One thing I would add is an analysis on whether it would be worthwhile to replace TMB or MB with Speedy Crafters. I know it got nerfed but mid to late game, if you compute for the net earnings/s when you have it equipped vs. not, it can be better than TMB or MB. Particularly since you're crafting multiple items at the same time. Please verify if this is correct. I haven't even ascended once so what do I know.

@Phoenix
whether it is better to have less money now or more money later on. Which itself is a tough question in general.

That is exactly my thought, only you put it better into words.


@jogar
I haven't ascended as well (probably in 10 days though - I'm on my last map;)).
Your theory is interesting, but it falls into the same category as MB - you'll have to sell more often, to compensate the loss of money from not having TMB equipped.
In my opinion it is a psychological problem. At the beginning and middle game I tend to care about the tech tree. So having Speedy Crafters will result in a faster tree upgrade, but slower flow of money. Less money means less army camps upgrades, which means slower game.

HOWEVER, I find your approach suitable for the late stages. After you are done with the tree and you are truly crafting for profit, maybe Speedy Crafters will generate more money indeed

Edited 5/26/2021 09:31:22

@jogar

I did the calculations. I based all the numbers on my play through Triskelion, and they are all here: https://justpaste.it/2ifol

So, TMB (rare) generated 725K/sec or 43,5M/m.

I tried to find how much income one-alloyed items will generate with the Speedy Crafters on rare (+25%)
1. Item sell profit/minute (without SC)
2. Item sell profit/minute using all 15 crafters (without SC)
3. Bonus of having SC equipped
4. How many crafters are needed to outproduce 43,5M/m



here are the results:

Tin Can
1. 1 tin can --- 1,76M/m
2. X15 crafters --- 26,5M/m
3. with SC+25% --- +6.6M/m
4. doesn't outproduce

Welding Rod
1. 1 WL --- 1.18M/m
2. X15 crafters --- 17,7M/m
3. with SC+25% --- +4.45M/m
4. doesn't outproduce

Struct
1. 1 struct --- 4M/M
2. X15 crafters --- 60M/M
3. with SC+25% --- +15M/m
4. doesn't outproduce

Glass
1. 1 Glass --- 22M/m
2. X15 crafters --- 343M/m
3.with SC+25% --- 85M/m
4. at least 8 crafters are needed ----- +45,3M/s

Boiling Flask
1. 1 BF --- 22M/m
2. X15 crafters --- 332M/m
3. with SC+25% --- 83M/m
4. at least 8 crafters are needed ----- +44,2M/m

Explosive Bolt
1. 1 EB --- 33.7M/m
2. X15 crafters --- 505M/m
3. with SC+25% --- 126M/m
4. at least 6 crafters are needed ----- +50.4M/m

Relay
1. 1 relay --- 84.6M/m
2. x15 crafters --- 332M/m
3. with SC+25% --- 211M/m
4. at least 4 crafters are needed ----- +56.2M/m


Magnet
1. 1 magnet --- 60.7M/m
2. x15 crafters --- 910M/m
3. with SC+25% --- 227M/m
4. at least 3 crafters are needed ----- +45,4M/m


So the simple answer is yes, if for example you let 3 crafters work simultaneously on three magnets and Speedy Crafters is equipped, then you will outproduce TMB!
You only need to be sure that you won't be suddenly out of ores and alloys!
Also you have to constantly sell those items to have a flow of money


I just added this section into the guide. And thanks jogar for bringing up this topic!

Edited 5/27/2021 13:31:25

To find the value added by equipping speedy crafters, you need to multiply the profit per second (without speedy crafters) by the following:

(speedy crafters)/(1-speedy crafters)

In the case of the 25% speedy crafters, you would multiply by:

.25/.75 = 1/3 = .3333333

For 35% speedy crafters: .35/.65 = .53846
For 50% speedy crafters: .5/.5 = 1

It's much easier to calculate it the other direction, starting with speedy crafters equipped. In that case, you can multiply the profit per second by what the speedy crafters artifact says. The text states that crafters work x% faster, but the artifact actually reduces craft time by x%.

I've found speedy crafters to be better at some points in the level and worse at others, including Triskelion. In the early part of the level, when I had very little income from bonuses/territories, it was worth it. The same is true for Europe Huge. Toward the end of Europe, I switched back to my other money boost.

Edited 5/27/2021 20:13:37

[Slightly off-topic: I tried posting the next paragraph on the main guide thread, but it's too old.]
The guide has grown, several aspects branched out as mini-subguides, and these have grown as well.
A game's aspects can fall in 3 categories: unknown unknowns - "I have no idea what to expect"; known unknowns - "I know the mechanics of the game, but some/all parameters involved are unknown", for example I know theres money in a money cache, the amount is unknown; and known knowns - for example I know all mines start at level 1 with a total output of 0.99 ores/second.
The role of a wiki is to uncover the unknown unknowns. The role of a guide is to share the experience of veterans to newer players, so the newbies can enjoy the game and gain experience without the frustration of becoming stuck.
The guide needs the wiki, and linking to it helps for easier understanding.
Wiki should explain the commodities in the game: the main ones (armies, money, resources) and secondary ones (powerups, artifacts, advancement points, coins, time), and the mechanics of converting one commodity into another.
The guide indicates how to be efficient in playing the game.
== Back on topic ==
The guide on markets and resources can be explained as "converting resources into money" and "converting money into more resources", or, taken together "converting money into more money", with the goal of converting money into armies in order to win the level (covered in a different part of the guide). It also explains how to avoid converting money into less money.
I identified 4 chapters in this guide, and named them "mining", "smelting", "industrial crafting" and "commercial crafting". I'll explain each one in separate replies.

Mining - this chapter is well covered in the guide. What is not clarified, is when it's efficient to upgrade a mine, and when upgrading results in converting money into less money.
Mines are acquired as a "side effect" of conquering the map. Side effect, because you cannot conquer the map without getting the infrastructure. Another part of the guide covers how to prioritize conquering the map to maximize benefits from these side effects.
Mining results in ores, that can be sold (converted into money). Smelting is another chapter, completing the tech tree is another part of the guide.
Ores can also be obtained from resource caches/arenas, but in a finite quantity, and as a "known unknown" - you dont know what resource and quantity you'll get. Overall resources from caches are insignifiant compared to mines, players should include only the mines in their strategy.
Upgrading mines - converting money into more resources (and into more money). An upgrade is effective if, over the remaining of the level, the value of the surplus ore mined surpasses the cost of the upgrade.
The cost of the upgrade is given, the value of the surplus ore is cumbersome to calculate - some players made spreadsheets for this (maybe a future statistic will help). If the player estimates that the level will end before ROI is achieved, the upgrade is inneffective. Even if the upgrade generates a little ROI, probably it's best to spend the money elsewhere.
My rule of thumb was: first half of the game, compute the value of the increased ore output, multiply by 100000 ( 100000 seconds is ~28 hours), and if the upgrade costs less, do the upgrade. Second half, upgrade only on a "ores needed" basis. Nowadays I no longer do the cumbersome computations, I upgrade based on "ores needed".
Another aspect, "converting resources into more resources" can be achieved by purchasing the "upgrade mining" tech. The early techs give more benefits than any money you may get from selling the ores. Late techs requiring advanced alloys and items might not provide a ROI, however most players want to get the achievement for completing the tech tree, so ROI is irrelevant for them.

Smelting - also well covered in the guide.
Smelting cannot be done without mining, you need ore to smelt into alloys, "convert resources into other resources into more money".
Most alloys are profitable, but depending on the particular prices set for each map and the advancements purchased/ artifacts owned, some high-end alloys might sell for less than the selling price of its ores, making smelting them unprofitable.
A player smelting for profit should smelt those alloys that give the highest profit. Purchasing statistics level 3 gives this value (profit/second) for all discovered recipes.
Players should also consider that an idle smelter produces no profit. If the mines cannot sustain your smelters, switch to a different alloy.
Attention: mid-level alloys need low level ores in addition to mid-level ores. High level ores require all kinds of additional low, mid and high level ores. If you use all your ores to smelt lower level alloys, you won't have enough low/mid level ores to smelt high level bars. Better be cautious until you uncover the "known unknowns", the ingredients for the high level recipes.

Industrial crafting - also well covered in the guide.
Basically extends the chapter of smelting.
Requires both mining and smelting. More high-tech items are crafted at loss, so calculating the profit is required.

Commercial crafting - this needs better coverage in the guide.
Uses crafters and markets. Does not need mines and smelters.
Some items, usually those requiring a single alloy, can be crafted at profit even when buying the ingredients from the market.
The disadvantage of commercial crafting is a smaller profit.
The advantages are:
- not dependent on mining and smelting, doesn't need a constant flux of alloys (and ores), requiring no mine upgrades, freeing up the money to be used elsewhere.
- frees up the smelyers, allowing them to work on more profitable alloys
- fewer calculations required. You need to calculate the "commercial profit per second" once for every recipe, once the recipe and the market(s) carrying the ingredients become available. Remember the most profitable recipe, set your extra crafters to work that recipe. Compute the amount of alloys needed to keep the crafters busy for your idle time, purchase the ingredients, and you're set!
Tin can is usually the first recipe that's profitable commercially. In the late stages of the game, the profit from commercial crafting might exceed the income from territories and bonuses combined.

@Dj Storm,

agree with you on many many points.

when it's efficient to upgrade a mine, and when upgrading results in converting money into less money - it's a difficult thing to explain in a guide. To answer it you need to ask yourself "how many days am I going to play the level". The longer you play the more efficient are your mines - but your goal is exactly the opposite - be done with the map as fast as possible...

I do upgrade mines, but only (mostly) when the cost isn't interfering with army camps and hospitals upgrades, and also with digging.
Money is always needed - So that's also the reason I don't really recommend buying resources from the market (you are right, I should probably address it in the guide).
Exception is for completing an important tech. If you need 314 Welding Rods, but have only 313, and you aren't patient enough to wait those extra 10 minutes...

@Parsifal,
Example: usually, in the beginning of a level, when you have 3-4 smelters with 5-6 recipes and 2 crafters with 2-3 recipes, you notice that your smelters working full time on copper and tin bars cannot keep your crafters 100% busy crafting copper and barbed wire. In cases like these, I say buy the tin bars! An idle crafter doesn't make profit. A smelter smelting zinc or nickel makes more profit than one smelting tin.
When you get the screw recipe, look if crafting screws from boughy iron bars is profitable. If it is, buy the iron bars, let your smelters smelt lead or silicon.
I don't sell the nickel and zinc bars, I know I'll need them later. Even if I made more items than needed for techs, I don't sell before getting the two +15% item price techs.
Once you get the tin can recipe, you might have 3 crafters, and since I kept the crafters busy, I probably have all the barbed wire, screws and nails needed. Tin bars cost ~10% of the selling price of a tin can, so I put my crafters to work on tin cans from bought tin.
Later, recipes like rivet and struct might bring more profit than tin cans when crafted from purchased ingredients. I switch my extra crafters to work on the most profitable recipe.
By the time I get the two techs increasing the price of items, I have enough items to sell for ~500B.
At this stage, the cost of ingredients doesn't matter. I might craft boiling flasks, spending 3B/hour on gold bars, getting 5B/hour selling the items.
For an easy comparison between recipes, I calculate profit per minute per crafter. Let's say boiling flasks make a profit of 40M/minute/crafter. Exploding bolts might make a better profit, case in which I switch to them, no matter how much the platinum bars cost, the sale price covers them, and more.
Magnets used to make over 100M/minute/crafter profit, but on latest maps they aren't profitable anymore. I still craft them from smelted neodymium bars. Here, if I used my silver ore to smelt silver bars, I realize silver ore is what keeps me back from smelting neodymium bars. That's why I try to smelt a minimum amount of silver bars (also gold, platinum), preferring to buy the bars for crafting and keeping the ore for later alloys.

My recommendations, in short:
- Keep your crafters busy, even if you craft from bought alloys, as long as they still bring a profit.
- Keep your smelters busy, even if they din't work on the currently most profitable alloy.

I agree with you on most of the points but your argument breaks apart if you keep the crafters busy with items that you only intent to use to unlock techs. Then, every invested money for buying alloys is not an investment but totally lost. Unless you count your tech benefits towards the profits of buying those particular alloys. But that will be a messy calculation.

I'm not saying that your approach is wrong or that I know better. I'm just saying that buying alloys for the sole purpose of keeping crafters busy is only profitable if:
1.) the item recipe is profitable even after buying the ingredients. If not, every second the crafter is running, it is burning money.
2.) the crafted items will be sold later on. If not, all costs will never be recovered.
3.) you have the money to buy from markets in the first place. As you said yourself, you don't sell the (more profitable) nickel/zinc at that point, so you need other sources of money to be able to keeping your crafters busy.

If one of the above isn't fulfilled, a (partially) idle crafter is better. Then, rather work with alloys produced yourself and accept that every now and then the crafter will wait for more alloys.

So, if you intent to unlock all techs, then all crafters will - at first - work towards tech requirements only. And therefore, they don't produce items that will be sold. Hence, every bought alloy is a net loss.

If you plan to sell the produced items eventually but intent to keep them until you unlocked some of the item sell value techs, you can very well craft items that - at the time of crafting - mean a slight loss. But still, if these items get turned into techs, they will make no money.

Real example, Asia: Population Density, about 25% into the game.
I have 2 markets, 6 smelters and 4 crafters.
I need 2k copper wire, which the market sells for 3.4M each, for a total of 6.8B. Since I have plenty of copper ore, imperfect logic says I should smelt and craft the wires. Crafting needs 9 copper bars, so the entire project needs 18000 bars; 6 smelters, so 3000 bars each. 8 seconds per smelt, so 6h40min of smelting. Crafting takes 43 seconds, 4 crafters so 500 wires per crafter, 5h58min. Total, 6h40min with 42minutes of idle time for each crafter.
Tin bars are sold for 5.28k each. Tin cans require 78 bars, and crafting takes 5min25sec. Each crafter can make 73 cans in 6h40min. Ingredients cost little over 120M, cans sell little over 15B, profit 14.9B over the same amount of time, and this leaves my smelters free to smelt anything else. I could set my smelters to smelt tin bars to squeeze out the full 15B profit since I have plenty of tin ore, but I prefer letting them smelt higher level bars. Out of these 14.9B, I can pay 6.8B to purchase the copper wire, and still make a profit of 8.1B.
I can also smelt welding rods from bought aluminum bars. Over the course of 6h40min my 4 crafters can make 80 rods, the ingredients cost 28.8B, the bars sell for 47.6B, profit 18.8B, slightly higher than for tin cans. True, the ingredients cost a lot, but I can use the smelters to smelt aluminum ore into bars, gaining a bit more. My mines cannot support 4 crafters running nonstop, that's why I buy the bars I need. Upgrading the aluminum mines is unprofitable past a point, and soon I'll switch to rivets out of bought nickel bars for higher profits, later structs, flasks, and exploding bolts, as long as the recipes get more and more profitable.
Recipes like metal pipe, if crafted from bought ingredients, have a negative profit, that's why I only craft them from smelted bars, and only as many are needed for the tech tree. If the metal bars aren't needed right away, I keep playing, later I might decide to buy them, since a crafter crafting exploding bolts from purchased platinum bars is usually more profitable than one crafting metal bars from smelted alloys.
The profits above are without using my rare Crafting Speed artifact, that rises my output (and profit) by 53.8%, about 1.2M per second using all 4 crafters crafting welding rods. Currently my standard income is 413k/s, can be boosted to 596k/s using rare bonus boost and rare territory boost. So, my main source of income comes from crafting, surpassing income and money caches combined.
Warning, later maps have smaller margins, to a point where welding rods are crafted at a loss. Twine is almost always crafted at loss if you buy the silicon bars. Check your math before crafting from bought ingredients.

Once I get access to recipes that are profitable, I buy tons of resources from Markets to avoid having to use my Smelters & Crafters to make lesser valued items b/c that means not making the profitable items. If those profitable items can still generate profit by buying their ingredients from markets, I'll do that too but lately this seems to not be the case other than Tin Can. I used to be able to buy Nickel/Zinc/Gold/Platinum for Rivets/Bolts/Boiling Flasks/Explosive Bolts and still turn good profit, but lately the buy prices have gone up so much that this actually loses money, so need to smelt the alloys for these now, which makes it even more important to not tie up the smelters by producing stuff for Techs if possible, else there is risk to not having enough to keep the Crafters going.

Some info: The market price equals to 7 times the sell price, when no modifiers are presented.

The problem is that it's the market price of ingredients of an item are 7x the sell price of those ingredients, which are often 4x-10x the sell price of that crafted item.

This model is obvious broken with intent to force players to smelt/craft ingredients instead of buying. If the world worked this way, car manufacturers would have to also manufacture their own glass, tires, radios, interior fabrics and materials, plastics, etc, and computer manufacturers would have to develop their own power supplies, processors, RAM, hard drives, video cards, etc. Some companies do some of these, but nowhere does all.

Then again, injecting logic into WZI is a mistake to begin with ... WZI is after all a weird world (set of worlds) where you require massive quantities ore of cheaper metals to produce bars of other precious metals (like needing tin for gold, gold for neodymium, neodymium for lanthanum, etc. Oddly, all of these are elements so by definition not compounds, and thus adding anything means it's no longer a pure bar of that metal (in fact it's mostly composed of the cheaper ore, so a bar of gold is actually a bar of tin with a bit gold plating perhaps, lol, but sells for much higher - what an evil game!). Oops, logic again. #end

Ever heard of redox reactions? There, one ingredient gets oxidized to reduce (purify) another ingredient. Assuming that all the ores are sorted by their affinity to oxygen (which they aren't, I think?), then using a cheaper ore to refine a pricier one makes total sense.

I couldn't find an example with two metals, but this is a (short) explanation I found so far:

Extraction of Metals: The redox reactions find a great deal of application in the extraction industry to extract metals or minerals from the natural ores. Metals usually exist in an oxidized state in nature (due to their long term exposure to the oxygen present in the air surrounding them). Hence, they need to be reduced in order to extract the required metal out of them. This is done in the industry on a large scale with the help of a suitable reducing agent, depending on the metal or ore which is to be refined. For example, iron is extracted from the oxidized ore of ferric oxide in a large blast furnace in the iron extracting and refining industries using coke as a reducing agent.

Source: https://www.vedantu.com/chemistry/applications-of-redox-reactions

Edited 6/28/2021 17:12:46

LOL, reaching pretty hard.

That shows that what you find is a mix of 2 metals and you separate them to get pure metals. This is the opposite, where you're taking 2 pure ores and mixing them in quantities of 90% cheap metal ore & 10% expensive metal ore to somehow get a pure alloy bar of the expensive metal.

So you assume ores are pure elements from the get go?

Source Wikipedia:

Ore is extracted from the earth through mining and treated or refined, often via smelting, to extract the valuable metals or minerals. [...] Minerals of interest are generally oxides, sulfides, silicates, or native metals such as copper or gold.

Yes, some are more pure than others, but pure ores are, I'd assume, the minority.

To elaborate on what I said before, if you have an oxide of a valuable metal and want to purify it, it wouldn't be impossible to do so with help from a pure(r) and "cheaper" other metal as the reducing agent. You then let the oxygen that was bound to the valuable ore transfer to the cheaper ore because the cheaper ore has a stronger affinity to oxygen. The end products would be an oxide of the cheaper material (that, for our purposes, would just be waste) and a pure(r) and more valuable metal.

So let's take Silver, because most players will know it by now. In each level that I played so far, Silver is smelted by "mixing in" Copper. Despite the fact that some of the ores in idle would never be found as oxides in the real world, let's imagine, mines would produce silver-oxide and the copper you use for the smelting/refining is pure copper (that raises the question, why you don't use copper bars here, but that's not the point I'm making here). Then the smelting would produce pure silver bars and copper-oxide. Given that we are only interested in pure metals, the output of the smelting is just the silver bars.

You are right, that some recipes rather look like they produce alloys instead of pure metals, but given that for each smelting recipe there is an ore of identical name, none of the smelting recipes actually can be alloys (chemically speaking), but have to be somewhat pure metal bars. And if they are alloys, then this wouldn't be totally wrong either given real world examples: Most jewelry isn't made from pure gold but from a gold alloy to achieve different properties (like stability) that pure gold wouldn't meet. They shouldn't be called simply "Gold" then, but hey, it's just a game, so over-simplification isn't a big no-no in general. Besides, some of the metal names are completely made up, so real world chemistry might not apply here at all. Just saying, the smelting isn't what I would classify as unrealistic in WZI.

I have a decent basis in chemistry (if you want to translate it into your educational system, I took a "Leistungskurs" chemistry in my "Abitur", perhaps something like a major in high school??), so I'm not "reaching hard", but applying knowledge that I learnt. Thanks, krinid, that after all those years I again had a reason to apply my chemistry knowledge somewhere. So much of everyone's school knowledge is completely useless. ;)

HAHA, glad to be of help in finding a niche to apply your knowledge.

Well when I say "reaching hard", I think you're actually agreeing with me that this isn't realistic. The fact that you yourself said "some of the ores in idle would never be found as oxides in the real world" & "that raises the question, why you don't use copper bars here, but that's not the point I'm making here" indicates that you already feel this isn't a strong fit from real world to Idle world, but do see a loose thread that can connect to real world if we ignore some of the details and cut it some wide slack. In short: we agree on this, your reasoning lends credence to it, but it's still materially incorrect.

One question though ... for this type of smelting in real life, would there ever be a case where you would need a 5x or higher ratio of the inexpensive metal to the raw ore of the expensive metal? Some of the recipes ask for ~300K of an expensive ore & 2M of an inexpensive ore.

I know about das Abitur ... I lived in Stuttgart for a year, and I recall hearing the students going through a rough time preparing for them. Closest we have here in Canada is final exams for each class in final year, but the Abi is amped up massively and more impactful, since here going to university is just a matter of which school you can target with your grades & how much money you can/will pay, but if you're willing to pay and lower your aim to less prestigious schools, you'll be able to go to some university somewhere. Whereas in Germany (and many European countries) university itself is free, so you're more actively competing for those free and limited spots. I recall 1 car in particular that was covered in celebratory decorations, driving down the road, and while I forget the exact wording, the back window read something like "das Abi" ... so someone was very happy to have them over with, and presumably did well on them.