Other Make the boosts for feeding Aureate and Storm comparable to the fire phoenix

[edeba]

The Aureate and Storm are for goods based strategy, but they are entirely unbalanced and useless to make any kind of meaningful difference in comparison for the military based strategy.

Fire phoenix benefit - 50% attack all military types for 24 hours.
This is equivalent to:
1) 125% of the attack from the needles, plus
2) 125% of the attack from Hero's forge, plus
3) 125% of the attack from the dragon abby, plus
4) 125% of the attack from the temple of the toads, plus
5) 125% of the attack from the Victory springs

Together these are 150 AW levels, but at 125%, equivalent to 188 AW levels for a full day. The tournament stabilizes to increasing the attack strength by 3% for every province deep for the range that most players will start to experience increasing losses. With the fire phoenix, it is almost 17 more provinces before the attack ratio is to what it would have been without the phoenix. Because the squad size also increases every province, the equivalent losses probably starts to happen 6-10 provinces later. I believe it is fair to say the fire phoenix enables players to go about 6 more full provinces with the same resources, and probably more.

The storm gives an extra 50% power on the MM, which requires 30 AW levels to achieve with the Elvenar trade center. It is only active for 3.5 hours, which if you set an alarm gives you 2 collections or about 1/3rd of your possible collections taking in account sleep.

If the active time for the storm phoenix was increased to 1 day it would still be giving the power of only 1/6th to 1/7th of all of the AW levels of the fire phoenix. The storm has a hard limit of power limited to your MM supply, if you build them 24/7 and play the tournament, you end up with around 29 per week. Doing all 6 levels on a province is 270 tournament point and 6 would by 1620 tournament points. It is a fair assessment to say that the fire phoenix enables about an additional 1600 tournament points and it is fair to say that it could be much more. So, 6 provinces with 6 levels is 36 levels all together.

Take a player with say a mix of 20 manufacturers. They will get one day where they can polish all of their manufactures and a second day where they can polish half by using a week's supply of MM. If the polish time was a week and they used a week's worth of MM and played a heavy MM strategy, this would increase their goods by about 11% (1.5*0.5/7= 10.7%) with using 100% of the MA and all of the tournament MM earned in a week for the polish, and that would be 6 on about 6 collections per day. As it is, the storm only works for 2 collections, and then another polish is required. You would use 2/3rd the MM and increase the weekly goods by about 2.4%. (0.33*.5/7= 2.4%).

This is catering costs at province 15. My marble gives 4048/3hrs. Say I had 7 marble and I get 2 collections, so polishing the storm would increase the MM by 50%. I already get the other 50% without the storm. So, 7 manu x 2 collections x 4048 x 50% =28,336 extra marble. My t3 gives 5152, so with 7 polished t3 it would give about an extra 35-36k, and that would cover 2/3rds of this level. So, to cover this single level would use up the extra goods from what the storm would give from having 16 manufactures polished with MM. So the week's supply of MM might do 2 levels. The fire can help with about 36 levels and that's without burning other resources. 2/36 gives the storm 5 to 6% of the value of the fire phoenix.

Not only should the active time for the storm phoenix be extended, but the time that the MM is active should also be increased.

So, if the storm phoenix was increase to +24 hours on the MM and the active time for the storm phoenix was say a week, players could stack and polish it once every 2 weeks and use all of the MM production from 2 weeks. Players would have the opportunity to polish everything 3 times in the week by doing the polish every other day. So, one polish with 2 weeks of MM used would give enough goods to do about 6 extra levels each day, for 6 days which would still be in the range of half the power of the fire phoenix because it is alternate weeks, but it would be considered valuable instead of a horrendous waste of pet food.

So Storm phoenix fix proposal is 1 week polish and MM gets +50% and +24hours extra activity time for the MM. (+48 hours on the MM time is probably more balanced because this is still half as strong as the fire phoenix)

The Aureate give an extra 300% of base for 2 collections, if you set a timer and don't miss the second. The manufacturers give base plus a 700% relic bonus. So the percent increase collection for all manufacturers without the use of MM is 300/800 or 37.5% increase. It is actually less of an increase if you have the MM because that increases the size of the denominator. So with 2 collections out of say 6 in a day, that's an increase of 12.5% goods for the day. It is very comparable to the increased goods from the Storm Phoenix, but it doesn't require the use of MM.

So 7 t1 manufacturers would give 9240 increased

The mountain hall increases goods and the maximum increase with 35 levels in 284% so the polished aureate is like giving 37 AW level bonus. This is about 1/5th the bonus AW levels of the fire phoenix.

Going on the calculations for the Storm phoenix, basically having 50% increased collection over 6 days (7 day recommendation for polish was for convenience.) gave the ability to do all 6 levels of 6 provinces catering ever other week because of the MM limitation. The Aureate is 37.5% increase, but no other resources. If the Aureate had a one week polish time it would increase the resources to be able to do 5 complete provinces and maybe one more level, but this would be weekly. This is still less than the power of the fire phoenix.

So Aureate fix proposal is to increase the active time to 1 week.

These are very out of balance and it would also bring balance back for players that used artifacts on these birds rather than going for a second and/or 3rd fire phoenix. Clearly your game is much stronger for having a fire phoenix and the other two are practically useless.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I will never understand why all three original Phoenix were not 24 hours each for the feeding ability on release.

 

[edeba]

I will never understand why all three original Phoenix were not 24 hours each for the feeding ability on release.

Yeah, but if you look at the power of the fire phoenix, even 24 hours on the other two they are still grossly under powered. Goods collection is highly dependent on time whereas with the timewarp you can play the whole tournament in under an hour if you do not do manual battles.

Look at what the Aureate shows:

That suggests a nice benefit. If you get 5000 goods from your manufacturer, it suggests you could get 20,000 goods, and get it twice with the time, and that would be like getting an extra production day from your manufacturers. I've said it before and I'll say it again, that had to be the thinking when the time restriction was decided but they actually implemented is quite different. It just doesn't make sense. It is 15k x 2 x #of manufacturers and it essentially doubles the output for that manufacturer for the day.

So here's a manufacturer close to 5k production.

But when you look at the breakdown it shows this:

So what the polish does is it takes that 540 and triples it, and adds it to the production, so an extra 1620 goods for a total of 6588 for the polish. So, for every 3 collections, it is like having one extra manufacturer for that collection. If you do your collection for a 9 hour and you work, you probably can't get the 3 hour because of the short time frame, so I do the calculation for 2x3 hours and I count as if you have 6 collections/day, which about the same as 1x9hr and 4x3hr.

This is 1620 x 2 x #of manufacturers and increases your daily production by about 11% for this example. I got 12.5% in the above example because I didn't include any AW boost. The tournament example I used doesn't have t2, but it would be around 25k, and just doing a rough calculation, you'd need a city with 24 manufacturers to be able to cater one level from the boost if it was all t2.

If it gave what it looks like from the first picture and you got an extra 3x 4968 x 2 x say 18 manufacturers I just calculated it would give you the ability to cater about 7 province levels. Certainly the timewarp increased the power of the fire phoenix because you would have had to boost it 3x before the timewarp to get through a tournament.

Anyway, that's why I keep coming back to thinking they didn't program what makes sense and even what they implied in the graphic. And I also can't help but think that because we had all of those manufacturer boost days that actually worked like what the image implies, not what we got, that they made the time restrict so tight because they looked at it like one of those manufacturer boost days. You were able to stack the benefit on those days with the MM so you got a minimum of 3x1.5 to 3x2 which is 4.5 to 6 times your normal production from a single collection, so it would make sense to apply caution, and 3.5 hour collection time is highly cautious and almost useless with how the benefit has been applied.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

That is why I never feed the Aureate Phoenix. The bonus boosted good production percent has always just been of the base production amount, before the relic boost is added in. It is basically extra relic boost, like the Mountain Halls bonus.

 

[Killy]

I thought the two birds are for traders. Wouldn't you feed both of them and then use your time boosters to maximize the effect? Also why are we compairing the 50% from the fire chicken with 25% from the wonders? Am I missing something?

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I thought the two birds are for traders.

Aureate's goods boost from feeding is mostly useless. Storm is massively helpful after reaching sentient goods because it makes the MM enchantment better and those work on all factories. Those and the ETC trimmed many weeks off the time it took me to get through chapters 12+.

 

[Killy]

I didn't really had problems with the sentient goods but seems useful. I build the Aureate after collecting the extra artefacts for it but never fed it (the building itself is pretty good), I am just gussing what I would do with it if I would play as a pure trader.

 

[edeba]

One other point to bring up here, the birds were introduced in the context of saying that changes were being made to enable players to choose their strategy and these birds made it so a goods based strategy is impossible because the military power is strong and goods based support is pathetic. In my FS there were players that were mostly a less efficient goods based prior to the birds and they simply had to adopt a military approach because of the increased imbalance favoring a military strategy.

 

[Killy]

@edeba That isn't really the fault of the birds. In the early chapters usally catering is better for the tournament and later on it is fighting even without the birds.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

@edeba That isn't really the fault of the birds. In the early chapters usally catering is better for the tournament and later on it is fighting even without the birds.

I did not start converting my US city into a fighting city until after we got the Fire Phoenix back in 2019. I did well enough in that event to have a level 10 Fire and a level 6 Storm and did not max my Storm until 2020, when we were able to convert Coldfire artifacts into original Phoenix artifacts. I was in chapter 12 or 13 at that time and both birds made an immediate impact on the success of my city.

 

[edeba]

@edeba That isn't really the fault of the birds. In the early chapters usally catering is better for the tournament and later on it is fighting even without the birds.

That was recognized and there was discussion on making the game so you could play your strategy, and it is has been steered further towards military.