Talk:Farming villages

Why is this page locked? I have useful info to contribute. Very annoying!

There was no useless copy of the main page, I updated copied it to the talk and did an added some usefull info and deleted some wrong info. - Zorrotwee

Mood info : Mood seems to increase roughly 1% every 30 minutes. Will need more testing to confirm
Slimline 18:07, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Mood

When looting an NPC (farming village) with 100% strength (and therefore 6005 resources on hand) the mood seems to go down by a fixed amount (48%) regardless of the size or mix of army sent to do the looting. Najevi 05:34, 20 October 2010 (CEST)

Resource looting

An NPC village at 50% strength will yield 2275 resources. Therefore, in the very early stages of game play, you need not strengthen a farming village before looting it. Only once your loot carrying capacity has increased beyond 2275 do you need to become concerned with first strengthening an NPC village before looting it.

The mood of an NPC village reduces in proportion to the amount of loot your army carries away regardless of which type of unit (or mix of units) does the carrying. However, this proportional relationship is not a simple linear proportion. Najevi 19:57, 21 October 2010 (CEST)

Efficient farming procedure

Various opinions are voiced as to the virtue of researching Booty and Diplomacy to help with efficient farming. Rather than debating that point, this section aims to simply describe an efficient procedure for farming a non-player city (NPC) with and without Booty and Diplomacy. Each reader can then decide for them self which is best for their chosen style of game play.

Steps 1 through 7 can be queued at the same time and might take you 30-60 seconds to queue (and verify) these 7 waves of attack. You can then go away from keyboard while your troops complete their tasks and when you return you have ~10,000 more resources in your warehouse. You then spend another 30-60 seconds queuing the same attacks on the next available NPC. Depending on the city mood you might then trade resources to tweak the mix of resources in your warehouse.

The starting condition for the target NPC is 50% strength and 100% mood since that is where all NPC's drift toward if you leave them alone for long enough. Of course strength could be at any level depending on which other players are farming your targeted NPC. Notice that this procedure includes trade activity because that is just as important to increasing your supply of resources as looting.

The mood threshold mentioned below refers to that lowest mood level at which the villagers are still smiling at you. (i.e. 75% without Diplomacy and 60% with Diplomacy) In either case the visual cue described in the section titled Mood is always your indicator.

Note that although the game expresses mood and strength in percentage points they are simply treated as points in this table - to avoid confusion.

General procedure		Without Diplomacy				With Diplomacy
Step	Action	Strengthen	Loot	NPC Mood	NPC Strength	Strengthen	Loot	NPC Mood	NPC Strength
0	Initial condition			100	50			100	50
1	Increase strength toward 100	75 pop.		100	65	75 pop.		100	65
2	Increase strength toward 100	75 pop.		100	80	75 pop.		100	80
3	Increase strength toward 100	75 pop.		100	95	75 pop.		100	95
4	Top up strength to 100	25 pop.		100	100	25 pop.		100	100
5	Loot such that Mood drops to threshold		3088 booty capacity	75	91		4680 booty capacity	60	88
6	Top up strength to 100	45 pop.		75	100	60 pop.		60	100
7	Loot maximum booty		6005 booty capacity	27	84		6005 booty capacity	12	84
8	Wait for mood to return to 80			80 21h38m	??			80 27h45m	??
9	Trade as needed to balance resources			80	??			80	??
10	Wait for mood to return to 100			100 +8h10m	??			100 +8h10m	??
11	Repeat the entire cycle			100	??			100	??

The following example unit choices correspond to the figures used in the Strengthen column of the above table. The formula is not complicated so you could do the math in your head if you can remember your multiplication tables.

#pop = strength_increase * 5

#units = #pop / pop_per_unit

Strengthen	Catapult	Chariot	Horseman	Hoplite	Archer	Slinger	Swordsman
5 pop. +1 strength	0.333	1.250	1.666	5.000	5.000	5.000	5.000
25 pop. +5 strength	2	7	9	25	25	25	25
45 pop. +9 strength	3	12	15	45	45	45	45
75 pop. +15 strength	5	19	25	75	75	75	75

The following example unit choices correspond to the figures used in the Loot column of the above table.

• Reduction in mood will be greater than indicated if NPC strength is less than 100% at the time of the looting attack. So keep it predictable and always loot after first topping up NPC strength to 100%.
• The pairs of unit counts correspond to without : with Booty researched.

Loot	Catapult	Chariot	Horseman	Hoplite	Archer	Slinger	Swordsman
3088 booty mood 100..75	7 : 5	48 : 37	42 : 32	386 : 296	128 : 98	386 : 296	193 : 148
4680 booty mood 100..60	11 : 9	73 : 56	65 : 50	585 : 450	195 : 150	585 : 450	292 : 225
6005 booty maximum booty	16 : 12	94 : 73	84 : 65	751 : 578	251 : 193	751 : 578	376 : 289

Once again the formula is not complicated but dividing by 1.3 is going to be easier with the aid of a calculator.

• without Booty researched

#units = #resources / carrying_capacity_per_unit

• with Booty researched

#units = #resources / carrying_capacity_per_unit / 1.3

• round down for safety margin at step 5
• round  up  for safety margin at step 7

Diplomacy

Without diplomacy the cycle time is 29h48m (1788 minutes) and with diplomacy the cycle time is 35h55m (2155 minutes). 2155:1788 :: 120:100 In one cycle the player who has researched diplomacy will loot 17.5% more resources than the player who has not however, the player who has not researched diplomacy has a 20% shorter cycle time. As a practical consideration, few people are going to set their alarm clock and play this game so precisely that they can capitalize on the 20% shorter cycle time.

It is also noteworthy that the number of units required to queue all 7 steps in one sitting is fewer for the player who has chosen not to research Diplomacy. This becomes a mute point rather quickly since you will want a larger army eventually however, it is a valid consideration during that phase of the game while you are still working hard to expand the level of your farm.

Therefore the choice of whether or not to research diplomacy is going to depend on your style of game play and especially on whether or not you are willing and able to repeat these cycles with no extra delay than that required for the mood to recover to 100 points.

Alternative procedures

The above is not the only imaginable farming procedure. It is simply one that takes advantage of every opportunity available to increase your resources - trade and the mood threshold being the obvious two. It is well suited to the player who visits the Grepolis web site for short durations in between tending to other real-world tasks. An alternative procedure involves looting for maximum booty as soon as mood has increased above the 60|75 threshold with|without diplomacy. This alternative is well suited to the player who can visit the Grepolis website more frequently. This alternative also requires a smaller looting army.

The cycle time for this alternative is just 19h35m which might appeal to the player who checks in at the same time every 24 hours because that player can mindlessly loot for maximum bounty at the same time each day and every few days that player will discover that the mood has increased to 100 before they loot farm in which case they have the option to execute a two phase farming cycle every few days.

What this guide needs

A player who has researched the rate of mood recovery could enhance this guide by quantifying the time it takes for mood to recover:

1. 12..27
2. 27..60
3. 60..75
4. 75..80
5. 80..100

The data is in! Mood recovers in a pure linear fashion at the rate of 58.835 points every 24 hours. This is purely linear and has a coefficient of correlation of 0.9997 - so close to 1.0 that there can be no doubt about the linear relationship! That is 1 point every 24.5 minutes. (Figures are for a 1x speed world.)

• Any claim that mood recovers quicker below 60 than it does below 75 is debunked.

Opinion

The game seems designed to tempt players (while your city is still young) to spend resources (and free population) on units that become redundant (or less useful) after (i) your city grows in size, (ii) increases resource production/looting capacity or (iii) researches more advanced technologies. This is true for (i) resources consumed to build units used in looting armies, (ii) research points used to research various technologies in the Academy, (iii) population consumed to build each type of unit and increase the level of various buildings.

• So plan for the long term and accept compromise for the short term.

e.g. In the beginning you have just 6 swordsmen and can't build other units right away ... so you might be tempted to build more swordsmen.

Horsemen help you farm rapidly but since they cannot be built as early on as archers, make the research/building of horsemen a high priority and make do with a smaller number of archers in the early days.

(Once you have horsemen you'll wonder why you wasted resources on swordsmen.)

Eventually, an army of archers built for looting is also a valuable city defense force whenever they are not deployed farming. Similarly, an army of slingers is useful for looting nearby player cities. Steps 6 & 7 in the table above can just as easily be achieved with slingers (step 6) and archers (step 7) while steps 1..5 are achieved with horsemen.

Najevi 15:58, 2 November 2010 (CET)