Scavenging Guide - In Depth Series

[DeletedUser14962]

Recently re-released my scavenging guide on .us due to the new world coming out and thought it may be useful for .uk as well to enjoy.

This guide explains how to be use the early game scavenging to your advantage and what numbers produce the most optimal results.

So... Let's start this off by explaining scavenging by using a 100 Spear example from my beta account to test the new feature:
(Take into account this was done on a speed 2 beta world, so the numbers will be halved on a speed 1)

https://gyazo.com/dfff270f37767558c962f9b975302afc

As you can see here, scavenging is scalable depending on the features you've unlocked.

The first grants 10% of maximum haulable income
The second grants 25% of maximum haulable income
The third grants 50% of maximum haulable income
The fourth grants 75% of maximum haulable income.

Here's an example with 200 spears:

https://gyazo.com/284503ef14b6d3164fb987c1acb59003

As you can see here, the resource values remain constant with regard to %, but scale (Not linear) with regard to time.

Here's an example of light cavalry looting 5,040 resources (Same as image #2 in terms of loot)

https://gyazo.com/b7c98d2472171d8f8054fe52da86cd50

This means that speed of troop has absolutely no effect here, deeming the best cost per loot haul troops the most valuable (Spear fighter)

Let's sidetrack a little bit here:

What does early game require most from the individual?
In specific order
1: Activity
2: Premium
3: Farming

The most common issue with farming is the dreaded 1/80 microfarm loots or even for noobs sending 20sp/sw to get maybe 15/800 resources at the start of the world.

Now, it seems that innogames has taken it upon themselves to add an extra 'farming feature' (Sadly it doesn't count toward plunders/total looted)

What I'm here to show you that scavenging will either need to be nerfed due to the current state of the game, or people like me or other 'veterans' will take advantage of this and have enough res/troops to decimate every noob before as soon as they exit their generously granted 5 day beginner protection.


Let's explain how early game works again - My early game guide was removed by innogames several months ago

The world starts by offering 25,000 Wood/Clay/Iron in the Premium Exchange in EACH continent

-Any decent player with a fair amount of luck with have easily bought 5,000 of each resource in their continent before the resources have run out.
-Instead of rushing the typical lc rush, the meta will be changed towards upgrading your scavenging abilities (I honestly believe sp/lc mix will be best way) and you will easily be able to upgrade to level 3 scavenging by day 1.

-By day 1, if you're a significant premium user (2000+ premium available for use) you'll EASILY have the resources to build the maximum of about 150 spears (depending on barracks level) on day 1, in addition to researching your lc, increasing your pits, blah blah blah.

So... what can we see on a level 3 scavenging with 150 spearmen?

https://gyazo.com/d27207611f216604056c10e5e2387561

On a speed 1 world, this should take about 3:20:34 so you will receive 8 of these runs per day, with no fear of spikes, minimal hauls, or literally any statistical discrepancy.
If you budget only 75 spears while farming with 75, you'll see your run time distances actually go down significantly, allowing you to do 12 runs in a day.

https://gyazo.com/2dc4dbea2860d0fbf0037fbf570bafe5

The big thing though, is to statistically budget your level 2,3,4 (Level 1 isn't work it) scavenging abilities to minimize resource income.

Here's a 24 hour excel sheet example (Done for speed 2) with 150 spear men:

https://gyazo.com/c9506086d972dde73bba2eb4fee63be4

Took some time, but it's worth it to show you the results of mixing up your runs by not solely focusing on putting everything into the possible theoretical scavenging run.

On a speed 2 world, you can actually easily have 300 spearmen by the end of day one if you have that level 5+ barracks, but for the sake of everything, we'll pretend it's speed one and divide these results by 2.

By following this method, you'll have looted a guaranteed 18k+ (assumption of maximum efficiency), and this is not counting what you'd have looted via LC from normal farming, or with your spears/swordsmen from farming the filled 500/500/400 new villages before you had upgraded your scavenging to level 3.

This is just part 1, will be adding part 2&3 which will explain scavenging level 4, talk about how newer players can benefit, show cost-benefit analysis of spear investment, and go into further explanation that this will give premium-scaling players an unfair advantage.

 

[DeletedUser14962]

Part 2:

Scavenging Level 4 (costs 10,000/12,000/10,000) & Scavenging Scaling:

At around possibly 600 spears, I'd say you can probably routinely/daily unlock the ability to get scavenging level 4, so I'll use the example of 600 spears here.

https://gyazo.com/fc1d0f384e08c7c0810c727b73c62b23

Here's what you'd see.

Recall:
At 150 spears the times for 2,3,4 were:
1:03:15
1:40:17
2:15:26

https://gyazo.com/b8f62dc64ca87abeb33f4f0a29ac8fd3

What you can see here is the problem with diminishing returns. Although you have an investment of 4x 600 spears, you see a return not even 2x that total amount.

What you want to do in this case is to diversify the portfolio by equally allocating your troops to a ratio system by putting equally distributed amounts in each level rather than putting them all in 1 basket.

Here's what happens when you put 200 in each:

https://gyazo.com/9c3c52eb187c8e86d641f6ca10e82f6c

That would be about 85K looted per day with just 600 spears on a 2 speed world, or roughly about 42.2k looted per day on a speed 1, probably day 3 of a speed 1 if you push 24.7 spears + premium + level 7 or so barracks.

This would take literally 0 of your LC, contribute nothing to your looted per day total, and would be a great wood sink when you're 24/7 producing lc.

To average a statistical distribution of 42.2k resources per day (14k each res), you'd need resource pits of level 21 EACH (616*24=14784). The cost-benefit ratio of building these spears makes building resource pits insignificant early game, unless you have resources to spare with both lc and spears running 24/7.

As you go up the curve, you'll see much more diminishing gains, here's an example of 1800 spears just to make an example.

https://gyazo.com/3f5387a3ede5a4efb17ec623979f2629

https://gyazo.com/01043c4ff9940938577d435d9edf2c77

New Player Benefit:

New players can also benefit quite well from the scavenging event. Since the scalable rewards continue to scale very well up until around 100 spearmen, this can push new players to building more defensive units without any worry for losing troops attacking players or spiked barbs. This may create more hugging/less fighting, but can be a way to nurture new players and cause an opportunity cost for the vets.

What's the opportunity cost here you may ask?

The opportunity cost lies upon the predator who may be attacking the new player. The attacker may ask him/herself... Do I want to attack this guy, lose some troops and possibly get a daily reward of ~800 of each resource per day, or would I RATHER invest my time, resources, troops, efficiency into focusing my spears or axes - (Even though they loot 10 per attack, only Total AMT looted has an effect on scavenging times).

This will give noobs a longer time to play, maybe a full 10 days instead of 5 days, before they receive scouting attacks, or incoming to attack their precious loot. This will allow noobs to build troops and have more defenses to protect themselves before attackers make their approach

My opinion: Yes this helps noobs, but it will comparatively help very active players who know how to manage scavenging in a much greater fashion.

Cost-Benefit Analysis:

What does a spearman cost: 50/30/10 --> 90 resources

What does a spearman loot: 25 resources
A spearman loots 3.6 of its cost, making it the best cost-benefit asset of any unit in tribalwars.

When it comes to early game, efficiency, cost-benefit focus, and farming are unrivaled by anything else in TW besides the use of premium points.

For this, we'll use an example of 50 spears as that's a modest goal everyone hopes to attain in the first day of a world.

Around this time, you'll probably have around level 2 scavenging as level 3 may be a little pricey (I think it's like 1k each resource) and the scaling at this level isn't too significant to warrant huge problems.

Here, a spearman can loot 25% of it's full loot potential, and brings a return of 313 resources every 36:24. This produces a value of 3.5 spearmen, and a total of 12.4k resources per day.
These 50 spearmen alone (On a speed 2 world) would bring you a return of 137.6 spearmen in ONE DAY ALONE

https://gyazo.com/1c1ae894fed90e583701ca9c972ef96a

These benefits are way too good for their input and I personally believe that something should be done to lower the advantages brought to the game.

I came in writing this to explain how OP scavenging is and how much it will help veterans but I've developed somewhat of a newer idea on the subject.

Reflection: This new ingame feature does the following:

1: Allows premium users to insanely grow the first few days, gain a significant advantage, but then drops off that advantage by lowering the scaling for those who went all-in and sort of slowly evens out the playing field

2: It allows players to develop a great spear system by pushing players to accumulate 200,300,400,500 spears, but then also leads them to invest the resources into other things like light cavalry/pits because the scaling gains slowly but surely decrease as you add more troops to each attack

3: Will shift the focus on early-game farming to the use of scavenging, which hopefully deters players from attacking noobs and brings more people to the game because they'll get to learn and enjoy more before being slaughtered like a Thanksgiving turkey.

4: The cost-benefit with a 0% Risk-index is too advantageous in a strategy game like Tribalwars. The numbers need to be adjusted and accounted for.

5: This new ingame interaction will be very fun on the first few weeks that it's released in the world. It will be replaced by farming after players pass about 1/2 of their max farm space, but it will always be wise to continuously use about 200 spears on each scavenging option to gain loot which rivals that of farming gains.

6: The scavenging option may provide an interesting take on No-Haul/Limited haul worlds if introduced, as it will deem players un-lootable but will also add an edge to the really stupid early game tactic of maximizing resource pits with putting no resources into troops.


Hope you've read all of it and I hope you've enjoyed this in-depth guide on the concept of scavenging. This was made because US32 WAS being released soon and I wanted something to teach my tribemates as I'm now leading tribes to bring more of a learning/cooperation aspect to the game, to help teach players what they should do.

You can catch me under the username Report on the Tribalwars.us server or under the skype username sustephen123

If you have any questions or feedback, please skype me as I love to learn, teach, and enjoy speaking with others about the game and my math involved with these guides

 

[DeletedUser14962]

Part 3 (New):

How will SCAVENGING be more effective than FARMING on UK World 46. (Was based off Us43 so sorry for discrepancies)

After analyzing the world 43 TW data, I have seen that the current barbarian village ratio is at 7,9 (barb,bonus).

This means the for every player village created, .07 barbs and .09 bonus villages are created.

Doing some quick math, that results in 6.25 players PER abandoned village.

While this number is frightening, you must also consider that more than half of players don't even understand the concept of farming and refuse to farm after doing the initial quest.

Let's just assume there are 3.0 semi-active farming players per abandoned village. With a current barb rise of .002 (Rise is usually .002 or .003) that means - If I'm not mistaken - that there is a .2% chance every minute that the barbarian village will level up a random building. This means that on average every 500 minutes, a building will be leveled up.

https://gyazo.com/8a93b39090fbcb864f9160db11400dd3

With 8 beginner options of potential village level-ups, there is a 3/8 chance that a resource camp will be upgraded, which increases base production from 5 resources per hour to 30 resources per hour (speed 1 world).

On average, it will take a barbarian village 1,333 minutes before leveling up each resource camp and if you hit the average, it will be ~4,000 minutes before a barbarian village has all camps level 1 (Does not account for HQ lvl 3 - Barracks, wall, market etc)

4,000 minutes is a long time to get that SWEET JUICY loot of 30 resources x 3 every 60 minutes.

It takes 4,320 minutes of game time to equate to 3 days.

So let's say by day 3 you have 1,1,1 pits. These pits will produce a combined amount of 2,160 resources per day. With possibly 3 players farming each barbarian village, that 2,160 may only result in a cut of 700 resources for you .

Now, what does scavenging offer you that farming or Micro-farming does not?

50 spear fighters on DAY 1 (on speed 1 server) will bring a return of 6,200 resources using the humble haulers option (speed 2 brings 12,400).

Seriously, are you going to wait until day 3 to micro-farm with 2sp/sw and hopefully get 700 resources from each DAMNED barbarian village per day, or are you going to just stick to your friendly scavenging tool and bring a steady flow of resources in on a daily basis.


Sure, if you can find a modest balance between farming and scavenging, I would suggest you follow what best suits you. However, if you're farming after the initial 500/500/400 resources are gone from that adjacent barbarian village within the first 1-2 days, I can't help but warn you that you're doing something wrong and that you should review this guide.

-Steve/Ghio1/Report

 

[DeletedUser14962]

Made an excel document and some graphs to also show change in efficiency of using different scavenging methods over time.

All data was based on US42

Level 1/2/3 (100-2000 Spears)

Level 2/3 (100-2000 Spears)

Level 2/3/4 (100-2000 Spears)

Level 1/2/3/4 (100-2000 Spears)

Line Graph to Distinguish Most Optimal Method at each amount of spears

Bar Graph if you don't like line graphs

Additional Findings:


1. At beginning of world, only use Level 2 & 3 Scavenging

2. Once you reach 350 or more spear fighters, start using level 1 scavenging as well.

3. Level 4 Scavenging costs 32,000 Resources

4. Once you reach around 500 spear fighters, you can work to upgrade to level 4 scavenging as you'll receive an extra 20,000 resources each day from scavenging.
4a. You will need a large warehouse space to acquire this scavenging level, so you may want to wait a longer period of time. This is also affected by world speed.
4b. You will also have to consider the opportunity cost of building resource pits and see if upgrading to level 4 scavenging is worth it.

5. You should never need to use only level 2/3/4 scavenging if you're looking to optimize efficiency because once you reach 600 spear fighters, using all levels is most efficient.

6. If you want to take a more AFK/Lazier approach, you can also skip level 1 scavenging… However, it does come at a cost of resources which you can determine by the line graph or bar graph.


If you want the full excel or have questions, feel free to contact me via Skype: Sustephen123 or Discord: SteveTheLizard#4447

 

[SuperMario]

Really big fan of your guides. Hope to play on the same team as you one day