Refinement to the 4-expedition challenge

[Dog of Justice]

The usual "4-expedition challenge" is an extension of the "In Time for Lunch" Achievement: starting from scratch, defeat all 4 bosses in your first 4 expeditions.

Some people have pulled this off (e.g. a "Winning the game in four expeditions total" YouTube video was recently posted on r/LoopHero). So I was thinking to myself, what's even more impressive than winning the game in four expeditions?

Also building out your entire base and owning all relevant supply items, before going on another expedition, of course. To be more precise, you must end the fourth expedition with enough resources to build the Alchemist's Tent with at least one resource of each type to spare, and the ability to generate... let's say 1 million hydrogen. If you use a non-fighting infinite loop to do this, determine how many loops you need to leave the game running for to reach that resource threshold (fewer loops * [tiles per loop] is better).

Interestingly, I found that "basic Necro" farming endless battlefield-covered Vampire/Ratwolf mobs after killing the final boss can ALMOST pull this off. My high-quality level 89 skeletons could safely fight level 74 but not level 75 Vampire/Ratwolf mobs; level 100 skeletons could safely fight level 80 but not level 81 mobs. (I had placed 3 Sand Dunes, so your numbers may vary slightly.) I had enough spare resources to generate >300k hydrogen when I retreated (with the Ancestral Crypt resurrect charge still available; looks like Prime Matter is exceedingly unlikely to kill you when you have sufficient skeleton quality/attack speed/skeleton level) at the end of loop 81, but I wouldn't have been able to make it to 1 million with that strategy since the enemies' quadratic scaling was starting to overtake my linear scaling.

I haven't tried them yet, but I'm guessing that both all-Swamps and 99-Sand-Dunes scale well enough in the current v1.1 beta build to reach 1 million hydrogen. (Not coincidentally, I suspect that those two cards could benefit from some rebalancing... and the same can be said for the Necro class as a whole...)

[Dog of Justice]

To elaborate on the last comment about game balance:
- It's probably a good thing that the best players in the world can complete the standard 4-expedition challenge more than 5% of the time. This means that the game isn't fundamentally about grinding.
- However, if it is possible to complete this greater challenge more than 5% of the time, that might be bad. One characteristic of this game is that different decks are better for different goals. The reaction to the initial v1.1 beta supply limits illustrates the value of keeping Farming All The Things as a thing you can do in the game; but if the same basic deck + class, available to someone who has completed only three expeditions, has too high a chance of both beating the final boss AND subsequently Farming All The Things in the fourth expedition, something in that deck and/or class may be stronger than it should be for the long-term health of the game. It's more fun to wield godlike power when there's something more substantial for it to be wielded *against*.

[Jean]

I love the brainstorming but I don't personally like the idea of adding a farming component over the 4-expedition challenge. I find it somewhat tedious and definitely time consuming. There's not many people already doing those in the first place so I would encourage competition using the simple baselines and going for quicker time!

Game balance is generally broken all over with grind as you noted, which is an extra benefit of relatively short, simple challenges which don't to get to grind.

[Dog of Justice]

While time is a remaining dimension to compete on, I'm more interested in decision quality; the game can be paused at any time, and that makes it possible to give any particular decision as much contemplation as it deserves. See jorbs's 5-expedition-win YouTube series; I find that more entertaining to watch than a pure speedrun, and I think I'm far from alone in this.

Perhaps the terms of my proposal could be revised to further reduce the amount of required grinding, but I'm pretty sure it's already quite mild? You're still limited to 4 expeditions. The first 3 are resource-capped, and the endgame of the fourth is about setting up an infinite or near-infinite loop, rather than manually updating your gear every few levels (I noted in my first post that regular Necro play, which does require tedious scanning of all incoming items, can't quite make it to a million hydrogen; you need to set up something overpowered that ISN'T grindy once it's set up).

[Dog of Justice]

After a bit of testing, I no longer suspect that Swamps are overpowered (Necromancers do not like to face Mosquitoes early on), and I don't think Sand Dunes are useful for this challenge either since they eat up so much deck space and are slow enough to get going. So Road Lanterns would probably be the way to go.