The Ranking that Matters (Aug 2014)

Day 2,460, 12:52 • Published in Netherlands Finland • by Walhallah

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

the story is not new anymore, so for those who just want the graphs, skip to there 🙂

Standard Story

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 excluding 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 2.5 million, for D2 over 8 million and for D3 around 20 million. If you cannot do that kind of damage in D1 with around 10-20 clicks you have no sustainable access to this resource. Then you should DEFENITELY not rank up, because it will get only WORSE. I guess in D2 and up, nobody can, but then combinations of medals and CO can lead to profitable fighting.

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. (why i say 90 instead of 91, read Weekstroms article)

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. Yesterday somebody stole a BH I was aiming for with 6 clicks. 6 clicks to a million damage in D2 (currently D1) , for somebody who has lower XP than me is awesome. He will probably stay in that division a long time and already had over 500 BH medals. (1500 gold) Imagine what you can do with that kind of gold. (based on old divisions)

In order to get attention for this I am presenting you with a regular Ranking, based on X/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 = awesome
1 < X/S < 3 = acceptible
3 < X/S < 6 = mediocre
6 < X/S = worrying

Something insane happened! There are several people now with X/S < 1. Congrats everybody! Awesome work. In the meantime, even 13 people! Thats an increase of 2.




Mind you, D4 is added on request. For D4 this is not entirely relevant. Altho you never know when the game changes. And as you are all aware by now, it recently did. My predecting capabilities appear to be boundless. Several D4 people got divved down to D3 and are now profiting from having a lower XP compared to their former competition that is now still in D4.

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.

In the graph below you can see how the different DIVs are doing in terms of max training. The vertical line in the middel indicates the reshuffle, greatly messing with the percentages. However, a clear increase is permanently visible. Keep it up!



Since the last update we see a slight decrease in %. For D1 this is explained by influx of new players, so D1 is excused FOR NOW. D2 should be ashamed. Altho D3 sees a slight increase, they also lost players to D4 so the increase is minimal. D4 is also excused, due to a small growth and Weekstroms holidays the % appears lower, but in fact its a status-quo or a small increase.
Point remains that all divs could do better. However, D1 promises to spawn a handful of fresh strong D2 troopers soon enough.


Regards,

Wallie, your personal drill sergeant


Dont hesitate to ask for personalized advice.
And dont forget to join BG!
And dont forget to join the Dutch Armed Forces!