If I use time warps or go away for some time, it often gives me the same amount in a draft as if I were playing around with the game and clicked it after 6 minutes when it pops back up. Same deal happens with the sliding portion. It'll give me a large draft after buying mercenaries and/or hitting a bunch of army caches. If I immediately buy more mercenaries or hit more army caches, it'll often pop back down to the normal draft, if not lower. So now I just try and wait until I come back to do it again, and I'll refresh the screen at least once, so I won't lose another bonus sized draft. It doesn't seem to taper off like it used to. I've been playing around with it. I'll refresh the screen, and it'll give me a different draft size for seemingly no rhyme or reason. It's been inconsistent and unpredictable. It's been acting wonky like this ever since I maxed out the Increase Draft Sizes achievement. Maybe it was just an update that coincided with that. I don't know.

Just a wild guess, but is it possible that with a high increased draft size the fixed portion dominates the sliding portion by a huge margin and therefore the drafts are always very similar? As far as I understand drafts, the game tries to target some percentage of income. Increased draft sizes doesn't influence this percentage (as far as I know) but the speed with which the drafts can catch up if you are below this percentage. If this "speed" is high, you will reach this limit with every draft (almost) regardless the time passed since the last draft. Only if you get some income that is of significant size (cache and mercs) the sliding portion will exist but even then only for a short while. This would explain most of your observations.

And if your increased draft size is big enough that the fixed portion itself exceeds the targeted percentage, then this can at times cause that some drafts can even get a big smaller under certain circumstances. Or it might just be a negative feedback loop between fixed and sliding portion (don't make me explain this, it's just a weird thought that popped up without much substance).

It happened again with the drafts. I hit two army caches that cost about 15%-20% of all armies earned up to that point. The draft stayed the same afterward. I used a bunch of supercharge army camps and free caches about 15 minutes prior. I got one big bonus draft, and then it immediately went back down without tapering off. I intentionally waited 15 minutes and refreshed the browser in hopes it wouldn't do it again, but it did. I should have just called it quits and come back later to hit them. I feel like I just made the level take at least a half a day longer because I just wanted to use up all my stuff and make the level go by faster. I guess you have to use the stuff in short bursts, or the game will penalize you for going too fast now. I've been trying not to buy too many mercenaries at one time for the same reason. It's just wasting them if it's not going to give you bonus drafts because you've hit some kind of a cap. I understand fixing the exploits like unlimited money at the markets or slipping in a speedy artifact at the end of a smelt/craft, but this kind of defeats the purpose of using these items if you're effectively going to be penalized for using them.

Still, no temporary increase in draft size after using time warp either.

Not getting bigger drafts at all after large merc purchases is odd ...

Do you have some sample #'s to provide?

Do you have L4 Stats?

Would be interesting to see the #'s for each of these for the 5 cases of (A) stable draft qty, (B) before merc purchase, (C) after merc purchase, (D) after first draft after merc purchase, (E) stable drafty qty after merc purchase.

# armies from army camps
# mercs purchased
# armies from draft (fixed component)
# armies from draft (sliding component)

Edited 6/7/2022 17:56:24

I'm really bad at remembering numbers, so, you might have to search the forum for the exact (or let's say, community consent) percentage that the drafts target. Something in the back of my head says something around 15-18% but that could be off by an order of magnitude. So, assuming these numbers if your overall army income was 1B, the targeted draft income would be 150-180M. If you boost your draft income, then the sliding portion will catch up with this target very quickly, possibly in a single draft. So, assuming the before mentioned numbers, you earned 1B armies so far and 150M of these were from drafts. Now you buy 1B of mercs (or find a army cache of 1B), then the next draft could be as big as 150M.

As I said, if the draft boost is so good, that you get all the 150M in one go, then there will be no "tapering off" phase. And that's by design. The difference is that without the draft boost these 150M would have spread over, say, 5 drafts with 30M each or whatever. Still, even if you caught up to the targeted percentage in one go, the fixed portion of the draft will also be boosted by the draft increase, so even if the increase in the sliding portion is only once, your overall (steady) draft income will be larger than everyone else's.

That all said, I can't prove to you that the drafts are actually working as intended. For a long time there was a bug in the auto-advancements while you were idle. So, I don't know if Fizzer might have a bug in here as well. But all that you described so far COULD (but don't has to) be normal behavior (with the explanation that you might just have the wrong assumptions/expectations for what draft boosts do). Unless Fizzer joins this discussion (or you file a bug report to him), I'm not sure if the community can really help you with this (because only very few players even invest in draft boosts).

So there's the thing with saving up or buying supercharge army camps and using them in conjunction with free caches and getting an enormous amount of armies, money, and resources. Then on top of that, you (used to) get insane bonus drafts, and they kept going if you hit army caches or bought mercenaries. It seems like maybe they've decided to put a stop to this because you can shave off a substantial amount of time completing a level if you do it at the right time, which is what I thought they were intended to do. I guess don't use mercenaries or armies from free caches to hit army caches. You're blowing your chance at bonus drafts if you blow through your goodies too quickly, which is robbing you of the free armies you'd get otherwise.

I have no idea how long I'm supposed to wait after doing something to cause a bonus draft without being robbed of a subsequent one because I used free cache or bought mercenaries too soon afterward. Whatever the reason for this is, I don't like it.

You're doing it right from what you've said, but without the #'s requested above, can't really say much more.

Increasing draft sizes depletes your sliding draft pool faster and makes draft sizes taper off more quickly after you get caches or buy mercenaries. If it takes 4 drafts to deplete it without the advancement, it will take 1 draft to deplete it with +300% to draft sizes. The advancement doesn't really change how much you can get from the sliding portion, which is 15% of total armies earned. It does increase the smaller fixed draft portion.

Edit: It works as expected in the most recent mobile version. I haven't played it on browser for a long time, so it's possible that there has been a change there.

Edited 6/8/2022 03:20:36