Moonshine wiki build, what am i doing wrong?

[DrakenKin]

I am at R20 now,

Switched from fairy diamond forge to monshine, as the wiki recommends.

However this moonshine build is so awkward, and seems much much slower than the diamond forge build!

First, it's a struggle for faction coins at the start, takes a while to get the full mercenary build and all heritages running. Second, even after a full setup and leaving it for 20 minutes or so, the production barely grows. It is very slow compared to diamond forge, it doesn't make money as fast.

Example, i was at e66, ran moonshine for 20 minutes and it went from 1 e66 to about 300. But then I switched back to diamond forge, and on the very 1-2 spell combos i went from e66 to e69.

I am using neutral, fairy blood, and fairy chanting on gold where everything else but tax is on silver. I don't know why this build is so slow, what am i missing? Is the wiki outdated?

[Kesac]

Have you gotten the spell upgrade from Elven Challenge 3?

Edit: Also, don't be afraid to use a few excavations to get the FCs required. Also, if you haven't unlocked Coin Pillage yet, it's fairly easy now (use Goblin with max mana / mana regen researches (S50, S105, D135, W135 at least), and either autocast TC or manually cast it at least...twice a second or so)

[DrakenKin]

I have both elven challenge 3 and coin pillage.

I recently focused a lot more on the challenges and the trophies / excavations, i think i have most if not all of what is reasonably achievable. I didn't go for those who seem to require a week or more of dedicated grinding, only those achievable in a day or so of focus.

[Kesac]

Well, there's nothing that says you can't keep using DF if you want -- you're only going to about the same gem total (until you can unlock research in that R), and it will be quicker and quicker each R. I do remember Moonshine being a fairly large boost however (e3 gems/run or more), just to be sure, are you importing this?

FR3,FR4,GB1,TT1,TT6,TT9,DD1,DD4,DD5,DD9,DN7,DN8,SP:Moon Blessing,SP:Fairy Chanting

[Grennan]

At R20, you shouldn't need to use Moonshine if you've hit e66. Switch to Fairy research. As the R goes up, moonshine can be used to higher and higher gem counts but you can also start fairy research at lower and lower gem counts.

I did occasionally have to bridge the gap with another build, but that stopped around R19-R20.

For either Moonshine or Fairies, if I was at 0 excavations, I'd use 200; if I was under 300 I'd use 30-40 and if I was over 300 I'd use 30 - enough to grab all the heritages, the merc requirements and 50+ exchanges per faction. That gets you jumpstarted quickly. I built my own "fast fairy" research build to use for the first fairy run (or more if necessary) that mostly just grabs everything that's low-cost that has any benefit at all, so I could load that each time I crossed over into the low or mid-e60 range until I could hit a "good" fairy (or other faction) build.

What I found was that if I could build out all my buildings/upgrades/etc plus heritages and exchanges, and a spell cycle got me to at least 3e127 coints for buying C10, then I could make Fairy research work from there; if not, I'd go back and run another mercenary build of one sort or another. Run a spell cycle, buy all available research from the fast build, run another, buy more, repeat until I've got all my research or a sufficient gem total to want to adbicate...then do another quick fairy run or step up to a better build, possibly a different faction. (I liked elves or goblins to get faction coins for research levels).