[MERCS Lab] Training grounds calculator

Day 1,703, 10:27 • Published in Mexico Mexico • by Marko Aberst



Versión en español: [MERCS Lab] Calculadora de campos de entrenamiento.

MERCS Lab is proud to anounce their first tool for eRepublik.

Training grounds calculator: http://drakoyang.com/train/

Feel free to enjoy this tool everyday if you want to 😃 Works on every browser, even mobiles 😉 It should work on IE, but... if you’re using that browser please cease immediately of reading this article RAIT NAO!

Here comes the development history.

Last week we, Colmillos and I, were worried about Plato giving upgrade offer to the training grounds into Q4s. We began thinking about how much gold we should invest and trying to figure out the real cost of our train. We made some free and simple calculus, but was kinda uncertain, so we made a spreadsheet on GDocs in order to see costs and new strength gain. But in GDocs only one person can be editing or it would be a mess.

So... what was the solution? An online tool, hell yeah!

I remembered that Drako already has an online website, so we could deploy our tool there and make it available for anyone who wants to dream a bit. On Monday I started with a simple form and two tables, which was only an export from the spreadsheet. Of course we couldn’t publish that ugly thing.



The tool was completed, now we had to pimp it, ya tú sabe’, make it fancy and cool. jQuery plugins can do real magic, trust me.



I thought it was almost ready, so I uploaded it onto Drako’s website to start giving some style, margins and stuff like that. So a little drawing here, one effect over there and as simple as that was this tool finishe😛



Yes, I see something is wrong there, because plugins are awesome but can be difficult to control. Nevertheless we managed to accomplish our goal, with old tricks. And here’s the final version.



INSTRUCTIONS

First of all you have to understand the usage of the tool, unless you don’t wanna know all the benefits. It’s divided in 2 sections, the first one is to input the data and the second to see the results. Here you have in the left the training grounds itself ordered by gold cost from free to the most expensive. You have to select the quality of the building by just clicking the stars, then enable or disable the building for calculation. The second part are the tables on the bottom which will give you the info you were looking for. I will explain every column now.

Days: Number of days within the calculus. In the first row is the number of days to get an SS.
Strength: What you gain in the whole period.
# of SS: Number of SS you will get in the period. For the first row is 1.
Brute Gol😛 Cost of the training you will use in the period.
Gold of SS: Gold you will get from SS medals in the period.
Net Gol😛 Net cost of the training in the period.
Net/Day: Net Gold divided in the number of days.

Finally I can see you crystal clear, go ahead and sell me out and I'll lay your ship bare. OMG... Thats not what I meant to write, let me focus. Finally I can tell you our real costs of the development of this tool for you banda:

Around 1,000 IP lost in League of Legends.
One coke.
Some laziness.
A few RL work hours.
Like 25 awesome screenshots.
Several google searches.
A pinch of salt.


Staff of MERCS Labs:

Colmillos, Ideas and Tester.
Drako Yang, Hosting and Styling.
JPVS, Design and Images.
Marko Aberst, Development.