Middle Ages QI Combat

One of the most frequent questions I've gotten is what to fight with after my last two posts have focused on how you can grow your economy.  At the end of last round I did some more exhaustive testing of different auto-battle options at different boosts to establish what works and what doesn't.

Why are these recommended boost numbers so high?

The boost I'm recommending for most units is often more than 3 times higher than the opponent target's boost.  There's a few contributing factors to this:

- Two wave battles require fairly clean wins of the first wave.  Being badly outnumbered in the second wave is a recipe for disaster.

- Artillery are weaker by Late Middle Ages (comparatively) than they were in Iron Age - especially defensively - which makes it more critical that you kill as many units as possible as fast as possible.

- Generally speaking you want to lose as few units as possible so you can also train less units and place less strain on your supplies (which can instead go to buying goods expansions or fancy space-efficient decorations for additional boost).

Day 1-5 (EMA opponents)

If you have some boost from your main city you can often fight through these without training anything with just 10-20 "Quantum Units at Incursion Start" from your main city.  Or you can dump ~46k Coins and ~34k Supplies to build an EMA barracks (5 seconds), train 10 units, and sell it which should give you a good amount of substitutes as your troops get injured.

Which units should you use?

Catapults are the primary choice if you have a decent amount of boost.  You ideally want ~150-330 sword and ~260-490 shield to feel confident that you can dispatch the enemy armies quickly and take the odd hits from angry Mounted Archers.  You may want to swap to a different army against opponents with many Mounted Archers.  Also note that Trebuchets do not have significantly improved defenses and fear Mounted Archers just as much as Catapults - so if you've upgraded to Trebuchets early you still may want to sub them out against Mounted Archers.

If you find Catapults are too squishy for you (i.e. you actually lose some units), any of the other units should be just fine too against the small one wave armies in the early days.  

Armored Infantry require the least boost to cap out, but may occasionally struggle to run down a Catapult and lose a unit.  10-90 sword and 130-220 shield should be comfortable.

Mounted Archers are probably the most powerful option if you're trying to fight with little boost of your own.  They'll usually do "ok" on auto, but with your control you can keep them out of danger on the first turn and then charge in wiping out most of the enemy army, minimizing the retaliation you take.

By day 6, when HMA opponents appear, you should be able to have any troop you want to have and your starting EMA units may be starting to struggle to keep up.  Interesting options include:

Trebuchets or Cannons

Artillery have the highest chance for clean fights, but if you don't have enough boost or poor luck can fall apart quickly to massive casualties.

Trebuchets have longer range than Cannons and as such, with enough boost, will outperform them by taking less hits occasionally.  This is probably the best option through day 8 at least before your opponent's boost starts jumping but if you stick with them all the way through, you will need much more boost for the day 11 boss.  I'd recommend at least 1600 Sword & Shield to usually 2-shot Imperial Guards and usually take 3 shots to die from enemy Cannons on day 11 boss encounters.  It would take ~2700-3200 shield to start taking 3 shots to die from other enemy units.  

Cannons are perfectly serviceable and need a little less boost than Trebuchets do.  They may take a few more casualties on days when you have more than enough boost.  If you want to fight day 11 boss I'd recommend at least 1250 sword and shield to usually 2-shot Imperial Guards and usually take 3 shots to die from enemy Cannons on day 11 boss encounters.  It would take ~2300-3200 shield to start taking 3 shots to die from other enemy units.

The most dangerous day 11 boss encounter to relying on either Trebuchets or Cannons is 3 Fast, 3 Artillery, 2 Ranged // 4 Heavy, 3 Light.  It's quite possible to lose 4 artillery in the first wave with bad ordering making the 2nd wave a struggle to finish.  You may be able to get around this by manual battling this single arrangement.  2 Fast, 2 Heavy, 4 Artillery // 1 Heavy, 6 Light can also inflict significant losses to artillery, but I never saw auto-battle fail it outright (at equivalent to ~1400 sword, 1300 shield).

Imperial Guards

The easiest unit to max stats on, they will be reliable wins on day 11 boss encounters with about 700 sword, 1200 shield.  Of course they'll still have 1-2 casualties every fight even on easier encounters so you will need to train many more units if solely relying on them.  Rather I'd recommend having a small number of Trebuchets for easy fights they can win cleanly and only breaking out the Imperial Guards on the final day or two if going this route.

Longbow Archers

An in-between option, Longbow Archers are strong and reliable if you have enough shield.  They will still win many fights cleanly, but a few less than artillery do overall.  They are less prone to collapsing to massive casualties though if you have sufficient shield for them.  I would recommend at least 630 sword, 1400 shield to always 2-shot Imperial Guards and have some durability (Taking ~7 artillery hits or 3 other hits) on day 11 boss encounters.  The higher your shield, the better an option this will become (it would take ~1900 shield to minimise damage taken from cannons and ~3500 shield to minimise damage taken from almost everything).

Heavy Knights

Another in-between option between Artillery and Imperial Guards, Heavy Knights are of medium difficulty to cap out.  I'd recommend about 600 sword, 1600 shield to maximise performance against most opponent units on day 11 boss encounters.  They will not have as many clean wins as Trebuchets, Cannons or Longbow Archers, but they will have equal reliability and less casualties compared to Imperial Guards.

My choice

For now I'm planning to rest on Catapults into Cannons ; my base QI boosts are 300+ and I'll plan to build 900+ boost in the settlement.  We'll see if I wish I had Imperial Guards for backup on day 11 next round.  I expect to kill off ~300 Cannons and will be training ~500 to be safe until I'm more confident in my estimates.

If at some point I have much higher shield than sword from main city boost I would choose Longbow Archers.

Middle Ages QI for the Intense

Part of what I like about this round of changes to Quantum Incursions is that it's no longer such a nuisance to repeatedly evolve a city thanks to the lack of roads needed.  This leads to me being willing to at least consider a more intensely optimized startup than I've played in the last year.

My first runs on beta were hallmarked by using Alchemists as cheap initial Alloy production upgrades to ramp into the endgame buildings, and this is still what I'd consider the ideal start if you need to conserve Quantum Shards (QS).  But while their one hour construction is not problematic from a theoretical perspective, it can be from a practical perspective if you don't check in an hour later for their construction to complete and start the production.   It could mess with attempts to gain extra collections by significantly more than the intended hour ; potentially to the extent that you miss one of their collections and mess up your ramp plans.  So this post considers an alternative with a straight shot to T3 buildings which while more costly seems more reliable.

The problem with this is that most "natural" initial builds struggle to hit much more 400 Alloy per collection (the lazy approach in my previous post started at 330, but with a bit of extra collection effort could reach 400).  Which means three collections until your first upgrade and is a big loss over building some temporary Alchemists on the first two collections which can still build a T3 building on the third collection thanks to their additional production.  So for skipping Alchemists to be a plausible win you need to be building a T3 building on the second collection.  And that means 500 Alloy per collection.  

To meet this goal requires your focus to be almost entirely on low-population houses (or a whole lot of expansions), which will require additional starting coins.  You also need to take advantage of quick-build euphoria to have many more Alloy producing buildings than you otherwise would.

Prerequisites

Starting Goods: 50 (for 1 free expansions with goods at the start).

Minimum initial build cost: 630,000 Coins (180,000 extra starting Coin from your main city).

Total QS: 1,395

- 250 QS on initial expansions (assuming 2 are from QS)

- ~35 QS on impediment removal

- 350 QS on rushing construction on your first 7 T3 Alloy producers.

- 760 QS on rushing production on your first Bakery 8 times for 3000 extra Alloy.

You will need to buy ~1,000 additional QS if you use this plan immediately at the start of a new championship, but should be able to make enough QS per round to sustain it for future rounds (~6,500 personal progress per round should cover it; I'm hoping to pass 10,000).

If you need extra troops at some point early on, it costs 11,250 Coin and 5,625 Supply to buy and sell an EMA barracks and 35,000 Coin and 28,000 Supply to train 10.  If you need to do this before first collection it will require additional starting Coins.  By second collection it shouldn't be an issue to pop out enough to last you until they wain in power.

The 500 Alloy Plan

You start with 3 expansions.  You can work in more supply buildings if you have more expansions, or take the house flipping strategy to the extreme.  You would need at least 2 additional expansions to move 8 of the 9 houses to convert a block to 4 additional Tanneries and not lose out too badly (4 Tanneries should payout somewhat more Alloy than a single house).  You would also need additional starting Coins for larger layouts (which is at least in part why you're using just 3 starting expansions).

Initial build:

- 15x Multistorey House, 30x Estate House

- 2x Tannery or 3x Additional Multistorey House (or empty space to save cost)

Total Cost: 654,000 Coins ; you will need 204,000 additional starting Coins (from for example 11 Koi Ponds).  

If you are short a *little* on coins, the 2 Tanneries are not crucial on the first collection (but are on the 2nd then) - this reduces the cost to 630,000 coins.  You can build the Churches that replace them with your first coins from Town Hall collection.

Multistorey Houses are used to the extent they are to increase your coin gain, lower your build cost, and at no loss in terms of number of collections at a given productivity.  i.e. It would still take 3 Churches before you move to 60% productivity even with all 45 houses as Estate Houses, but would add 90k coins to the construction cost and lose coin production.  If you're going for additional expansions and different numbers of houses the math may change in terms of exactly how many of the houses you can get away with being Multistorey Houses instead of Estate Houses.

Collection procedure:

Collect and Sell 2 Tannery and 4 Multistorey Houses at 20% Productivity.  Build 3 Churches.

Collect and Sell 9 additional Multistorey Houses at 60% Productivity.  Build 4 Churches.

Collect and Sell 2 additional Multistorey Houses at 80% Productivity.  Build 1 Church.

Collect and Sell 4 Estate Houses at 100% Productivity.  Build 2 Churches.

Collect and Sell 3 Estate Houses at 110% Productivity.  Build 1 Church.

Collect and Sell 4 Estate Houses at 120% Productivity.  Build 1 Church.

Collect 19 Estate Houses at 150% Productivity.

This will net you 503 Alloy (15 + 10 * (6 * 20% + 9 * 60% + 2 * 80% + 4 * 100% + 3 * 110% + 4 * 120% + 19 * 150%)).

You will also collect at least 1,863,000 Coins (could be boosted slightly further by city buildings but the 600% boost from Estate Houses is pretty dominant), which should eliminate any worries about Coin costs of buying and selling stuff.

Sell the Churches and rebuild everything sold after the first collection and after the second collection you'll have enough Alloy to build your first Bakery to start addressing supplies.  You should probably spend at least 50 Quantum Shards to complete its construction.

Now that you have a building producing 375 Alloy per collection at 150% Productivity you should use Quantum Shards to finish production repeatedly on your Bakery and immediately blitz more T3 buildings.  Without this step you're just falling behind plans that would build Alchemists on the first 2 collections.

The Blitz

Start by converting as much of your city as you can to Breweries while maintaining 150% Euphoria.  This allows you to convert some of your excess coins from the start into additional supplies as you finish the Bakery's production repeatedly.

Each additional 1,000 Alloy building requires 3 finished productions from your Bakery.  Which will also produce at least 3x 222,000 supplies in the above configuration.  A second T3 building will cutoff ~1.5 collections worth of ore.  A third T3 building will cutoff ~1 collection worth of ore.  A fourth T3 building will only cost 2 additional rushes because of the leftover.  Launching directly into 4 Bakeries (construction rushed) is a good spot to stop.  Include a Ropery to start making additional goods expansions next collection.  The next two images below have "too many" Estate Houses due to a revision ; will update next week.  9 Multistorey Houses is the new recommendation.

Before Collecting, make goods and place 4 expansions, these expansions can be any ones without impediments.  Sell the Ropery and move 16 houses to the new expansions.  Build 8 Churches.

Collection procedure:

Collect and Sell 2 Tannery at 80% Productivity.  Build 2 Churches.

Collect and Sell 4 Multistorey Houses at 100% Productivity.  Build 1 Church.

Collect and Sell 2 Multistorey Houses at 110% Productivity.  Build 1 Church.

Collect and Sell 3 Multistorey Houses at 120% Productivity.  Build 2 Churches.

Collect 22 Estate Houses at 150% Productivity.  Sell 4 Churches and 8 Estate Houses.  Build 6-7 Breweries.

Collect 4 Bakeries at 150% Productivity.

This yields 1,959 new Alloy.  Build 1 Clapboard House (construction rushed) and 1 Pillory.  Rebuild with a mostly-normal layout focused on boosting your T3 buildings coin and supply production, including the Ropery once more.  You will still be reliant on some temporary buildings converted to Euphoria.

Collection procedure:

Collect and Sell 1 Tannery and 4 Multistorey Houses at 60% Productivity.  Build 2 Churches.

Collect and Sell 2 Multistorey Houses at 80% Productivity.  Build 1 Church.

Collect and Sell 3 Multistorey Houses at 100% Productivity.  Build 2 Churches.

Collect and Sell 1 Multistorey House at 110% Productivity.

Collect and Sell 3 Multistorey Houses at 120% Productivity.  Build 1 Church (or Palace; not needed here but may be a relevant option if you have more expansions since Churches don't fill the space of a standalone 4-House expansion).

Collect 14 Estate Houses, 9 Breweries, 4 Bakeries, 1 Clapboard House at 150% Productivity.

This yields 2,358 new Alloy.  Combined with the leftover from prior, you're past 2500 Alloy.  Build 2 Clapboard House (rushed) and 1 Pillory.  If you can afford additional goods expansions, build them (2 additional planned here).

Collection Procedure:

Collect and Sell 6 Multistorey Houses @ 100% Productivity.  Build 1 Palace.

Collect and Sell 2 Multistorey Houses @ 110% Productivity.  Build 1 Church.

Collect and Sell 4 Multistorey Houses @ 120% Productivity.  Build 1 Church.

Collect 11 Estate Houses, 14 Breweries, 3 Clapboard Houses, 4 Bakeries.

This yields 3,145 new Alloy.  Build 2 new Bakeries, and 2 new Pillories.  It is now more optional as to whether to rush new buildings as existing buildings now represent over 80% of your Alloy production compared to new construction.

Further Progression

From here, try to keep your Supply and Coin production balanced (more Bakeries than Clapboards; Breweries preferred to Estate Houses when it comes to filling extra space.  Quantum Supply Boost from your main city is particularly useful because of how much space Breweries take up to provide it).  Build additional Pillories as needed to stay at 150% productivity (you want them at the end anyways).

Drop the Ropery once the cost of further goods expansions seems hardly worth the work.  You could also drop it temporarily as a micro-optimisation if you're going to wait more than 1 collection to buy another expansion.

Build a Trebuchet or LMA barracks when your EMA troops are starting to feel insufficient.  (In preparation for Day 6 when the opposition becomes HMA troops may be a good moment).  Sell it when you have enough trained to make it to the end (possibly as soon as the next cycle if you've built up enough Coin and Supply before you place it)

Trebuchets or Cannons only care about sword boost for practical purposes but desire it quite high for day 11 (it takes an even larger amount of shield boost to let them survive even 2 hits, so that's not practical).

Longbow Archers or melee LMA troops only need modest sword boost but desire high shield boost for the later days.  Melee troops are easier to come close to capping shield boost for reliable wins, but will usually still cost you 1 troop per encounter while capped.  Longbow Archers will often have cleaner wins and with enough shield will also become reliable.

Final Goal

Whatever your initial build plan involves leads to a similar spot: Get to a point with high Alloy, Coin, and Supply production to setup for the final goal - a settlement with enough boost and saved up troops to win through the final day, and convert the rest of the space to AP generation (Pillories), ideally with most goods expansions purchased.  Optimising the start is all about getting to that point earlier so you can have your max AP generation for longer.  With that in mind, there's also motivation to try and get "extra" collections by being on precisely 10 hours later.  5 days in could be 12 collections instead of 10 and buy you an extra day of high AP.

An expansion's worth of Pillory costs 2,000 Alloy, 480k Coins, 480k Supplies for 800 AP/hr.  3 Expansions (less 6 tiles) are wasted on the Town Hall.  This means that say 19 usable Expansions will cost ~38k Alloy, 9.1M Coins, 9.1M Supplies for 15,200 AP/hr.  Given that it takes an unrushed Clapboard House or Bakery 40 hours to be profitable (10 hours to build + 3 productions to get ahead), once you're around 8-10k Alloy production it's time to stop thinking about increasing it and just focus on Coins and Supplies for the switch (selling your producers will recover an additional ~5k).  That's somewhere around 20+ combined Bakeries + Clapboard Houses.

If you need military boost, your options:

- Tower Ruin/Group of Trees at 800 Alloy, 400k Coins, 300k Supplies for 180% Boost/Expansion.  

- Gargoyle/Signpost at 3,200 Alloy, 1.2M Coins, 1M Supplies for 240% Boost/Expansion.

- Nautical Statue at 12,000 Alloy, 6.4M Coins, 4.8M Supplies for 480% Boost/Expansion of *both* colours.

Keeping Clapboard Houses a little longer can allow an earlier conversion to Pillories, Alloy-wise, if you don't need all your boost yet.  2 Clapboards make an extra 750 Alloy every collection.  That could be 1 Nautical Statue or Almost 4 Gargoyles/Signposts per collection.  If you can delay their sale by 2 collections that's all the Alloy needed to replace themself with Gargoyles/Signposts.  If you can delay their sale by 7 collections that's almost all the Alloy needed for Nautical Statues.  Of course that doesn't help with the Supply cost (and keeping Bakeries without Breweries would struggle to do much either while taking a lot more space), so you need to budget that into your pre-sale agenda still :)

Middle Ages Quantum Incursions for the Lazy

It's almost upon us!  And contrary to what some people would have you believe, it's great news for the lazy player.  No more roads (and thus less limitation on how to lazily evolve your settlement) and more ability to focus on the rewards you want (instead of a little bit of everything).  

Prerequisites and General Strategy

So the starting point is going to be an assumption that you're in a solo guild with no QI support at all provided by your city.  The concept also can be adapted if you're in a guild that clears the bosses and gets you to the farming nodes (actually even easier then as you don't need to make goods; just donate coins and supplies); but the in-between situation where you're in a guild that finishes the early donation nodes but doesn't open the farming nodes will be a struggle.

Because of the nature of QI, you're going to want to be online twice a day between 10 and 14 hours apart.  This allows you 2 collections a day and, barring a whole lot of bonus AP production, an ability to always spend before you get capped.

  
Skip the middle tier of production buildings because the (current) need to be online and visit your settlement an hour after you start construction to get full benefit is positively unlazy.  Rather save up enough Alloy to jump from T1 to T3.  Their 10 hour constructions fit with the collection schedule.

You'll need 450 Quantum Shards per round for 3 expansions.  And hopefully no more than 35 Quantum Shards on impediment removal (at least 1 of the 3 expansions needs to be naturally impediment free). This only gives you 1 round per championship guaranteed (we start with 500 free QS), but should be sustainable if you actually play to the extent discussed here (on average you need to exceed ~2,300 personal progress to make back 500 shards over the round and should be making a bit over 4,000).  You can use extra shards to open chests after the last round of the championship you decide to play.

Select Rope as one goods type as it's the smallest building.  Troop donations are no longer a thing and will be ignored (Fighting is better, but needs some support from the main city to be smooth - and still takes more clicking).

When donating coins or supplies, try to keep them roughly balanced.  Initially this will mean donating supplies.  Later on it will mean donating coins and only using supplies to make goods.

Settlement Layout

3 initial expansions should all go on one of the two short edges of your settlement to make a slightly larger rectangle.  Much of the settlement can be viewed as 6x6 sections:

The large green 6x6 sections can be either 4 3x3s or 9 2x2s.  As the most common sizes of building, this gives you good flexibility to evolve the settlement as it progresses.  When it comes to adding 4x3 Bakeries, they'll either go side by side in pairs to make 4x6 sections or one atop the other in triples to make 12x3 sections with 4 3x3s beside them for a 12x6 section (i.e. 2 6x6 sections).

Extra expansions can go anywhere in moderate amounts as dedicated 2x2 space (you'll always have some 2x2s).

The Play

Note: Update in progress.  Some pictures will be out of date (sizes and layouts of buildings still the same, but which buildings is changing to reduce selling and get a bit lazier).  It should be done in under a week.

Initially build the following:

- 7x Estate House, 1x Mansion, 1x Multistorey House (480 Population)

- 6x Church (960 Euphoria)

- 6x Tannery, 6x Brewery (360 Population Demand)

- Donate Goods and Supplies

Production:

- 330 Alloy Production

- 188,750 Coins ((3,750 * 7 + 7,500 + 12,500) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 7 + 0.1) + 50,000)

- 322,160 Supplies ((12,000 * 6 + 4,800 * 6) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 6))

On the 1st collection you'll have 330 Alloy (to be saved for next collection)

- Donate Goods and Supplies

By the 2nd collection you'll have 660 Alloy.

- Sell 6 Churches

- Build 1 Doctor

- Sell 1 Estate House and 1 Mansion

- Build 2 Multistorey Houses

- Build 3 Tanneries and 2 Breweries

- Donate Goods and Supplies

Production:

- 405 Alloy Production

- 212,000 Coins ((3,750 * 6 + 12,500 * 3) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 6) + 50,000)

- 503,840 Supplies ((12,000 * 9 + 4,800 * 8) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 8)) + 50,000)

On the 3rd collection you'll have 565 Alloy.

- Sell 5 Tanneries

- If needed, arrange open space such that you have a 6x6 area + 3x3 area for the incoming construction 

- Build 1 Doctor in the 3x3 area

- Build 5 Multistorey Houses

- Build 2 Estate Houses

- Build 1 Ropery

- Donate Goods (produce as needed) and Supplies

Production:

- 435 Alloy Production

- 453,000 Coins ((3,750 * 8 + 12,500 * 8) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 8) + 50,000)

- 317,840 Supplies ((12,000 * 4 + 4,800 * 8) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 5) + 50,000)

On the 4th collection, you'll have 500 Alloy (to be saved for next collection):

- Make 90 Rope.  Place 2 Goods Expansions (30 Rope + 60 Rope).  Any expansion without impediments will do.

- Move 5 houses which are near your Ropery to your new expansions

- Build 3 Estate Houses in your new expansions

- Confirm orientation of houses beside your Ropery such that you have 2 3x3 spaces open beside it

- Build 2 Breweries beside your Ropery-House-House row

- Donate Goods (produce as needed) and Supplies

Production:

- 510 Alloy Production

- 572,625 Coins ((3,750 * 11 + 12,500 * 8) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 11) + 50,000)

- 386,000 Supplies ((12,000 * 4 + 4,800 * 10) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 10) + 50,000)

On the 5th collection you'll have 1,010 Alloy:

- Sell 5 Multistorey Houses

- Move your Ropery and adjacent houses if needed away from Breweries (into sold house space)

- Build 2 Breweries where your Ropery + 2 houses were

- Build 1 Clapboard House

- Donate Goods (produce as needed) and Supplies

Production (Clapboard House not yet active):

- 465 Alloy Production 

- 341,375 Coins ((3,750 * 11 + 12,500 * 3) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 11) + 50,000)

- 461,840 Supplies ((12,000 * 4 + 4,800 * 12) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 12) + 50,000)

On the 6th collection, you'll now have 475 Alloy (to be saved for next collection):

- Donate Goods (produce as needed) and Coins or Supplies (whichever is higher)

Production:

- 840 Alloy Production 

- 822,375 Coins ((130,000 + 3,750 * 11 + 12,500 * 3) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 11) + 50,000)

- 461,840 Supplies ((12,000 * 4 + 4,800 * 12) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 12) + 50,000)

On the 7th collection you'll now have 1,315 Alloy:

- Sell off 3 Tanneries

- Place a Bakery alongside the remaining Tannery

- Move your Ropery behind/ahead of the remaining Tannery

- Build 4 Estate Houses (2 beside the Ropery ; 2 where the Ropery used to be).

- Donate Goods (produce as needed) and Coins

Production (Bakery not yet active):

- 855 Alloy Production

- 1,056,875 Coins ((130,000 + 12,500 * 3 + 3,750 * 15) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 15) + 50,000)

- 321,440 Supplies ((12,000 * 1 + 4,800 * 12) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 12) + 50,000)

On the 8th collection you'll now have 1,170 Alloy:

- Sell your last Tannery

- Sell 2 Multistorey Houses elsewhere to make a Ropery-shaped hole away from your Bakery

- Move your Ropery where the 2 Multistorey Houses were

- Build Bakery where your Tannery + Ropery was

- Build Estate House where your Ropery was

- Donate Goods (produce as needed) and Coins

Production (2nd Bakery not yet active):

- 1,200 Alloy Production

- 1,001,750 Coins ((130,000 + 12,500 + 3,750 * 16) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 16) + 50,000)

- 508,640 Supplies ((60,000 + 4,800 * 12) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 12) + 50,000)

On the 9th Collection you'll now have 1,365 Alloy:

- Sell your last Multistorey House

- Build a Clapboard House

- Donate Goods (produce as needed) and Coins

Production (2nd Clapboard not yet active):

- 1,560 Alloy Production

- 943,000 Coins ((130,000 + 3,750 * 16) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 16) + 50,000)

- 742,640 Supplies ((60,000 * 2 + 4,800 * 12) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 12) + 50,000)

All further productions with no more modifications will be:

- 1,935 Alloy Production

- 1,554,000 Coins ((130,000 * 2 + 3,750 * 16) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 16) + 50,000)

- 742,640 Supplies ((60,000 * 2 + 4,800 * 12) * (1.5 + 0.2 * 12) + 50,000)

This is already more than sufficient to keep up on day 11/12 Goods and Coin donation costs at 5,600 AP/hr (where this settlement is currently at with no effect from main city).  You can build additional goods expansions.  You can continue to build into higher AP/hr by constructing additional euphoria buildings (Pillory recommended from here on).  This may require additional coin/supply upgrades as well if taken far enough.

Further Optimisation

This build order was chosen for specifically lazy play and pure donation to be accessible to even the least developed city without complicated collection procedures.  You can relieve strain on coins/supplies by fighting early, especially with support from your main city.  This in turn makes optimizing for alloy production more important as it's the core limiter to build up your city further, no matter how much help from your main city you have.

Euphoria, which was upgraded first in this example, is the slowest return on Alloy - often requiring 5 or more collections to repay the Alloy you put into it.  Furthermore you can temporarily build T1 houses or supply buildings that you collect at less than full euphoria and then sell and build Churches in their place for additional Alloy while building up to full euphoria for your main collection.  As such, if you want to put more effort into it, euphoria should be postponed.  Pillory is also the more space-efficient euphoria (both in terms of AP/hr/tile and Culture/tile) and if you've gotten your Alloy production sorted first, you may as well jump straight to that instead of Doctors (which are more Alloy-efficient, but less space-efficient)).

I will write-up a plan for my main city before the feature goes live on Thursday, involving more extreme optimisations.

Dorks! (Historical Allies)

One of the recent features Inno has been shoving down our throats, Historical Allies (hereafter referred to as dorks for brevity and to reflect my opinion of the feature) have now reached the point where they're hard to ignore, especially Rare dorks.  Every event main building has a room for one, and they represent a decent chunk of the building's potential value.

This is still a feature in progress that isn't as fleshed out as they plan (there's tabs marked coming soon), so I'll need to update this at points still.

Summary of dork "Power":

Rarity	Base Value	# of Stats	Total Value	~XP Cost
Common	10%	1.0	110%	6.2M
Uncommon	15%	2.0	230%	7.8M
Rare	25%	2.0-3.5	250%-438%	9.0M
Epic	35%	2.5	338%	15.5M

1 "Stat" = Generic Single-Color Sword or Shield or Venue-Specific Single-Color Sword and Shield.  Rares always have 3 stats, but often 1 or 2 of them are "half stats" (Venue-Specific Single-Color Sword or Shield)

There's 3 tiers of rare so far in terms of value:

• Ragnar Lodbrok and Freydis Eriksdottir have Generic Single Color Sword and Shield for a double stat plus 1 full stat plus 1 half stat for 3.5 Stats.
• Artemisia I, Pompey the Great, Septimia Zenobia, and Thermistocles have 2 full stats plus 1 half stat for 2.5 stats.
• Qin Shi Huang and Fu Hao have 1 full stat plus 2 half stat for 2 stats.

100% Gets added to the Base Value for each stat from the levelling process.

Some of the first dorks came with levels already in place, but new dorks arrive at level 1 and need to be levelled by Heroic Endeavours in the Heroic Taverne to unlock their full value.

There are 5 types of tasks with 20 entries each per week that reward 10 1k xp scrolls:

• Win a Battle with red stats (0 - 10000% boost opponent)
• Win a Battle with blue stats (0 - 10000% boost opponent)
• Pay FP (10 - 10k ; total = ~49k)
• Pay Medals (1k - 1m ; total = ~4.9m)
• Win a Negotiation (5 rounds, 10 options, 1 - 589 goods multiplier)

For each 5 tasks total you complete per week you're rewarded with an additional 100 1k xp scrolls and 5 fragments of an Epic dork.

Maximum earning per week is 3m xp of scrolls + 100/1000 fragments of the Epic dork, but it's likely that some of the tasks will either be too much for you (high boost opponents), or that you'll deem them not worth the cost (high FP payments or high multiplier goods negotiations).  Do what you feel is no big deal and wait for the next week to do more.  It'll take you 3 or more weeks to fully level a single dork in general.

When you've got some scrolls you can view the status of your dorks in the building next door:

In the level up tab for the dork you're interested in, hit the "use multiple scrolls to level up" button (there's no sense in using 1 scroll at a time):

Some general advice:

• Only level dorks you have rooms for.  The house symbol on the icons on the left of the overview mark which ones you currently have placed.
• Rare dorks generally provide the best value.  You should be willing to pay twice or more the cost of a common dork's level to level a rare one instead.
• Higher levels cost more.  If you have many dorks sitting in houses don't neglect grabbing a few cheap lower levels (generally level 25-30 on a common makes sense before level 100 on a rare as an example) on all of them before focusing on the ones that have the best value to you.
• Most dorks come from events.  Recent events have included the possibility to obtain 2 rares each event.  If you fail to complete a dork during an event options to finish them have been lacking (though Care for Tomorrow appears to be including an option in the shop to buy a few missing fragments for previous dorks).

There's really not much interesting about this feature yet, just boring free power with additional busywork.  But enough that it'd be silly to continue to neglect them.

Quantum Incursions for the Lazy or New Cities

As I'm considering a return to the game for a (possibly short) stint, I've been thinking on Quantum Incursions.  Specifically how even on many of my diamond mines it'd be really nice to get a prize or two to make GE more relaxing; yet even on my main I'll be contemplating how to do less of QI.  So the question is what is the least effort one can do and still get decent access to rewards in a timely manner.  Note that this is not an optimized approach if you want to try hard at the feature - rather it's based around "I don't really want to play it, but I would like some rewards for the least effort".

Prerequisites and General Strategy

So the starting point is going to be an assumption that you're in a solo guild with no QI support at all provided by your city.  The concept also can be adapted if you're in a guild that clears the bosses and gets you to the farming nodes (actually even easier then as you don't need to make goods or troops; just donate coins and supplies); but the in-between situation where you're in a guild that finishes the early donation nodes but doesn't open the farming nodes will be a struggle.

Because of the nature of QI, you're going to want to be online twice a day between 10 and 14 hours apart (between 11 and 13 hours apart being slightly preferred as that means the 1 hour build time on tailors is of no consequence).  This allows you 2 collections a day and, barring a whole lot of bonus AP production, an ability to always spend before you get capped.

You will be using 250 Quantum Shards per round for 2 expansions.  This only gives you 2 rounds per championship guaranteed (you start with 500 free QS), but should be sustainable if you're actually playing to the extent discussed here (which should make you ~400 Quantum Shards per round from random rewards alone - plus sometimes some from the pass).  You can use extra shards to open chests after the last round of the championship you decide to play.

You want to select archers or soldiers as one troop type (assumed archers going forward); and iron as one goods type as you ideally want a 3x3 or smaller building when you need to make stuff to donate.

When donating coins or supplies try to keep them roughly balanced - the city I'm recommending produces them roughly equally and you need equal amounts for goods and troops.  It should be ~13 coin donations to 4 supply donations, if you're following the plan exactly, because you start with many more coins than supplies.

Settlement Layout

Part of the requirement to be lazy is not changing your settlement layout too frequently.  Accordingly we'll be doing very little buildup, and a fixed road grid.

The 2nd tailor, marked by the yellow circle, you cannot afford immediately and can be replaced with 2 additional rooftile houses in the initial build.

The 4th butcher, marked by the green circle, will be replaced with your goods building or barracks when you need it and has room for 1 additional rooftile house in that configuration as long as it's 3x3 or smaller.

The two expansions can be any adjacent plots without an impediment, they don't need to be any specific spot.

When you collect you will need to sell down to 6 rooftile houses to get full enthusiasm (from 7 in the plot as is; could be 9 before you get your 2nd tailor; or 8 when you've got a goods building or barracks replacing the 4th butcher) but do not need to build any culture.  Just collect the extra rooftiles, sell them, collect the rest, rebuild the rooftiles.  If you don't like to do the sell and rebuild while collecting at all you can just stick to 6 roof-tiles (instead of 7-9) and have some additional wasted space and a few less coins and AP (you will want to donate supplies somewhat more often).

The Play

Donation amounts assume you start between 8am and 9am eastern and will be available shortly before or after midnight eastern to drain your AP bar at the end of a day or start of the new day.  In general the primary goal is to avoid capping your AP bar, but the amounts here are also intended to maximize your most efficient donation days (2,4).  If you need to do more at a moment or different stuff because of your situation do so - better to have spent early on a less efficient day than to have sat at cap because you couldn't be there when you were about to cap.  Fully spending your AP bar should give you 17 hours before you have to spend again.

• Day 1, as soon as possible, construct your settlement with 1 tailor, and all 4 butchers from the above layout.  Include 2 rooftile houses in place of the missing tailor.  Donate 17 sets of goods (finish the first node) and 7 sets of troops.
• Day 1, collection 1, collect 3 rooftile houses, sell them, collect everything else, build 2nd tailor, and rebuild 1 rooftile house.  
• Day 2, after reset: Donate 17 sets of goods and 10 sets of troops
• Day 2, collection 1: collect 1 rooftile house, sell it, collect everything else, rebuild 1 rooftile house.  Donate 7 sets of troops and 2 sets of coins.
• Day 2, collection 2: collect 1 rooftile house, sell it, collect everything else, sell marked butcher, build iron foundry, build 2 rooftile houses.
• Day 2, before reset: Donate 15 sets of coins or supplies and 13 sets of troops. 
• Day 3, collection 1: collect 2 rooftile houses, sell them, collect everything else, rebuild 2 rooftile houses.  Make 80 iron.  Sell iron foundry, build archery range.  Donate 9 sets of goods. 
• Day 3, collection 2: collect 2 rooftile houses, sell them, collect everything else, rebuild 2 rooftile houses. Make 60 archers.  Sell archery range and rebuild iron foundry.
• Day 4, after reset: Donate 17 sets of goods and 8 sets of troops.
• Day 4, collection 1: collect 2 rooftile houses, sell them, collect everything else, rebuild 2 rooftile houses.  Donate 9 sets of troops and 8 sets of coins or supplies.  
• Day 4, collection 2: collect 2 rooftile houses, sell them, collect everything else, rebuild 2 rooftile houses.  Make 60 iron.
• Day 4, before reset: Donate 9 sets of coins or supplies, and 14 sets of troops.
• Day 5+, every collection: collect 2 rooftile houses, sell them, collect everything else, rebuild 2 rooftile houses.  Make as many multiples of 20 iron as you can.  Donate all you can.  You will be wasting AP on these days because you don't have enough coin and supply production to fully donate.

Expected Results

Average expectation is 631 fragments per round of the 2 seasonal rewards and the selection kit for old rewards.  This means a bit less than 2 seasons should, on average, get you a level of each of those from random rewards.

You should also get ~2700 progress per round on the pass.  Which means ~3 rounds to get 2000 fragments of the selection kit for old rewards from that using the current pass.

To the extent that one of the old rewards is your goal, 3-4 rounds (=6-8 weeks) should get you 2 level 2s of whatever it is you were hoping for - one from pass and one from random rewards.

Further Optimisation

If you're looking to put in just a little additional effort, some small changes while keeping the core of the lazy approach are possible:

• If you can get enough main city support to build one out of the gate, 1 Goat Farm replaces *all* of the supply producers in the above layout.  Or 1 Arch replaces *all* of the culture.  This would be a slightly different grid but can save you expansions or enable you to build more production so you can do more on later days.  You can come up with a bigger plan based around what you can afford from your main city support.
• Fighting is cheaper when it works and if you can autobattle it's not that much additional effort.  Especially on day 1, fighting can be nearly "free" (no troops lost) with 8 ballista or 6 ballista and 2 archers.  If you have some boost to your QI troops from your main city it can last for more days.  This means additional coins and supplies saved for later days.  It is more clicking though compared to "check the max box and donate all".  If doing this you may wish to work to replace 1 of the culture with an arch so that you don't need to sell rooftile houses.  and upgrade 1-2 of the rooftile houses to better houses so you can have both archer and iron production available when the fighting days end as you'll have some extra coins and supplies to donate troops too.
• If day 11+12 aren't too useful to your guild (which if you're in a solo guild = up to you), you can start day 1 after midnight eastern and have a full 24 hours for day 1 instead of 16 hours. And 8 hours for day 11 (no day 12).  The expected difference in the above strategy is ~17 fragments less and ~60 progress more for starting at midnight on the first day instead of 8 am.  It could have more of an advantage if you fight on early days.

You will need to adapt the timing and amounts of goods and troops produced to match your optimisations.

Ugh! Harbors...

Recently a number of my worlds have hit Arctic Future with the goal of nothing more than to get through it (and OF) as quickly as possible.  Obviously the primary obstacle is Promethium and Orichalcum.

Way back when Arctic Future was new, I had settled on "just use +Promethium" as my arctic strategy and copied it forward to Oceanic Future when that released.  Worlds I've done since have largely copied it but weren't in a rush.  And I still wholeheartedly recommend just +Ore for a lazy world that may not collect on time.  Even if -time was better in theory, failure to collect it on time would pull +Ore back ahead.

But what if you were willing to set timers and get on at crazy times.  Can -time be better?  One of the properties of -time is it gets increasing returns the more you stack (to the cap of 7 hour trips).  Going from 24 hours to 20 hours is 20% better.  Going from 20 hours to 16 hours is 25% better.  It's also for the same reason better with a fully upgraded harbor and base trip time of 17-18 hours instead of 24 hours.  By contrast +ore is %-wise less incrementally effective the more you get.  going from 65 to 80 ore is ~23% better.  Going from 80 to 95 ore is ~19% better.

But bear that in mind, just how good can each strategy get.  Let's start with Arctic Future:

With maximum upgrade crew:

Time Crew	Time	Promethium
Steersperson Tsani	-180m
Navigator Avril	-144m	+4
Navigator Zhon	-121m	+5
Steward Bryce	-90m		28% Time Boost
Trip Yield	7.0h	74	10.6 / h

Promethium Crew	Time	Promethium
Storesperson Maddox		+24
Miner Pikatthi	-39m	+17
Sailor Elise	-33m	+15
Quartermaster Mediha		+11	47% Ore Boost
Trip Yield	16.6h	158	9.5 / h

So time *is* capable of out-producing +promethium when fully upgraded and with extra attention, but the catch here is that you're not likely to hit max crew before you no longer care about promethium.  It takes 154 trips to get a member to level 10 in Arctic.  And you're probably not there much more than two months tops.  

In general early on time crew will level about 50% faster than promethium crew due to more trips.  We'll compare Level 4 Promethium (24 trips) vs Level 5 Time (38 trips) as somewhat indicative of where you might expect to be at the 1 month mark.

L5 Time Crew	Time	Promethium
Steersperson Tsani	-123m
Navigator Avril	-80m	+1
Navigator Zhon	-89m
Steward Bryce	-50m		18% Time Boost
Trip Yield	11.4h	66	5.8 / h

L4 Promethium Crew	Time	Promethium
Storesperson Maddox		+14
Miner Pikatthi	+4m	+9
Miner Bobby	+8m	+9
Quartermaster Mediha		+5	29% Ore Boost
Trip Yield	18.2h	111	6.1 / h

While Time Crew isn't *that* far behind in production at the 1 month milestone, it is much worse at the start, with an un-upgraded harbor:

L1 Time Crew	Time	Promethium
Steersperson Tsani	-91m
Navigator Avril	-50m	-4
Navigator Zhon	-70m	-5
Trip Yield	20.5h	41	2.0 / h

L1 Promethium Crew	Time	Promethium
Storesperson Maddox		+10
Miner Pikatthi	+50	+6
Miner Bobby	+75	+7
Trip Yield	26.1h	73	2.8 / h

As such my recommendation for Arctic Future in a practical sense, is to focus on +promethium, and only take -time if it's enough to move the collection time to a more convenient spot or if the crew members you want are not available.  The storesperson and miners are your main crew, but other crew members that have +promethium are good subs.  All those words to circle back to "just take +promethium" :)

Oceanic Future is a different story.  They made the time crew members in general much stronger in OF.  In fact they're so strong there's multiple configurations that hit the "minimum trip time" cap and allow you to include a member for other considerations.

Balanced Crew	Time	Orichalcum
Electrician Stan	-495m
Officer Deklan	-70m	+15
Officer Zia	-30m	+18
Reactor Walter		+28
Trip Yield	7.1h	129	18.2 / h

Just Ori Crew	Time	Orichalcum
Reactor Controller Alize		+22
Reactor Walter		+28
Officer Zia	-30m	+18
Auxiliary Eun			50% Ore Boost
Trip Yield	16.5h	170	10.3 / h

Excellent value from Electrician Stan who cuts *over 8 hours* off by himself and causes the time-optimized crew to make close to 80% more per hour!  Without him you probably want at least two time-primaries instead of one of the ore payload characters.  You already get good gains from time with a level 4-5 crew (albeit with more time characters).

L5 Balanced Crew	Time	Orichalcum
Electrician Stan	-260m
Sonar Tech Kali	-285m	-6
Electrician Yara	-165m
Reactor Walter		+17
Trip Yield	7h	79	11.3 / h

L4 Just Ori Crew	Time	Orichalcum
Reactor Controller Alize		+11
Reactor Walter		+15
Officer Zia	-20m	+9
Auxiliary Eun			27% Ore Boost
Trip Yield	16.7h	112	6.7 / h

A time-focused crew has already pulled way ahead with somewhat levelled crew.  It's already surpassed the level 10 Just Ori crew.  A teeny tiny bit of bad news though is that they don't fare so well at level 1 with an un-upgraded Oceanic Terminal.  

L1 Time Crew	Time	Orichalcum
Sonar Tech Kali	-265m	-8
Sonar Tech Iggy	-90m
Electrician Yara	-110m
Trip Yield	16.3h	42	2.6 / h

L1 Just Ori Crew	Time	Orichalcum
Reactor Controller Alize		+8
Officer Zia	-15m	+6
Yeoman Skye	+40m	+7
Trip Yield	24.4h	71	2.9 / h

It is however not dramatically behind, and as we've seen it'll surpass it pretty quickly with harbor and crew upgrades.  In terms of which time crew members to focus on:

Electrician Stan is the strongest of the time crew at high levels but starts out rather average.  You should try to include him to get him experience whenever possible.

Sonar Tech Kali starts as the largest time savings at a cost of a decent chunk of your orichalcum per trip, but makes your other time investments better at that time.  She doesn't improve very fast with levels however.  She will nevertheless offer the 2nd highest time savings at level 10 and the orichalcum penalty will not be so significant by then either.

Sonar Tech Iggy, Electrician Yara, and Digit Rosa are all medium-strong time members with average levelling progress.  You'll use them a lot earlier when your other time members need more help, but later a couple of them (or one of them and Kali) will be the backup plan if Stan doesn't show up for you to pick.

Officers Deklan and Zia aren't the strongest time members but are great orichalcum payoffs in combination with stronger time members while still being able to help cutoff some of the last hour or so.  Deklan cuts off a bit more time while Zia adds a bit more orichalcum.

Navigation Hailey is not worth considering.  Any crew where she'd theoretically surpass other options is already at minimum trip time.

Note that once you have your time assistance somewhat levelled it may occasionally be worth including good orichalcum increases over some of them if the collection time with a full-time-boost is inconvenient and you won't take advantage of the savings anyways.

Beta Space Race Update II

Ok, since I last posted on how my beta city was doing I've advanced to Future Era.  Halloween event was great for goods which enabled me to get moving forward, but in Tomorrow Era, supplies very much became the limiting factor now.  So I remodeled my city with as many TE supply buildings as I could and have been sending my spare FP to Lighthouse of Alexandria for now.  

I'm all set on goods up to TE now I think and am just waiting to make enough FE goods and supplies to advance to the Arctic Harbor.  

I suspect it's now too late to make it to SAJM in time for Titan, but hope to be in VF+ at least, past the OF blockade.  In other news speaking of a space race I have another big post coming soon about what I'm doing in Dilmun, the new US server :)