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Some time ago Ilene Dover published an article anylysing the profits of the Freedom Fighter medal, which reminded me I wanted to tackle the problem as well. As I have gathered the required data I can finally share my findings with you. My approach will be slightly different from hers, so I recommend you read her article as well to get the full picture.

What I want to emphasize here is that this is a viable earning method even for players with low levels and low strength, and also that the appropriate weapon choice is essential to maximize the profit. As usual I want to give a detailed argument, so if you are short on time, just skip to the conclusions, which contain concise results.

Just to refresh your memory, the medal under question is rewarded for killing opponents in successful resistance wars. The number of both opponents and wars increase as you proceed, but not indefinitely - the whole process is cyclic in the following ways:
1. The number of wars per medal increases from 3 to 10, then goes back to 3.
2. For a given number of wars, there are three medals to earn: with 25, 50 and 75 enemies defeated in each war.

So, explicitly, the whole cycle starts with 3 wars and you need to defeat 25 enemies in each of them. Completing that, the next medal requires 3 wars with 50 enemies, then 3 wars with 75 enemies. Next, the number of wars increases to 4, and enemies required go back to 25, then it is 4 wars with 50 enemies and 4 wars with 75 enemies. The sequence continues until the requirement is 10 wars with 25, 50 and 75 enemies killed, at which point the whole thing resets to 3 wars with 25 enemies.

Each medal awards 1000cc, but obviously it requires energy, which means both time and money for food, and also potentially weapons as an additional cost. It makes sense to consider the whole cycle as a unit simply because the costs vary greatly between the start and the end, and you cannot go back to the simpler levels without completing the longer ones. In order to estimate the total profit, the most important quantity is the number of hits per opponent, which depends on the weapon quality, and also gives the energy required.

From the setup it follows that the total number of opponents is

n_T = ( 25 + 50 + 75 ) * ( 3 + 4 + ... + 9 + 10 ) = 150 * 52 = 7800,

and at each stage with fixed war number (3, 4,..., 10) there are 3 medals, one for each variant of enemies killed (25, 50, 75), so 3 * 8 = 24 medals for the full cycle.

The big question now is: How many hits are needed to defeat an opponent? The answer to this is given in one of my previous articles on military formulae. The number depends on the opponent's energy, weapon quality and the difference in strength. The crucial point here, which everyone can observe for themselves, is this: no matter how high your strength is, the battle algorithm will almost always return an enemy so that their strength is within 200 of yours.

This can be seen from the formula itself – if you used no weapon (Q0) against an opponent with Q7 and strength higher than yours by 200, you would do zero damage and never defeat them. So the first important thing to remember is that your strength does not really matter in the whole process. Here is a histogram, i.e., probability P that the difference in strength is 𝛥:



You can see that the enemy will almost always lie within ±200 of your strength (and rarely below -200). As explained in the other article, all enemies are currently treated as if they had Q7 weapons, so the (energy) damage for firepower FP simply becomes

D = 10 + 𝛥/20 + FP/10,

The number of hits required is then the enemy's energy divided by the above. But again, the energy is random, and this cumulative probability distribution (chance of getting E or less) suggests it has uniform distribution:



This means that all energy values are equally probable and lie between 45 and 100. The average number of hits per opponent is

h = 〈 E/( 10 + 𝛥/20 + FP/10 ) 〉,

which is the average over both all the strength differences 𝛥 and opponent energies E. We do not have the exact distribution, but the gathered data can be used to approximate it if the sample is big enough. Thus, taking into account that the firepowers for Q0 through Q7 are ( 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, 200 ) we can calculate for all weapon qualities at the same time and obtain

h = ( 10.87, 8.49, 7.27, 6.47, 5.24, 4.65, 4.25, 2.97 ).

This was the difficult part and the rest is pretty straightforward. The total numbers of hits for the whole cycle are

h_T = n_T * h = ( 84827, 66256, 56716, 50480, 40876, 36261, 33148, 23171 ),

which in turn give us the energy costs, e_C, because 1 hit requires 10 energy, equivalent to 5 Q1 food, which costs 0.15cc,

e_C = h_T * 0.15cc = ( 12724, 9938, 8507, 7572, 6131, 5439, 4972, 3476 ) cc.

Notice that in this step you can save thousands of cc if you produce your own food.

The weapon costs, w_C, can be calculated similarly, and we cannot forget that each weapon has its specific amount of ammunition (hits per weapon): a = ( 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 ), for Q0 through Q7 respectively. As for the price, I used values which are close to the cheapest and can easily be met in many countries, except for Q7 which has had a sudden spike (due to the current event probably), so I used an older but more frequent value; here is the price list: p = ( 0, 0.03, 0.05, 0.10, 0.23, 0.80, 2.84, 7.50 ) cc. Together these quantities give the total weapon costs of

w_C = p * h/a = ( 0, 1988, 1418, 1683, 2350, 5802, 15690, 17378 ) cc.

It is immediately visible that the Q6 and Q7 are exceedingly expensive, due to their other uses. The medals themselves give 8*3*1000 = 24000cc and the grand total comes down to

profit = 24000cc - e_C - w_C = ( 11276, 12074, 14075, 14745, 15518, 12759, 3338, 3146 ) cc.

First of all, the result for Q7 agrees with what Ilene found, but what is surprising is also that the Q6 and Q7 are the two worst profits. It is Q4 that gives the most money, by balancing the weapon and energy costs.

However, this is not the end of the story. The final element that needs to be taken into account is time. As can be suspected, using no weapon to kill 75 opponents might be impossible, due to the energy regeneration rate and the limited time that battles last. A battle could end in 1.5h so the whole war might end in 9 * 1.5h = 13.5 hours. Let us assume you start with 1100 energy, have regeneration of 20 per 6 minutes and use it all for fighting. Here are the times required (to regenerate enough) to defeat 25, 50 and 75 enemies, with Q0 through Q7:

t₂₅ = ( 8.1 , 5.1, 3.6, 2.6, 1.1, 0.31, 0.0, 0.0 ) h,
t₅₀ = ( 22 , 16, 13, 11, 7.6, 6.1, 5.1, 1.9 ) h,
t₇₅ = ( 35 , 26, 22, 19, 14, 12, 10, 5.6 ) h.

It thus seems that the 25 enemy wars can safely be fought with Q4 (1.1h), 50 enemy wars as well (7.6h) but for the 75 ones, Q5 or even Q7 might be required. Especially since the war needs to be won and one might want to start fighting when there is less than 13.5h left, e.g. when the score is already 22—0.

To see how this modification changes the above results, here are the partial profits, that is, grouping medals for all 25, 50 and 75 enemies wars (rounded for clarity):

profit₂₅ = ( 5.9k, 6.0k, 6.3k, 6.5k, 6.6k, 6.1k, 4.6k, 4.5k) cc,
profit₅₀ = ( 3.8k, 4.0k, 4.7k, 5.0k, 5.2k, 4.3k, 1.1k, 1.0k) cc,
profit₇₅ = ( 1.6k, 2.0k, 3.0k, 3.4k, 3.8k, 2.4k, -2.3k, -2.4k) cc.

Note the negative profit for the last two. This might sadly be necessary in order to go through the full cycle, but the overall profit is still positive.

Finally, remember about the worst case scenario - when there are very few opponents on the other side and you constantly fight someone with strength higher by ~200, you might need 100 hits or 1000 energy to defeat them with Q0. In such cases Q7 might be necessary too, just to make it in time.

CONCLUSIONS

I hope that the above will help you in better approaching the Freedom Fighter medals. The most important points to remember are:

1. Once your strength is at least 200, its absolute value does not matter in how fast you kill an opponent.
2. Whatever the setup, Freedom Fighter always brings you guaranteed profit.
3. To maximize your earnings, you should use Q4 weapons for the wars with 25 or 50 enemies to defeat. If, additionally, Q7 is used for 75-enemy wars, the total profit will be ~9300cc.

The last stage can be further tuned by using a combination of Q4 and Q7 – I will let you figure that one out yourselves; without the food cost it can be brought to 16kcc. Additionally, damage boosters might shorten the necessary times and make cheaper weapons even more viable – a possible topic for the future. Finally, remember not to produce the Q4 weapons yourself – it is still cheaper to buy them, as discussed here.