This discussion talks about the Phase II upgrade Increased AP and also mentions some endgame aspects of Idle. Do not continue if you don’t want any spoilers.
________________________________________________________________________________

So, there are a lot of differing opinions of when to invest into the Tier II Advancement of Increased AP. Some people say “as soon as possible, it’ll pay off in the long run” while others say “don’t bother, it is a waste of AP” and others say “wait until you are strong.” I have done calculations to see just when the best time is, and I will leave it to you to decide what to do.

To fully upgrade Increased AP (IAP), you must spend 7,718 AP. That seems like a lot, but it will increase your AP generation by 25%, right? In order for it to earn back what you invested, you will have to earn 30,872 AP (unboosted) which would be more than beating all the levels again… TWICE. “But Z” you ask, “wouldn’t this still be better in the long run?” Well, let us see.

For the same measly 7,718 AP, you can upgrade Increased Army Camp Production (IACP) from 0% to 390%. This would make you beat your levels almost 5x faster (and thus increase your AP gain by 390%). Last I checked 490% is greater than 125%. “But wait” you say, “my IACP is more than zero, so it’d be less effective right?” This is true.

For the same AP to max IAP, you could upgrade your IACP from 310% to 500%. This would only be a mere 147% increase to your army production (and consequently beating levels). This is much closer to the value of the Increased AP. You would need to have IACP at 380% before IAP becomes the bigger (and significantly more expensive) boost. “Is this the right time to upgrade IAP then?” Probably not.

There are plethora of other useful and cheaper upgrades to get which will increase your ability to beat levels (Ore Sell Values, Money Cache Increase, Mercenary/Army Camp Discounts, Mercenary/Draft Amounts, etc.). There is no definitive way to say when (or even if) it is worth investing in Increased AP. You can endlessly repeat levels by Ascending, so there is no limit to AP (where IAP would be useful). You are better off upgrading useful upgrades to beat levels faster.

Summary:
It is 100% not worth upgrading Increased AP before you have AT LEAST 380% Increased Army Camp Production. Even then, it probably still is a waste of AP. If you want to spend 150 Coins and reset your AP at the end of every level, then another 150 Coins to change it back, well that would be the fastest. Otherwise, Increased AP should be renamed to Wasted AP.

But that is just my opinion. Feel free to do what you want.

Edited 4/16/2021 12:58:47

I'll do a similar disclaimer. If you think you heard everything there is about the Increased AP advancement, feel free to stop reading, the only purpose of this response is to present some sort of antithesis. I don't claim that my statement is better than Z's or that the former statement is wrong. These are just two different aspects of the same issue.

---

Assuming the numbers Z presented are in fact in the right ballpark (I haven't checked every one of them, but the ones I checked seem legit), what does that mean for individual players? My first point that I want to address is that these numbers assume that there are no side-effects whatsoever. No Army Camp Boost artifact, no techs that increase army production. Nothing. Because if we assume you found (or upgraded to) a rare Army Camp Boost artifact, the numbers change. Instead of an increment from 0% to 390% we suddenly end up with an increment from 40% to 430% (all increments are additive and we assume you use the artifact in both cases). This is still significantly larger than 125% but already smaller than the 490%. If you unlock any Army Camp tech while playing some level, the benefit of the IACP advancement will get a bit smaller each time you unlock another related tech (because you would have the tech whether you chose IACP or IAP). If there are two army camp techs with 15% each in one level, let's take some sort of average over the whole level and say you roughly have one tech unlocked all the time. That might be wrong in both directions, but it's one possible approximation. Then (without the artifact) the numbers would be 15% to 405%. If we combine artifacts and techs (and maybe also Supercharged Army Camps, I'm still unsure whether they make a difference) the advantage of the IACP advancement becomes smaller and smaller. Based on the 0% to 310% example, we will never get this benefit below 125% but for Z's second example, we actually could in some constructed rare case. Everything that influences your army camp production changes how high the actual returns of the IACP advancement are.

Second point: How to relate army income with finishing a level. Besides the percental numbers before, there are fixed numbers that play a role. Do you use Mercenary Camps? If so, and you have 2 times the army income, you won't finish the level in half the time. You will need slightly longer because IACP doesn't change the amount of mercs. You can spend more AP on IACP than on IAP so let's think about the possibility, that you combine IAP with Army Camp Discounts. With the same amount of money I can then reach a higher base army income. Or similarly, compare IACP with maxed out IAP and spend the remaining AP on Increased Ore Sell Values. You will have more money to spend on army camp upgrades. The point is, army camp production is not the same as level speeds, there is at least one other "resource" - the money - that has an effect on level speeds, too. Army income and level speed might relate but they aren't the same. And for the combined advancements, I will come back to a related point later.

Next scenario: We assume you intend to max out both advancements after each other, the only difference is which advancement you max out first. I could calculate this for you, but this is just one example among thousands to paraphrase that the game doesn't end as soon as you've decided whether or not you unlock IAP. In this concrete example where you focus on those two first, I guess it wouldn't matter much which one you max out first (at least in the long run). What I want to say here is, if you intend to play WZI until you maxed out every advancement, delaying IAP makes no sense because if you unlock IAP last, you will never have a ROI (return of investment). Just looking at two advancements and comparing them only works if this comparison is applicable to someone. And I don't know if the WZ community is perfectly divisible into one group that uses IACP and not IAP and one group using IAP but not IACP.

Advancements aren't binary, they are a range. You can stop upgrading any advancement at any point. The sweet spot for IACP for example is 30%. If you spend more than 60 AP on IACP your ratio of benefit to spent AP gets lower and lower every time. 30% is the ideal point (20% has the same ratio, but 30% is more than 20%, hence 30% is the best you get). That doesn't mean you shouldn't max out IACP, it just indicates what all those numbers can mean for your play style. If you want to min-max everything, more IACP is a waste. Similarly, IAP has 12 levels (including 0%). The sweet spot for IAP is 9% (aka the level of IAP with the earliest ROI point). While I have a hard time defining an exact ROI for IACP, for IAP calculating this is trivial. At 9% you would have to collect another 19k of (unboosted) APs to break even (circa 1.5 times all the levels), but you only spent 1.7k. I don't want to do a whole case study based on these numbers and compare this with all other advancements, but this changes the scenario enough that you would HAVE to calculate this from scratch. Just one number: upgrading IACP from 460% to 500% costs (slightly) more (1.9k) and gets you (slightly) less (7%). Again, numbers don't tell the whole truth. (See, what I did here, I picked one example that was beneficial for my argument. That's the power of numbers and statistics, you can manipulate them as long as you like until you get the result you want to have.)

In this spirit we could come back to combining advancements. You won't find the best combination of advancements for everyone and everything. And calculating the benefits of a mixture of advancements isn't trivial. If we had access to Fizzer's brute force AI that he uses (or used) to define approximate level times, we could evaluate how this AI would compete given different advancements. That wouldn't be applicable to some human player but it would give us the benefits for one specific style of playing idle. For us, the closest we get are theoretical numbers and they will be inaccurate. Take any advancement and try to max out on whichever you picked. For example you don't suddenly have 8k APs for IAP. You earn them bit by bit. And hence, you will unlock/upgrade the advancement step after step. Therefore, The 5% more AP will already apply to all the levels you play to get from 5% IAP to 25% IAP and will have different effects based on what you spent your APs before that. Obviously, the same is true for IACP or any other advancement, it will just work a bit differently.

All in all, I don't want to advise you to max out IAP, but perhaps you will consider spending some AP into IAP if YOU can justify for YOURSELF, that this will give you a boost of some sort. But your final answer will depend on: How long you want to play idle? What your goal is for this game? How much time you want to invest in WZI each day (I haven't mentioned it yet, but spending any amount of AP in Auto-advancements will - based on raw numbers - NEVER break even, still Z would probably not tell you that Auto-advancement aren't worth it)?

Tbh, personally, I don't know yet when exactly I will unlock IAP, but I'm sure I will at some point.

Edited 4/16/2021 21:37:14

For the same measly 7,718 AP, you can upgrade Increased Army Camp Production (IACP) from 0% to 390%. This would make you beat your levels almost 5x faster (and thus increase your AP gain by 390%). Last I checked 490% is greater than 125%.

I question the math. "Armies from camps" is typically the smallest stat among armies from camps/merc/caches/drafting/JS/hospitals, I typically only comprising 10-15% of the total armies required to clear a level, so not sure how 3.9x increase results in 5x level clearing when it's such a small contributor? By the same logic, completing the Army Camp Techs on a given map should result in clearing the level quicker, but I find this isn't the case, especially if you're concerned with getting Techs before completing a map. I find at the end, I have lots of armies left over, accumulating beyond my needs, while I smelt and craft for Techs ... so probably ~5% of the "armies" gained that level are idly generated (wasted) and never used, and often still have mercs left over and money too, so it's not a matter of having armies but finished the Techs, and for that I find the Mining and Sell Item & Cache techs are the most valuable ones to focus on to aid completing the level the quickest. Get those right, and the Techs finish quicker. Focus on Army Techs/Army upgrades/Army artifacts/Army advancements, and there are definitely benefits, but perhaps not what you need. If you forego Techs or it's a 2nd playthrough and you don't need the achievement anymore (essentially same thing, foregoing the Techs), this could change things.

Also depends on how people play, if they focus on upgrading army camps vs buying mercs, etc. Whether they have Supercamps, etc.

In order for it to earn back what you invested, you will have to earn 30,872 AP (unboosted) which would be more than beating all the levels again… TWICE.

I think we need a boosted calculation. This is of course difficult b/c it depends on which levels you're playing in which order, but that 30,872 AP won't be unboosted earning, it'll be something more in the range 27167 AP (using a rough median of 12% savings). Not sure if 12% is a good number to use or not.

I did the calcs for my particular advancement through the levels, and it basically amounted to this:
- I'm not sure where the break-even point truly is b/c the uncalculable value of using the AP on other Advancements and what you could have gained by using them instead of IAP (IACP, Discount Mercs, etc). It's most likely that some blend of the cheapest levels of key Advancements (IACP, Discount Mercs, Increased Drafts, etc) is the best initial investment, and when they all start getting too expensive, IAP is the best investment.
- This advancement is ONLY useful if you are committed to playing this game for a long time, minimally finishing all the levels twice. I didn't know about 'Ascending' at this point when doing these calcs - this changes a lot, b/c the second pass through will be quicker due to the having so many Advancements and Artifacts, which will make it worthwhile more quickly.
- I'm in the for the long haul, so EVENTUALLY, this Advancement will pay off, thus may as well get it now.

I now have IAP at 25%, think I started using it from approx Old Town through Africa, now earning full 25% on Europe Huge (1st play) and USA (2nd play) -- but my progress was far from linear. I finished USA, Triskellion, etc, before a lot of the interim maps, and before getting IAP at all ... so my calcs were very dependent on my specific playing order and playing maps out of order in order to have the next IAP upgrade purchasable at finish of map to get the INCREMENTALLY BOOSTED bonus AP of the next successive map in turn to maximize the benefit.

Just to address some points you came up with:
- The base idea is that if you upgrade IACP from 0% to 390%, you are upping your army camp production from 100% (0+100) to 490% (390+100) which is an boost to 490/100=almost 500%=almost 5x. This confused me, too with one number (the 310 to 500 increment, in particular) but I think they are all correct. If you assume this very narrow field of view.
- I addressed the mercs already in my antithesis, because as they don't improve from IACP, they prevent you from reaching this theoretical benefit, caches should be the same. Drafts depend on army income, so higher army income causes higher drafts. Joint Strike and Hospitals don't actively produce armies, they just save whatever you spent. Therefore, they should be negligible (a 30k hospital is the same as if you would subtract 30k from every territory and your army counter). And they would be either available in both cases or in none.

"Armies from camps" is typically the smallest stat among armies from camps/merc/caches/drafting/JS/hospitals

I don't know which artifacts you use, but your "active" army income sources (army camps, caches, drafts, mercenaries) can never be less than your "passive" army income source (hospitals, JS) at least in their respective sums. Sure, that doesn't mean that army camps HAVE TO BE the largest part of the "actives", but in my experience and with my level of artifacts and advancements, mercs are way below army camps, caches also, drafts depend on your other sources of active income hence they can't be way off the chart (probably an order of magnitude less than army camps). And the passives are smaller because you can't save more than you spent (yes, you can save the same armies several times in theory but that would only work if your hospitals save you at least another 25% on top of the 25% JS, don't know if this is achievable). As I said, given specific advancements and artifacts, this might be different for other players or in specific levels but these are my observations.
- Given that you have to replay each level twice (for the ROI) and you only get the tech achievement once, you don't have to do all the techs in this scenario. But you could still want to have the army camp techs. so yeah, this is another point that Z was very vague about. But, army camps techs improve your army income and will therefore speed up your level. Not necessarily by the 15% that the tech gives you, but even if it is only a very small percentage, not having the tech will mean longer level times.
- The 30k is correct (7.7k*4) and means every level at least twice (all levels summed up give you 13k AP). These numbers work out fine. But as you pointed out, they assume that you play each level exactly once and then ascent and then repeat. Otherwise you would lose some AP. You will earn some additional AP while saving for the higher IAP levels, but these additional AP are rather small compared to the full 30k that you need to break even.

To round this up with a small thought experiment: Let's assume a player who logs in to WZI exactly once per day, does a few clicks and then immediately logs out again. Their active online times would be close to 1 minute at best. So, it this theoretical player unlocks the first stage of Increased Idle Time (for 172AP), this player would get 25% more AP. They would increase their level time per day from 2h to 2.5h which is 25% more. So, IAP definitely would be the wrong choice for this clientele. As I said before, find the right parameters and you can provide numbers and argue for either side.

Edited 4/18/2021 01:46:00

Phoenix brings up very valid points, and he isn't wrong. As stated before, at the end of the day, it comes down to personal choice.

I just want to comment on a few things that were brought up for clarification purposes:

To begin with, I used Increased Army Camp Production as a representative of a more efficient AP boost. There are other choices that are also good, but it I just chose this as an easy example.

My first point that I want to address is that these numbers assume that there are no side-effects whatsoever. No Army Camp Boost artifact, no techs that increase army production. Nothing. Because if we assume you found (or upgraded to) a rare Army Camp Boost artifact, the numbers change.

This is true. Assuming you are doing a level with all upgraded Techs (165%) and you have a Rare ACB (40%), then adding +390% from IACP would boost from +205% to +595%. Resulting in an income of 305% vs 695%, or only a 228% increase in army camp production as opposed to the previously mentioned 490%. Even so, still better than 125%.

*Note* This assumes you have all tech active from the get go. Every moment you do not have Tech unlocked makes IACP more valuable and closer to that 490%.

Second point: How to relate army income with finishing a level. Besides the percental numbers before, there are fixed numbers that play a role. Do you use Mercenary Camps? If so, and you have 2 times the army income, you won't finish the level in half the time. You will need slightly longer because IACP doesn't change the amount of mercs.

This is true to a degree. Total armies needed is a constant, Caches are constant, Hospitals (for the sake of argument here) can be assumed as constant, Joint Strike as well. Drafts are proportional to Armies/second, so all that is left are Merc Camps. On a level where you can beat it before buying all your Mercs, then it does slow the efficiency of IACP down, but it will still be close. Let us assume that you managed everything perfectly and would finish the level with your last Merc purchase. Now, multiply your income by 5 and try again. If the armies from Camps were equal to Mercs (for example), then you would not have enough money to purchase all Mercs. You would only be able to purchase 25% of the Mercs in the time it would take you to collect enough with 5x income. (Yes, that ignores Draft, but as I said that is proportional to Army Camp production and very hard to calculate the differences between.) So that means would need to build 175% armies compared to before. For no techs and no Artifact, 4.9/1.75 is still 280% faster. If you want to use the Tech/Arti/Upgrades (TAU) (695%) vs Tech/Arti (TA) alone (305%) then you would only afford 16.7% Mercs for TAU and 45% for TA. This come out to 6.95/(2-.167) = 380% faster for TAU vs 3.05/(2-.45) = 197% faster for TA. Adding 390% with all Techs and Rare Artifact increases your level completion speed by 193%. Again, it is higher than that if you don't have max Techs. (Side note, the increase is 160% if you have Legendary ACB).

*Note* If you can still afford your Mercs, the completion times will be even faster. Odds go even better to IACP.

Basically, in a worse case scenario, using the AP for IACP instead of IAP will almost double your AP gain rate compared to just Increased AP. I can play with different scenarios all day, but there is no reasonable way to drop it down to the +25% from IAP.

Next scenario: We assume you intend to max out both advancements after each other, the only difference is which advancement you max out first.

Yes, each upgrade will have it's own individual value, so when your IACP is high enough, there is a point that IAP will start to catch up. That is possible, but tricky to calculate, and I do not care enough to find that inflection point, so I considered in bulk. If you want to calculate each step, then be my guest. My argument that 7k AP invest in IACP will generate significantly more AP than 7k invested in IAP.

In this spirit we could come back to combining advancements.

Yes, a variety of upgrades will affect you in different ways, and they will work together. And differing values will affect you differently. Everyone has to decide what best helps them. As you point out yourself, you upgrade bit by bit and that provides incremental increases.

All in all, I don't want to advise you to max out IAP, but perhaps you will consider spending some AP into IAP if YOU can justify for YOURSELF, that this will give you a boost of some sort.

Agreed. This comes down to choice. The purpose of this thread was mostly to warn new players from rushing into IAP and leaving themselves crippled for a long time (see comment of needing to Ascend twice after unlocking it to gain back the AP lost). I have seen many players do this, and I myself fell into that trap for a bit.

I maybe will invest in it at some point, but then again maybe not. There are many upgrades that help you beat levels faster and in hard to calculate ways. IAP is at a disadvantage because it is easy to calculate. It increases AP by 25% and nothing more. How would decreasing costs of Mercs by 50% and Army Camp upgrades by 30% affect in comparison? Both significantly cheaper even combined, and have the potential for better than 25% increase to AP. It may never be worth it in my opinion for IAP, but that is my choice, feel free to make yours.

I haven't mentioned it yet, but spending any amount of AP in Auto-advancements will - based on raw numbers - NEVER break even, still Z would probably not tell you that Auto-advancement aren't worth it?

As for Auto-Advancements, those are a different category altogether. Technically, they do NOTHING to help you beat levels faster. They do allow you to be lazy and let the level play itself. Additionally, they allow you to beat Challenges and win Battles which is a reward as well. I personally have 50% Auto-Conquer and 50% Auto-Upgrade Army Camps for those reasons.

Other upgrades that technically do nothing are Increased Idle Time and Statistics (of which I have +4 hrs (I plan to +5 or +6 at some point) and Lvl 4 respectively).

***Potential spoiler below****

The 7k AP spent would cover half of an upgrade that would DOUBLE your AP generation. And even at that point, it will still take you beating all the levels again TWICE before you make up the lost AP. Food for thought for those thinking long run.

I'm in the for the long haul, so EVENTUALLY, this Advancement will pay off, thus may as well get it now.

I don't think it ever will. Until you have boosted everything else that is good first.

Edited 4/21/2021 17:23:28

Yes it takes Increased AP a long time to break even, but if you plan on playing the game a long time it's worth it for a couple of reasons.

1) Levels take a long time period and no advancement is helping you finish a long level 5x as quickly.

2) There's some good stuff in phase three and we assume some really good stuff in phase four (I think the fastest players are just now closing in on phase four). Increased AP makes a good AP sink to unlock phase three. Decreased mercenary cost or speedy crafters are the only phase two advancements I can think of that I'd rather invest in now that challenge levels are nigh impossible.

3) The phase 1 advancements are generally the best bang for buck. That doesn't mean its a good plan to only spend in phase 1.

Agree with Phobos - nothing is going increase level clearing speed 5x over. If your math shows this, the math is faulty.

I upgraded IACP to 100% and was disappointed to see how little it impacted by level clearing speed, and it certainly didn't double my speed. Even with this, army camps were only 10% of the required amount to clear the level, so it's not surprising. But things have changed with numerous tweaks and the addition of hospitals, artifacts, supercamp. Now with these things my army camp production is closer to 20%, but pumping up IACP just means instead of organically buying mercs to finish the level, some of those merc armies will unnecessarily come from army camps instead, shifting the ratio of army camps to perhaps 25-30%, and other than changing the # of mercs bought, isn't going to materially change the level clear time, while having spent AP on IACP which isn't materially contributing to level clear, so I'd rather spend it on IAP instead, clear the level is the same time and get the +AP bonus.

More importantly, the math to prove any of this out is complex and dependent on game play, and there's not a single most effective method, and it's also level dependent (some have scads of money creation opportunities, some don't; some have nasty Tech requirements, some don't; etc). I did the math, and for the route I've chosen (moderate AP Adv upgrades for IACP, Increased mercs/drafts/Idle time, low Auto-conquer, Stats) followed by maxing out Increased AP) was the best AP ROI for my play style, especially for the first playthrough where I'm focused on getting the achievements for all Techs. There have been a number of levels where I've completed them all but had to hold off the last couple territories to let Techs finish, and when this happens armies from army camps built up at the end (ie: wasted, I already had more than enough armies from army camps). Having maxed out Stats helps this as now I can plan level completion instead of being surprised with the requirements for the last Techs ("frak, need 10 dysprosium, 6 terbium, 8 yttrium, 12 samarium ... gonna take a while!).

More recently I've found that either a recent update changed how money/markets/sell prices operate or just the last few levels I've played have marked differences from other levels, where the money is tight. Income is low, market prices are high, army camp/hospital/mine upgrades are high, artifact digs are high, item sell value is low to the point where buying ingredients to craft & sell is not a viable strategy, you have to smelt & craft the ingredients to sell items, which means money is almost entirely earned from just from bonus/territory income over time.

I find now the focus is on how to increase money income to be able to quickly upgrade hospitals and keep the artifact digs going. And if there ever ends up being a "faster dig" artifact or AP advancement (or some kind of supercamp-like "superartifact") that increases dig times, that will be a new focus for attention.

The game is in beta ... so these tweaks will continue to happen and we'll have to keep adjusting our strats to be effective.

I maxed it out at first opportunity because I initially thought the AP from levels went down forever. If I were to do it over, here's what I'd get before starting work on Increased AP:

Increase Army Camp Production (+250%, Phase 1, 3030 AP)
Increased Cache Money (Maxed at 100%, Phase 1, 887 AP)
Joint Strike (Maxed at 25%, Phase 1, 459 AP)
Discounted Mine Upgrades (Maxed at 25%, Phase 1, 273 AP)
Additional Mercenaries (+75%, Phase 1, 3880 AP)
Statistics (Maxed at 4, Phase 1, 500 AP)
Auto-Conquer (5%, Phase 2, 132 AP)
Increased Cache Resources (Maxed at 100%, Phase 2, 990 AP)
Mercenary Discount (Maxed at 50%, Phase 2, 1002 AP)
Increase Crafters Speed (Maxed at 50%, Phase 2, 3282 AP)
Idle Time (6 hours total)

That combination of advancements has worked really, really well for me. Based on my numbers, nothing else in Phase 2 would be better than Increased AP after completing the above.

I don't really want to be rude, but this conversation is much ado about nothing. I think most players would agree that the only advancement you want to max out all in one shot is Joint Strike. For all the others, you don't only need boosts in one area of the game, so you need to have a solid mix of advancements.

It began as an interesting conversation, but I'm really not sure there's anything left to say on the topic.

I don't really want to be rude

Don't want to be rude, but you will be. #indecision

Agree with you on JS though, don't think anyone with playing experience will argue that that the biggest benefit that should be maxed out asap.

I'm really not sure there's anything left to say on the topic.

So you just came to say that you have nothing to say on the topic? While actually saying something about it (JS). And also not wanting to be rude but then doing so anyhow.

Fair point. I guess I was just a little miffed that it felt like the same things had been covered a couple times each.

Edited 5/18/2021 23:09:53