From the late game to the space (Empire points grinding)

[Balgrim]

Hello mates,
Since some days, i am grinding the empire points to reach the space part of the game.
But it seems to taking a lot of time, i am at my 35th sail away, and the game is pretty redundant.

So i am asking this question : is it normal to taking so many time or i am using a bad build ?

Thanks mates !

[Ameto]

How many empire points do you have? How did you spend your amber? Did you max out the Wise Frog relic?

In general, you want to have Egyptian 5, American 1, Greek 2, Romans 5, Russian 3 (for International trade unlocking after 10 tiles), English 4, and German 5. After you have that, American 4 is nice too.

If you didn't already, I recommend getting the 999 amber upgrade.

I assume you have been investing in stone production, which is fine in the beginning, but as you start to sail away faster it starts to give less and less returns. So it might be a good idea to start going for wheat instead, and doing 1 forest, 1 quarry, 1 temple, then 1:1 wheat field/school/cathedral/shipyard.

And late game you should be running Wise Frog, and ditch academies. With the relic at high levels you benefit more from building up and abdicating fast than from waiting for captures and rituals.

If you're still getting tiles slowly try doing a few captures with Oni, with berserker and levelling the 2nd weapon (1st axe) in the forge for faster kills, then switch to Frog.

[XenosHg]

When exactly does wheat become worth it? i assume I'm missing something yet.

[Saltar]

Originally posted by XenosHg:

When exactly does wheat become worth it? i assume I'm missing something yet.

The way I look at it is: What do you find is taking the most time as you go through a continent? If it's waiting for your early schools, is it wheat, wood, or stone that's driving it? Is it your faith accumulation to get your god of war mentorships or perhaps upgrade your relics? Then boost faith production. If you just boost whatever the biggest driver is to the first slowdown you notice, you can't go wrong. Stone only has 1 purpose after your tiles are filled, and that's income. Wheat speeds up your resource accumulation, early combat, and production of everything but shipyards. Wood upgrades shipyards (which in turn increase income) and can be used for hero leveling and forge fueling if desired. Without Russia 5 faith can be almost as useless as stone if your relics are fully upgraded, but if you pay attention you'll find there are times where you're sitting around waiting on faith (that decreases as you get certain things like Egypt 1, Egypt 4, Greek 3, Greek 4, Russia 4). Then you can look at things like "I do runs to heritage XYZ pantheon every continent". What if you just abdicated and immediately had enough faith for that? Not viable for god of war or sacred path really, but would be possible for nature/chrom easily.

[XenosHg]

Yeah, I'm kinda early game, 12 empire points (america-1 egypt-3 greek-1 roman-1 russian-2 and saving for russia-3)
And most income comes from using cromlechis heritage and a ton of rituals.
And, since it's linearly growing stone income plus linearly growing number of rituals, without the exponential cost of buildings price/waiting time, it's a bit incomparable. After a day of idling, it gives back 1+ B gold per 35 second ritual.
It's possible to get, for example, 300, maybe even 500 loggers per forest, but fields are much, much slower than that. Meanwhile, masons per quarry count in thousands.

So I was asking, which upgrade/combo makes wheat instantly more profitable per time invested than just running cromlechis rituals for a day and then buying 10 tiles and running for another day and buying 10 more tiles

[Ameto]

I'd recommend investing in Egypt 5 ASAP because it will double your gold income, if you can keep up with half time rituals.

There's no turning point that makes wheat obviously more profitable. It's just that with wheat you'll get your schools workers higher faster, and quarries just let you build academies but eventually you'll have so many surveyors that academies become obsolete. Also later on with Wise Frog relic you can abdicate with less and less rituals, so Cromlechis also gets useless. Idling becomes pretty much inexistent after you sail away about 30-40 times.

My permanent upgrades right now are +16000% wheat and +1000% wood/stone/faith, and I sail away in about 4 minutes. I actually anticipated that stone would start giving less and less returns so I invested in wheat all the way. I eventually started investing in the other bonuses to speed up school and shipyard construction and pantheon acquisition.

[XenosHg]

Ah, I guess at some point amber becomes part of the planning. I'll keep that in mind.

[Balgrim]

Thank you for your tips Ameto !