Starter Guide: Efficient event scoring

Introduction

Update 2019: When I started playing this game around 680 days ago, I didn't think much about strategy or efficiency. I just laced my boots, assembled the best squad I could and started smashing Decepticons. Because that is what you do when starting this game. You only have a handful of bots, so you can't really choose which bot to use or not to use. You are blessed with I think 250 fuel cells, so you don't really experience cell depleting in the first days of your gaming.

I started in our mid tier alliance who had an event minimum set at 3,000 points back in the day. I could smash that score without thinking too much about how to get there, as I just played whenever I could, played with what I got and it worked out fine. Cool down times were short, so I could basically just logged in and went at it.

But after some weeks in the group I took a look at the top of our scoreboard, and I saw players scoring amazing scores of 8,000 to 10,000 points. I was sure that those guys were just spending some money on battle bundles or coins and didn't care about it too much. As I grew stronger, I started to do that on my own. I had nice and motivating competitions with other players in the group. I was completely startled when one of our 10k guys told me he was doing it all free-to-play. Not spending a single dime.

 

I wanted that, too. So I started asking myself and more experienced players in the alliance about how to play this game with an improved efficiency. In this guide I want to share my thoughts and ideas with you.
 

The goals of this guide are the following:

• To give you a little insight on how time management in this game works
• To enable even lower level players to reach the holy ground of 10,000 points or higher
• To do so without spending money
• To do so in a healthy way without sacrificing sleep or too much of your private/work time

Basics

There are some basic key figures you need to know about when you really want to dive into this game. There are also some terms I use that I want to clarify first so you don't get confused.

• Battle: This is a single fight with a single squad.
• Turn: This is a series of battles with all the squads you can or want to use.
• Cell: This refers to the fuel cells you use up in a battle.

After using up your 250 initial fuel cells when you start to play this game, the following basics are important to know about cells.

• Your fuel cell count is limited to 50.
• Every battle uses up 5 cells.
• 1 cell takes 4 minutes to refuel.
• Reloading 5 cells for a battle therefore takes 20 minutes.

Maximum number of battles

Any idea on efficiency in this game is heavily related to knowledge of time. This divides into two different parameters. 

• Refuel time: The time that is needed for your cells to refuel.
• Cool down time: The time your bots need to recharge and be available for the next battle.

So let's focus on refuel time first to exercise some theory.

An event weekend covers a time span of 72 hours or 4,320 minutes. If you take the 20 minutes it takes to refuel 5 cells for a single battle, there is a possibility of fighting 216 battles in an event without spending money on extra fuel cells. This number is highly theoretical as it would require you to play every 20 minutes. So this would mean to spent your whole weekend with your smartphone, which would most likely damage your health and your personal life as I don't know too many friends, partners or family who would tolerate this.

Much more problematic is the certain lack of sleep in between the battles. I know that there are players out there who sacrifice sleep for a higher event score. I personally don't do it, and would never recommend it. Sleep is necessary for a healthy life, and no one should sacrifice their sleep for playing a game. I consider this to be toxic gaming, therefore this whole guide aims at giving you an idea of what scores are possible without spending money or sacrificing sleep.

The ideas of how many sleep a human being needs differ from case to case. It depends on who you ask, how old you are and so on. I found out for myself that I can do pretty well with a daily six hours of sleep. So let's assume that, of the 72 hours of event time, 18 hours are spent with sleeping. This leaves you with 54 hours or 3,240 minutes of game time. If you now again take the 20 minutes it takes to refuel 5 cells for a single battle, there is a theoretical possibility of fighting 162 battles in an event without spending money on extra fuel cells.

If you compare this number with the possible battle points from the last events, these are maximum possible scores when you win all of these 162 battles.

So in this scenario, you just got to assemble a zone 6 squad, play every 20 minutes for 18 hours a day, don't lose a single battle and you will almost crack the magical 10,000 points. The problem is that you will still be spending the whole day with your smartphone (at least without sacrificing sleep) and will most likely not win every battle. So this scenario basically leaves you with enough sleep, but zero social life and possibly less than 10,000 points because you will lose a battle now and then. Not very appealing, isn't it?

The importance of using up fuel cells

The biggest problem with playing just one squad every 20 minutes, besides the mentioned social and health difficulties, is that you will never use up all your cells. You have got to keep in mind that you usually start an event with a completely filled storage of 50 fuel cells (except for you used those cells before the event by raiding resources). If you now just use on squad every 20 minutes, the lowest your cell count will go is 45. You will use 5 cells for your battle, and they will be refilled within the 20 minute gap between your battles. So no matter how many squads you use, at one point of every event day you should use up all your fuel cells.

As long as your cool down time for your squad is below 20 minutes, this can be done with one squad. Just fight your first battle and return after cool down is done. Do not wait until cells are back up to 50. Because once they reached the limit of 50, they won't fill up above that limit. So letting the fuel cells max out during the day is the worst possible scenario when you think about efficient playing. This brings us to first and most important rule of efficient event scoring: Stay ahead of your cell count!

A picture you don't want to see in an event.

Using up your cells gives you a serious number of extra battles you wouldn't have if you would just play in the 20 minute refuel pattern. If you manage to bring your fuel cells down to 0 once a day and stay ahead of the 50 cell limit for the rest of the day, you are close to maximum efficiency.

 

With using up your fuel cells once a day, the highest possible number of extra battles would be 10 battles daily. This sums up to a possible number of 192 battles in an event. Remember, you will still sleep 6 hours daily and only therefore lose 24 battles in total compared to the theoretical 216 battles we calculated in the beginning. So if we add these numbers, here is what using up your cells will bring you.

 

So our above mentioned zone 6 solo squad would generate an extra of 1,800 points, which is certainly worth the extra effort.

Of course it is much easier to do this if you assemble more than just one squad. With several squads, you can do several battles in a sequence and therefore use more cells in one gaming session. The more squads you use, the more time you will have in between your turns before your cells go to 50 again. So using more squads basically means more time in between gaming sessions.

The right number of squads

I really did my math to find out what the right number of squads is for an efficient event. I did a lot of spreadsheet work which I will spare you for now, but of course I will share the results.

To get the most accurate result, it is theoretically necessary to do a calculation for every single bot level and its cool down time. I did not do that but instead created three groups of cool down range adapted to the 20 minutes of cell refueling time.

The picture above shows the highest possible number of battles in the three cool down groups depending on the number of squads. Two things are important here.

First, it never makes sense to fight with only one squad, unless you simply don't have enough bots for a second squad. As soon as your longest cool down time expands 40 minutes (which happens at bot level 47 and higher), you should assemble a third squad. As soon as it expands beyond 60 minutes, you should do a fourth one.

Besides that, it doesn't really matter how many squads you lead into the battlefield. You can play at maximum efficiency with just two squads, as long as your cool down time is below 20 minutes and you stay ahead of the cell count. The number of squads only effects the frequency in which you need to do your turns. The more squads you have, the more cells you burn. Therefore more squads will give you more time to do other things than playing the game.

For me it has turned out to be most compatible with my personal life to play with at least six squads. My cool down times are around 60 minutes, so I would start an event day with six turns every hour to burn my cells to 0 and then login every 120 minutes for another turn. My most common event setup is an army of 5 squads hitting zone 13, 5 squads hitting zone 12 and one developmental squad currently htting zone 10. I start an event day with 1 turn of 11 battles burn my cells to 0 and then login every hour to play my top 3 squads and burn the cells that recharged within the hour. So with 192 battles a weekend I could theoretically score around 30,000 points. But assuming that you rarely win all the battles because there's always a base that doesn't fit your squad setup, or you get distracted or other reasons, I'd rather think of having a 90% wins and therefore end up with 27,000 points.

Zone management

A question that always comes to my mind when assembling squads is if it is better to do less squads and attack higher zones, or to do more squads and attack lower zones.

There are two things you need to think about here. First there is the average amount of points. Let's say you have 6 squads ready for zone 9 in a standard event. Those would score an average of 90 points per battle. Zone 10 averages 103 points, zone 8 averages 80 points. So if you now rearrange your teams to have one zone 10 squad, you may either be forced to play with just 5 squads (which would raise your average to 93, but increase your number of turns you have to play) or to reduce your sixth squad to zone 8 (which would leave your average score at 90 with the same number of turns). The example shows that to have one or two squads in higher zones isn't a huge difference maker if you need to weaken the rest of your squads and therefore send these to lower zones simultaneously.

The second and even more important thing is your winning rate. What you should try to avoid at any cost in events is losing battles. Because catching up on lost points is near to impossible. Therefore you should rather go for a lower zone and have 95% of wins there instead of aiming too high and maybe just win 70% of your battles.

The following sheet shows you the average score per battle in each zone related to the win rate you can achieve in that zone. It shows you that the loss tolerance for hitting a higher zone isn't very high. Let's say you have a strong zone 9 squad which wins 95% of its battles and therefore scoring 86 points in average. To have a positive effect on your score, you would need to win 85% of battles with a zone 10 team. Below that, hitting a higher zone would either be of no effect at all or may even be negative because you will lose more often.

 

 

So as you can see that as long as you can't certainly say that you still win at least 80% of your battles when moving up a zone, it might be better to just stay in your current zone and secure 90% wins or more.

As a little tool for finding the right squad setup for you, I made this little spreadsheet. Feel free to use it in your event preparations.

Transformers: Earth Wars - Event Calculator

Conclusion

So that's basically it. If you take a look at the presented numbers and follow those five simple rules you should be fine in your upcoming event scoring efforts.

• Stay ahead of your cell count all day!
• Burn your cells to 0 once a day, at the latest at the end of a day - just don't take cells to bed with you!
• Rather hit a lower zone with a high win rate than a higher zone with a low win rate!
• Don't forget your private and work life!
• Don't sacrifice your sleep!

If you enjoyed what you just read, come and join our fight in the Sentinel family. We have four alliances for every level of playing.

Thank you for reading along. Constructive comments and feedback are very welcome.

Cheers

bioDROID // Sentinel Shadows

NEWS: New game mode

Yesterday Space Ape revealed the new game mode they are working on. It is called "ALLIANCE RAID" and it's basically a mode where you attack completely overpowered zones as a team to earn rewards.

So the idea is that every player's attack does damage to the base, and the next player attacking finds a pre-damaged base to add more damage. The more destruction the alliance creates as a whole, the more rewards we get.

To attack in this mode, you don't need fuel cells but tokens. Tokens are earned during normal event battles.

They'll add some new building types, but for this mode only. You can see these in the screenshots I made - they are the oversized buildings. Graphics aren't final, they'll get their own design.

The defenses have ridiculous health points to make destroying them very hard, but they also give you more ability points than usual when destroyed so the abilities can be used more often.

Bases can't be attacked simultaneously by several players. They'll be blocked as long as an attack is taking place.

These raid battles offer normal XP only, but the overpowered defenses give you much more XP than the normal base defenses of course.

For the record: The duration of 340d shown in the first screen is a test only, reality will see these happening at the weekend instead of a standard event. So we won't see these every weekend. Maybe they'll do these during the week as well in case people react positive to the mode itself.

We'll have the opportunity to test this mode in some way, no details on that yet.

Release date isn't set, but planned to be before the end of 2018.

You can watch everything yourself here at 29:30 - https://youtu.be/PguXv9zWCdU

bioDROID out!

ESSENTIALS: Sentinel Rulebook

The leading members of Sentinel family felt it is about time that we lay down the rules for all family members. This creates transparency over how we roll and secures fairness while playing this wonderful game together.

Feel free to add questions or feedback in the comments.

Earth Wars: Sentinel Family

Rulebook

1. WARS:

1.1. Participation is mandatory in all started wars.

1.2. We stand united, even in the face of defeat - everyone has to attempt base 1 in every war.

1.3. Not attempting base one will cause a reminder message from leading staff during the war.

1.4. Everyone with 0 attempts at the end of a war "earns" a war strike.

1.5. 3 war strikes in a row result in a demotion to the next lower alliance.

1.6. If a war strike is collected, it can be negated by fighting in the next war.

1.5. Behavior that may result in a demotion to the next lower alliance:

• Repeatedly having to be reminded to attempt base 1
• Repeatedly collecting 2 strikes before participating in war
• Ignoring leading staff's call to redesign an obviously flawed base (i.e. solos, Dead End pulls, Megatron rushes)

2. EVENTS

2.1. All players have to hit their respective alliance minimum score.
2.2. As soon as someone knows that he won't be able to hit that minimum, he or she has to actively inform their commander.
2.3. If the alliance finishes the event early and a player hasn't already hit the minimum, they are required to at least complete that minimum score by helping out other Sentinel alliances.
2.4. Players who don't move out for above mentioned point may be kicked with a message telling them to do so.

3. PROMOTION

3.1. Players who exceed their respective alliances at least 3 times in a row will be considered for promotion to the next higher alliance in case they meet the other requirements (base level, squad power).
3.2. The promotion offer can be denied twice by the player if they don't feel ready for the next step yet or already know about upcoming real life issues preventing them from keeping their gaming level.
3.3. The third time a promotion is offered, the player has to move up.

4. DEMOTION

4.1. Demotion generally is in order whenever a member constantly fails to live up to the respective alliance's requirements, i.e.:

• Missing event minimums 3 times in a row
• Not participating in wars 3 times in a row
• 2 days (Sentinel Warpath) respectively 3 days (Sentinel Beings, Sentinel Knights, Sentinel Shadows) or more of uncommunicated absence

4.2. Players will be informed about their demotion by the commander or officers with the request to move down voluntarily.
4.3. If a demoted player doesn't move voluntarily, he may be kicked and ordered to report in at the next lower alliance.
4.4. A demoted player has to work his way back up under the above mentioned rules of promotion.

5. REAL LIFE ISSUES

5.1. We have an honest understanding for whenever real life gets in the way.
5.2. Every player is responsible for actively communicating any issues to their officers or commander as soon as possible.
5.3. If a player is hindered from hitting the respective alliance minimums by a real life situation, he or she is expected to do the right thing and step down voluntarily to a fitting lower level alliance.
5.4. Players who are asked to do so and refuse to comply may be kicked and ordered to report in at the next lower alliance.
5.5. Urgent or emergency situations won't get anyone kick as long as we know what's going on.

6. COMMUNICATION

6.1. Our central communication tools are Facebook and its Messenger tool.
6.2. We urge every player to become a part of at least one of them to make out-of-game communication easier for everyone.
6.3. Players without a Facebook account can reach the family via its BAND group, via LINE or via this blog.
6.4. Event scores are communicated on a weekly basis for team and LB events via the Sentinel Family Facebook page.
6.5. Here are the most important communication links:

• Facebook group "Earth Wars: Sentinel Family"
• BAND group for Sentinel Shadows "Earth Wars: Sentinel Family"

6. ALLIANCE REQUIREMENTS

6.1. Sentinel Knights:

• First level competitive crew
• Base Level: All bases HQ 8 or higher
• Event Minimum: 4,000 points in all events
• Squad Level: Top war team with a power of 3,000 or higher
• War Schedule: Four wars a week (Monday to Thursday), participation mandatory
• No wars during events (team & solo events)

6.2. Sentinel Shadows:

• Mid Level competitive crew
• Base Level: All bases HQ 13 or higher
• Event Minimum: 80% of 40 player average in standard events, 10,000 points in leaderboard events
• Squad Level: Top war team with a power of 8,000 or higher
• War Schedule: Three wars a week (Monday to Wednesday), participation mandatory
• No wars during events (team & solo events)
• BAND required

6.3. Sentinel Beings:

• Mid level competitive crew
• Base Level: All bases HQ 11 with fully maxed defenses
• Event Minimum: 7,000 points in standard team events, 11,000 points in leaderboard events
• Squad Level: Top war team with a power of 6,000 or higher
• War Schedule: Four wars a week (Monday to Thursday) and during 10 points flat solo events, participation mandatory
• No wars during team events

6.4. Sentinel Warpath:

• Top level competitive crew
• Base Level: All bases HQ 15 with fully maxed defenses
• Event Minimum:14,000 points in standard team events, 18,000 points in leaderboard events
• Squad Level: Top war team with a power of 10,000 or higher
• War Schedule: Wars all week and during all events, participation mandatory

Event info: BATTLE OF WITS

Sorry for being lazy here lately, had some busy days. This weekend will see an individual totalizer with 60 prestige, rewarding us 2-, 3- and 4-star shards. It will be a triple XP event, therefore everyone battle zone only offers a max of 10 battle points.

Assuming one scores an average of 9 per battle and fights the full 192 battles I calculated in my player's guide a few months ago, the possible score to achieve without spending or sacrificing sleep would be around 1,700 points.

So since every prestige takes 100 points, this allows you to get 17 prestige and the following rewards staying F2P:

17 x 25 = 425 2-star shards
17 x 15 = 255 3-star shards
17 x 10 = 170 4-star shards
17 x 50,000 = 850,000 energon
17 x 50,000 = 850,000 alloy

That's very lame, so it'll be all about the XP this again.

Go level your bots!
bioDROID out

Event review: POWER BEYOND MEASURE

So here we are, guns are still hot from shooting down an incredible amount of Decepticons this weekend. The event was called "Power beyond measure", and it saw the official launch of the newest additions to the character roster: Rodimus Prime for he Autobots and Motormaster for the Decepticons. I'll get into those two bots and their abilities later in this post.


Leaderboard events are always special as they are the only type of event with a game wide ranking and no point limitation whatsoever. A lot of people despise them though because it's been almost impossible to hit the top 100 and get at least the 3* version of a new bot without having a majority of the alliance buying fuel cell bundles. So basically non-spending alliances are doomed to a new 2* and a handful of premium crystals, which isn't the most appealing reward for a weekend of grinding. But still, the event itself usually always is a lot of fun, and this weekend was no different.


Sentinel family had a hard time on leaderboards lately since we lost a bunch of hard hitting members a few months ago and couldn't get anywhere near the top 100. This led to other members (including me) leaving the family for the triple changer weekend and act as a mercenaries on other alliances to get their shot at the new 3* bot. The remaining players focused in our top and mid tier groups Warpath and Beings and finished both groups in the top 400 (#346 for Warpath, #381 for Beings).


But since we still want to evolve Warpath back into a top 100 group, we tried to do things different this weekend. Warpath currently has 34 regular members. We approached all of them two weeks before the leaderboard and asked them to state a score that they are able and willing to hit in the event. We got 24 answers, 10 of them committing to our minimum score of 12,000 points or higher. 10 people went for at least 10,000 points, and another 2 admitted they won't be able to hit hard that weekend and dropped down to Beings. Two members openly stated early on they were going out to a top 100 group as mercenaries.


So we now had the chance to offer the remaining 10 spots in Warpath to every Sentinel member from Knights and Beings who would commit to at least 10,000 points. The resonance was awesome, so we had no problem in filling up Warpath to a full army of 40 players. Beings again took in some players from Knights to be at 40 as well. So with all the pledges combined, we could expect a total score of around 430,000 points, which should have led us at least back to the top 300. But what happened than was just amazing.


We started off pretty well, finishing the first part of the event (a 60,000 point totalizer for mainly shards and 2* Rodimus Prime) after 4 to 5 hours in. Looking at the leaderboard we realized that we were way more higher than expected, always pending around rank 120 something. Especially our "guests" from Sentinel Beings and Knights really pushed themselves hard, adding up nicely to our top 5 scorers. so in the end, we exceeded our expectations of 450 to maybe 500,000 points by far, ending up with a total of 603,593 points, ranking 131 of the world.

This was a fun race with some motivating competition within the alliance, and I'm very proud of where we ended up. A lot of folks exceeded their pledge by far, and all I can say is thank you guys for the effort made, the time invested and the dedication proven.


Bad news of this event is that, the bar for hitting the top 100 once again has been risen. 760,000 points were needed to get a 3* bot out of this event, which is an average of 19,000 points per player and therefore near to impossible to reach without spending money on fuel cells. I'm sure this will just intensify the anger at this type of event, but most likely nothing will change.


Before I close this post I wanna take a short look at Rodimus Prime.

His special "overloads" the other bots in the team and pushes their stats for a short time period. I already read that even the 2* gives a nice boost to a squad and that people expect this ability to be nerved very soon, so enjoy yours while it lasts.


Thanks for reading along, see you next time.
bioDROID out!

Event info: POWER BEYOND MEASURE

So here we have it, ladies and gentlemen: The first leaderboard event of 2018. This one is for our new leader class bots Rodimus Prime (Autobots) and Motormaster (Decepticons).


In preparation we organized some temporary player movements. Warpath will be filled up with 40 players doing a minimum of 10,000 points, some aiming even 12,000 or 15,000 points, to end up ranked top 200. Beings loses some hard hitters by this, but will still aim for the deserved spot in the top 400. Knights will aim at finishing the 60,000 point totalizer.


Here are your event details:

 

 

 

Have fun and go smash some cons!


Yours
bioDROID

Event review: THE LAST TRICK

We just came out of what was an, in my opinion, exciting and motivating event called "The Last Trick", which came as a type of event a lot of people were looking for. Not only was it an alliance totalizer with 60 prestige but it also offered a so called "Trickster Crystal" at the end of every prestige with a chance on either 2-, 3- or 4-star shards or a new bot in 2-, 3- or 4-star Cosmos. Additional to that, the event offered a total of the following rewards:


60 x 300 = 18,000 Spark
60 x 25,000 = 1,500,000 Energon
60 x 25,000 = 1,500,000 Alloy


In preparation for this event no major player movements were made, so all three alliances started with the personnel they had. The goal was as usual to finish Warpath early in the event and than spread out to Beings and Knights for a maximum possible reward for everyone. Every group set very clear minimums this time:

• Warpath: 9k total minimum, 3k as daily target
• Beings: 6k total minimum, 2k as daily target
• Knights: 3k total minimum, 1k as daily target

Warpath had only 5 people below the expected score (adjusted to the fact we finished early), Beings saw a little more with 13 players missing out on the target, and Knights had 8 folks below par. The upside of this was that we had some early and clear statements from people who had to deal with real life or technical issues, which I truly appreciate. As long as we know about someone's whereabouts, we won't lash out on or even kick them.


The overall dedication to this event let to Warpath finishing after approx. 50 hours. We have to admit here that we received huge help by lesviva and mudthump, two Warpath alumni now killing it TF Psy-Ops, who brought as an extra score of 50,972 points. Without them, we would have needed maybe 8 to 10 more hours to finish, still leaving us with at least 12 hours to help out the family. In reality, we now had 22 hours left to spread out in rotation which was great.


Beings already had about 184,000 points by themselves when rotation kicked in, Knights had about 124,000 points. So Beings were heading for 264,000, Knights for 178,000 if both kept their pace. Both numbers are great, and with some help from Warpath members we finally finished with the following results.

I took a look at everyone's combined score from all three groups and, for the first time, I'll present to you the first Sentinel family event ranking.

Congratulations to everyone who extended their personal best and thanks to all who pulled their weight this weekend.


Kind regards
bioDROID