@krinid
400B! Assuming that wasn't a typo
no typo. it's true. I think every big map has one territory with one gigantic stack in it

but what's the point of having them at all?
Some players (sadly not me) are really good with markets. Imagine crafting 50 antennas or a couple of TV screens and then selling them at once.... I can't - don't have the patience.

@SubLunar Unit
Unlock/upgrade expensive advancements while you still can
why? what else happens after ascension except that I won't get that many Powers?

After ascending you start again with the low levels which give little AP. So you won't be able to afford the expensive advancements until you reach the high levels again - which takes a while. Skip level powers are finally useful here...

@Parsifal

why? what else happens after ascension except that I won't get that many Powers?

Oh nothing happens, really. Just the AP rewards will be smallish again.

@Parsifal
Wow, well a 400B territory is kind of exciting actually! Looking forward to it. Did you just attack it straight on normally, or use some of the active artifacts to take it down?

@SubLunar

No, I mean advancements for higher prices of ores, alloys or items.

OHHH so this one:

Increased Item Sell Values
Items sell for 10% more money. Upgradable to 100% in 5% increments.

I've got my eye on it but with 1745 AP buy in, it's a tough start, and as it's phase 3, only recently even became available to me. Do you know what the upgrade prices are after the 1st one?

And that ties right into:

Yeah I might have one recommendation regarding Ascending: Unlock/upgrade expensive advancements while you still can.

And this makes total sense hearing it now but I didn't consider it previously. Having to slog through the low levels again with low AP returns, unable to unlock the useful high initial AP advancements. I suppose it's kind of too late for me now as I'm now on my last level and will ascend as soon as I finish with 1563 AP for Europe Huge + the 24.65 AP I have now for a grand total of 1587 AP. There's a few I won't have enough to unlock, including Increased Item Sell Values. Which sucks as that's probably one of the nicest ones to unlock given the problems like I'm seeing here ... but I'm not sure it'd be enough to help on this map right now, even @ 100% with the +30% Techs and +16% Artifact, that's only +146% and I think it's more like +500% needed to profit off these recipes.

Thanks for the tips ... even I can't leverage it right here right now, it's good insight. I'll be close enough that after 5-6 of the early levels that I could likely unlock it.

@krinid

Did you just attack it straight on normally, or use some of the active artifacts to take it down?
No artifacts, just mercenaries (I had maybe 300-400B worth of them)
And my Drafting was giving me 11B per draft (that's about 100B per hour!)
Wasn't a problem at all.

Edited 4/7/2021 20:01:38

11B per draft !! whoa. How big are the merc camps? To get 11B in a single draft, the camps must be >100B ?? Or maybe just you captured a whole bunch of 10-50B ones in one big spree?

I purchased the super camp. It helps a lot. A LOT!

then I had the following composition:
- all the upgrades from the tech tree (except from the very last army camp upgrade. couldn't bother getting the last three Dysprosiums):
+ 150%
- army camps AP: +240%
- army camp boost artifact on epic + 80%
- draft boost artifact on rare + 16% to all drafts
- also while idle I had both money generating artifacts equipped. both on rare (+40% from bonuses and +100% from territories)
PLUS I was playing Europe Huge simultaneously with the US map and used all the Powers from both levels only on Europe (that was a nice boost, but not a game changer)

I think at the end my army camps production rate was at 1M+/sec

1M/sec sounds about right for the huge levels. I did buy a SuperCamp as well ... just b/c I wanted to support the game in some capacity and that seemed better than buying a colour I don't really want. I'm already a lifetime member.

It does help, notably in the early game.

Now you've got me thinking, while paying Europe Huge, should I ML on USA one more time before ascending? And if I'm still playing USA when I finish Europe, what happens then ... ?? I wonder if I ascend and it counts towards clearing USA pre or post ascension.

It'd only be 1000 AP instead of 1300 AP b/c it's m 2nd playthrough.

Though artifact digs will be a bummer ... b/c can't dig in both simultaneously.

i just stopped bothering about smelters and crafters. get the first few upgrades and be done with that section. too many resources needed and buying to keep them producing is not worth.

so why waste any time on them.

@Timi
Agree ... I avoid them whenever possibly. Too much micro messing around with them ... but this level forces their use, since there is a massive lack of money b/c EVERY SINGLE CRAFTED ITEM costs about 5x+ more to buy the ingredients than you can sell it for. So if you want an item, it is either very costly in money (which you severely lack as aforementioned) or very costly in terms of time & resources b/c you must smelt them (and craft them as well in some cases, as some have crafted items as ingredients). Severe PITA!

I mean just look at these two items ...


Air Compressor requires 30 Uranium bars, 7 Lanthanum bars, 255 Welding Rods, 855 Twine (insane!) ... so you can smelt and craft those in some suuuuuper long period of tedious time, or buy them all for an egregious price (the twine alone would cost 164B) and sell 1 crafted item for 116B (a loss even just from the twine, never mind the more expensive items).

Or the Robotic Arm ... sells for 493B. Sounds great, right? But requires 119 Uranium, 101 Lanthanum, 54 Erbium, 18 Unobtanium. Seriously, why bother? The uranium alone costs 550B, and don't think anyone will make 119 uranium in total across completing an entire level! Makes the 18 uranium requires for Techs on this level seem insignificant. But why even scatter these unnecessary recipes around the map? They're just distractions, no harm, no gain, just distractions (I suppose you could say distractions are slight negatives).

@Parsifal
Found your 400B territory finally! Pretty exciting. Found a 349B merc camp along the way! wow. The full merc camp isn't enough to take this one territory down, but excited to use Field Hospital, Damage Territory & Quad Strike on this bad boy. Sooo many 10-35B territories scattered throughout a slew of 2-3B territories ... a pretty interesting map configuration, except for the Money/Recipe problem.

I always stick with Explosive Bolts and Boiling Flasks.

Easy to do the math, usually 2 smelters can be easily funded with mines, and can handle 5 crafters without diminishing. I do the math to find out what I can handle, and I sell all other ores.

Maxed out AP upgrade for Ore Sell Value. It is cheap and well worth it. Makes it so the upper end ore is worth more than the alloy which makes life much easier.

Doing the complex recipes are a pain in the butt, and by the time you are at that part of the game, the small differences shouldn't matter much.

If you want higher value recipes, the single ingredient crafts are always the easiest to do and cause less headaches.

@ krinid

yup. there she is. in all her glory!
if 1 merc.camp almost takes care of the stack, you are in good shape!
don't forget to send me a screenshot of all you items before you finish the level ;)

totally agree with Z about the Ore Sell Advancement.

have you already got the recipe for Microchip? I think you only need Chromium for it.

@Parsifal
Was waiting until I actually found the dang Microchip to respond ... and I've now found it hiding out in Ireland. It takes 13 chromium bars, sells for 10B (11B with a rare Sell Value artifact). I haven't found the Market that sells chromium yet (I'm assuming since it's the last level that chromium exists in a Market somewhere) so can't advise on the price to buy the chromium bars, but chromium is between thorium and uranium in value and cost, and I do have a market with both of those:

Uranium Bar for ￦4.63B
Lanthanum Bar for ￦6.78B
Samarium Bar for ￦5.43B
Thorium Bar for ￦1.18B

So even assuming chromium is the same price as thorium instead of averaging T & U, the total cost of ingredients will be 15.34B which is obviously >11B, so still a 4.34B loss. :(

Was the microchip actually profitable for you? Maybe there was an update between when you played and I'm playing and values changed? Surely you weren't smelting all the chromium for it, b/c having enough ore to do that for those expensive bars is always challenging.

@krinid

don't remember if there was a market for chromium....

I had so much chromium ore, I just let the smelters work on it (that was the late stages of the game)

it's also possible I was crafting microchips and losing money. lol. It never occured to me to double check the prices.

@Parisfal

it's also possible I was crafting microchips and losing money. lol. It never occured to me to double check the prices.

Soooo funny! I always compare the cost to buy vs sell, find the highest profit margin I can afford and mass produce it. I wonder if you were really losing money on it though ... haha.

@Z
Rivets, bolts, boiling flasks, explosive bolts, magnets have been profitable on (I think) all maps to date that they've been available on. But not this map, at least not this version of it.

- Rivets, 85 nickel bar, 13M sell price, cost of nickel @ market 50M, 37M profit loss
- Bolts, 634 zinc bars, 33M sell price, cost of zinc @ market 129M, 97M profit loss
- Boiling Flasks, 13 gold bars, 1.16B sell price, cost of gold @ market 2.4B, 1.24B profit loss
- Explosive Bolts, 10 platinum bars, 1.55B sell price, cost of platinum @ market TBD haven't found the market yet, TBD profit loss
- Magnets, 13 neodymium bars, 6.98B sell price, cost of neodymium @ market TBD haven't found the market yet, TBD profit loss

So the last 2 are TBD but I'm confident they will be a losses given how I haven't found a single profitable recipe on this map yet. I think they can be profitable if you smelt and craft all ingredients, just not if you buy ingredients from Markets. But smelting & crafting is tedious and takes waaaay too much time, micromanagement & ore required for actually smelting the expensive alloy bars, and thus isn't feasible/sustainable.

Anyhow ... point being ... money is overly tight on this map. Just to finish 62% of it after 14 days - by territory count, which means I'm really only ~30% finished by actual army counts. And still not a single profitable recipe! To get this far I've used almost all my saved up powers ... approx 10 time warps, 15 supercharge army camps, 15 supercharge mines, 20 free caches, 10 market raids, 15 inspire mercenaries. I haven't had money to buy digs, army & mine upgrades and also bars from the markets to keep the smelting/crafting going for Techs, had to choose one among them. I've used these powers to compensate for lack of money, which is fine ... I had a lot saved up b/c I wasn't using them in previous levels. I picked the right level to unleash them on, this level needs it! Without the powers, I think I'd likely still be at 10% completion. I expect the end to go quicker though b/c now I have my hospitals built up nicely to 1.12B benefit per capture.

But then again, I'm probably underestimating the remaining armies on the map in the fog. I can see 2.18T and there are 410 fogged territories still, most of them in the far end of the map, so assuming they average out to 3B per territory, total armies will be 3.4T armies. So remove ~33% from hospitals, then 25% for joint strike, I get 1.7T armies. I have 139B armies right now and probably about 600B mercs in camps ... so provided I can find the money to buy them all (and that's the whole point of this thread, despite me getting off topic here - I lack the money to do so) then this could be over quite soon after the Drafts from buying all those mercs. So really just a matter of how long it will take me to earn the money to buy the mercs. Oh forgot about army caches ... I could probably round up another 50-100B on army caches to help as well.

Sorry ... this was way longer than it needed to be. (;

Edited 4/14/2021 05:39:47

There weren't any late game valuable recipes on Europe Huge the last time I played it (a couple months ago). However, I finished faster than anticipated despite this.

Thanks Jz. I'll strap in for the medium haul. I suppose I shouldn't rush too much anyhow, else I'll miss all the artifacts.

you can't really "miss" artifacts. if you keep digging nonstop, what's the harm in rushing through levels?

@krinid

take the map easy. most of the russian northern-eastern territories have 2B to 2.3 B armies. and those territories are empty (no mines, army camps, powers), so leave them for the end. your hospitals shouls save you about 1B/conquest.
I hope you have enouth Inspiring Powers to get all your mercenaries. they will finish 15% of the map
I stopped upgrading my A.camps and moved to the M.camps when I had Finland, Belarus, Caucasus and half of Russia still unconquered.

and yes, forget about digging "all" the artifacts. there are plenty of them in every map