Hi,

I am in the beginning of the last third of Afro-Eurasia Gargantuan.
Right now I am crafting boiling flasks, but the net win is only somewhere around 55%. Is there another item, where I shall go for the recipe soon, which can increase my crafting income?

Magnets (i used in previous maps) are still not possible, as I earn ways to less neodymium (and I can't buy neodymium bars in this map :-( )
All things like resistors, diodes etc. in the previous maps, where not worth to craft at all. Either you had to buy expensive items from markets, or you had to craft such sub-items yourself. But in that case, crafting time extends and throughput shrinks, as you can't use all crafting slots for the main item.

Thanks for useful hints!

Sounds like you're crafting for profit (and not Techs). Any reason you can't just get the profit directly from the markets through Buy/Sell?

Have you put AP into Alloy Sell Value? Do you have an Alloy Value artifact? This could help with market strat.

Whenever I have not to craft for techs, I wish to craft for profit.
Right now I have a rare alloy value, and with that, I am milking each market soon after I captured it.
After that I start crafting and buy alloy-bars from markets, up to the self-creating value. Smelting alloy bars for profit makes no sense at all, as selling ore and buy alloy bars is much more efficient. For that I have already my epic ore-value artifact.

Up to China my way was: Craft glass, as soon I have the recipe and the silver market, then jump to boiling flask with gold, explosive bolt with platinum and magnets with neodymium. I don't need to have enough mines for the corresponding ore at the time, as i buy my alloy bars. This process is self-sustaining, as i can buy the next alloys from parts of my earnings.

Writing this, I found a solution with capturing Finland: Microchips are crafted there from 9 chrome bars, which is just that, what i need now.

So right now my return per crafter is:

Boiling flask: 3.58B (with rare item values) cost 1.75B for alloy from market, 1:30h gives 1.4B/h
Explosive bolt: 8.4B ; 4.38B for alloy , 2:21h gives 1.71B/h
Microchip: 69B; 28B for alloy ; 6:00h ; gives 6.8B/h

Which is a fantastic return, especially with 10 crafter slots.
In fact, with that return it makes now sense, to use the 30% ad-watching speed for crafting!

Edited 4/12/2022 19:07:40

You guys really put some effort into those, and here I am, making 95% only tin cans because I'm lazy and dont wanna do some calculations. (Also make glass sometimes and this and that but mostly tin cans for profit)

Hmmm by my understanding it's key part of idle to do certain calculations in order to finish levels in a reasonable time.
When I would craft tin cans I could earn 188M/h per crafter, which is nothing compared to 6.8B/h.
So you should upgrade crafting to the next level, as soon as you have captured a recipe and a market, as source for the bars.

Crafted items are nowhere near as profitable (not even in the same universe)as bars. SO I just trow random crafts I can do mindlessly. Don't have the item value yet (only have the artifact). And I got the all techs achievments for all levels on my first playthrough, so I did what I needed too. When that was done the level was almost over anyway.

I'm on my second way through, and so far didn't need crafting. Just reached "Asia POP density".
For the harder levels further ahead I assume I will start needing that. Its just not worth it just yet.

Crafted items are nowhere near as profitable (not even in the same universe)as bars.

Hey, I just wanted to say that this is no general truth and only applicable under certain (game play) decisions. In general crafting items IS IN FACT significantly more profitable than smelting alloys. And this relation can stay true if you decide to invest in the sell value boosting advancements (and also, but separately, the different techs) at the same time. And even when you take the sell value artifacts into account the factor between smelting and crafting decreases, but not by much. ONLY if you solely focus on alloy sell value - which I agree is the currently best strategy - this relation gets turned up-side-down.

So, even if this strategy is widely accepted, I would be careful with statements that can easily be interpreted as generalizations, if they instead assume a very specific play style that some might not a) know how to pull off, b) be able to deploy (yet), or c) want to use. I guess when you reached Gargantuan you have earned some AP and have some basic advancements, but nonetheless I'm astonished that the only real "solutions" in this thread are "you haven't spent enough AP in Increased Alloy Value". Are you sure, that answers the stated question?

What I don't really understand here is, why your crafting strategy involves markets at all (or at least only works if there is a market for some alloy). So, apparently you focus on crafting recipes with a single alloy ingredient that is Silver or higher. That to me sounds like a legit plan. But, why can't you just smelt those? Regardless of whether you could buy them from markets or not. The reason why I ask this is that acquiring mines and upgrading them is generally a good investment. I admit, that's a similar assumption than what I just criticized others would use for their answers. But for me so far having enough Silver ore was never the problem when it came to smelting Silver bars. It's always the Copper I don't produce enough of before I actively switch to Glass production. And upgrading the Copper production is cheap. Given that for example one Silver smelter can usually sustain at least two Glass crafters, you don't need a Silver bar market to put (depending on the exact boosts you have) three crafters on Glass. Sure, having the market can mean that you can put a arbitrary number of crafters on one recipe at once. But if one recipe isn't sustainable on its own (because there is no market), you can still use as many crafters as possible for the more profitable recipe and put the remaining crafters on some recipe that you can buy the ingredients for. And even if you say that "Smelting alloy bars for profit makes no sense at all" because you heavily invested in Ore Sell Value, it might still be profitable to smelt as a way to obtain crafting ingredients. You would have to do the math, but having some loss when turning ores into bars might very well be more than evened out by turning those bars into items afterwards. And, as I said before, that smelting isn't profitable at all at the moment is a temporary situation. As soon as you invest in Alloy Sell Value, smelting will become profitable again.

Along same lines of Phoenix's Q. Not clear on why you drain the markets then buy bars to craft items. If there is profit in it, sure, go for it. But I find after the markets have been drained, the buy price for bars is typically so high that it doesn't profit much on the crafted item anymore.

It typically works out like this:
- Pre-Market drain, can buy cheap bars to either sell for market strat, or craft for expensive items
- Market strat is near immediate, crafting takes a long time
- I'm not sure, maybe crafting would result in more money over the full duration
- But Market strat is money Now, which wins for me
- And once the market prices reach Buy>=Sell, only thing I craft for is Techs if any still require it
- There have rarely been cases when continuing to buy bars for crafting for meaningful** profit

** = there is lots of negligible profit, where profit>0, but the profit needs to be significant enough to buy remaining mercs, upgrade hospitals, upgrade army camps (for use with SAC/FC) or buy mortars (lol, yes this is just a joke, no one buys mortars)

People will buy mortars because it has a bug

Fire --> Miss --> F5 or Reload game --> Fire -->Miss --> F5 or Reload game --> Fire -->Miss --> F5 or Reload game-->....

Mortars don't force a sync? Then this is actually exploitable (and probably a bug). Still, would you use the mortars when you could do this trick of reloading until you hit? Even then, I would argue that they are still not worth it.