@Darryl Chow

Screw the Triskelions. Both Triskelions are hopeless. I still haven't found a way to do Triskelions without running out of money at the end. Just skip them.

After being deep into phase 4 and upgrading Alloy Sell Value artifact to at least Rare, the market strategy should work for all levels except the Triskelions.

This is a demonstration of me using the market strategy as a late phase 4 player:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dts87Xsa3w

As you can see, I don't need to use powers. Maybe you'll still need help from powers in the next 2 ascensions or so before you can get those good advancements in phase 4, but it's not unsustainable because you won't need to rely on powers anymore in long run.

@riskboy88

Your setup is not too far away from the one functor used for the 8h Africa speedrun with 10k AP invested. So I guess you can try to power through levels with market strategy for levels before Africa.

I don’t think there’s a hard cliff where this “stops working”, but it becomes increasingly more likely that you’ll run out of mercenaries by the end of each level as AP increases.

You can get by up to ~China without Level 4 advancements from a base of joint strike and 150% additional mercs assuming you know where the hospitals are and what level you plan to upgrade them to. Then you can do “waves” where you make minimal pushes towards all the L3 hospitals + markets which make sense, then wait two hours, then towards all the L2 hospitals + markets which make sense, then wait two hours, then finish.

You might be left with a couple drafts on the later levels and your definition of “later levels” might vary slightly if you aren’t at +150% mercs or don’t know where the hospitals are.

If you want to run this strategy beyond ~China, you need to accept that there will be hours of drafting at the end (probably still faster than any other approach but annoying) or you need to push for Level 4 advancements (hospital boost, increased army cache, auto-drafting).

Unfortunately there’s a HUGE lull in effective AP advancements between alloy sell value and the Level 4 advancements with the current meta.

The best strat I've used ONCE YOU KNOW WHERE THE LOCATIONS OF THE MARKETS & HOSPITALS is:
(if you don't know, ask around in GC, lots of people can tell you)

TLDR:
- Start with SAC+FC
- Get a market, merc camp & hospital
- Use money from market to get more merc camps, use those armies to get all hospitals
- Upgrade all hospitals
- Clear the level

Full details:
- Use whatever small money you have at start of level to upgrade army camp (AC)
- Pop SAC (artifact or power, doesn't matter) + FC
- If you want to amplify the start boost, get a 2nd or 3rd army camp (AC) before doing this, then pop 1 SAC per AC, or if you're really limited, grab the 2nd and/or 3rd AC while the 1st SAC is still activate, then pop more SACs & FCs
- Get first market (MA), merc camp (MC) & hospital (HO); order of the above 3 doesn't really matter
- Use as many SACs & FCs as is required to get the first of each of these (MA, MC, HO); if you capture quickly, you'll still have time in the SAC left and can pop more FCs to compensate if you need more armies/money
- Capture army caches along the way ONLY IF YOU NEED TO in order to avoid running out of armies; it's best to leave them for after the +50% cache Tech is acquired; if the level you're on doesn't have this Tech, then go ahead and capture them
- If you're having trouble doing this, use the OPTIONAL SAC/FC open, and this should enable you to comfortably get 1-2 ACs, 2-3 MCs, 1-2 HOs, minimally 1 MA
- Beeline directly to next HO, capturing MCs along the way
- Focus on conservation of armies, don't even bother with doing JS attacks
- Use MA to get money to empty MC, but only take as much as you need until you get the proper Alloy/Item techs; don't want to drain the MA more than required before you can get the max benefit from it
- Monitor your remaining armies; if you get low, ensure you have MCs with mercs available
- Find more MCs if you need to - don't run out of mercs, else you will get stuck
- Continue until you have all HOs
- Ensure you have all MAs that have the items needed for Techs for merc discounts, alloy/item values, +50% cache bonus, HO discounts, HO buffs + anything else you want (but the ones I've listed here are really all you need)
- Smelt/craft anything else you need for the Techs mentioned above
- Upgrade all HOs
- Wait 2h or pop 2x TW
- HOs now upgraded + all smelting/crafting should be finished
- Upgrade all pertinent Techs
- You are now ready to conquer the world, using normal strategy (JS, grab caches, etc)

There are actually some variations. If you have high Mercs (+100-150% Additional Mercs) and have enough money (depends on level + your Adv's), you can even skip the HO upgrades on some levels.

If you don't have high Mercs or have low Money, you may benefit from a 2nd round of HO upgrades and grabbing a few more Techs beyond what I've listed above.

The more AP you get, the more of the above steps you can fast track for speed runs through levels.

Fyi, here is a pic of what the "ready to conquer the world" state looks like for Europe Huge. At this point, I had captured all HOs and had kicked off the upgrades. For Hard levels, I typically do a couple HO upgrades on the first few HOs as I move across the map.

@Darryl Chow

I am pretty sure that all revision 17 levels have enough money to support this strategy with your current advancements.

On revision 18 levels, there are several ways to address the possible money issue.

1. Skipping Afro-Eurasia Gargantuan, Triskelion, United States suggested by Mathematician.
2. Better advancements suggested by graemes.
3. Reducing the wasted armies and money following the details given by krinid.
4. Doing some appropriate amount of crafting. In general, crafting can provide a lot more money than markets at the cost of waiting. There are a lot of highly profitable recipes on the last four levels. Some calculations are needed to determine the optimal amount of crafting.
5. Getting better artifacts: Hospital Boost, Mercenary Discount, Alloy Values.

Or, you can simply do a slow Europe-Huge and grind early levels for AP.

Edited 10/5/2021 18:25:37

Thanks everyone! I’ll try the strategy by @krinid and hopefully 3 ascensions later I’ll be able to attain the phase 4 advancements as suggested by @graemes. In the meantime I’ll just skip the Triskelions until I’m sufficiently deep into phase 4 advancements.
As for the profitable recipes, not only do they take extremely long to craft (even if I upgraded crafters speed in phase 2, it’s still a long time), until I max out item sell values in phase 3, these recipes are in fact unprofitable- I have verified these using the recipe stats dialog in the level.
In the meantime I’ll try option (3) while upgrading my artifacts to rare grade (eventually), and see how it goes!

@Darryl Chow

I do not have recipe stats, hence I cannot check it myself. However, according to my calculations, the following recipes are profitable on revision 18 Europe Huge with an alloy value modifier 2.3 (tech + advancement) and item value modifier 1.3 (tech).

Copper Wire, Tin Can, Welding Rod, Twine, Glass, Boiling Flask, Solenoid, Transformer, Capacitor, Circuit, Antenna, Battery, Motor, Speaker, Welding Torch

I agree with you that crafting is not desirable due to the time it takes, and we should avoid it if we have enough money. But it is not totally unprofitable.

Crafting is totally profitable, the only thing that's changed on that point is that you have to be careful when you're buying ingredients from the market. Whereas before you could just buy 500+ platinum and come back hours later to 25+ ebolts and repeat the process as required, now you have to be careful that you don't drive the price of platinum up so high that you're losing money by making ebolts. This depends on a lot on which market the platinum is in (the early ones tend to get expensive more quickly), and if you're using that market to earn money through buy/sell (in which case, be careful!) or just as an means of buying Techs and ingredients for crafting.

Also note that there are almost no universally profitable recipes. For the most part, the ones that functor listed are profitable, but even then (a) some levels are negative profit with Antenna, Solenoid, etc, (b) depends on your Advancements (if you have high Alloy but not Item sell values, you may be better off selling bars rather than crafted items - you'll never _lose_ money but will waste opportunity to gain more profit), (c) the hard levels are an entirely different case of their own, whereby even the most usually profitable recipes are often not profitable; iirc barbed wire is more profitable than tin cans on the Hard levels, ebolts are relatively worthless, etc. Hard Trisk doesn't even have platinum in the markets anyhow.

So there's no surefire way to know which recipes are profitable on a level without playing it and looking (or getting that info from someone who has played them).

But one thing for sure, if you need ingredients from a market, do NOT drain it of money up front, else it's worthless to you for crafting purposes.

oh, does the merc and market strat work better on earlier levels?

It does work, but there are exceptions where you’ll run out of money and mercs and as such will need to depend on drafts and army camps- the notable examples being Copper creek castle, Reconquest and Fort Harbor, since they have fewer markets and mercs as compared to the levels around them.

For any strategy, including the market/merc strategy, you need to generate 100% of armies to clear a level.

Of these:
15% come from base mercs
22.5% come from additional mercs
xx% comes from hospitals
25% comes from joint strike
xx% comes from army caches
The remainder have to come from army camps

Importantly, the army camp piece is the only part of this equation that is not instantaneous. Anything you do which decreases the percentage of the other bucket fills up army camps by necessity. Any cache you capture when you don’t have the +50% unlocked. Any territory you capture when you don’t have maxed hospitals. Any inefficiencies with joint strike. This is very bad.

In ideal world, there is no remainder. But some levels which are large require you to capture many territories before you get all the hospitals. Some levels which are awkward require you to capture many territories without joint strike.

This is true for any strategy, it’s just the other strategies are so slow that you don’t notice how close you need to cut things to keep army camps to zero since you give yourself wiggle room by taking longer.

Thanks a lot everyone, just cleared United States easily, with leftover money that I could use to upgrade lots of army camps after the mercs ran out and the hospitals were maxed, though I had to wait for a short time (several hours) collecting drafts. Now onto Europe Huge (for the second time)!

How on earth do mercenary-based strategies give you guys anywhere near enough armies to finish levels? I'm only at +37.5%, but mercenaries are usually a fairly small portion of my final army count when I finish levels - 20% of the total, maybe. And I've drained every merc camp dry by the end of most levels. The only time mercs ever got me to the end of a level was when I superpowered Inspire Mercs near the end of a mid-level map (Copper Creek?)

Mathematically, this doesn't make any sense to me. Additional Mercs caps out at +150%, so I'm getting over half the mercs it's possible to get (short of superpowered IM). And that's a heck of a lot less than half the armies I need to finish most levels.

What am I missing here?

@Alsadius

Joint Strike: 25%
Level 3 Hospitals (+20% tech + Rare Hospital Boost, excluding JS effect): 30%
Mercenaries (+100% advancement): 28%
Army Cache (+50% tech): 12%

These amount to 95% of the total territory cost. With drafting or better advancements/artifacts, it is not hard to reach 100%.

Edited 10/11/2021 16:06:21

All mercs combined used to give you 20% of what you needed to conquer a map. With the latest updates this percentage got reduced, but I don't know by how much exactly. But just for the sake of this argument, lets take 20% as a number. If you max out additional mercs, you get another 150% of 20%, meaning 30% more, meaning you get 50% of the armies needed from mercs alone (assuming you can afford them). But, you don't need 100% to conquer a map. If you play strategically you don't have to acquire 25% of the needed armies because of JS. And if you upgrade hospitals early and quickly you save another (varying) percentage of the 100% map cost in armies that you never have to come up with.

So, if we assume there are no hospitals and you have maxed out additional mercs, you only need 75% of the total army count (due to JS) and have 50% in mercs. Hence, you only need another 25%. They can come from different source: caches, army camps, clan request. And very important: drafts!! You will get another x% (I think the community were never able to pin-point the exact number) of all armies that you earned in form of drafts. So, if you buy mercs that cover 50% of a map's total cost in armies, and the draft percentage would be - say - 10%, then your merc income would actually be bumped up to 55% (over time, drafts need some time to reach the limit, so you have to draft a few times). If - say - 10% of a map's total cost is available in form of army caches, there are another 11% (with the assumed draft percentage) that you don't have to earn otherwise.

If you subtract all those factors, the number of armies that HAVE to come from army camps becomes really small. Then, the only problem is to get all the money necessary to buy all the mercs.

Disclaimer: I haven't mastered this strategy yet and I know that you don't have to max out additional mercs. I'm just repeating what others have said before. But to me, this sounds plausible. And with the new markets you can make money out of thin air by buying and selling something as long as the buy price is lower then the sell value.

I think the base merc is 15% of the map and max sliding draft is 15% of total armies earned

The remainder have to come from army camps

True but misleading. With good Advancements and Artifacts, the combined total of all the other categories can easily total >100%, thus meaning you don't actually need any armies from army camps at all.

However, this only applies to the point when you've proceeded enough in a level to have access to all the markets, hospitals, merc camps, have enough money to buy the mercs, have unlocked the Techs, etc. And to get to that point you need some armies from army camps. But not much, which ends up being <1% of total armies earned (and even less if we use total armies required to clear the level, including JS & hospital figures).

So yes, you need army camps, but only as (A) an early level tool to the first market, hospital & first few merc camps, and (B) to increase the size of your drafts. And optionally (C) to boost the benefit of the SAC+FC level start strategy. These 3 things are truly all army camps are good for.

Thus ... if you want to set yourself up for success, apply your Advancements to align with boosting your long term money income, as this will help you.

@Alsadius

Here's the data of where my armies came from from my late phase 4 market strategy demonstration video that I've posted above.

The percentages are the % of total territory cost on the map. So when you add the percentages together, it can be larger than 100%, which means that I have armies left over when the level is finished.

You may notice that my Joint Strike saving is much less than 25%. That's probably because hospitals reduce the amount of armies I need to spend, hence reducing the amount of armies saved by Joint Strike. The use of auto-conquer at the end and my habit of going straight towards important targets without caring about Joint Strike may be relevant as well.

Hardened Scandinavia:
army camp 0.00895%
merc 38.2%
army cache 22.6%
drafts 0.327%
joint strike 12.3%
lv2 hospitals 41.7%

Hardened Far Land:
army camp 0.0117%
merc 39.4%
army cache 20.9%
drafts 0.382%
joint strike 12.6%
lv2 hospitals 42.9%

Hardened Old Town:
army camp 0.00118%
merc 38.6%
army cache 19.7%
drafts 0.00190%
joint strike 14.2%
lv1 hospitals 28.6%

Hardened Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire:
army camp 0.00535%
merc 37.3%
army cache 25.0%
drafts 0.183%
joint strike 11.7%
lv2 hospitals 42.2%

normal Europe Huge:
army camp 0.00410%
merc 33.2%
army cache 20.3%
drafts 0.155%
joint strike 14.1%
lv2 hospitals 37.3%

Hardened Europe Huge:
army camp 0.00498%
merc 31.3%
army cache 17.9%
drafts 0.213%
joint strike 15.4%
lv2 hospitals 35.2%

normal Scandinavia:
army camp 0.0389%
merc 38.2%
army cache 24.4%
drafts 1.51%
joint strike 14.6%
lv1 hospitals 26.7%

That makes sense on paper, but it doesn't match my experiences in game.

I'll use my current United States run to illustrate. I'm at 855/3066 conquered(west coast to Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and about half of Texas), so not all that far through it, but hopefully it'll demonstrate.

Relevant advancements:
+100% army camp production
+40% cache money
+25% joint strike
+37.5% more mercenaries
-20% army camp cost
-30% mercenary cost
+80% draft size

Artifacts:
+40% bonus money
+40% army camp production
+80 minutes idle time

Session age 7 days 14 hours

I usually prioritize hospitals and army camps first, then army caches, then mines/smelters/crafters, then bonus incomes.

53.2 billion armies earned
- 30.2B from army camps
- 7.9B mercenaries
- 6.8B caches
- 8.3B drafted

- 17.5B saved with Joint Strike
- 8.4B saved with hospitals

And I have 9.1B mercenaries who are unpurchased as of yet.

---

So in total, I've gone through just over 79B worth of territories. 22% of that was saved by JS, and 11% by hospitals, and of the remaining 67%, drafting will do for (67*0.15/1.15) about 9%, so I have to earn 58% in actual army income. Of that 58%, about 9% has from caches. That leaves me 49% to earn with mercs and camps. Even if I'd bought all the mercs currently available to me, that'd only be about 21%, leaving 28% of the total army count to be earned from camps. For sake of argument, if I maxed out merc availability (which would probably take all the AP I've earned in the last year), I'd be at 38% of the total territory cost, leaving 11% for camps.

I can see some merit in this approach, generally speaking, and it's how I try to play - cost savings are really good (though I think Fizzer has really nerfed hospitals recently, because I'm not getting nearly as much from them as I used to). But I am nowhere near able to actually do the kinds of things you folks are talking about. And again, I'm about a year into playing Warzone Idle. What does it take to get there?