Stop hating on IACP... It makes bigger CRA, bigger drafts, more income when sleeping.
Only idle addicts that set their alarm every 2 hours at night to prevent having to buy idle time hate IACP 😜
It does do those things, but at tremendous cost.
Let's say you want to take IACP to 500%, that costs you 12280 AP. Regardless of what phase you're in, there are much better things to spend that AP on. For example:
Phase 1: 127.5% AM (starting from 0) can be had instead, which is several orders of magnitude more impactful.
Phase 2: Full IASV, MD and IDS can be had with 6117 AP still left over. Plus, IDS (and draft size in general) stacks multiplicatively with IACP, making it both drastically cheaper and also drastically more effective for boosting draft sizes, which is a reasonable thing to want for early SAs (because you won't have enough AP to boost AM high enough to go draft free yet, at least on the first pass).
Phase 3: CSL9 can be had instead, which is just an absolute game changer. You know what's faster than waiting on army camps to generate armies? Everything! But, also not needing to play the level in the first place.
Phase 4: Full BH and 5% AAQ (with another 1762 AP left over). Seriously.
Also, there's (up to) 260% IACP available in the tech tree on every map that costs 0 AP. Because all sources of IACP are additive, the marginal gain of IACP drops off quite quickly.
On top of that, any AP spent on IACP (except possibly the first 1000) is just pure dead weight towards getting to SA, because it doesn't help you unlock the next phase. Any of the other suggestions above (except for AM) don't suffer from this problem.
But truly, the main problem with IACP is that if it looks attractive, it's probably because you're relying on army camps to produce armies for you beyond just getting to the first market. The further in you get, the less feasible this becomes.
Let's look at HChina for example, where the total armies required is 3.9T. Let's say you went
really hard into IACP and army camps and are producing an incredible 1M armies per second! At this rate, you will produce 3.9T armies in a little over 45 days, which is glacially slow. In comparison, each 2.5% more AM would give you another 13.94B armies instantly, equivalent to just under 4 hours of army camp production. You may recall that we could have had 127.5% AM instead of 500% IACP, which is worth 710.94B armies, or a little over 8 days worth of army camp production, and again, instantly. Now, some of these numbers are inflated because they ignore the cost reductions from JS and hospitals, but they should give you an idea of the relative benefits.
In general, once you have AM high enough the armies your army camps generate are completely irrelevant as soon as you hit the first market (and represent <0.1% of your total armies earned at the end of the level). Putting more AP into IACP only delays reaching this state, which is why it's a trap.
