Forums → Games → GC2CS: on gem bombing and grade

Lower grades increase armor more than hp, but don't give you much more xp per bomb or monsters per bomb.

At level 300, you don't need to optimize much because you'll be able to do better on the replay with more levels. Just worry about getting to level 2500 or so in the least amount of playtime then worry about getting as much xp as you can stand (because it's omg tedious) from enraging.

Don't forget that xp for a field heavily depends on getting wisdom sparks (a grade 54 gem will max them out). A difference of a 50 multiplier by wave 100 vs a 10...optimizing gem bombing isn't going to get close to that. And it's due to change with the next patch anyway.

Try a lot of high grade gems...
And it's grade 57 for the wisdom sparks

At max skill level, normal gems at grade 5 cost about 1,000 mana. Gems at grade 15 cost about 1,000,000 mana. Gems at grade 25 cost about 1,000,000,000 mana. And so on, going up roughly 1,000 times every 10 grades.

At lower skill levels, those gem grades will not match up with those costs, so with lower skills, you will have to make your own observations about which grades to use.

What I do though, is early on, after upgrading everything, I round my mana down to the nearest "-illion" : 125,534,632,456 would round down to 1,000,000,000. I would then take that rounded down amount, divide by 1,000 and use the gem grade that corresponds to that cost. In this case, 1,000,000,000 / 1,000 = 1,000,000 ... and so I would use a Grade 15 gem.

Later on, when I'm having to wait more than one Mana Lock cycle to upgrade anything, I stop going by the amount of mana I have in the bank, and instead go by the amount of mana I gain per Mana Lock cycle. If I need 5e28 mana, I have 1.4e28 mana, and I'm getting 4e26 mana per cycle, it makes little sense to toss hundreds of gem bombs at e24 mana each. In this case, going down to e21 (rounding then dividing from the e26 figure instead of the e28 figure) allows me to build up the mana I require while still throwing big bombs and getting a lot of experience.

Oops, missed the second part of the question although Astro addressed cost above: Don't worry about making back the mana cost of gem bombing. It's minorly a concern around your level (big concern earlier where you need the kill mana to pay off), but once you have 60 in every skill (45 + 15 talisman), you'll make 99.9repeating% of your mana from mana gems.

Like for Astro's example: using 10^23 mana to anger a wave, the kill mana gain for the wave probably won't crack 100 million (10^8...even with the late game multipliers). You probably get more xp per wave than mana late game

to clarify a few things, i meant WAVE 334 in OP, not wizard level, my level is currently just a few under 1.5k. I have all the skills that matter (fusion, resonance, true colors, freeze, red, yellow, black, orange, fury, traps and some others) to 45, and already have everything +15. (also i understand mana per kill is trivial, even in the first mana cycle it only makes like 2% of my gain, and it just plummets to infinitesimally low ratios from there...)

i don't think anyone really answered my main question, though admittedly i didn't make it stand out much, let me rephrase a bit... precisely what i want to know is, if E is the exp gain from killing the monster, and H is the HP gain, what strategy will make X biggest in:

X = E/P

to me, this is the kind of deep digging that really interests me, my edge in games is that i make it a point to learn every last mechanical detail of what makes the game tick and use / abuse that knowledge to optimize my play. so if it seems like i'm being really detailed about something that probably doesn't matter all that much, well sorry, but that's just how i play the game.

Your question can be easily answered looking at the game itself, and the answer I found surprised myself a lot.

First of all, from game code, with massive edits for clarity (I hope I'm not committing copyright infringement posting this):

willSummon = pow(usedGem.grade,1.2) * 4 + 4 // * 1.5/0.2 if swarm/giant

HpIncr = (usedGem.grade * 0.03 + 0.1) * monsterWave.hp * (1 - FURYRED)
armorIncr = max(2, 0.24 * monsterWave.armorLevel * (1 - FURYRED))

XpIncr = 0.02 * (1 + FURYINCR) * monsterWave.xpBase * pow(usedGem.grade + 1,0.89)

AG forum formatting is especially ****ty with pseudocode, I'll probably make a better written version in the gemforce repo.

From the above we gather:

1) Only grade matters, so always enrage with u-upgraded gems (no special combines)

2) Armor increment does not depend on the used gem

3) The interesting quantity to look at is, as LucaDiv already said, is F=XpIncr/HpIncr and we have, letting g be the gem grade:

F(g)=C(W)*(g+1)^0.89/(0.3*g+1)

where C(W) is a coefficient beyond your control that depends on the characteristics of the wave and on your fury skill

This function is plotted below:

As you can see this function has a maximum and then slowly decreases, which means that (if I'm not mistaken) there is an optimal gem grade for XP!

Some math tells us that this maximum is at g=590/33 -> g=18

So it seems that using gems of grade 18 would yield the best result.

This needs testing (that I can't do right now), because I may have missed some other piece of code that changed those values, maybe try to dump the same amount of mana in two different ways on the same wave.

Of course at the current version (1.0.19) it's not practical to keep enraging with g18 the whole match, but maybe in future versions we'll have better enraging tools to use.

TL;DR: Try to enrage waves using only grade 18 and see if it's better than your usual way, than return here and post your findings, to help the community

12345ieee

I'm deeply impressed, but without further testing I would say, bombing with HIGH grade gems is more effective as I exceed killable armor/hp when I enrage with low gem grades (and 18 is sometimes a very low grade).
As an example: I have a wave with e60 hp and I am capabla of killing e61, I would rather drop one or two bombs with Grade 95 than 10 of Grade 18...
But with the next update, everything changes I guess...

WARNING, NEARLY EVERYTHING I SAID IN THE PREVIOUS POST IS FALSE

TL;DR: What I discovered you ask? What everybody already knew since always, using high grade gems wastes more mana but gives more XP.
You can easily skip the rest of the wall of text

I missed 2 lines of code further down :-(

The pseudocode should read:

willSummon = pow(Gem.grade,1.2) * 4 + 4 // * 1.5/0.2 if swarm/giant

Wave.hp = Wave.hp + (Gem.grade * 0.03 + 0.1) * Wave.hp * (1 - FR)
Wave.armor = Wave.armor + max(2, 0.24 * Wave.armor * (1 - FR))

Xp = Xp + 0.02 * (1 + FI) * Wave.xpBase * pow(Gem.grade + 1,0.89)

Which means that hp increase exponentially rather than linearly (as Xp does), as it's easy to verify in game.

This changes a lot the analysis at point 3, because, after some math, we get that throwing n gems of grade g to a wave that wave has:

HP(n,g)=HP(0)*( 1 + (0.03 * g + 0.1) * (1 - FR) ) ^ n
XP(n,g)=XP(0)*( 1 + n * 0.02 * (1 + FI) * g^0.89 )

Now a mathematician would say:
"Easy problem, let's choose a constant number for HP, get all the couples (n,p) that give us that HP and then find the couple (n,g) that maximize XP!
Also extra yay, I'll use that very funny method I learned in 1st year"

But that is an horrible calculation to do (VERY, VERY HORRIBLE), so I behaved like a physicists instead, and plotted the HP curve at constant XP.

Guess what?

Exactly! What everybody already knew since always, using high grade gems wastes more mana but gives more XP (or less HP, that's the same).

Thank you for having joined me in the pursuit of wasting a lot of time to rediscover the wheel by reading this post.

12345ieee

Awesome work bro! so basically: use the highest grade gems you can afford to toss a few hudred/thousand of without dipping to far into your mana pool. (yeah there's mana related inefficiency, but when 99.99...% of your mana comes from orange gems... no one really cares)