@Parsifal
Found your 400B territory finally! Pretty exciting. Found a 349B merc camp along the way! wow. The full merc camp isn't enough to take this one territory down, but excited to use Field Hospital, Damage Territory & Quad Strike on this bad boy. Sooo many 10-35B territories scattered throughout a slew of 2-3B territories ... a pretty interesting map configuration, except for the Money/Recipe problem.

I always stick with Explosive Bolts and Boiling Flasks.

Easy to do the math, usually 2 smelters can be easily funded with mines, and can handle 5 crafters without diminishing. I do the math to find out what I can handle, and I sell all other ores.

Maxed out AP upgrade for Ore Sell Value. It is cheap and well worth it. Makes it so the upper end ore is worth more than the alloy which makes life much easier.

Doing the complex recipes are a pain in the butt, and by the time you are at that part of the game, the small differences shouldn't matter much.

If you want higher value recipes, the single ingredient crafts are always the easiest to do and cause less headaches.

@ krinid

yup. there she is. in all her glory!
if 1 merc.camp almost takes care of the stack, you are in good shape!
don't forget to send me a screenshot of all you items before you finish the level ;)

totally agree with Z about the Ore Sell Advancement.

have you already got the recipe for Microchip? I think you only need Chromium for it.

@Parsifal
Was waiting until I actually found the dang Microchip to respond ... and I've now found it hiding out in Ireland. It takes 13 chromium bars, sells for 10B (11B with a rare Sell Value artifact). I haven't found the Market that sells chromium yet (I'm assuming since it's the last level that chromium exists in a Market somewhere) so can't advise on the price to buy the chromium bars, but chromium is between thorium and uranium in value and cost, and I do have a market with both of those:

Uranium Bar for ￦4.63B
Lanthanum Bar for ￦6.78B
Samarium Bar for ￦5.43B
Thorium Bar for ￦1.18B

So even assuming chromium is the same price as thorium instead of averaging T & U, the total cost of ingredients will be 15.34B which is obviously >11B, so still a 4.34B loss. :(

Was the microchip actually profitable for you? Maybe there was an update between when you played and I'm playing and values changed? Surely you weren't smelting all the chromium for it, b/c having enough ore to do that for those expensive bars is always challenging.

@krinid

don't remember if there was a market for chromium....

I had so much chromium ore, I just let the smelters work on it (that was the late stages of the game)

it's also possible I was crafting microchips and losing money. lol. It never occured to me to double check the prices.

@Parisfal

it's also possible I was crafting microchips and losing money. lol. It never occured to me to double check the prices.

Soooo funny! I always compare the cost to buy vs sell, find the highest profit margin I can afford and mass produce it. I wonder if you were really losing money on it though ... haha.

@Z
Rivets, bolts, boiling flasks, explosive bolts, magnets have been profitable on (I think) all maps to date that they've been available on. But not this map, at least not this version of it.

- Rivets, 85 nickel bar, 13M sell price, cost of nickel @ market 50M, 37M profit loss
- Bolts, 634 zinc bars, 33M sell price, cost of zinc @ market 129M, 97M profit loss
- Boiling Flasks, 13 gold bars, 1.16B sell price, cost of gold @ market 2.4B, 1.24B profit loss
- Explosive Bolts, 10 platinum bars, 1.55B sell price, cost of platinum @ market TBD haven't found the market yet, TBD profit loss
- Magnets, 13 neodymium bars, 6.98B sell price, cost of neodymium @ market TBD haven't found the market yet, TBD profit loss

So the last 2 are TBD but I'm confident they will be a losses given how I haven't found a single profitable recipe on this map yet. I think they can be profitable if you smelt and craft all ingredients, just not if you buy ingredients from Markets. But smelting & crafting is tedious and takes waaaay too much time, micromanagement & ore required for actually smelting the expensive alloy bars, and thus isn't feasible/sustainable.

Anyhow ... point being ... money is overly tight on this map. Just to finish 62% of it after 14 days - by territory count, which means I'm really only ~30% finished by actual army counts. And still not a single profitable recipe! To get this far I've used almost all my saved up powers ... approx 10 time warps, 15 supercharge army camps, 15 supercharge mines, 20 free caches, 10 market raids, 15 inspire mercenaries. I haven't had money to buy digs, army & mine upgrades and also bars from the markets to keep the smelting/crafting going for Techs, had to choose one among them. I've used these powers to compensate for lack of money, which is fine ... I had a lot saved up b/c I wasn't using them in previous levels. I picked the right level to unleash them on, this level needs it! Without the powers, I think I'd likely still be at 10% completion. I expect the end to go quicker though b/c now I have my hospitals built up nicely to 1.12B benefit per capture.

But then again, I'm probably underestimating the remaining armies on the map in the fog. I can see 2.18T and there are 410 fogged territories still, most of them in the far end of the map, so assuming they average out to 3B per territory, total armies will be 3.4T armies. So remove ~33% from hospitals, then 25% for joint strike, I get 1.7T armies. I have 139B armies right now and probably about 600B mercs in camps ... so provided I can find the money to buy them all (and that's the whole point of this thread, despite me getting off topic here - I lack the money to do so) then this could be over quite soon after the Drafts from buying all those mercs. So really just a matter of how long it will take me to earn the money to buy the mercs. Oh forgot about army caches ... I could probably round up another 50-100B on army caches to help as well.

Sorry ... this was way longer than it needed to be. (;

Edited 4/14/2021 05:39:47

There weren't any late game valuable recipes on Europe Huge the last time I played it (a couple months ago). However, I finished faster than anticipated despite this.

Thanks Jz. I'll strap in for the medium haul. I suppose I shouldn't rush too much anyhow, else I'll miss all the artifacts.

you can't really "miss" artifacts. if you keep digging nonstop, what's the harm in rushing through levels?

@krinid

take the map easy. most of the russian northern-eastern territories have 2B to 2.3 B armies. and those territories are empty (no mines, army camps, powers), so leave them for the end. your hospitals shouls save you about 1B/conquest.
I hope you have enouth Inspiring Powers to get all your mercenaries. they will finish 15% of the map
I stopped upgrading my A.camps and moved to the M.camps when I had Finland, Belarus, Caucasus and half of Russia still unconquered.

and yes, forget about digging "all" the artifacts. there are plenty of them in every map

@Krinid, go for smelting silver, gold and platinum, they should enable you to craft profitable alloys without being too much a pain. If you still have a mine power, use it to get silver/gold/platinum going (and upgrade the specific mine to at least 3)

Edited 4/14/2021 07:16:03

@Timi
What I find is that there is a lull in digging when starting a new level. The final dig of the previous level is still going, and when it finishes, there's a delay on the new level before (A) finding dig sites, and (B) getting enough money to dig them, whereas once a level is well underway, it's almost straight digging. So the "missing" relates more to constant dig time and keeping it going, and this takes a hit when starting new levels, so I try to time my completion of a level with getting at least most of the artifacts. I'm not fixated on getting 100% of them for the reason you stated, more of a blend of getting as many as makes sense with continuing to earn AP. But also have to keep the Tech achievements in mind ... it doesn't help me to finish the level quickly but still have Techs left to grab for the achievement, so the plan is to time the map completion to the Tech completion and keep the artifacts flowing the whole time. When I mess this mix up, I end up having tons of money and armies left over at the end of the map, but just waiting on those last Erbium, Terbium, Samarium, Dysprosium bars to finish smelting.

@Parsifal
I do have some IMs left but wondering if I'm going to need any more of them on this level. Guess it depends on how quickly I decide to rush through it ... I suppose it might be possible to use up my last MRs & IMs to finish both the Techs and have enough armies. I'm upgrading my hospitals even more, and I think at the end up it I may have close to 1.5B, so hopefully will be able to mow through all those empty territories in the northeast. Found a 90B territory as well plus a bunch of 20B and 30B ones. Fun! Makes the Active artifacts worth using.

@Olja
I do have some mine powers left, so will make use of them. Also have a Supercharge Mine artifact which I think is actually useful after the recent Active Artifact boost.

Edited 4/14/2021 08:51:01

@ krinid

better use all you Fog Busters to reveal the map. then you'll know how many merc.camps are left

I hope you have your TMB equipped and not BMB. on this map territories income is bigger than the bonuses
I say it becauseit seems like your 3rd slot is occupied with the Fog Revealer.... (why would you do that?....)

BMB is actually slightly higher than TMB right now. Depends on the map and progress within the map, sometimes TMB > BMB and sometimes the reverse, and right now TMT=219K/sec, BMB=226K/sec, no BMB slight higher but about the same. They're both Uncommon, so TMT 100%, BMB 40%. If I'm not cooling down any Active artifacts, I typically equip Army Camp Boost 20%, TMB, BMB. If 1 Active cooling down, typically TMB & BMB. 2 cooling down, the bigger of TMB & BMB.

Hell no, not using Fog Buster artifact in slot 3 (but I do have an Epic one) but it only reveals 24 fogged territories every 16 hrs which is garbage. Not worth a slot by a long shot. What you see in the image I pasted was the leftovers of using a fog buster. Big maps like this need too many to FB the whole thing from the start.

Btw ... is Ascension an automatic thing or do I have to activate it? I'm playing 2 levels now, USA + Europe Huge at same time, and once I finish Europe, I'll have completed all levels -- not sure if it just happens, or if I can push it off and active it later ... and if I do activate it, what will happen with my USA ongoing game.

Ascension is not automatic. You have to press a button and confirm that you want to ascend. As long as you don't do this, you stay with the current/already unlocked levels.

If you say "No, don't Ascend", do you lose the option or still retain the ability to activate it at a later time?

You can ascend anytime, i.e. the option remains

Thanks Olja.