I've kept up with #terracore for a few months now. Mainly because it requires so little attention on my part. I'm still running the node.js bot that automatically claims and attacks every four hours (if I have at least 32 SCRAP in the stash). That means all I need to do is check in once a day or so and decide where to allocate my stats and how I want to progress.
In my last post, I explained that I was selling SCRAP for a few weeks to get back my initial investment of ~30 HIVE. I finished that and have gotten back to leveling up.
My stash size and favor...nice...
When looking at my last 100 battles, 3 attackers were my main source of lost SCRAP:
Roofer, saboin, and militech! Of course, for anyone new to terracore, there's no reason for hard feelings towards these three! This is part of the game and everyone attacks everyone.
However.
You can protect yourself! How much defense you should have is a function of your engineering level. Every four hours, I produce ~44 SCRAP.
The number of people who would regularly attack me is actually quite small. They must:
My top 3 attackers over the past few weeks have the following stats:
Over the past week or so, I was able to raise my defense from 301 to 311, which prevented more attacks from roofer. Then I raised it again to 321 which has now cut out saboin and militech. I was last robbed 19 hours ago by saboin before raising my defense.
The game is always in flux, of course. Each of these players could up their damage at any time and resume attacking me, but for now, it's very likely that I can mine in peace.
Every once in a while, I might pop up to the top target of a player with even higher damage, but we can determine roughly how likely this is by looking at people with similar levels of defense to me:
In the image below, the defense column is in red, with me at the very bottom. I've highlighted the players with engineering at my level or higher. The point of the image is to show that people with higher attack levels (328 and above) have much juicer targets.
rishi556 is producing 24 SCRAP per hour! That's more than double my rate. De-player.one is churning out 17/h. So that's data point one in my decision of what to level up next.
Data point two is the number of players with damage between my defense (321) and thwoz (327). Here's that list with attack numbers highlighted in blue.
In other words, there are two players who can attack me that can't attack thwoz and de-player.one. leosoph can attack those, and they should almost always have more scrap than I do. Especially de-player.one.
This is one that could be calculated, but that I tend to just feel out. Increasing your engineering means that you make more SCRAP per hour, but it also means that you'll get attacked a bit more often. If the goal is to raise our defense as fast as possible, we need to consider that raising engineering can sometimes be beneficial even if it leads to more attacks. As long as I'm generating more extra SCRAP per four hours than I'm losing to robbers.
As I mentioned, there are only two players who can attack me that won't have much better targets. Will they start attacking me every four hours if I increase engineering by one level?
Here's the defense ranking again, but this time, of players below my defense level. Note that there are players with 20-22 engineering below me.
This took much more time to write, explain, and for you to understand, then it actually takes me to do live. I probably spend 5 minutes considering these factors before deciding whether to increase engineering or defense next. It's also not the end of the world if you don't choose the perfectly optimal one. In my case, I'm going to increase engineering next. I'll generate an extra ~1 SCRAP per hour. That will make me a bit more of a target, but only for two players, and I won't always be at the top of their list when it's time to attack.
If I misjudged and start getting attacked a lot, then I just make sure to raise defense next. Maybe by 2 levels before raising engineering again. The goal isn't to never get attacked (I don't think). If you try to do that, you'll spending a lot of time raising defense with low scrap production rates. I try to keep SCRAP production high enough that I can afford the next level of defense in 2-3 days. I just pumped defense 2x in a row, so I'm below that now.
Lastly, I'm close to being able to pump engineering quite a bit. Once I have the same or more defense as these other players with high engineering, I can raise my engineering higher, too!
Now's not the time to look at that! This is just a game right?! 😆
Well, if you like pain, take a look:
If you read my last article, I was selling scrap in the .015 - .017 HIVE range to make my initial 30 HIVE back. In hindsight, that was a wise decision. I could have increased my SCRAP production, but not by 3x which would have been required to break even given the ~67% drop in price.
And remember kids! There's always room for another 67% drop!
Naturally, I'm not worried about selling SCRAP at these prices. I'm just focusing on the game and enjoying planning my next moves and climbing the rankings. If anything, I'm considering buying, but I see prices falling more from here - at least until more features are added to the game (SCRAP sinks) and more players start joining. Spending a little bit of HIVE at this point wouldn't be a terrible idea. Each HIVE gets you 200 SCRAP!
However, some quick maths:
In that time, how far do we think prices would fall? 😄 So no, I'll probably just keep passively generating SCRAP and investing it into upgrades. If it does drop to .001 or .002 though, I think I'm a buyer at 1000 SCRAP for 1 HIVE. Not for investment/ROI reasons (the ROI doesn't change), but just for the joy of jumping up the rankings. Who knows? Maybe I'm a buyer before that.
I'm having fun playing the game! I still haven't done boss fights. I don't like playing games with a 5% win rate (my current luck number). I am slowly raising my stash size and favor for quests though. I'll probably try those out. I'm really hoping for co-operative play in the form of guilds/corporations.
I know this was a lengthy one, so thanks for reading!
