[WAL] The Ranking That Matters (2720)

Day 2,721, 13:38 • Published in Netherlands Finland • by Walhallah


Hi People of eNL, and especially a warm welcome to our new and young citizens,


The question I asked myself is, what are the best choices to make in this game. We all face many choices every day, yet we can do so little sometimes. I am slowly working towards a general view how to approach this game in an optimal way. This is very difficult, because there really is no optimal way. The optimal way would bore you to death and you would quit, being the most effective player ever. So there are tons of options you have that are trade-offs between the maximum efficiency and 'just-enough-fun-to-keep-you-playing'.

Picture this somehow as a line that starts at zero, but goes not in a two-dimensional graph, not even in a three-dimensional graph but somewhere in a complex multidimensional infinity. I have tried a little linear programming to calculate this optimal path. But I gave up. This makes my brain boil.

There are certain lessons from this exercise that I regularly share with you. These lessons are 'ingredients' that you can use to improve your own game. But they are by no means the only way, and they are by no means the optimal way to play this game (optimal including the component 'fun').

One of the most important lessons is that XP is sticky, dirty stuff. Actually, that is not true. Well, it is true because it can stop you from achieving your goals. The game presents this as a valuable asset for you. The ranking is based on XP, sometimes you get it as a reward in missions and last but certainly not least for most everything you do on a daily basis (work, train, fight etc.). Even today, the weekly challenges are a trade-off between XP incurred (albeit called 'prestige' there and cash for weapons and food versus gifts that you can obtain. (some of these gifts incite you to get even MORE prestige (XP)

To understand why XP is dirty, you should picture yourself as a young player in D1 with 0 XP. What are your ambitions? Whatever they are, you will probably need gold to accomplish those ambitions. From day 1 you will want to:

1) be able to afford weapons and food. (so you can fight and have fun, I think those are the most modest ambitions)

There are VERY limited ways to get this kind of money. Working in your own companies will earn you small change of around 5 cc per day. Working in a commune can earn you up to 45 cc (in eNL anyway), working for an employer you can find up to 25 cc per day. Then you can beg your friends for gold or supplies. But mainly you can go for achievements (medals). Here comes the catch. Some medals are not profitable (TP, MM) depending on how you play (SS) or limited to one per month (CP,Congress,HW) or just near to impossible to get when you are in D1-3 (CH, TF).

Basically there is only ONE medal that is infinitely available, fun to get and profitable, and that is BH. In order to tap into this resource you will need to be able to do a certain amount of damage on average while incurring minimal XP. For D1 you need around 2 million, for D2 over 8 million and for D3 around 20 million. If you cannot do that kind of damage with around 10-20 clicks (for D1, for other divs i assume 150FF or so)you have no sustainable access to this resource. THen you should DEFENITELY not rank up, because it will get only WORSE.

Im telling you this to create the right mindset, not because its the undisputed truth. If you ever want to achieve this goal in reasonable time, you will need to harvest this BH medal. And you can only succesfully do this by following an optimized path that im presenting you here. This optimal path is based on incurring little XP when you do maximum influence. In order to achieve this you will need to start training hard. That should be your first goal, to gather enough gold so you can train at 90.

When you train at 90, your strength will increase at maximum speed. If and when you hit during this time, you will gather MORE rankpoints per XP. Training hard will bring down the amount of XP you will need to trade off to get the next BH. Bringing down the amount of XP you incur will allow you to stay longer in your division and tap into this resource.

In order to get attention for this i am presenting you with a regular Ranking, based on XP/S. Because this is a clear indicator of how succesful you are doing in your Div. The actual indicator should probably include rankpoints (or HitQ7) but X/S is a very good, easy to understand, measure.

THE RANKING THAT MATTERS.

I want all of you not to make the mistake I made, and actually try to get up on that ladder Erep presents you. Instead, try to improve your ranking below!
For reasons why, read my previous articles.

To give you a small interpretation. (subjective and debatable, please do)

X/S 1 3 6


Mind you, D4 is added on request. For D4 this is not entirely relevant. Altho you never know when the game changes.
In order to do something around the idea that desirable X/S actually varies across divisions I'll add something soon. I will then also explain why I highlighed Atuniel in the ranking.


For those that are clueless what im talking about here, read for example this:

http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/mijmeringen-van-een-strateeg-x-s--2308365/1/20

Added to that, there are 2 things you should keep in mind in order to benefit from this ranking:
1) top prio, enjoy the game. Dont ruin your game by sticking to wallies rules.
2) Train harder, rather than fighting less, in order to improve on the ranking and make wallie happy
Training Strategy

Its crucial to train as hard as possible. To do that, the optimal training path is presented below.




The green cells are the optimal parth. Daily net profit is presented there. The first two fully upgraded training grounds are still profitable, while you are already incurring 30S per day. Thats actually not enough to do your DO daily. You can save this gold so you can upgrade your other traininggrounds. As soon as all 4 are upgraded you can buy a training contract 90% and you can train for a month almost cost-neutral, and you will be incurring 2700 Strength.


Regards,

Wallie, your personal drill sergeant


Dont hesitate to ask for personalized advice.
And dont forget to join BG in the process (you wont find us in the party list)!
alternatively join ReL and look for us.