I have it at 20%. It's much better than regular AQ for cleaning up levels. It saves a LOT of effort.

I was able to beat all of the challenge levels with it, thanks to my insane army camp boost. The advanced AQ was beating challenge levels at 5% that regular AQ had been losing at 10%.

I used advanced-auto-conquer in those 2 days before my third super-ascension. It worked quite well.

I treated it as auto-conquer that respects joint strike. Instead of manually clicking the expensive territories to make sure that they're all joint striked, I could just turn on advanced-auto-conquer, which saved me time and effort.

@Math
How well did it work? For example let's say there are a lot of small territories but no JS available (contrived example, I know) and some other large territories also with JS available. The correct action would be to capture the small territories, especially the ones less than the base hospital benefit to capture for free to create JS opportunities for the large territories.

But I suspect that if no JS is available, it'd just revert to capturing the largest territories again. So while many/most scenarios might be fine, sooner or later, seems like it's going to make a bad decision.

Whatever AAQ does, there will always be players/strategies for which this advancement performs worse than the original AQ. I don't know whether AAQ got improved compared to the analysis that Fizzer did in his stream, but he mentioned that AAQ got trained by tweaking the different parameters and rerunning it again. Thinking about this, I suspect it could be possible, that AAQ achieved a stable state at some point but only got to a local extremum and never found the optimal play. This is a multi-parameter set up, so finding any extremum can be difficult, even more so if you want to find the absolute extremum. And this training only happened for one strategy as far as I know, so, unless you play exactly like the trainings AI you will see different outcomes (might be better, might be worse).

AAQ for me would be justifiable (given the cost and the state at which you can start investing in it) if the players were able to specify (most of) the parameters that AAQ uses themselves. This way it would be (a) safe to use for everyone: if you only want AAQ to capture free territories, you could leave all other parameters to penalize any non-free territories, (b) adaptable to any strategy: if you want mines, up the weight for mines, if you want mercs, up the weight for mercs, and (c) powerful enough that the high barrier to entry doesn't feel like you wasted APs: there has to be an incentive to spend the AP instead of super-ascending, otherwise (if it stays as monolithic as it is today) it should be considered for AAQ to be moved to Phase 3.

Agree with you, more flexibility is what "Advanced" Auto-Conquer should offer, not just a black box "better" offering, and it needs to be both earlier and cheaper.

A super expensive phase 4 advancements make no sense, b/c investing in this will make you eligible for your next Super Asc before you get a chance to really use AAQ. So who does it target? Late phase 4 players who opt out of Super Asc again and will just chill in phase 4 instead? What's the point?

maybe a special phase 5 when u unlock super ascension and is not deleted upon acesnion

I got enough AP to super ascend 5 days after unlocking AAC and about half a day after unlocking Auto-Dig.

Being able to carry over certain auto-advancements would be really nice. I'd also like to see Fizzer add a second super ascension reward for spending 500k AP total.

Great idea, both UFO & MJz. Essentially similar ideas with different implementations.

The way it is now, phase 4 is mostly useless. There's no reason to stay there long, and as you unlock the good Adv's, it's time to start again.

These options would give phase 4 more purpose. The key though is to have additional benefit of staying in phase 4 longer, rather than just up the SAsc requirement entirely to 500k (which tbh seems like the standard reaction that happens). So you can still SAsc with P4 100k but have additional benefit to do so with P4 >100k.

hear me out, new super acension pick, you can choose one type of AP slot to save, for example if u wanted to carry over your copper mine bonus then you can (idk why u would tho)

as such you can transfer the phase 4 advancements each super ascension and play with them from the begining

Edited 4/26/2022 15:04:37

I think that would kinda break the game and remove the "restart" SASC is meant to do. Thats already accomplished by SASC reward and the crazy artifacts people have. SASC is meant to give you guys who played for a while a new challenge. Starting with some crazy advancements would remove it.

That said... I also would like a fase 5 with permanent rewards, that you can only get with, say, "extra points" NOT AP. Say each SASC gives you a point, and it costs 3 or 5 to get a upgrade. Though I have no idea what they would be, since I havent even spent anything on fase 3 didnt even look at fase 4.

On a final not, while I deslike this "smart auto conquer" because its just a better version of the older one, not all advancements are equally useful and in the end thats fine. Of course suggestion to improve them its good.

Thats what I think, and who cares about what I think anyway

Not saying that this would be a good change, but if super-ascension would require you to have spent more AP on phase 4, some of the (really) expensive phase 4 advancements would actually make (some) sense again.

@UFO: was your suggestion that you could always preserve exactly one advancement, or that you would - with each super-ascension - preserve one more? Preserving exactly one would not be that useful because sure in your second attempt (after first super-ascension) you would have an easier start, but you won't benefit from further super-ascensions. And if you could preserve one advancement for every time you ascended (so, after third ascension you start with three advancements), the regular super-ascension reward wouldn't make much sense anymore because super-ascension would lose its "reset"-character if you could select one more advancement and a super-ascension reward. But nonetheless, I like the way you're thinking here.

Anyone know what the upgrade cost of AAQ is? I know it unlocks @ 5000 but didn't make notes while testing it out what the 10% and higher level costs were. I seem to recall the total cost to unlock to 100% was >100k though.

Unlock: 5,000
10%: 3,000
15%: 4,000

Thanks. The 1000 increase aligns to what I recall, but when I did the math, it worked out to even more expense that I remembered so figured I had it wrong. But it is in fact just simply a ridiculous cost.

Total unlock cost is 233,000 AP. I doubt anyone will fully unlock it. Tbh, increasing by 1000 is non-feasible when there are 20 increments. It'd be more reasonable if it incremented in 10%'s and increased 1000 each time (would still 68,000 to fully unlock, still quite high).

Half unlock to 50% is 68,000. More reasonable but still super costly. And still fairly pointless when you consider that any sane person will first unlock:

- Better Hospitals to 50%, AP cost 5518
- Auto-Draft to 0m, AP cost 10044
- Auto-Mortar to 10m, AP cost 10301
- Faster Digging to 50%, AP cost 11810
- Increased Cache Armies to 100%, AP cost 25739
TOTAL AP so far: 64921
*** Auto-Mortar was a joke, it's not included in the TOTAL AP so far calc.

So by the time you get to even 50% AAQ, it's SAsc time again.

Restricting to the Army Cache & Hospital Adv's brings the AP count down to 31257, leaving a lot more room for AAQ to have a reasonable lifespan if you're willing to forego Auto-Draft & Faster Digging.

Maybe a better idea is to only ever unlock it to 5% (5000 AP)-20% (17000 AP) and just manage within that range. With Army Cache Adv maxed out and a good Army Cache arti, could probably manage that.

AAQ to 100% in probably a theoretical scenario at best. No-one will realistically do that.
AAQ to 50% is more reasonable because AQ is also limited to 50%, so assuming that AAQ is better than AQ, having AAQ at 50% will represent an improvement for your game play. But still, for whatever small advantage this will bring, it is quite expensive.
Given that AAQ is (meant to be) better than AQ, there will be some break even point where AAQ and maxed out AQ are performing equally good. Equally good at whatever measurement you apply yourself, for example, same time for a level (hence AP per time), or whatever you want to apply here. Then, AAQ at - say - 40% might be comparable to maxed AQ, but still, what would you gain if it were equally good. At this point you effectively wasted all AP you spent on AAQ if you only (!!!) broke even.
If - as I said before - AAQ would give you more control over the conquering process, 200k would still be way too high to have anyone really appreciate the advancement in its full glory, but "more control" would certainly be a reason to spend some AP even if you wouldn't reach the same level of automation as a maxed out AQ. Just like I would probably invest in Auto-Upgrade Mines if I were able to specify the max level this advancement is upgrading my mines to, but without this extra control AUM is a total waste of money as you will never need a level 20 Copper ore mine but can start another two or three diggings for whatever AUM is investing.

Or would anyone want to differ on this?

AUM is a good candidate for worst Adv in the game. Tbh it makes no sense to just enable an Adv that will "upgrade some mines". It's not like Army Camps or Hospitals where "Upgrading" has a specific context and beyond spending too much and getting poor ROI, it doesn't matter which one you upgrade, there's always _some benefit_ you can make use of. But with mines, each mine is different, so it's super important to choose the right ones, so to just flip a switch and upgrade some of them is disastrous. And to use (waste) a whack of money doing it, the Adv might as well be called the "Insta-lose Advancement". Especially if you enable it right after draining the markets having a ton of money on hand.

@krinid

Oops I didn't notice your reply.

How well did it work?

Pretty well.

For example let's say there are a lot of small territories but no JS available

That is very unlikely to happen, unless it's Triskelion, which is a map that I don't play. If that actually happens (I doubt if it will ever happen), I guess I can just manually click a territory to continue the chain reaction. No big deal.

I've had a chance to test out AAQ more. It's still super expensive, but certainly many fold better than regular AQ.

It does a good job of prioritizing JS. I've seen it ignore non-JS-able territories and capture elsewhere on the map that has JS available. And if I make a non-JS capture in that area that creates JS attacks, it resumes it that area. For that reason alone, even on HEH or Hex, I can turn it on and not have to worry that the huge territories are gonna be captured without JS.

Tbh though, It's the AQ we always should have had!