Certainly not all Advancements are made equal. Some are simply better than others, and JS is the king of them all - not only b/c it's cheap, but b/c it constantly maintains its value from the moment you unlock it through 1st Ascension and long after even after 4th or 5th Ascension, it still holds value, which isn't the case for all Advancements. Merc & money based Advancements are directly after JS. Counting only army camp units & mercs, my ratio of armies earned is 4% army camps, 96% mercs. As you progress through levels, your speed gets QUICKER not SLOWER -- so army camps that require you to wait longer to get the benefits from (and let's be clear here - if you clear a level more quickly, you're earning less armies from your camps unless you somehow hyper-upgrade them asap, but then you still have to wait to earn the units from them) do not align to this strategy, but merc & quick money making strat aligns to clearing faster. Basically, it's quicker to craft, earn money & buy mercs, then it is to craft, earn money, upgrade camps, wait for armies to accumulate.

In my opinion, the best advancements are, in order of raw value, not in order they should/can be unlocked:

- Joint Strike
- Better Hospitals
- Increased Cache Armies
- Increase Crafters Speed
- Increase Item Sell Values
- Additional Mercs
- Discounted Mercs
- Increased AP
- Increased Cache Money
- Increased Army Camp Production
- Increased Ore Sell Values
- Discounted Mine Upgrades
- Faster Digging
- Increased Cache Resources

And I've purposely left these two out . . . b/c they are essentially a set pair, and by the time you can afford them, you likely no longer need them b/c you've already Ascended 3-4 times and probably don't care about playing ML anymore, and maybe not even WZI anymore at all.

- Simultaneous Levels
- Can Skip Levels

But of course you can't unlock them in that order b/c some are locked in phase 2, 3 or 4. Now if I reordered these into the order that they should be unlocked & unless stipulated also fully maxed out before continuing down the list, I'd probably say:

[phase 1]
- *Joint Strike
- Increased Army Camp Production - only to ~100%
- *Additional Mercs
- Increased Ore Sell Values
- Discounted Mine Upgrades
- *Increased Cache Money
[phase 2]
- *Increase Crafters Speed
- *Discounted Mercs
- *Increased AP
- *Increased Cache Resources
- Increased Army Camp Production - up to 200-300%

[phase 3]
- *Increase Item Sell Values
- Increased Money from Bonuses

[phase 4]
- *Increased Cache Armies
- *Better Hospitals
- *Faster Digging

NOTE:
- Items with asterisks are the ones that will give the highest value AFTER your 1st Ascension b/c they aren't related to time, but rather to activity, such as capturing a territory, crafting items, etc. Completing a level more quickly doesn't impact the value these advancements provide.
- Item without an asterisk are time based, meaning you need time to pass in order to get benefit from those advancements, and thus as you level up and begin to complete levels more quickly, the less value these advancements will provide.
- Thus, imho advancements like JS, Additional+Discounted Mercs, the Cache bonuses, Better Hospitals, Crafter Speed, Item Sell Values have higher longer term value than advancements like IACP, Ore sell value, Increased Money from Bonuses. We can call these "long term benefit advancements" (LTBA) and "short term benefit advancements" (STBA).
- STBA are still necessary to do better on your 1st playthrough, even to some degree on your 2nd playthrough. IACP up to 200-300% is still likely going to have some value in early level phases before mercs & crafters come into play.
- But as your level clear times decrease, you're going to have less time to mine ore, to earn money from bonuses, to accumulate armies from army camps, etc. What took 16+ days to clear on the first playthrough and allowed you to generate lots of armies/ore/money, will only take 4-7 days on the 2nd playthrough, vastly reducing the benefit you receive from these STBA. This became clear to me when I compared my level clear stats of levels from my 1st and 2nd playthroughs, and finding that despite upgrading IACP, Ore sell values, Money bonuses, etc, that my armies from camps, income from selling ore & from bonuses was significantly down each time. Of course this is the simple math of VERY LONG TIME * MediumValue >> VERY SHORT TIME * HighValue.
- But the LTBA are related to activities such as buying mercs, capturing territories or caches, crafting items (technically this is still somewhat time based but this LTBA actually makes things craft more quickly, so it mitigates this factor), finishing levels, etc. So the benefit these provide doesn't reduce as your clear speed decreases, and they continue to offer high value despite the value of the STBAs reducing.
- It actually poses the question whether investing in a blend of STBAs & LTBAs to get through the 1st playthrough and maybe part or all of the 2nd is still recommended, and then resetting AP to focus on the LTBAs from that point forward.

@Phoenix
Btw, yes it was me that didn't upgrade army camps for more than 1B cost. Now I typically don't even go past ~200M b/c at the end of the level, regardless of how much money I put into upgrading them, they just don't give much output compared to mercs, hospitals, JS, caches & drafts (usually in this order). Armies from army camps is always last. So I just repurpose the money into hospital upgrades.

That said, army camps are valuable for the early game, before crafting & merc camps are available. They get the level started and moving to transition into the crafting/hospital/merc mid & end game. Once I enter that stage, all money either goes to (a) buying mercs, (b) upgrading hospitals, (c) buying ingredients to craft items so I can sell and then do (a) or (b).

Now, I've read everything, let's see if I remember everything I wanted to comment on:

---

Following this strategy, I managed to complete AD 1045 in 5 days.

Given your strategy and the APs this would cost, this will be in 2nd ascension, right? Let's see what my numbers will be then. I'm actually curious. Especially if I stick to a different strategy then everyone else. If I just copy you, I will likely get the exact same numbers.

Mercs-based gameplay isn't realistic in ascension 1 and the first half of ascension 2. It only starts becoming realistic in the second half of ascension 2.

Thanks, mate! While you are already doubting this statement yourself, this finally is a statement that is still somewhat true and can take some pressure from new players that get told that mercs are the ultimate answer to everything but can't make this work (like I commented on my attempt with the Peloponnese map). Similarly to the claims that upgrading artifacts is said to be always superior to swapping, which - if I may repeat - is not true if you can't upgrade at least two or three artifacts to epic or higher (or somewhere around that point, I haven't calculated this but estimated, so you might be able to make this work earlier or even need more fodder material).

Since your guide is intended to be a long-term one and covers until the end of ascension 3, and merc-based gameplay is realistic once you've reached the second half of ascension 2, it's important for me to bring up merc-based gameplay.

I see this and I agree. From my little (to no) experience of late-game gameplay (where late here means, with lots of APs) I really only were able to estimate what the future might bring. And I was still caught in a somewhat binary thinking: Either some advs are highly effective or they serve no purpose. I think I should see more of the gray scales in between.

With the help of Additional Mercenaries, I never run out of mercs, so there's no such thing as "all your mercs are gone".

Well, with no additional mercs, this situation happened to me all the time. And maxing out additional mercs isn't exactly cheap. So, seeing that mercs only cover 20% of my armies (as we now know) and knowing that buying mercs can often completely drain your money balance, I wasn't able to see the value of additional mercs IN THIS PHASE OF ME PLAYING WZI. But, yeah, I now accepted that my strategy isn't suitable for the long run.

Alternatively I can invest the money in mercs to capture more bonuses. A day has 86400 seconds and each second a captured bonus produces more money, which can used to buy mercs.

My original statement wasn't meant to be taken for face value. I know that upgrading an army camp minutes before finishing a level is ridiculous. But with only the 20% stock mercs (and no additional ones), you NEED army camp production, and then upgrading can be the right choice even if the break even point will never come before the level is done.
But I never really saw the other side of the picture, that conquering territories with bought mercs can also mean long term benefits. It's not just one less territory to conquer in order to clear the level, it's some over-time-benefits. Still, with no additional mercs and the fact that you only unlock the Merc Discount Techs rather late in the game, I think that saving most of them for the end, is still the best approach for my way of playing idle.

It all boils down to comparing the increase in "AP gain per unit time per AP invested" by investing on time save advancements and by investing on IAP directly.

I was about to say, that a speed-up of 67% with additional mercs isn't comparable to IAP because the mercs adv costs - what - three times as much APs than IAP (to max out), but fortunately you more or less added this yourself. I think that there are soo many factors to WZI that you can't calculate the exact time savings per spent AP, but I already figured this out for each individual adv. Most advs have their peak at stage 3 to 5. Best IACP is at 30 or 40% iirc, best IAP is 7% or so... There is one adv, though, (can't remember which one unfortunately) that has its peak at stage 1. So, already the first upgrade is a loss in efficiency. But this piece of information won't be a good guide when it comes to idle, there is so much more involved than just best ROI when it comes to advs.

As for the question of why the levels took so little time -- that's exactly my evidence for the argument that my strategy works better? Not sure what I'm supposed to say here. I didn't have supercamp, or anything else other than powers on the level itself.

To make this clear, I'm not calling you a liar! It's just hard to believe. At this point, one has 4.1k APs to spend, so, sure, you can have unlocked and upgraded additional mercs a bit, you can have maxed out money cache boost. But still, you make it sound like there were always enough mercs, which is hard to believe, and there was (almost) never too little money, which I could see work but still unlikely. Perhaps (to paraphrase Parsifal) you should try to write down your strategy as best as you remember. This could really be the one piece of information that might convince more players that mercs are the key even early on.

I strongly recommend you to do the following calculations yourself.

I'll move my reply to this to a separate post, this is already getting way too long and I want to highlight some aspects for crafting.

We can call these "long term benefit advancements" (LTBA) and "short term benefit advancements" (STBA).

I've seen this analysis already because you effectively posted it twice into two different discussions. And I totally agree. I'm just not sure yet, what that means for my strategy. As you highlighted yourself, it does not tell us anything about whether one type might be strictly superior to the other or not. And there is also the third time of advs, the "convenience advs", like stats, any of the visibility advs, the auto-advs, (to some extend) idle time.

@Phoenix

>> Following this strategy, I managed to complete AD 1045 in 5 days.
> Given your strategy and the APs this would cost, this will be in 2nd ascension, right? Let's see what my numbers will be then. I'm actually curious. Especially if I stick to a different strategy then everyone else. If I just copy you, I will likely get the exact same numbers.

The advancements in my first reply in the thread consists of advancements that I have already obtained, and those I plan to obtain. Below are my latest advancements.

* Increased Army Camp Production: 100%
* Joint Strike: 25%
* Increased Ore Sell Values: 100%
* Additional Mercenaries: 42.5%
* Statistics: 1
* Auto-Conquer: 5%
* Mercenary Discount: 35%
* Increase Crafters Speed: 25%
(I got Statistics 1 to estimate the length a level much more accurately.)

> > Mercs-based gameplay isn't realistic in ascension 1 and the first half of ascension 2. It only starts becoming realistic in the second half of ascension 2.
> Thanks, mate! While you are already doubting this statement yourself, this finally is a statement that is still somewhat true and can take some pressure from new players that get told that mercs are the ultimate answer to everything but can't make this work (like I commented on my attempt with the Peloponnese map).

I would say that this claim is false. It is possible to employ merc-based strategy in the first playthrough. I am currently using it, and it works very well. Below is the time I spent on some levels I finished recently.

* Reconquest 1065: 5 days
* Fort Harbor: 4 days 4 hours
* Europe 1066 AD: 4 days 21 hours
* AD 1045 - Roads of Silk and Iron: 4 days 13 hours
* Old Town: 4 days 2 hours
* Orbis Veteribus Notus: 4 days 9 hours

I am getting more and more familiar with mercs, and I expect to finish Scandinavia in about 4 days.

I agree with functor.

For 5876 AP, you can bring additional mercs to 60% and max out discount mercs, cache money, cache resources, and ore sell values. For another 3282 AP, you can also max out crafter speed.

This is very achievable during the first ascension.

Now, let's focus on smelting/crafting only. I will mention some extremes a few times, to differentiate several approaches, but (a) I'm aware that there will be only few players that fall into these extreme categories, most will be somewhere in between, and (b) that this will apply nonetheless because even if you use a composite approach, all the statements will still be true for the part of your composite strategy that uses approach 1, and the other comments will be true for the part of approach 2. If you - say - switch from smelting for techs to smelting for profit at some point in each level, you will be covered by different parts of my analysis at different points in time.

There are three strategies for smelting (if we assume there is no crafting):

• not smelting at all
  
• smelting for techs
  
• smelting for profit

Not smelting at all is a waste if there is at least one recipe that makes any profit. Smelting for techs is fine (especially on one's first play through in order to get the achievement) but for this approach you don't care for an alloy's sell value or the sell values of the ores. When smelting for profit, you will look at the alloy's sell value and (depending on your point of view) also on the ores' sell values. If you read on, you will see that I would probably only take the alloy's sell value into account here, but the situation that I have smelters to spare is really rare, so the only viable option for me here is smelting for techs. If I don't craft (because I haven't found crafters yet) or if I can spare a smelter, then I only smelt for techs. After my first ascension I might (I don't know yet) stop unlocking techs (or at least some of them) so I might abandon smelting as a stand-alone thing at all (or switch to profit smelting as long as the following parts don't apply).

When it comes to crafting there are several dimensions:
First you can:

• not craft at all

which again, is a waste if there is at least one profitable recipe. If you chose to craft you have the options to:

• craft for techs, and
• craft for profit

and then there is a different dimension whether you want to:

• buy ingredients from markets, or
• produce everything yourself

If you craft for techs, all the sell values don't influence your recipe choice. It really doesn't matter that you are working on the lowest profit recipe or the highest profit one, whatever you crafted will be spent on techs anyway. If you craft for profit, this changes. Again, in this case the items' sell values are relevant to determine the profit of some recipe. And if you buy ingredients from markets you also have to include their sell values into the equation (more or less because buy prices are related to (unbuffed) sell values). But if you craft only with your own smelted alloys and crafted items (note: I will take any overproduction of intermediate items into account, I just don't care for the used up alloys, but crafting recipes that require other items aren't really profitable at all (at this point), so this case rarely comes up), the value of your ingredients isn't as important anymore. Here's why: While for crafting from bought ingredients the buy prices are part of the profit and important to determine which recipes are profitable at all, for crafting from your own production the sell values of the ingredients are only important to determine whether a recipe is profitable at all. I will never craft a recipe for profit if it isn't profitable! Just like no-one of the crafting-from-markets guys will pick a recipe that isn't profitable after buying. But as soon as I have concluded that a crafting recipe has some profit (which, when crafting from one's own production most of the time has a significant profit that is almost always higher than several times the ingredients' value, so the invested value pales in comparison anyway), I only care for the sell value of this item per time unit and per involved crafter (and to a lesser extend the number of smelters). If one rivet crafter has profit x and three crafters that produce 2 times screws and one times metal pipes has profit y, I can calculate which one is a higher sell value per time and crafter (always rivets in this example). As I feel like I have problems arguing here, let me present you what I call "idle crafting". I apply this strategy as soon as possible and when I've crafted enough items to unlock all the techs.

"Idle crafting" follows a few conditions:

• My mines produce more ore than my smelters need
  
• My smelters produce more than my crafters need (I haven't run into the situation that this would involve smelting recipes that need alloys, but given that you mostly only need one alloy per type, I would probably ignore those alloy ingredients in smelting recipes)
  
• My crafters produce more than my crafters need
  
• I choose crafting recipes with the most profit/value (respecting my mine capabilities)

That can mean that:

• I have to upgrade my mines, although sometimes I accept that my mine production is slightly lower if I have enough ores in stock
  
• I can't put all crafters on one profitable recipe but have to spread them out a bit as I can't afford to upgrade all my mines to level 20.
  
• I can in most cases run this approach almost infinitely without having to babysit anything (hence the name) the only times I have to adjust is after unlocking a sell value tech (at times, even those techs don't change the profits by much) or when I claimed another crafting recipe

If for example, I chose my crafting recipes in a way that require 3.7 of my smelters to work on, say, lead and I put 4 smelters on lead, the only aspect that I will neglect by not taking alloy values into account, is 0.3 worth of one lead smelter's output. And by having a strictly positive ore balance, I don't have to calculate their value either. If you view this as one smelter immediately feeding another crafter, the value of the intermediate product becomes irrelevant.

The key here is that I will never select unprofitable recipes in the first place and that the value of the ingredients is neglectable in comparison to the value of the created product such that not taking alloy values into account just means that I will make (almost) the same error in my calculation for each and every recipe. So, the alloy values get irrelevant again.

If you now craft for profit and buy from markets, you can also choose to smelt for profit or to produce whatever your smelters will need such that you have to buy fewer alloys. I haven't calculated this because I don't use this approach, but if we assume that your most profitable crafting recipe needed copper bars, which alloy would start making more profit to move your smelters from copper to this alloy? Without any buffs, buy prices are seven times the sell values and later alloys need more time smelting. So, you would have to find an alloy that (considering the ores' values, too), make seven times as much profit after compensating for the longer smelt times. While for my example with copper this might already be tin, for silicon this could be gold, for platinum this might be neodymium. I'd say for realistic choices of crafting recipes, it could be most profitable to smelt whatever you need for crafting because at some point the alloy values seem to stagnate (per time unit) and the steps from the used alloy to the more profitable alloy get bigger and bigger.

I hope this got clear. I could extend this post for another hour to reiterate over everything that I do, but I think this wouldn't be beneficial. Either you got my point or it is better to let you ask questions.

@Phoenix

All the arguments you just post on crafting are only theoretical arguments, which are obtained from reasoning under some assumptions. I could point out some assumptions that I do not agree with, but I think you would just come up with more theoretical arguments to counter my points.

I really recommend you do some explicit calculations of the profit per second, using your artifacts, tech and advancements. If the calculated result favors your approach, then you can show it to us and prove that we are all wrong. If the calculated result does not favor yours, then you can trace back your arguments and find the faulty assumption.

Edit: When calculate the profit per second, please do not skip any steps, and do not make any simplification. Just use the most naive calculation.

Edited 8/7/2021 15:26:40

@Phoenix, you wanted me to recount my ascension 1 strategy to see how I got those level times. I don't have the victory screenshot from Scandinavia to explain in detail, but apparently I do have Rise and Fall of Rome. This one took 8d5h.

Total Money Earned: 8T
Money from Territories: 500B
Money from Bonuses: 500B
Money from selling ore: 4B
Money from selling items: 5.2T
Money from caches: 1.6T

Total Armies: 395B
Armies from Camps: 30B
Mercs Purchased: 228B
Armies from Caches: 120B
Armies from Drafts: 18B
Armies saved with JS: 111B
Armies saved from Hospitals: 215B

The money stats should illustrate the power of crafting for profit -- I likely got most of my money crafting explosive bolts, while buying platinum bars off the market.

More interesting though, are the army stats. You question whether there are enough sources of armies in the level to preclude needing armies from army camps -- but here I got negligible amounts from the camps even in my first playthrough. I would guess I had ~50% additional mercs at the time. One thing I'd guess that could be a major discrepancy is hospitals -- you want to max basically all of them except the first few. The way I value a hospital upgrade is (cost of upgrade)/(0.75*#territories left*additional armies saved). This will give an approximate cost of how much you're paying per army by doing this upgrade. In the first run, I upgraded hospitals to around 2 times the most expensive mercenary. Hospitals are super important not to run out of armies your first run. Moreover, you shouldn't take territories you don't need to just to complete bonuses, etc. since these are territories you could get for free with hospitals later. All your fog busts should be about finding hospitals and taking them efficiently, ignoring even army camps (crafters and good recipes are worth taking too). Milking hospitals for all they're worth is how you make up the deficit armies when playing a merc-based strategy.

The important advancements i likely had at the time are joint strike, +100% army camps, +50% mercs, max merc discount, autoconquer 10%. I don't remember numbers exactly; I might've had more or less army camp/mercs than I'm remembering, or also had some increased crafter speed, or Increased cache monies.

Seems that now we have most things in agreement.

While I started merc-based gameplay in the second half of second ascension, some people here are claiming that they successfully started using merc-based gameplay earlier. That may be true, given that I played pretty badly early on, for example I didn't use crafters for profit and I unnecessarily dumped lots of AP into Increased Draft Size. Without making these mistakes that I made, it sounds reasonable that some people can start relying on merc earlier than I do.

Anyway, here's something for me to comment on:

the mercs adv costs - what - three times as much APs than IAP (to max out)

That's true, but there's no much point to max out Additional Merc. Once I've reached like 90%, I've never ran out of merc ever again.

@functor: I guess we misunderstand each other. While I thought that you were criticizing my strategy to use different crafting recipes for each crafter, I now believe that you want to argue against my general approach of crafting from my own production. You don't have to, I already see the potential in crafting for profit from markets. I just haven't adapted this strategy yet. And I've read all those discussions about speedy crafters and such. The thing is, I still want to get all the achievements and if I settle for crafting for profit from markets, I'm not sure if I will get all the required items and alloys at the end or if I have to prolong a level just for some more whatever bars. As I hinted at, if you don't want all the achievements (for example because you already have them all), you can freely choose any smelting/crafting strategy you want. But from experience I know that there are alloys and items in every level that you need for techs but that aren't sold by any market, and that means that you need ores from mines, which itself takes time to produce. And even money can't help you with that. So, if I wanted to find an excuse, I'd say that the techs achievement are holding me back. But I'm fine with having a slower first ascension if I then have all the achievements completed and don't have to worry about them anymore.

@functor: about your initial reply here that listed your advs: why don't you invest in Discounted Mine Upgrades at all? I see that you have (or will have) Increased Ore Sell Value. But that assumes that there are ores to sell. Those ores have to come from mines and especially if you have very short level times, those mines have to be upgraded to a significant stage to even produce any meaningful amounts of ore that you then can sell. So, if your whole strategy is around making lots amounts of money, shouldn't you also try to cut costs where possible? I saw that krinid acknowledged that by putting both advs on his list and based on megaol's numbers I assume he hasn't invested in Ore Sell Values and isn't upgrading mines much (he makes only a 1000th of his item profit with selling ores). I'm just saying, how much value does Increased Ore Sell Value have if your level times are that short and if you don't have a Mine Upgrade Discount adv.

@megaol: I really wanted to find any flaws in the posted numbers, but they all work out one way or another. First, I doubted that you can constantly reach 33% hospital savings, especially on the final large territories (without the phase 4 Better Hospital adv), but the longer I think about it the more possible it sounds. And with 33% savings from hospitals and 25% JS, you already save 50% of all the armies that you need to clear the level. If another ~20% come from caches, it is apparent that only 30% have to come from mercs, which is 50% more than the stock 20% which lines up with your 50% additional mercs. As I said, I believe in your numbers, I'm just not sure i could play this way myself currently.

@Mathematician: true, the last third of an adv will likely make up half or more of the total cost. So, if 100% more mercs (which is two thirds of 150%, aka the maxed out amount) are all you need, than the adv effectively is only half in cost. Therefore, this adv is quite the opposite of most of the Auto-advs where they are only really effective if maxed out, so spending only a few APs to unlock the first stages doesn't get you anywhere.

With so much that has been said here, I realize more and more how little I know about this game and how right I was to call this a not-guide. I really have to thank you all for teaching me all this. Right now I only have to find my way to apply those findings to make up a strategy that feels good for me. I just checked whether I might want to reset my APs with what I know now, but luckily I found very little that feels wasted so far and that I can't make up for easily with the next few levels.

@Phoenix

When I was still in Phase 1, I first got Joint Strike and Increased Army Camp Production. This is not enough to unlock Phase 2. At that time, the best option for me is to get Increased Ore Sell Values, which was much better than Additional Mercenaries and Discounted Mine Upgrades.

Now, I have more APs. If I ever reset my APs, I would not get it anymore.

Wow, lots of discussion going on.

RE: feasibility of Merc-based strategy for 1st playthrough, it's possible, I did it. As soon as I saw the relatively smaller value of army camps (very difficult to cause the # of armies from army camps to rival that of mercs or caches, and of course JS & hospitals are on a different scale altogether, as are Drafts for me [but not for others, see later]) value of mercs getting more early level bonuses & higher drafts, I switched to that. You don't need max Additional Mercs, I played @ 75% for my entire 1st and 2nd Ascensions. I'm now on my 3rd and I've raised it to 87.5%, and I will eventually get it to 150%, I'm just mulling over if other things have more value. But 75% was enough to get me through every level if I crafted enough & upgraded my hospitals properly. If you don't upgrade the hospitals properly, then you can get stuck at the end of the level by running out of mercs. This must be avoided. Good planning avoids this.

But as soon as I started using this, I realized that MONEY was the key. Unfortunately it took me a long time (1/2 way through 2nd ascension) to realize that Increased Crafter Speed was the answer. Both the Advancement & the Artifact help massively to get me extreme item sell value income. Of course I use the Item Value Artifact & am now putting AP into Increased Sell Value advancement (phase 3, so this comes later).

Increase Draft Sizes also helps me I think ... not sure how much, but my armies from Drafts are big compared to army camp income. I think this Advancement just helps me drain the sliding pool faster (the part that gives bigger drafts when you buy mercs). I have it at 150% ... no idea if this is actually required or if a lower % would suffice. But at end of level of Netherlands (2nd playthrough) for example, I have army camps 23B, mercs 373B, caches 160B, drafts 62B and tbh I left a lot of drafts in the sliding pool, I was still getting 2B armies each draft when I finished - which means I should have bought my final stretch of mercs sooner and drafted more often to get the units out of the pool and finish the level quicker. Once I get to phase 4, I'll likely focus on Armies from Caches first to get that 160B to 320B! The cache benefits are important b/c they are constant - finishing a level more quickly will not reduce the value & bonus they provide.

Increased Money Caches is good. It's in phase 1 ... and it's _money_ which means mercs. On Netherlands, my money income was territories 40B, bonuses 172B, ore 198B, items 1.6T, caches 707.6B. I spent a lot of AP on Increased Money from Bonuses in phase 3 . . . but you can see here that it's not that big; the advancement brings it from 86B-ish to 172B (I have +100%; the "-ish" is b/c I also have an Epic BMB so it plays a role too, not sure how best to break that down). So it has value, but not sure it's worth the huge AP it costs. Also as I finish levels more quickly = less time for bonuses accumulate = value goes down over time. I'd rather have put that AP into Increased Item Sell Values - but that's the next item in phase 3 I'll max out. I have it at 30% now. I have Increased Ore Sell Values @ 100% - it's cheap and in phase 1 and gives you something to do to get profit from extra ore.

Another good Advancement is Increased Resources from Caches. It's in phase 2, and like the Money cache Adv, it's reasonably cheap and value doesn't diminish over time, and it helps both for (a) having ore for the luxury bars for the last Techs that have the nasty bar requirements (some levels give the right ore for them, if so, great; but some don't), (b) additional ore to sell, so if you have Increased Ore Sell Values, these work well together.

Not smelting at all is a waste if there is at least one recipe that makes any profit.

If you have Increased Ore Sell Values maxed out, smelting bars is NEGATIVE PROFIT. It's _only_ worth smelting if you're making bars for crafting. Otherwise you're wasting time b/c you get more money by selling the ore.

After I start crafting & have the market to buy what I need, I fall into the "smelt when I need it" group. If I don't need something, I stop my smelters -- b/c sometimes smelting consumes all the ore I might need later for a luxury bar for a tech. Notably the 15% merc discount techs, 15% item sell value techs, the 10% hospital value techs, 50% cache value tech. The 10% hospital discount techs typically come too late for me, and I've already upgraded my hospitals by that point. They really need to be higher in the tech tree to be useful. No point grabbing those at great cost when you're already upgraded 90% of your hospitals.

So for new players, I would say definitely get:
- JS (no brainer)
- Increased Money Cache
- Additional Mercs b/c you get more of the _cheap_ mercs too - if the expensive ones are too expensive to buy and you leave them there, fine, but you're still getting more of the cheaper ones, and as you get more crafting buffs, even the expensive ones will become accessible

And once you get to phase 2:
- Increase Cache Resources
- Merc Discount
- Increased Crafter Speed
- **Increased Draft Sizes (see note above)

And in phase 3:
- Increase Item Sell Values - this is really the only item you absolutely need
- Increased Money from Bonuses - not really necessary BUT you need to put AP into _something_ in order to unlock phase 4, and this is really the only other item worth getting imho

I haven't created a similar detailed version than I initially did, but I wanted to check whether I understand the merc-strategy, so I looked at the advs and selected what a merc-strategy would unlock and why. Note: I will on purpose exclude advs that even those players would initially unlock in order to get a little speed-up early on. See this as the selection of advs that one would reset their APs to as soon as they have enough.

Advs-groups that are irrelevant:

• Ore Booster (this strat doesn't use mines)
• Auto-Advs (they aren't efficient for any strat)
  
• Everything with techs (techs are no priority, the relevant techs come too late)
• Everything with mines and Army Camps (this strat ignores mine production and doesn't value army camps except very early on in each level)

What that would leave as relevant:

• 1) JS (obviously)
• 1) Additional Mercs (well, it's a merc-strat after all)
• 1) Idle Time (even merc-based players must sleep from time to time)
• 2) Smelter/Crafter Visibility (no priority, but nice to have, if they move with a new map generation)
• 2) Merc Discount (well, mercs again ;) )
• 2) Recipe Visibility (no priority, but nice to have, if they move with a new map generation)
• 2) Speedy Crafter (main source of money income)
• 2) IAP (no priority, but even a merc-based strat profits from this)
• 3) Merc Camp Visibility (no priority, but nice to have, if they move with a new map generation)
• 3) Item Sell Value (main source of money income)
• 3) Market Visibility (no priority, but nice to have, if they move with a new map generation)
• 4) Better Hospitals (main saving of armies)
• 4) Army Caches (to reduce the amount of necessary mercs further)

If I now filter by priority, I get a selection that pretty much prioritizes unlocking adv-phases as a side product:

• 1) JS (obviously)
• 1) Additional Mercs (well, it's a merc-strat after all)
• 1) Idle Time (even merc-based players must sleep from time to time)
• 2) Merc Discount (well, mercs again ;) )
• 2) Speedy Crafter (main source of money income)
• 2) IAP (no priority, but necessary to complete phase 2)
• 3) Item Sell Value (main source of money income)
• 4) Better Hospitals (main saving of armies)
• 4) Army Caches (to reduce the amount of necessary mercs further)

Any comments? Have I missed anything?

Edited 8/8/2021 11:09:58

@Phoenix

The list looks pretty good. Below are two comments.

Until we have a high modifier of Additional Mercs, it is very likely to run out of mercs. By then, the army production will drop to about 10%. We need to plan ahead and try to mitigate this issue.

Since we are purchasing a lot of mercs, it is not that easy to drain the drafting pool, 15% of total armies earned. Some army production boost and draft size boost could be helpful.

Edit: You can check krinid's post and find some additional advancements that could enhance this strategy.

Edited 8/8/2021 11:45:23

Increased Ore Sell Values does work w/mercs strategy, b/c you are either:

(A) smelting all your ingredients (KCENbroh can advise on this - the summary is that he has found a method to make even more profit than buying from markets by smelting all the ingredients for crafting), thus more ore is required, and whatever is left over (some mines have 2+ ore types, so you will likely create some you need and some you don't) can be sold for higher profit = more mercs.

(B) buying all your ingredients from markets, which means you aren't smelting much or even at all, in which case all the ore you pick up from caches (etc) can be sold for higher profit with this Adv.

Regarding running out of mercs before end of level - yes, that's a danger. Unless you're sure you have enough for that level (either just have a good feel for it, or check people's logs for how many armies are on the map, how many mercs are on the map, calculate how much hospital benefit you need to clear it without running out), you should come close to maxing out all the useful upgrades of the hospitals. For example, on a 400B army map with 300 territories left, upgrading a hospital that saves 500K=150M savings total for the remaining territories=not really significant, so you can and should skip it, unless it's one of the super cheap initial upgrades. If it's a hospital upgrade that saves 50M=15B total = significant, and you probably need this to be able to finish the level without running out of mercs (depends on Additional Mercs level, for up to 75% you need high hospitals to finish w/o running out; I've just recently upgraded to 90% now & 100% resource caches, and I find the resources are giving me lots of money, so combined with more mercs, I've been getting away with hardly doing any Tech upgrades or Hospital upgrades; but so far only to Copper Creek ... the tougher levels are still to come).

Lastly ... regarding drain the drafting pool ... this is important! DRAIN THE POOL. In order to do this, you need to buy mercs EARLIER. Don't save them all for the end. If you wait until you're ready to clear the level, you can leave ~10-20% of the total armies earned in the draft pool ... wasted. But you need time to drain it, so you should buy mercs earlier. Even if you aren't going to immediately capture territories with them, buy mercs and keep on doing big drafts. Or what I do is just buy mercs and strategically capture bonuses (the most you can capture with the units you have), without trying to take the big territories before your hospitals are ready for it. And keep on drafting! Don't waste that 10-20%.

In my case, I draft massive amounts of the cheap mercs asap. Then when they start getting expensive, I slow down until I get at least a couple of the 15% merc discount bonuses, then start again. And once I get the last one (or the last one I'm willing to bother getting, I'll skip the last 1-2 if they require bars that are too obnoxious to smelt and can't be bought from markets), I just dump all money into hospitals, digs, and whatever is left over buys mercs ... then draft. There are some levels where I get massive drafts continuously from the mid-game through end game b/c I keep on buying mercs.

Edited 8/8/2021 23:12:35

Given today's idle update I would LOVE to hear any new strategies with the new situation we're in (markets for the most part). For now, I will postpone my experiment of trying a more merc-based approach in the next level until there is a new consensus about a merc-based strategy that will - most like - be based on money generated from one's own smelters/mines. At this point, I will definitely not risk my slow but still somewhat predictable level times on maps where I need roughly a month. If I now tried my best attempt of a merc-strat and failed, the level would last two months probably. So, that's where I am at right now.

Honestly, I think I need Kcebnroh to weigh in on this. He is already a smelter-based merc-purchasing money making strat ... so my strat just from smelting not market purchases.

He made this work already from smelting, so I think takes away or market flexibility and forces us to use his strat, to at least some degree.

I'll need a couple levels to see the real impact of this & re-assess.

I think mercs will still work, just need to figure out how to get the money, or how much of the money can still be acquired from smelting and maybe that offset will still make the remainder (what smelting can't produce) viable for market purchases. But the straight up market-profitable heydays are (likely) over.

Will report back in a couple levels . . .

In the interim . . . Kcebnroh ... pls teach us the way.

I use a mostly smelting-based strategy; I usually go straight for Tin Cans because those are the most profitable early thing and I'll buy alloys for that if I'm ever having trouble keeping enough things for smelters to work on early on, but other than that I use markets very little- I maybe grab a few key alloys before using my Time Warp artifact if it'll set something good up. There's not much more to it than upgrading your mines; if you can't keep a smelter going constantly making a alloy you need, upgrade mines until you can (or be prepared to switch back and forth between useful alloys often). If one smelter doesn't make enough, invest in mines until you can run two. This isn't always immediately viable, meaning you'll have to swap smelters between alloy types relatively often early in a level before you can afford to get some good ones going, but eventually you'll have a few different alloy types constantly pumping out so you can run a few different crafting types. You may need to increase the priority on getting smelters if you don't have enough to keep your crafters going. You won't have everything running the most profitable recipe because you won't always have the ingredients. Invest in the first few levels of ore production tech and maybe a level or two of reduced cost on upgrading mines.

I generally get just about every early mine up to at least level 4 and trail off on the later mines where it'll take too long to pay off. A lot of the very early mines will get up much higher than that in later levels; I go back and upgrade early mines that cost just a few seconds of money production on general principle, to support having the ore for the two-ore alloys later on. In later levels I tend to invest heavily in silicon and aluminum mines, to support having the welding rods and twine needed for most high end crafting items.

I have Increased Ore Sell Values maxed (which is very cheap), which gives most alloys negative profitability. Thus, I never smelt for profit, just for techs and crafting ingredients. Just sell high end ores that you're not going to smelt. You can get a lot of money off of this in levels where the resource caches mostly give high end ores.

Edited 8/9/2021 19:46:18

@Sefer, do you use the speedy smelter adv? Or speedy crafter adv for that matter? As I've mentioned in some other thread, there comes a time about mid-way through the campaign where one smelter (of any alloy) can't fully supply one crafter (of any single-alloy-ingredient item before glass) anymore. I could see that being a lesser problem if you have maxed out speedy smelter adv, but if you (also) use speedy crafter adv for the additional profit, I would assume that there is a constant need for more smelters. Given this phenomenon in those later levels and my experience with those high-demand recipes, I'd think that you HAVE TO choose one crafting recipe for every crafter (even if your mines can't keep up forever) and - if necessary - switch all smelters/crafters over to a completely different recipe if your stock of ore is depleted because otherwise your smelters will produce too little of some of the recipes. But having all on one recipe is the easiest to handle. And for Tin Cans the mine upgrades are relatively affordable.

I have maxed Smelter Speed and 35% extra on Crafter speed. For late game levels I end up with most of my smelters working on aluminum and silicon with a few devoted to other alloys- I think when I was finishing up Europe Huge and US recently I generally could handle a gold and platinum full time, with another mine switching between them (so when I ran low on gold switch to platinum and build up some gold, when running low on platinum switch back), a couple that could mostly keep up with thorium and neodium, and the rest on whatever was useful- mostly lead because Europe uses Structs for late recipes and Structs sell for more than Welding Rods in US. It definitely requires more hand holding than buying alloys and it slows down the start some (there's a while that you're spending money on mines and not making much money from selling things), but it does reach a point where it's self sustaining and just pumps out profits without you needing to use those profits to buy ingredients for the next round.