Currently on Netherlands level. I saw some other posts like this, I’m struggling to decide which to get rid of because I find them all useful. But some are undoubtedly more useful/I could probably be getting more benefit if I used some to upgrade. I’ve done some math, but it’s not making the decisions easier. And I guess I’m hanging on to some lower tier ones that I see as useful in case I want to use the higher ones as upgrades (like hospital boost or discount hospital). The main use are my heavy rotation. The ones I don’t use as often but still see as most useful I put in [italics].

Here are my artifacts: (all are the passive ones unless noted)
Main use:

• Epic Bonus Money Boost
  
• Rare Army Camp Boost
  
• Rare Mine Boost
  
• Uncommon Hospital Boost 4%
  
• Rare Supercharge Army Camp (for 1 hour—Active)

Epic:

• Epic Army Cache Boost

Rare:

• Hospital Discount 6%
  
• Item Values


• Resource Cache Boost 40%
  
• Alloy Values

uncommon:

• Mine Discount 5%
  
• Army Camp Discount 3%
  
• Money Cache Boost 8%
  
• Mercenary Discount 4%


• Supercharge Mine (active)
  
• Tech Discount 3%
  
• Tech Discount 3%
  
• Market Raid (active)
  
• Market Raid (active)
  
• Army Camp Boost
  

Common:

• Hospital Boost 2%
  
• Hospital Discount 1.5%
  
• Army Camp Discount 1.5%
  
• Idle Time

Open to any suggestions. I’m hesitant to get rid of item values mostly because I wonder if it will be necessary/useful for completing the “craft an item worth X” achievements. But I’m considering using my rares to upgrade Army Camp Boost. The hospital and army camp discounts, and even the hospital boost are no doubt useful, but the extent of how much difference they really make seems iffy when doing the math. Anyway, what would you do?

Keep Item Values, not because it'll help you with those achievements, but because it'll help you make a ton of money once your crafters are done making things for techs and start making things for profit. Combine that with Speedy Crafters for even more money. Those late game hospital upgrades and mercenaries are expensive and you'll want to have a lot of money from selling your explosive bolts and boiling flasks.

Disclaimer: I'm following a "many rares" strategy with lots of swapping instead of a "few epics" strategy, your mileage may vary.

Upgrade:
- Mercenary Discount
- Item Values
- Cache Boost & the Resource/Army/Money Cache Boosts are also good ones iff you're going with the multiple Rare strategy. If you're going the few Epic strat, then sac these too.

Sacrifice the following:
- Idle time (just get the AP Adv, not worth tying up a slot for this).
- All the active items like Hospital Discount - it's active, not worth 16h for a 1.5% discount; and Market Raid - have not had good results in testing these, they just aren't worth it unless it's Epic -- and by the time you get it to Epic, you won't need it as much, and the more the play, the less you're going to need it and will have wished your invested in something else.
- Alloy Values - you're going to get the most value of items, so don't need this. Once you upgrade your Ore sale value AP Adv, smelting bars is negative profit, so you'll only need to do that to craft items, or just sell the ore, skip the middle step unless you need it for items.
- Rare Mine Boost - personally I think there are better ways to get more value out of a slot than this; unless your strat is highly ore centric, maybe you upgrade a lot of mines & sell a lot of ore? Otherwise better to focus on Item Values, Speedy Crafters, etc, to get money (as Awaythro said).

Agree with all Krinid proposed.

One exception: The supercharge mine (active) can be quite useful at a rare/epic level (1/2 hours boost), as it helps you to get the tech advancements at the higher levels much faster. I use the artifact mainly to get the merc discount techs quickly, they usually require a large quantity of more expensive ores and using the active supercharge mine speeds up this process significantly. So imo - at the late levels - this artifacts pays off despite it blocks a slot for 16h. The same is true for the active triple/quadruple strike artifact (which you don't have yet), it also helps to clear the late levels (with huge territory costs) much faster.

But in your case I wouldn't focus on this yet - just saying that some active artifacts can be useful even after ascension.

The passive merc discount, army camp boost, item value and cache artifacts are much better in general, not only at the late levels, so I'd focus on upgrading those and use the rest as fodder.

The first artifacts to be sacrificed are the duplicates.
As for the rest, I also use ~20 artifacts, some more often, some rarely. I prefer to have those 20 at the highest grade I can afford, instead of sacrificing 16 to upgrade 4 of them.
I also keep 1 of each artifact, even if unused (like active ones). Used to have them at poor grade, in time upgraded them to common (lots of poor digs). A strategy asks for using a Supercharge Army Camp active artifact early in the game, and if you sacrificed it before learning this strategy, you'll regret.
I stumbled upon a rare Damage territory which I was prepared to sacrifice, but there is a 401B territory in the last level, and this artifact was useful, reducing the stack to more manageable size. You can use this artifact on fogbusted territories, even if not reached yet.
The artifacts that increase your gains, like Cache money or Increase drafts become less effective after upgrading the paired advancement. An uncommon draft boost rises your modifier by 8%, which can be from 100% to 108%, or from 400% to 408%, the later being an effective 2% increase. Once artifacts fall out of grace, you can sacrifice them without regret.

I stumbled upon a rare Damage territory which I was prepared to sacrifice, but there is a 401B territory in the last level, and this artifact was useful, reducing the stack to more manageable size. You can use this artifact on fogbusted territories, even if not reached yet.

I know this territory well! And what you say is true ... however ... I would recommend Quad Strike over Damage Territory, b/c DT @ Rare gives 24% damage, but QS gives 48% reduced army requirement to capture the territory.

So while technically you could keep use DT on that 401B territory ... but that's a 16h hit each time for only 12%, and the next hit you do will be 12% of the remaining 76% (reduced impact).

I tested using Field Hospital, Damage Territory, Triple Strike & Quad Strike pretty extensively on United States & Europe Huge, and found Field Hospital > Damage Territory b/c it gives the same benefit (12% @ Rare) but reduces the armies required for each territory it borders, not just the 1 target. Using FH + TS or QS worked fairly well. Imho, DT is too weak to be useful when compared to these other 3, unless you are really sold on using it to hit the same territory multiple times over.

I used DT repeatedly to reduce that territory from 401B to 112B.
Mentioned that DT can be used on fogbusted territories, even if they are inaccessible. Calculated that on my income, a Territory Money Boost that I was using in third slot, exchanged with a Mercenary discount at the right time, and increased drafts for the purchased mercenaries, and JS recoups, would give me at most an extra 5B armies @ 16 hours. DT recovered more, so I used it repeatedly, and between usages I played short stints of 3 different active artifacts.
Plus I had DT @ rare, QS @ common, and no will/possibility to sacrifice artifacts to upgrade QS at this time.
I had this rare DT for quite some time, wanted to sacrifice it but had no 3 other rares, and used the excavation rewards to upgrade my useful uncommons rather than hoard them to make enough to upgrade a rare. Wanted to say that it's usually counterproductive to sacrifice useful artifacts to upgrade a better artifact, because at various stages those sacrificed artifacts would have been more useful; and artifacts that you don't consider useful might be, given circumstances you have not considered.

Edited 7/19/2021 04:08:34

I can see DJ Storm point about DT. Sure in number alone DT is (quite much) lesser than QS. But it is (well) compensated by its less requirement. QS needs 4 connections, TS needs 3, JS needs 2 but DT needs none. Imagine, just for example not a real one, on map with 800 territories after playing for 5 minutes we have open 50 territories and use our 5 FBs to reveal everything. Lets say the biggest territory is 500M. We use DT (@Rare) on it and remove 24% of 500M = 120MB. It is quite possible this number is alot bigger than, lets say, ACB @Rare can give for next 16 hours since our army production on that early stage is still very low.

Totally agree, need to (try) keep everything. Some we already know when it would be useful, some we still need to find out how it could be useful.

You mean you use FB to reveal territories, then use DT to reduce large & inaccessible territories so that when you reach that territory days later that it's smaller and easier to capture?

If so, interesting usage ... never considered that at all.

Edited 7/19/2021 04:20:46

It's well worth doing that. I do that all the time with my DT and FBs.

@mobtrio
Rare DT deals 12% damage, not 24%. 24% is Epic DT.

Thanks Splat, I have never use it. I just got mine @Uncommon a few hours ago. It is 6%.

Krinid, yeah I just know it from DJ Storm post. Good thing it happen before I throw my @Uncommon.

I have quite weird question. Lets say that we do not need/want to use artifact for the first 16 hours and we have three DT artifacts (@same or different level). Could we use them one by one, occupying each and every slot. It could be applied on same territory or different ones. Haha, I don't know whether anybody have try it before.

That's impossible, as you can't have more than 1 of the same type of artifact equipped at once, even if another is on cooldown.

Edited 7/19/2021 06:14:58

This DT strategy is almost certainly bad. All else being equal, you should prioritize capturing lower value territories/bonuses/caches at all points in the game to accelerate income growth. Using an active artifact which will ‘kill’ fewer armies but drive army/money income is better than using an active artifact that will ‘kill’ more armies regardless of what simple arithmetic says. Exponential growth is very very powerful.

There may be an edge case for a late-game hospital that’s accessible early-game on a map like Far Land but I haven’t seen this before.

@graemes
That's an interesting idea if you could actually somehow accomplish getting a late game hospital which might have >100M benefit. This could vastly change the early game, immediately letting you capture >25%+ of territories for free or at little cost.

But you'd never actually be able to cap it as DT is exponential decay (Epic 24% damage each hit) so b/c there is no access to the territory, you can never finish it off, it just creeps closer to 0, the worth of the DT hit reducing each time, but with a non-reducing, significant 16h penalty on a slot each time. It's a significant early game investment for medium level mid to late game benefit, so I agree with you that there are better strategies to get earlier benefits with more lasting & compounding effects.

Tbh, assuming a 100B territory and 24% Epic DT, the value of using DT (24B) seems to be on par with (maybe even less than?) the increased value of the Drafts after buying lots of mercs. Buy 100-200B mercs mid-game often gives a benefit of 2-6B per Draft for a # of drafts in succession, and this comes as a free side effect of buying the mercs, so I'd rather spend my artifacts focused on generating money (bonus/territory/army income/crafting speed/item sell values/etc) to buy mercs and get the additional armies as a secondary draft bonus.

Now if you don't actually have 3 good passive artifacts and 16h downtime on a slot is a non-factor, then that changes things. But then I'd likely recommend an artifact strategy change as well. (;

@Graemes, Krinid

I think you're partially misreading mobtrio's question. Mob's asking if you can put 3 DTs into the equip slots for the artifacts to do this. I do get both your points, but they don't fully address mob's question. Even if this strategy could be useful, it is impossible to do, as like I said in my previous post, and Fizzer can confirm this, is that you can't have more than 1 of the same type of artifact equipped at the same time. If you have 3 DTs, you could only ever have 1 equipped at a time, even if another is on its cooldown.

If he was asking that (3x DTs) then yes, I missed that, and you're correct, it can't be done. It's not theoretical nor relying on attestation from Fizzer - you can test this by trying it with an artifact, and you'll see the message "You cannot equip two artifacts of the same type".

Figured I'd just hijack this thread instead of starting a new one.

What I have:

Epic: Army Camp Boost, Mine Boost, Bonus Money Boost

Rare: All 4 Discounts, Draft Boost, Hospital Boost, Item Values, the 3 Cache Boosts.

Uncommon: Army Camp Boost, Mine Boost, Fog Buster

2 Commons and 2 Poors.

I'm nearing the end of my last level before ascending and am planning on spend much less time playing (not drafting or switching as much) and was wonder what to do with my Artifacts. My first thought was to upgrade Hospital Boost and either Item Values or Mercenary Discount to Epic. Then I got Uncommon Army Camp Boost and Mine Boost and I'm now thinking I should sacrifice all my Rares and Epics to upgrade my Bonus Money Boost to Legendary since I'll still have a Army Camp Boost and Mine Boost.

Any thoughts?

This is closely aligned with my ethos to the game and my artifact portfolio as well

I don’t think a Legendary is in the cards yet with your current equipment. Personally, I would sacrifice Mine Discount, Army Camp Discount, Draft Boost plus whatever odds and ends you need to get the Merc Discount to Epic. Definitely keep the Rare Item Values and the Hospital Boost, getting these to Epic should be the next big investment in my opinion.

On the 3 cache boosts, this one is really up to you. I personally have found these tricky to use from a return on user time perspective but there’s no question they are value additive if you don’t mind swapping in and out.

Should definitely keep your eyes open for a Ore Values at some point as well!