Originally Posted by
pokey
Well fine, let's do the numbers thing again:
On a new account the base time to build a scout is 1min 40sec (100sec)
The base time to build a Ram is 1hour 15minutes (4500 sec)
The base time to build a Ballista is 50minutes (3000 sec)
Obviously a 200 attack hero will benefit the larger build times more than the smaller ones, but I'll concede the point anyway.
So, w/ lvl 9 MilSci and lvl 9 MetCas we get
Scout_Build = 100 * .9^9 * .995^200 = 14sec
Ram_Build = 4500 * .9^9 * .995^200 = 639
Balli_Build = 3000 * .9^9 * .995^200 = 426
I won't get into the math of scouts, I'll just concede 3 days to build scouts as a compromise. Full production on, cost of whatever I said before + 250mil food-value I believe you said, just going to use your numbers (actually I'm gonna calc it to be explicit, 2.5mil scouts eat 300,000,000 food per day. So day 1, they eat ~0 food. Day 2 they eat 100mil food, day 3 they eat 200mil food. Total food at end of day 3 when they're all built is ~300mil food. Or 150mil gold. I'll just use your 250mil number to fill in the gaps I didn't account for as they build incremently so no one complains about that).
EDIT: Aw fuggit I'm gonna do the math for scout building too.
15k pop / 20 racks = 750 per queue. 750 * 14 = 10,500 sec = 175min = ~3hours. 4 queue slots and a regen time of 1 hour if your numbers are right, you need to come by once an hour for 4 hours every 12 hours. Or you can come by once an hour every 9 hours, or break it up however you like as long as you wait an hour. with 10 cities you need to do this 17 times. Assuming you sleep 8 hours and work 8 hours you can easily break up the remaining 8 hours of your day into queueing units with the 1 hour gap between regens to do other stuff like cook clean eat dinner sex up the woman whatever. Even if you come home to empty queues and spend 3 hours refilling them, then spend 3 hours refilling them before bed only you can easily be done in 3 days. Yeah it's some effort coming back to the puter once an hour I guess, but oh well.
SO, now we're at rams and ballis, I already worked out the cost of building rams and ballis somewhere earlier, but lets add your build time math.
Assuming 10 towns, each with 15 lvl 9 barracks (we can do 20 if you really insist, but the math isn't as nice so I'm going with 15) a piece and 15000 population we can queue up a maximum of 15000 / 15 / 10 = 100 rams per barrack. At a time of 100 * 639 = 63900 seconds per queue (1065 minutes, 17hours 45mins a piece), spread across 10 cities we have our 10k rams in a day.
Now for the 60k ballis, 200 queued at a time, 200*426 = 85,200seconds (1420 minutes, 23hours 30 minutes). Spread across 10 cities we could have ourselves ready in 46.25 hours (2days). We now also have a 3 day build time. End of day 1 10k rams are eating 24mil food/day, End of day 2, 10k rams 30k ballis are eating 60000000food /day.
So we have a final cost of... 51mil for the rams, 210mil for the ballis + 42mil food-value vs. 51mil for the scouts + 250mil food-value. Factor in transit costs (double+ food consumption for mechs on attack due to the current bug, with huge increases in food consumption as your distance to target increases for mechs, with nothing comparable for scouts) and they even out as I said at the start.
Ah you know what, lets just do that calc too. To hit an enemy at 10miles away with my current HBR 8, it takes 1hr 21min; 121 food / balli, and 242 food / ram. And it takes 10 scouts with Compass 7 1min 59sec; 3 food (1 scout says 0 food so I have to use more).
So 242*10,000 = 2420000 food + 121 * 60000 = ~10,000,000 food.
3*10000 = 30000 food * 25 waves = 750,000 food to launch.
So 1,000,000 food per mile for the mechs, and 75k food per mile for scouts.
(a 50 mile attack would have a net food diff of 50mil - 3.75mil = 46mil food, or 23million gold).
Sloan posted a report where that force killed 150k archers (I will ignore the scrub units killed though I will admit they can be a factor, but technically they had 67k ballis, 11k rams, and also 4.5k pults instead of what I actually calc'd so lets call it even) and you still have a 333% increase in efficiency with scout bombs.
Even factoring in being slouchish on building the scouts, so you can sleep and work and have a life. Pokeynomics or not that's just numbers there.
Your half-billion gold tag forces me to do something I never said you had to do which was turn off production. I have 15k idle d00ds, 17 racks (tearing down some buildings now, remember its day 12? 13? for me only) and 400k of wood production right now. I prefer you not add your own factors to my calcs if they're unnecessary.
I'm sure I have more points but I'm lost in the math again. Oh yeah, something about how you lose more than your enemy only if you don't factor in plundering all their shiz, taking and barbing their town, and adding in the distinct joy of finally finally finally vanquishing your enemy. If you didn't hate that guy why would you have attacked him in the first place given current defense mechanics? Yes, I will concede to you that attacking someone sucks, but it is not impossible, and although you say that you do nothing but stain their shoes, no one has 500k archers in every town. This method is specifically for conjunction with real army attacking after clearing the town (yes that is another cost if you want to split hairs) of the insanely overpowered archer defense.