upgrade is the one that has highest FP increase/effective cost.
Effective cost = FP required to upgrade that lvl * return on FP factor.
"Return on FP factor" is how many FP you get back for every FP invested in a FP swap, and depends on how good are you on managing your FP trades. For example, if you exchange 100FP and lock a 1st reward worth 50FP, your return factor is 50%. In the same example, if you had a lvl 29 arc (50% bonus) your return factor would be 75%.
This return factor is obviously different for each individual exchange of FP, but you should try to estimate the average return factor in your last exchanges (even if it is just a rough guess), and use it as a reference.
Return factor, effective FP and Arc
Return factor is one of the reasons why a lvl 80 arc is so powerful, but we will also use it to evaluate how much a lvl 10 arc is worth. This will allow to answer the question of: when should we purchase the goods for lvl 10 arc?
First, be honest with yourself and think which is your current returning factor (if it's very low, think about redefining the way you trade FP with others). For the sake of simple numbers, let's magine it is 25%. A lvl 10 arc has a bonus of 31% contribution reward, which turns your 25% returning factor into 32.75%. This means that for every 100FP you exchange, you are getting 132.75 back. But those 32.75 extra FP will be reinvested in another trade, resulting in another 10.72FP. If you do this many times over, you are left with 148,7 FP. There is a formula for this, but a very easy way to do so is to apply this procedure 10 times until no FP are left to be reinvested (I did the same when calculating feedback UBQ and CF). Here is how it looks like.
We will call these 148,7 FP in this example "effective FP". And for the following calculations, we will always be talking about effective FP. The reason is that we want to be able to compare oranges with oranges, and apples with apples when we decide which GB to level next.
So, when deciding whether to put an extra level in StM or purchasing the goods for arc and leveling it to 10, we will compare the increase in return on investment (ROI) defined as ROI = increase in effective FP/effective cost.
We will be comparing a lvl 10 arc, whose costs are the FP required to purchase the goods (minus the reward we get on the seller GB) + the cost of lvling the arc, from lvl 0 to 10. This assumption seems reasonable, as there is a high initial cost in purchasing the goods, and arc scales very well until lvl 10.
There are 2 more factors that I haven't talked about.
1- Arc requires space, which is currently used by alchemist and housing. So, when we modify some cells in our excel file, we also have to reduce the number of alchemists and houses. This consideration is something you will have to do before building the other GBs too (Monte, CC, Sophia, etc.)
2- Arc makes you more proficient at sniping. This is something that cannot be modeled by math. You will have to compare the results of both choices, and decide if you want to produce 140FP, or produce 138FP and be better at sniping.
Houses, Inno Tower, % motivations and Terrace Farms
The last thing in the puzzle that hasn't been 'converted into apples' yet is when one should build Inno Tower. And that is the most difficult thing to do, because the 4 subjects mentioned above are interrelated.
Inno Tower allows you cover all the population needs, allowing you to sell all the housing and gain extra space. And this poses a trade-off: is it worth losing the gold generated by houses in exchange for that extra space? This is a part of the problem.
The other part of the problem is that, if you didn't have 100% motivated buildings, you probably will after getting rid of the houses. If that's the case, consider a middle ground scenario: collect 2 times per day (instead of 3 times, every 8h). This way you will get more motivations on the important buildings, alchemists. As for the excel sheet, I recommend that all your calculations 'call' to a cell defined as %motivation, so you can easily see what happens with your FP production when more buildings get motivated.
A 3rd part of the problem are Terrace farms. Terrace farms FP production (per tile) is much greater than the equivalent in RQ... if you don't need extra houses (that is, if you have IT). So, if you have 3 farms in the inventory, IT will be much more important that if you don't.
And the last, hidden part of the problem is happyness. You need to keep IT at level 1 to be able to maintain happyness. Even at lvl 1, you might not have enough (and if you need to build a cultural building for that... you will lose the space that you gained). IT at lvl 1 gives 3600 population, be sure you can manage that.
How to proceed, now that we know all the pieces of the puzzle? Easy. Go back to your excel sheet, save a backup copy (just in case...) and start modifying paramenters.
Check how much space you gain by adding a 6x6 but removing houses (remember roads also!). Delete the houses from your gold production, and add the extra alchemist/TF you can put in. Does the FP production increase? Good! Now take into account the cost of the materials, and compare the ROI of the FP in materials vs the ROI of the FP in another GB.
What's next?
Now you might be wondering: I have a method that lets me choose what investment gives me more value for my money, but I haven't heard anything about lvl 80 arc yet. When should I start to level it?
This time there is also (easy) math, but there is more to that. Depending on how nice and strong are your friends/guildies as well as your ability to negotiate with them, the 10-->80 Arc project might be faster or slower. Your luck so far with events and guild expedition (did you get many SoKs, Maraja Palace, SSW, TF, etc.) is another factor that has a huge impact. And a 3rd factor is: are there any juicy friends/guilds/neighbours shouting to be snipped by a middle level arc?
These 3 factors combine into a single question. At which ROI (return on investment, for FP) should I stop leveling my other GBs and start the lvl 80 project? I can't say for certain -and I didn't do it in my current world- but, If I were to do it again, I would go with around 180 days. In other words, start lvling your arc to 11 when it takes more than 180 days to recover the FP spend in your other GBs.
