Time Bonus Calculation

[DD13]

My brain isn't letting me math today. Anyone know offhand how the time bonus is calculated? (I'm doing scenarios at the moment)

[Dray Prescot]

There is a calculation method in the Strategy Guide, but the figures do not match what I am seeing for end Rank,

[gardlt]

Yeah, does the time bonus consider the time the task was given to us, or is it from the start of the game? People are getting within 2.6% of perfect time bonus on the 1st campaign mission. That's quite amazing. There are some tasks that simply can't be fulfilled instantly since you have to grow locked regions.

We should test what happens on a mission if you delay on one of the first tasks and then setup to "near instantly" fulfill all others. I think I might try it.

[Bla Razor]

Originally posted by Dray Prescot:

There is a calculation method in the Strategy Guide, but the figures do not match what I am seeing for end Rank,

I've tried to replicate the calculation as described in the game docs and can also confirm it's not matching with the time bonus in the game's final ranking screen.

My current best guess is that it's tied to a preset schedule, something like "best theoretically possible time" and if you're close to that you can get those really high scores.

What gardlt suggested also sounds possible...

[gardlt]

I did a few rough calculations. I didn't find a formula, but comparing time bonus before/after some optionals are completed it seems more plausible that it's from the time a task is given to us. After seeing the numbers it didn't seem promising enough to test delaying all tasks.

It seems that the maximum, if all tasks were fulfilled instantly, is 300k. Obviously that's not possible thanks to city growth, locked regions, etc.. By completing one task faster, our time to complete all future tasks is increasing. So even if we have a fixed length task, like grow a city to 120k, takes somewhere around 2 years at 100(+)% fulfillment, if we have longer to do that, our score will be slightly better. So we should want to unlock tasks as fast as possible and not wait.

Is there some info about it in the paid strategy guide? The only thing I found in-game is this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2992144430

Maybe because of translation, but the wording is quite opaque. "A continuous time bonus depending on the speed." "The speed" of WHAT? Probably it's just the speed you do the task. But we can only guess. . . .

My first play through of all the campaign and scenarios I kept the game running as much as possible. Took me far too long to find the game option to keep running in construction mode, so I was unpausing a lot till I found that. Missions were taking between 2 and 3 hours. Of course I didn't know what to expect, but my ranking is quite bad in general. I didn't do that for the last mission, slowing down and "learning" things. Spent about the same amount of time on the last mission as the rest of the game. This is where I realized that Restaurant and Market Hall can give insane express revenues, seems to be 10x what is stated, so +250% combined, when it should be +25%.

Score for the last scenario after 20+ hours seems comparatively quite decent. I also spent quite some time on the 1st mission to learn to optimize it better. Currently 5th, after spending 13 hours on it. Learning stuff along the way, so it's not a perfect run. From these, I suggest that if "real time spent" is a factor, it's not a powerful one.