I guess everyone really does Hex Earth different. My most optimized pathing uses 1 IM arti and 0 powers it takes ~15-20m to finish w/o clan requests. I use markets and don't go to Greenland unless I need the hospital over there (rare). The level can be done with 0 AP if you have an insane army cache boost in 4 hours for hospitals + however long it takes you to click all those hexagons lol. My 1st run I had 4051AP spent and used 3IM because I got semi lost but could have done it with only 2 IM. I probably spent too much time analyzing this level since then >.>.

@Krinid

I sort of explained it on discord but as a general rule of thumb to upgrade artifacts w/o digging:
- you need 3 "feeder" spots if you want to upgrade a rare to epic (unless you do WZIB till 3200BP then only need 2 spots).
- you need 2 "feeder" spots if you want to upgrade an epic to legendary.
- you need 6 "feeder" spots if you want to upgrade a legendary to insane.

I will explain the legendary case since I have 10 main artifacts spots + 6 feeders spots. It takes 10 super (20 epics) to make 1 insane assuming your base is already legendary as shown below by getting the 1st place battle epic + epic Triple strike.

X => Empty
E => Epic
L => Legendary
XXXXXX=> EEXXXX => EEEEXX => LEXXXX => LEEEXX => LLXXXX=> LLEEXX => LLEEEE=> LLLEXX => LLLEEE => LLLLXX => make insane

Takes 5 days for the last legendary to upgrade + 10 days for the insane to be born so it takes 10 super + 15 days to get an insane.

Old picture but it basically looks like this:
https://i.imgur.com/Rw47YKC.png

Think most of my 10 main artis are in the picture but all 10 are either legendary or insane no rare or epic left (even the hospital boost is legendary because why not lol). Well the 4 I had equipped are not shown since they got appended at the end but it should be evident that they are SAC + TW + AV + Army Camp Boost.

Edit: Was in a rush so many typos lol.

Edited 2022-08-11 00:08:08

@Olja
What do you mean by the 'Greenland caches'? There's only 1 money cache, no army caches. I never really considered the money cache there significant, only 10T, which on this map doesn't buy many mercs, only about 25B mercs? That won't get you to Russia for the army caches. Actually it might - it probably gets you to Ustuansky, which gives enough to get to the Russia caches.

@Xeno
Don't go to Greenland? That's a lot of mercs you're foregoing, and the hospital, too ... so you just go straight through Africa to Russia?

I use markets and don't go to Greenland unless I need the hospital over there (rare).

Of course no clan reqs, they're entirely useless on the new levels, but 1 IM arti & 0 powers, how do you even get to the markets at all? Assuming the first market you hit is Borkou 2, and that only gives about 100B profit, so with 0 AP (or even 1200 AP, you've still got 0 invested in Merc Disc Adv) and even with MD arti, this would only get you a couple billion armies, not enough to get to the next market @ Bonjurd.

My most optimized pathing uses 1 IM arti and 0 powers it takes ~15-20m to finish w/o clan requests.

LOL, "can" be done, yes, but "should" not be. I value my fingers, and that's about 3300 clicks more than I'm willing to do.

The level can be done with 0 AP if you have an insane army cache boost in 4 hours for hospitals + however long it takes you to click all those hexagons lol.

Also see you're still using TS - have you not graduated to QS yet? Given that you spend most of your time on Hex, would assume you either use QS or don't need TS/QS at all.

Edited 2022-08-11 06:07:29

Updated Ivan0's progress.

Xeno is shown twice on the leaderboard. At 12 and at 69

Fixed. Thanks for pointing out.

Xeno are you saying you don’t even bother digging anymore? You just get the two Epics per super ascension and the any digging is negligible?

Xeno are you saying you don’t even bother digging anymore? You just get the two Epics per super ascension and the any digging is negligible?

Makes sense. Once the +AP% gets high, a single SAsc only takes at max a few days if you're diligently playing, maybe a bit longer depending on cooldowns/power usage/etc.

So given the facts that (A) carryover slots are limited, and (B) digs in process are silently aborted when you SAsc (ie: you don't carryover digs in process), digging up new artifacts doesn't really make sense. Most of them won't finish in the time it takes before next SAsc, and even if they do, they're likely to be Uncommon level (small % chance of Rare or Epic if you do those digs, but then it's likely Poor not even Uncommon), in which case the Epic you get from clearing Hard Creek is a better use of the carryover slot.

The time it would take to dig up a bunch more Uncommons to upgrade to Rares then 1 Epic just isn't justified. So digging is no longer useful unless you still need to get that 1 artifact type you've been searching for.

@krinid
>Don't go to Greenland? That's a lot of mercs you're foregoing, and the hospital, too ... so you just go straight through Africa to Russia?

As usual I counted how many troops it takes from point "A to B" for anything remotely important in this level so I could know if I have enough troops to reach stuff at any AP amount or arti combination. The number of troops you spend by going to Greenland is enough to get the next army cache and basically finish the level. You can go to Greenland if you want to but it's not optimal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

It could exist but have not found a case were going to the 1st market at some point is not the most efficient way to clear the level if you have a good AV artifact. It just takes 2.7b to get there and don't need much artifact/advancement to get that back with the money produced and be at a net gain. As usual it all depends on which artifacts/advancement you have so you can go from needing only 1IM to 3 IM.

>Also see you're still using TS - have you not graduated to QS yet? Given that you spend most of your time on Hex, would assume you either use QS or don't need TS/QS at all.

On paper QS looks better and I was hyped about it but in practice I found myself using it on territories were there was no 4th neighbor or that I could not conquer the 4th neighbor (Ex. early big stack with only 3 cheap neighbors). The extra required territory made having a QS a no-go for me and TS was enough on cases that QS could actually be used.

Kind of funny but I just got an epic QS from WZIB >.>. It's like my 3rd or 4th too.

@graemes

Yes. I don't dig anymore. Digging is more tedious and slow. I'm getting efficient at no powers HCCC (pic below) and WZIB takes 1-2 tries. I may dig again if I need a specific artifact like a 2nd or 3rd TW for meme strategies or a Fog Buster to solve the mystery of how "good" an insane one is.

Old pic:
https://i.imgur.com/vYpjPMi.png

It’s interesting how the “increased AP” super-ascension reward ended up being the “faster artifact collection” reward as well.

Makes it nearly impossible to justify -20% dig speed unfortunately…

+34 faster artifact digging

Digging Speed : 99.975 %
Dig duration, Common : 7.2 seconds
https://ibb.co/tbRRZ6F

+40
Dig duration, Common : 2 seconds
+50
Dig duration, Common : 0.2

Lol. Insta-dig.

What exactly is the point in that many dig speed upgrades? There aren't enough dig sites for that to be useful also upgrading arts takes time that you just have to wait at the end of a SAsc.

For fun I guess. It's funny.

here: "+34 faster artifact digging"

That must be SAsc nr 100 or something?

Just look at the first page it sais he has 59

It's probably a lot more than 59. I just know that it should be at least 59 because here's ancient screenshot showed +400% AP and 11 artifacts, so I'm assuming
34 faster digs
16 +AP%
+9 artifact slots

But in reality probably here got a lot more than 16 +AP% by now. It was an old screenshot.

Oh ok, my bad. The only thing I noticed when looking at that screenshot was that he went and maxed Faster digs adv after all those dig speed SAscs. That Ap is definetly needed there lol

6th

All digs under 1 hour + auto-dig seems like a nice end game goal. Anyone know how long it takes to dig everything on hex earth without any dig speed boosts?

All digs under 1 hour + auto-dig seems like a nice end game goal. Anyone know how long it takes to dig everything on hex earth without any dig speed boosts?

Given that there's a massive list of digs available, I'd say 4 months if you have Auto-Dig, and 6 months if you don't.

I haven't counted but there's probably ~200 digs. So assume some distribution like 100x C @ 8h, 50x UC @ 16h, 30x R @ 24h, 20x E @ 36h digs (not accurate #'s, but just averaging out among the variants), we get a total of 3040h = 127 days = 4.2 months with Auto-Dig (and sufficient additional Idle time).

Edited 2022-08-22 03:56:04

Since the topic came up ... gonna try it out, just not at regular dig speed.

Just started Hex, got Auto-Dig to 40% & restarted Hex.

Digging Speed: 87% reduction (13% of full duration)
Advancement x50%
Super Ascend Reward x20%
Super Ascend Reward x20%
Super Ascend Reward x20%
Super Ascend Reward x20%
Super Ascend Reward x20%
Super Ascend Reward x20%

So started digging around 14:20 Aug 23, 2022 ... standby to see how long it takes to get through all digs. (;

1st dig is 87% UC to normally take 36 hrs, but now to take 4.68 hrs. Still pretty long . . .

Actually being realistic, I probably won't finish all the digs ... if full time estimate is ~127 days, 13% of that is still 16.5 days, so guess I need some another 15 or so x20% dig speed reductions to really make this truly quick.

here could probably drain the whole thing in <1 day, maybe even a few hours.

1 more update ... there are total 264 digs on Hex, composition as follows (thanks Functor!):
* 3% epic: 8
* 2% epic: 7
* 1% epic: 13
* 7% rare: 13
* 6% rare: 8
* 5% rare: 14
* 4% rare: 15
* 30% - 89% uncommon: 82
* 100% common: 104

Total time: 4483 hours (no buffs)
Total artifact value: 0.89 legendary
Total cost to dig them all: 16.6T

So there is more than enough money from the caches on the level for this money.

Quick calcs indicate that in order to empty all digs in <24 hrs, approx 21 x20% SAsc rewards are required in addition to the 50% faster digging Adv.

Edited 2022-08-24 14:02:26