Like many, I've historically only played Beta for a sneak-peek at features before they affect live. One glaring shortcoming of this being one of the things I always want to test most, new ages, has been out of reach because I haven't put the time in to get anywhere close. I'm going to try over the next 9ish months to fix that - which sounds like an interesting challenge.
My starting point isn't exactly from scratch but it's not a monster city either with the trappings of current optimized gameplay. No Arc, No Traz, CF is only level 10. Only settlement GP is a level 4 Ygg Tree. I'm not guaranteeing any of that will stay that way - but if I opt to improve such things, it will be with mind to making the rest of the journey either shorter or easier overall. I am not trying to make a monster city, just to get to the end era to test next era.
I do have 540/456 Boost from various events that were running at times when I wanted to test something on beta (which may or may not have been the event itself). Probably ~200 FP a day in collections.
I moved from PE to ME today - I was in industrial not too long ago, and have not built up much for goods from PE, but I do have 5 PE eagle mountains from last wildlife event and renovated 5 stage of ages to ME. I reno-ed other older event buildings to ME to produce ME goods. I expect goods to be the biggest challenge to me blitzing the ages.
Features, and my intended use of them:
- Events - Probably the most important aspect to getting things off the ground is improving my event buildings. Similar to a new city, pretty much any event has to be considered a good event, even if the prize isn't perfect - because it's competing with either empty space, or prizes so old that any modern prize is an upgrade.
- GE - I should be able to handle diff 4 without issues. And it's a significant source of goods, so it'll be a priority.
- Settlements - We'll see.... I'm going to be treating beta as "usually-once-a-day" still as opposed to my live worlds - and settlements are pretty slow at that pace. But I probably should do something in them, even if it's slow.
- GBG - probably a little now and then time permitting. But it'll be in my 1-man guild with a city that isn't really built for it. So likely top out at gold.
- Arena - have signed up again to it. Easy rewards.
So, my hopeful stages/timeline
- The race to Arctic + Oceanic Future - Hope to be done this in 1-2 months, because getting the harbor and terminal operational as soon as possible is a huge priority if I'm going to make it into the space ages anywhere close to Titan's release. 200 FP/day is way more than enough for this phase, and I'll likely be blocked by goods frequently, so I will have a little ability to work on GBs somewhat still. I'll be starting with Temple of Relics which I'd not built this far on beta because it's not like I GE-ed much here. But it offers additional current goods as I move up.
- The promethium/orichalcum grind. I expect this will take 4 months at best. ~1 month for AF and 3 months for OF.
- Higher ages - ~4 weeks each. I hope. I'll need a lot more FP and goods production by the time I reach this point - so hopefully I've kept up on events!
