It depends. Is it slow to get to the first market, or are you running out of armies after buying all mercenaries?
For the first case, ACampB will help, but I think it is better to just use SAC+FC power to jump-start a level. Believe me you will have a surplus of those powers in the future, so better use it when they are the most useful.
AcacheB just gives you free armies that you can't obtain otherwise and that is always useful in all stages.
I guess I should “proclaim” here that I super ascended for my first time? Do y’all still actually record first timers? Anyway… happy to have made it! (I took with me my legendary AV and an epic SAC), and chose the 100AP perk.
(I super ascended in Nov 2024 actually). It then took me until Jan 30, 2025 to make my first “post super ascension- ascension”
This series achieved the first sub-1day super ascension for me, and most supers are hovering at a bit more than 24 hours depending on much time I can play.
For artifacts, I'm hoping to upgrade either SAC or TW to insane next, but so far the RNG hasn't gifted me with a corresponding epic, so maybe the next will be money cache boost.
I will probably start taking +100AP at around 100th super. My analysis is that +25% AP vs +100 AP basically boils down to whether you want to optimize the gameplay before or after Feldmere. The accumulated AP from tutorial to finishing Feldmere is 485.14 AP, which means +25% AP of that (121.285AP) starts to tips over the +100AP you get.
By 100th super, I should be able to get 150% additional mercenaries by the time I reach HCCC, and getting more +25% AP won't help much since the next way to get more armies directly is in phase 4.
Interestingly, the hardest levels turn out to be Final Earth and Siege of Feldmere, both of which still don't have enough army for me after draining all caches/mercenaries/drafts.
I think it is about time to start taking +100AP instead.
There is now enough AP that doing hardened Scandinavia (and regular far land) is no longer required, and enough to finish HCCC with just 2 or 3 drafts.
Right now it is still about 1 day per super, give or take depending on how active I'm playing. Most of the time is actually waiting for army production to get to the first market. This is probably going to be slow to improve as I already have insane ACampB and draft boost artifacts, so the benefits from advancement are quite marginal.
For artifacts, it is just a matter of getting SAC/MD/MCB/TD to insane (preferably in that order), and then grab a second TW, and maybe an army camp discount, mine boost or BMB/TMB. The rest seems too niche to be useful.
@ShadowHawk, as far as I know, mostly only the first wave of players made insanes by digging. Things have changed since better strategies have been found.
