Drugwars Unit Cost Analysis - Weighing up the cost of War.
Drug Wars is a pretty cool game. I'm only just starting to get to grips with it, and it reminds me a lot of the "World War" mobile phone game from about 2010, where you have to upgrade buildings and units, and then battle it out to win resources of your opponent. The exception here is that with Drug Wars, you are rewarded daily with STEEM based on your production rate of Drugs.
source: pixabay.com
One of the aspect I am looking at now, because my resources were getting lost in battles, is how to protect your loot, and also how best to build an army to win some of it back from others.
Obviously the best way to protect your resources it to upgrade your storage as high as you can, and always maintain a resource balance lower than your "safe" storage capacity. That takes time, and a LOT of resources to do if you want to have enough safe storage to upgrade your buildings to higher levels.
The other way is to build up an army, focused on recruiting units with high defense scores to protect you from attack. These units come with a high coast as well, and can quite easily be lost in battle. So what is the most cost-effective way of defending, or attacking?
There is no clear-cut answer to that, and a lot depends on how much "unsafe" resource capacity you're defending, or how much "unsafe" resource capacity your target is holding, and the strength of their army.
To make is slightly easier to work things out, I have compiled a little table which shows the cost of each unit in relation to attack strength, defensive strength, and their resource carrying capacity, in terms of Weapons cost, Alcohol cost, and the combined resource cost. At the end you will find a 200 unit maximum of each unit type, being the total attack, defense, or resource carrying capacity strength if you sent an army of 200 of the same units into battle.
for the full size image, click here.
From this table you can see that as a "cost per attribute" most economic attack unit, the Bazooka Guy, followed by the Sniper. The most economic defensive unit is Big Mama (makes sense), followed by The Super Bouncer, and then surprisingly (to me anyway) the Rowdy unit.
The Big "BUT"
While some units may be more cost-effective, their combine total attack or capacities may not be enough to win a war, or defend a strong attack. You need to find a strong balance between attack and defense, as well as carrying capacity to bring home your winnings. Also remember that you will inevitably lose units during a battle, so think carefully before you attack, and calculate your cost of replacing lost units versus the amount of unsafe resource you stand to win... unless your enemy has no army to defend itself... Then you just go with max capacity.
Just remember: In war there are no winners, just more casualties on one side than the other.
Have fun, and remember it's just a game, keep it there!
I hope this helps somebody somewhere understand a little more about the game, or at least helps you to not make costly mistakes when going into battle.
Cheers!!
Nice overview!
I also did this calculations. For me the most important parameter is your "total cost per capacity".
It shows how often a unit has to bring loot at home until it paid itself. These factors are to big! Considering high costs per unit and that you have to built up a huge army it makes no sense to waste resources on units.
I recommend to build up more storage instead.
P.S.: I made the experience that in case of being attacked the attack value of the defending units is compared to the defense value of attacking units. Hence Bazooka Guy and Sniper are the best defending units.
Good observations. Building storage does make sense, but it is very expensive and time-consuming.
You make a good point about snipers and bazooker guys beimg good defenders, condisering the defending team gets first strike. There will have to be a balance of strong defence score units to take the counter-attack blow from the attacking team also. The more you think about it, the more complicated it becomes, especially factoring in the units' resource carrying capacity, and how many missions a unit needs to survive to bring back a positove return.
It make sense to pick your targets wisely, and have a strong defense force while you're upgrading storage.
Nice work, mate. I'll get started on the beginnings of a tool this weekend hopefully and then we can take it from there. The data here will serve as a good start and then we can work out more complex calculations for battle strategies/timings and so on.
Thanks @beggars. There are so many things to consider about defense and attack, like @markus.journey mentioned. Attack strength is just as important for defense, so a fine balance of both strengths is where the sweet spot seems to be.
But we have to start somewhere.....