@asdfgh
It depends on what's holding up your production. If you don't have enough smelters to process what you're producing, it won't have any effect. Otherwise it could have pretty significant effect.

@asdfgh
I've tried that tbh. On one hand, I've seen results where it gave me boatloads of Thorium (27 bars if memory serves), but then in other cases where I was testing on different bars to see if I could get a similar effect, I got the same as without the supercharge mine powers (think this was Lanthanum), and I think with Chromium it might have given me 1 extra bar for total of 2, but not positive that my non-SM powered MR was 1 Chromium bar and not 2. It's hard to test because you (A) need to do an MR with no powers active as a baseline, and (2) need to do another MR with powers active, then measure the difference. So unless you have a lot of MRs, it's not a great test.

@SubLunar
Good idea, next time I get a disappointing MR, I'll screenshot it and we can analyze it. Honestly, it would just fix this whole issue if within the Stats dialog at the top of the Smelters window, a column was added that was directly responsible for what you get as a result of using MR (power or artifact), regardless as to whether it's in 1 day or however the formula actually works. There is a "Can make" column already, but all math on it simply indicates that that is just simply (for alloys) #oreYouHave / #oreRequired = Can Make, so not really useful b/c it's only telling you what you can make with what you have at that instant, whereas if you just an alloy smelting all day long, you might have "Can make=0" at the time you left it but several hours later come back to find you have 5 or 6 bars depending on your ore productions, ingredient requirements, etc. So unfortunately nothing I can see that would directly related to MR from "Can make". Fizzer, pls enlighten us how this works.

@Fizzer
Anyhow, while I disagree and still think DT is underpowered, I think the move to increase the effects Actives have was a good move. Consensus before the change was unanimous that Actives were simply not worth the 16h cooldowns. Now some of them are legit worth it, some are likely worth it in situational cases, some still need work (imho) but overall a good move.

The actives are good up to a point. Quadruple Strike saves 96% at Epic. I've heard that it says 192% at Legendary, but only actually saves 100%. If so, it's not worth it beyond Epic. The actives also have the multi-level limitations (as has been mentioned).

I like the balance this change brings. It makes a couple of actives worthwhile for the first year or so of play. Assuming you want to keep a slot free, you don't need 3 useful actives. After a year of play, the Quadruple Strike can be used as upgrade fodder for a Legendary. The three slots become free again.

That's some serious long game thinking. I like it.

I think Time Warp has been rebalanced, thought it could still be further improved.

Has it? Right now it's 15 mins @ Common (so 2 hr Epic) ... don't recall what it was before, but memory tells me the math was ~48 mins @ Epic, so would have been 6 Common, so yea, it got longer ... but agree with you that it's insufficient. It's not even close to being enough. I don't see any situation where 15 mins would be worth 16h.

That said, the Time Warp power itself which this is based on is severely underpowered, so not expecting much here.

Given the non-active nature of this thread, I guess no one else has found much value with the buff to Actives. A bunch of them got stronger, but seems like it still isn't enough in many cases.

I think Poor being one hour would be a good start.

Given the non-active nature of this thread, I guess no one else has found much value with the buff to Actives. A bunch of them got stronger, but seems like it still isn't enough in many cases.

The issue with active artifacts is - in my eyes - the same as with swapping vs. upgrading. As I said somewhere else before, upgrading artifacts is only objectively more beneficial if you are able to make use of at least two epic artifacts to compensate for the losses of sacrificing all your collected artifacts. The same holds true for active artifacts. But perhaps so to an extreme. Every active artifact of level uncommon or lower really isn't even worth equipping. Rares, too, in most cases don't give you anything that balances out 16h of a blocked slot. Given that the change to the active artifacts was very recently and prior to that most players were exclusively upgrading passive artifacts and given that collecting enough artifacts being worth an epic takes you at least six weeks, I'd argue that even if some players now would find value in some active artifact, most of those players hadn't had the time to experience those changes properly.

I appreciate that the active artifacts got improved slightly. I'd argue that there isn't much headroom left to improve them further (as we see with Quadruple Strike raising their effects comes with problems and lowering the cool-down would at some point break all active artifacts as they wouldn't pose a serious drawback anymore, and the drawback is what allows them to be more powerful than their passive counterparts). Assuming that the majority of players play without ML (most of the time) an "active" play-style might work out now, but we as a group just don't have enough experience yet. Give it time.

PS: An epic Quadruple Strike gives me a territory almost for free, while an epic Damage Territory reduces the army count by a measly 24%? An epic Triple Strike means a discount of 80% already, right? How can that be? I mean, sure, I need three or four neighbors to use the Strikes, but assuming I would use active artifacts, I wouldn't use them willy-nilly given the cool-down. So I would use them for the really big territories. And preferably use one artifact once instead of an artifact several times. So, unless the map doesn't offer me enough neighbors, why should I use DT then? I don't get it.

Edited 4/25/2021 23:57:55

@Phoenix
Agree with you RE: DT having no use case. The response from Fizzer was that you could use DT multiple times on the same territory ... but that's another 16h cooldown per addition invocation, and if a single DT isn't worth the cooldown for the damage it does on a single hit (which is the point we're making here), certainly any multiples of that usage at slightly reduced benefit each time for multiple equally long cooldowns isn't worth it either. This would only make sense if some map has a gigantic territory with only 1 or 2 bordering territories, to make Trip & Quad Strike unusable, and not enough armies available in a reasonable amount of time, making 6% multiple hits the "best" way to cap the territory (but it would take multiple hits stretching over multiple days with cooldowns and a downed artifact slot to achieve this). Beyond that ... agree, there's no reason to ever use DT.

Does anyone know if you can activate multiple copies of the same artifact? I never tried this but it has a potential for being completely game breaking with 3 high level time warps.

@Fafzor: you cannot equip multiple artifacts of the same thing, so you also cannot activate multiple of them at once.

@krinid: using multiple DT on the same terr is a no go, since you only reach the massive terr when you are already so far into the game that you simply don't have time to wait out the 16h downtown a bunch of times.

i would argue it would be more effective to use artifacts to save some armies on the way there, so you still have a couple full merc camps when arriving.

@Fafzor
As JK said can't be done ... but I'm curious of what you had in mind? I can't think of any case where 3 Time Warps would be considered game breaking. Assuming you have three Insane Time Warps, that would be 24h of time advancement every 16h ... which is pretty good, especially if you cycle through actions before activating each ... but still don't think it's game breaking, b/c while you'd zooming ahead quite a bit, you'd be doing without any other artifact benefits.

@JK
Sounds like we play very differently ... I tend to scope out various areas of the map and have all the army camps, hospitals, merc camps, mines, markets, smelters & crafters identified if not captured around 50-60% completion. In the process of doing this, I typically stumble across the big bad territories. I did this on Europe Huge, found the big 403B territory, and based on Fizzer's recommendation thought I'd give it a shot at whittling it down which multiple attacks. I got it down to 333B after 3 hits, then decided that the 70B units weren't worth the 48h cooldown, and beyond that the returns diminish, so gave up. Instead just going to go with a Quad Strike (Rare 48%), savings 204B units in one swoop (including hospital & JS benefits), so actual cost to capture will be 129B.

@krinid I thought the time skip would cooldown the other artifacts as well so you could just cycle them infinitely without delay. But I forgot you can't even equip them together as you guys pointed out.

Time Skip would have potential to help abuse other Actives.

Does anyone know what the Free Cache formula is? Using an artifact in WZIB lets me suspect that a 100% Cache provides 10hrs of production, but this is off of a very small sample size.

If that is the case, combining it with Supercharge Army Camp can provide a very profitable boost at high rarities.

@Fafzor
OHHHH I see what you mean now. In that context, that would indeed be game breaking if it could be used to cyclically reduce it's own cooldown in addition to other Actives!

@Z
We know "Total Army Income UP->Free Cache Armies UP" and thus SAC increases the count, but don't know the formula, and not sure if anyone has any supporting math or evidence to be more specific than that.

I've seen some evidence to suspect that total Ore/sec affects resources provided in a FC, and obviously also MR but that is better understand to be related to a 24h production period specific to the items in the targeted market. There is likely some kind of value formula that assesses how much total value you are capable of producing, and that is an input into the FC resource value. What I have seen is starting off with meagre items like iron, nickel and lead bars, and later on in the level proceeding to better stuff - quantities of twine seems to be the most common, then welding rods when the overall value increases, and when I've really upgraded my ore and put some SMs on them as well, I've seen lanthanum bars, and I think I saw a few instances with 2+ bars of other bars like thorium, but have not been able to identify how it decides whether to give 2 thorium vs 1 neodymium vs 5 welding rods vs 10 twine, etc.

I never quite understood why all the active artifacts all have the same cooldown. If you open up for changing the cooldown, then things get more interesting and there is one more parameter to tweak the balance.

I never quite understood why all the active artifacts all have the same cooldown. If you open up for changing the cooldown, then things get more interesting and there is one more parameter to tweak the balance.

That doesn't necessarily solve the problem, though. Sure, this can help with artifacts that exceed a limit that they technically can't (like the Quadruple Strike or (potentially) the Discount artifacts). If the problematic artifact exceeds its limit, scale down the effect and also scale down the cool-down. But this approach makes them more and more like a passive artifact. At some point, it wouldn't really be an active artifact anymore. And we already have more passive ones than actives. To be clear, I wouldn't mind if some of the actives that don't have a passive counterpart yet would become more passive-like because I still prefer the passive ones at this point. But Fizzer definitely wants active artifacts in their current form (or at least similar to that) so he won't probably make actives more passive.

And having one global cool-down value for all artifacts makes it easier to judge their value for each player. Imagine you also had to factor in their cool-down in your pros and cons.

Side question:
Can you sacrifice an Active Artifact that's on cool down? This would be very useful and slightly broken.

You can only sacrifice artifacts that you do not have equipped, so no.

But does upgrading an active artifact that is on cooldown cancel the cooldown?

No, the upgrade timer overlaps the cooldown timer, meaning you can upgrade an active artifact on a cooldown for no extra time. The cooldown timer still counts down, but you do not need to wait for it to finish before the upgrade timer starts.

Edited 4/27/2021 16:48:18