Very true, and it's a balance that needs to be kept in mind and a balance that will change as you buy advancements. I've definitely burned through all my mercs before the end of a level before and wished I'd spent more on camps and hospitals early on instead. I'm at 72.5% additional mercs currently, though, and my issue now is generating the money to buy them all; I haven't run out in a while and have been shifting my spending away from camps and towards mostly hospitals and mercs (and mines to generate more money from items, of course). My AP spending is therefore on money generation until I start running out of mercs again, at which point I'll buy more additional mercs. With a 20% base, eventually we can hit the point that 50% of the armies needed can be bought from mercs, at which point I doubt you'll ever need to worry about running out when calculating what nets you the most armies per money spent.

I'm with you Sefer! That's my strat as well . . . don't spend on Army camps past the game opening, spend on hospitals & mercs!

If you invest in hospitals wisely (before capturing tons of territories, hunt them out, find a good recipe, spam creation/selling of it, upgrade hospitals) then the hospital/merc strat works well. My AP Adv & artifacts are focused on increasing mercs, and either saving money or increasing money earning to buy all the extra mercs.

Only problems I've had is on levels without a good recipe to spam (there were 1 or 2) or if I don't invest enough in the hospitals. I suppose the other problem is that sometimes I invest too much in the hospitals ... spend too much time earning/upgrading, and then the end game is just over too quickly with too many mercs remaining. In those cases, I probably could have ended 12-24 hrs earlier had I stopped upgrading the hospitals as much.

The thing with money is that even an ideal merc-focused strategy needs more money (for mercs) than having spent no AP on mercs. With maxed out Additional Mercs, you need 2.5 times the money to buy them all. Combined with maxed out Merc Discount, you end on 1.25 times the money needed for the base mercs. So, spending 25% more money on mercs to jump from 20% of finishing a level to 50% of finishing a level (at the costs of having to play each level 1.5 times in order to get all the necessary APs) is definitely a nice improvement. And by the time you have maxed out both those advancements you can probably afford the 25% more for mercs. Especially as this comes with a huge discount on army camps effectively. Together with maxed out speedy smelter + crafter you can double the money income from selling items.

If it just was this easy to clear the levels... Unfortunately you have to get the APs first. And I - for now - use a different strategy.

@Sefer

Here you are.

ID Name AvgMercCost
1 Tutorial 4
2 Huruey's Castle 99.6
3 Floating Rocks 106.6
4 War Of The Worlds 8.4
5 Ursa - Luna 3.4
6 Final Earth 71.2
7 Drakemor's World 1.3
8 Peloponnesian War 1.2
9 K-PX 4.8
10 The Siege of Feldmere 29.4
11 Sengoku - Rise of Oda Nobunaga 1.7
12 Copper Creek Castle 20.9
13 Geopolitics 7.6
14 Breaking Green 15.1
15 Far Land 22.9
16 Reconquest 1065 23.5
17 Fort Harbor 26.4


I can use any google service as long as it does not require a google account. If anyone wants to create a spreadsheet, I would like to provide data from time to time.

@Z, have you use DT, QS or TS? Are their numbers represented in your equation? Which one, Joint Strike?

@mobtrio
Not positive, but DT, QS and TS don't show up in the end Stats so far as I'm aware, b/c it's not armies earned by armies-caches-drafts/bought mercs/saved by JS-hospitals/etc. Also don't think Z uses these at all as a policy.

@functor
Some additional info people would be interested in having/sharing would be:
- # of army camps + base armies/sec
- # of hospitals + base far/near savings values + # of upgrades available per hospital & costs of each, maxed out far/near savings per hospital, sum total of all hospitals maxed out far savings (eg: 150M savings minimum for a territory not within 4 steps of a hospital)
- # of merc camps, # of mercs available at each & the cost
- list of dig sites, % of each P/C/UC/R/E, dig time, dig cost
- Techs available, notably the "Good" ones like the increased sell values, decreased merc costs, bonus cache value ("Tell your workers it's cash") and the requirements for those Techs and the ingredients for those requirements, eg: "Tell your workers it's cash" requires 2 Dysprosium, 199 Tin cans, and on that level Dysprosium requires ores 1.55M lead, 1.44M silicon, 211K yttrium, 191K dysprosium --> this tells you going into the map which ores you can can go ahead and smelt all you like, and which you need to stop smelting and save the ore for in order to get this Tech; same for the Techs leading up to it
- Market info, what's sold & the prices
- Total armies available via caches (this may be tricky if you're using artifacts or AP Adv to buff them, may have to do some math to get the base amount)
- What powers are available on the map
- What arena templates are available on the map
- List of useful market profitable recipes, ie: the ones where you buy the ingredients from the market and still make good profit (as opposed to having to smelt the ingredients); typically these are some but not all of tin cans, welding rods, rivets, bolts, structs, boiling flasks, explosive bolts, magnets, circuits -- it's useful to know which ones these are and where to find them

Probably more stuff but those are the key things I can think of off the top of my head. Knowing all this will mean you can build a strategy up front, knowing how many armies you have available from the mercs & caches, how many Techs you need, how much you need to upgrade the hospitals, etc.

Edited 7/21/2021 06:16:26