Wrong! Do not replay levels within one ascension!
What improves you are gained AP, the artifacts are of secondary importance

Well, Parsifal, that's your opinion (that I personally share). But if nonolet actually values artifacts higher than APs, then there is no reason not to try out this strategy. Or do you see any other arguments against nonolet's strategy, Parsifal?

what is the goal?
if the purpose of playing WZI is digging, then please, be my guest, stay as much as you want on one level and just dig.
but the thing is, you can dig on any level. Any level has dig sites with common artifacts.
so what is the reason behind replaying levels and get less AP, if you can advance, improve, invest your AP AND continue digging?

Not telling here anyone what to do. Just answering the question

P.S. artifacts get more and more expensive, that's true... but so does the income: getting bigger and bigger with each level.
so eventually digging from the first three sites on The Siege of Feldmere is going to be the same as the first three dig sites on Triskelion

I'm by no means saying that I find the strategy particularly useful, but if your goal is to farm artifacts (or just need one more guaranteed common artifact in order to upgrade some other artifact and you have just finished some other level) it should be possible (important! possible, not advisable) to start an early level, play until you found the digging site, start the digging, abort the level and continue with whatever level you want to play next. But I agree, you will find 100% common digging sites all the time. And upgrading one artifact is in most cases not more important than progressing in the idle levels. So, remember to upgrade as soon as you have enough artifacts to sacrifice and simply continue playing idle, I'd say.

I'm with Parsifal. Goal is to beat each level as fast as possible and ascend asap while keeping the digging team busy.

Fastest route for it is invested AP.
Simply put by the third sweep (two ascencions) a level that took you 20 days to complete on the first run should be down to 4-6 days.

If you want more artifacts in the long run, it's better to focus on AP until you can max Faster Digs in Phase 4.

Not a bad idea tbh so long as you can get a dig started quickly. Is there a particular level you have that has a cheap dig site early on? If so, that would be an ideal candidate, but if it takes 6-10 hrs to get the dig started, probably not worth it.

Keep in mind folks, he's not _finishing_ the level, he's starting a dig, then aborting it. So if it's a matter of starting the next level and not having a dig for 10 hrs b/c that level happens to work out that way vs spending 30 mins on an early level to start a dig, it's a decent alternative.

Edited 6/29/2021 18:09:53

War of the worlds has a 1D9H. I can get to it in 1-2 hours. That's probably the best one.

Actually, if you need a specific artifact, and you got impatient waiting for that artifact to drop, you can play Floating Rocks repeatedly until you find your needed artifact.
Floating Rocks has 1 8h dig site. When I "farmed" this level for artifacts, I could finish it in ~3h. I played the level, started the dig, finished the level, restarted it and played until close to completion, waited for the previous dig to end, started the new dig, and repeated. The difference is that I completed the level each time. By playing 9h/day I got 3 artifacts/day. Abandoning the level after the dig started was not needed, by the time the previous dig completed I had enough money and armies to finish the current level.

delaying AP farm in deterrence to dig is one of the worst tradeoffs you can make in idle.

the better AP/day ratio you can have is always the best option here. And almost always that ratio is optimal playing each level once and in it's respective order.

You are all right and also most of you wrong at the same time.

WZI is a game after all. So, its primary goal is to cause joy for the player. What exactly causes joy for one person, might be totally different to everyone else.

Yes, optimal AP farming is only playing each level once and then ascent. Yes, optimal AP means never to wait for a digging and rather complete the level early. Yes, the main way to progress in idle is by collecting AP. That is (probably, who really knows?) all correct and fine. But if one's goal is to have a poor artifact of every single kind, despite the usefulness of this goal, this person's happiest day will be the day, he finally found his 41st poor artifact. And if this player wants to discuss how to get the most artifacts out of one's time, then please stop lecturing each and everyone about how YOU think EVERYONE should play a GAME. This isn't about someone's tax declaration, it's about fun and everyone has a different enjoyment for games.

In my first answer to this question I already stated, that by going down this route, you will miss out on lots of AP and therefore idle progress. But that isn't a bad thing in general. It you don't care for idle progress, then you can still play WZI and - at least when it comes to me - discuss publicly how you can achieve whatever is most important to you. There is no need for all of you to repeat the same OPINION over and over. If someone wants to dig, let them dig, for crying out load! I have personally so far never finished a level without having started each and every digging site, although by times this meant to wait up to one day in addition to start the next digging. And I really don't feel bad about it and no-one will be able to convince me that this was the WRONG decision because for me it wasn't and I would (and probably will) do it again.

chill man. not worried about you. you are aware of what you're doing and playing as you enjoy it.

worried about a new player that enters a thread called Artifacts guide 1.0 and starts digging everything before advancing levels only to realize it's not the most efficient way to play later on. don't see a problem in giving that type of player a few warnings.

And Master Jz also made a fair point.

But this new player must be blind to oversee the (identical) "warnings" that you all were scattering around. If players seek advise, I'd assume that they will actually and thoughtfully READ the forum and not just skim the headlines. This thread currently reads like:

• Is xy correct?
  
• Yes, but it isn't wise.
  
• Don't do this.
  
• That's the worst you can do.
  
• Never use this.
  
• There is actually some usefulness in it.
  
• But you shouldn't do it.
  
• Don't do this.
  
• How could you even consider this foolish idea?!?
  
• If you do it, do it here.
  
• Don't do this.
  

From the players who give advises I'd expect to read, too, this time the question. The question was:

Looks like fastest and cheapest way to get a lot of common artefacts for subsequent upgrades. Wrong?

Hence, any potentially correct answer should therefore, well, ANSWER the stated question and not (attempt to) explain, why the question was wrong. And the question wasn't "should I do x and y" but "Can I use this approach to dig lots of common artifacts". And the objectively best answer for this question MUST BE that if you can dig for artifacts 24/7 while only digging the 8h sites, you have maxed out on common artifacts. There is no other strategy that will give you more (or even nearly the same number of) common artifacts. It just won't help you to progress in idle.

If you say yourself that new players should be able to learn from the knowledge that we collected in the forum, then at the same time you shouldn't discourage new players from asking new questions, by telling them how dumb they are for even considering asking a question. Every question deserves a good answer, even if it wasn't a good question. That is how a good community should help everyone seeking for help of any kind. And if you can't reuse 80% of the question to formulate your answer ("the fastest and cheapest way to get a lot of common artefacts" ... is to ... "don't do it!" - sorry, that doesn't work), then you have answered a different question.

I think we can do both, answer question asked, and provide additional information which we think will be useful in making informed decisions in case they're unaware of certain aspects of the game which might change their decision.

Something along the lines of:

- Yes, you can repeatedly complete Floating Rocks or WOTW and do quick digs repeatedly to have a constant flow of digs going.
- But imho there may be a better way to accomplish what you're trying to do while also completing many WZI levels, like so by doing xyz.

I do agree with your point though, Phoenix, a lot of people preach "the proper way to play", and I think we're shown in all the forum discussions that there are certainly several ways of playing.

I think what is best if for example if someone asks: Do I need Joint Strike to finish all WZI levels? Well of course the answer is No ... but to just answer No without asking 'but why would you want to?' would likely be doing the person a disservice. But if they answer, "B/c I want to be the first person to finish all WZI levels without it just to be able to say that I did it" ... then go wild & do your own thing. (;

hey Parsifal, love your guide

I wanted to make a comment on your original thread that had the full thing but I couldn't do it cuz it was too old so I'm going to do it here, hopefully that's alright

would it be possible for you to edit how to combine a supercharge mine + free cache and the market raid, just like how you did it for supercharge army + free cache? thanks!

Does SM+MR actually work reliably? I've had mixed results with it to the point where all I can say is that I don't understand the workings.

I did some testing with 2 markets where I did a baseline of each market ... and had low results on each. This did a bunch of SMs on the stuff in the 1st market & then did another MR and had excellent results (lots of stuff, way more than the baseline MR with no SMs), and then did the same with SMs on the stuff in the 2nd market & did another MR and had almost identical results as the baseline.

Not sure what the difference is. Anyone else done this with good results?

@John Smith

thanks for your comment. I'm planning on rewriting and updating a chunk of sections in the guide around mid August...
especially the market section!

I don't think that Supercharge Mine affects either Free Cache or Market Raid.

I don't think that Supercharge Mine affects either Free Cache or Market Raid.

Not sure about FC, but did another test yesterday with MR, and still found no correlation, so think you're right here.

@Master JZ

In a previous post you mentioned "War of the worlds has a 1D9H. I can get to it in 1-2 hours. That's probably the best one."

Could you please explain how can you reduce digging time so much?
According to the information I have read about faster digging Advancement Phase 4, it allows you to go up to 50% time reduction (twice faster).

Thanks,
Arcturus