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Question Upgrading Ancient Wanders influences negatively heavy the fight in tourney or spire?

SmillaJaspersen

Alchemist
Hello,
A quick question, a player just told me that upgrading AW influences negatively heavy battles in the tourneys and in the spire and quotes:
<quote>
This is official info:
"Tournament difficulty is no longer determined solely by Squad Size, but rather by a series of progression factors, which involve city development and research in general". </quote>
I replied that what makes harder is proceeding with the chapters and, on the contrary, some AW are actually useful in fight.
So, please, can someone be so nice to clarify what is correct?:rolleyes:
Thanks in advance!
 

Silly Bubbles

Necromancer
There is an agreement that completing research, AW upgrades and placing expansions negatively influences fighting/catering. There is not an agreement how to make up for this penalty so here's my personal take on it:

Research penalty: As long as you upgrade military buildings when you research their upgrades, there is not a net negative influences as the additional troops you'll train will make up for the additional losses. Same applies to catering, as long as you keep upgrading your manufactories, you'll be fine.

AW upgrades: All upgrades to fighting AWs make up for the penalty, same with catering AWs. You could reduce the number of AW upgrades by maxing them first before you add new AWs. That is, it's better to have small number of high level AWs than large number of low level AWs. You get more benefit from the AW per square and also save more space for other things.

Expansions: When you use your placed expansions to improve your fighting/catering capability then again it will offset the negative influence.
 

schadenfreude

Enchanter
A quick question, a player just told me that upgrading AW influences negatively heavy battles in the tourneys and in the spire
It increases the stack size of the army brought to battle. However, AW levels is probably the lowest influencing factor out of all the variables--wonder levels, mandatory tech unlocked (optional techs don't count), relic boost (most of us ignore this since we are maxed at 700), and how many premium vs regular plots placed. What's often confused is the increase in stack size with "difficulty". The difficulty is the ratio of your troops compared to enemy squad and is set and same for everyone, regardless of any aforementioned variables, chapters. (Well, things like facing 3* enemy will also make things more difficult, but for now, we're talking about ratio.) The gap widens as you progress in provinces in tourney and up the Spire. Therefore, whether you are in chapter 3 or chapter 19, you will face the same ratio at the same point in the Spire or tourney. The difference is the chap 19 player will bring way more gigantic stacks to the battle and lose way more troops, requiring replacing more troops each week. For example, if the ratio is 2:3, then one player might see that as 100 of your troops vs 150 enemies. Someone else might see that as 2000 troops vs 3000 enemies. A 10% loss on 100 troops is only 10 units, but 200 units on a stack of 2000. Your taste for difficulty is up to you as you are not required to fight any provinces in tourney or climb any stairs in Spire.

I am discerning on which wonders I place, but never hesitate to upgrade a wonder. If a wonder buffs my military, I can kill faster, which saves them more rounds and therefore more troops in the long run. If it buffs my military production, I can make more troops to replace dead ones faster. At least with military wonders, it generally helps you.
 

Stucon

Illusionist
Just realised this could look like a 'snotty' response. Not meant to be. Just being informative.
 

Stucon

Illusionist
Thx @SkyRider99., but there might be new people and there are always those that choose to read negatives into what we write.
ps how do you not fall through when you sit on the clouds?
 

Turing

Bard
@SmillaJaspersen if you google you should be able to find minmaxgamer's modelling of the "city advancement level". His is a forumla derived from observation; but it appears to be very accurate. For this purpose it boils down to squad_size = other_stuff * (total_AW_levels + 333)

So going from zero to 333 total AW levels doubles your squad and catering size in tourney and spire. That's maxing 11 AWs to L30 or so: which can more than double your troop production as well as give numerous other bonuses. Upgrading wonders which don't benefit the tourney will increase your squad size; but you'll need a lot of them to hurt your chances much.

And schadenfreude makes a good point: the wiki is a little misleading when it talks of "difficulty". The ratio between your squad size and opponent is the same for everyone, and depends only on the province number. AWs, expansions and research only actually increase the SIZE of the tourney/spire, not the difficulty in the sense of how hard it is to win any given encounter.
 

schadenfreude

Enchanter
His is a forumla derived from observation; but it appears to be very accurate.
Derived from crowd sourced data. If you use the spreadsheet, it will tell you the % error compared to what you see in the game and it is very small %, so yes, pretty accurate!
 

Silly Bubbles

Necromancer
So going from zero to 333 total AW levels doubles your squad and catering size in tourney and spire.

So it's really only long term players, serious tournament players and people with push accounts that have to worry about the negative influence of AW upgrades as to get to 333 AW levels takes a very long time. It took me 2 years to get 79 AW upgrades but I do focus on maxing them first.
 
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