DrugWars: Strategy Guide

in #drugwars5 years ago


drugwars-banner.png

During my first inspection of @drugwars yesterday I immediately concluded that it's likely impossible to make money playing this game because the creator rakes 20% off the top for himself. Numbers be damned, this is currently false. The time to get in is now.

Enough dumb money has been pumped into this game to get serious returns on smart investment. The prize pool is up to 31,000+ Steem and still climbing! The longer you wait to get in, the less viable returns become in this format. 8% of the prize pool is drained every day.


The game is currently set up as a pyramid scheme of sorts.

Get in now at the ground floor and be "guaranteed" ROI.

The current prize pool ensures this as long as the rules don't change soon.


Unfortunately, I don't have a bot army at my disposal, so I'll have to rely on my followers to help me Sybil Attack this game. Follow this guide and if you don't get a positive ROI I will personally cover the difference. Simply comment with #insurance and if I respond with #sign that account is covered.


phase-3-profit.png

Stage 3: Profit

This is a simple game of basic math. Good thing for us, people are terrible at basic math. The game is totally broken. The creator is scrambling to stabilize it. Lag is high, combat is broken, and he doesn't have time to fix the payout structure. This creates the perfect storm for us to swoop in and gobble up the coins being dumped into @drugwars.

Positive ROI is a simple matter of looking at how money enters the prize pool vs how money gets paid out.


  • Money enters the prize pool if players buy ANYTHING.
  • Money exits the prize pool to players with high drug production.

Therefore, the obvious play is to spend money on drug production and nothing else. If the majority of players are running around trying to play the game for real, upgrading buildings willy-nilly without thinking about it and buying troops to defend their stash, this means they are pumping up the reward pool and they aren't taking back their fair share. Well, maybe they are getting their fair share now, but they won't be once we implement this crippling strategy.


The first thing we need to do is calculate the dollar value of Drug creation:


drugwar-buildings-drug.png

Level 1


HydroMethCokePharma
52006711185149676

These numbers are ratios in the form of Drugs per day per dollar.
Notice any good deals?

Obviously Coke production is a must-buy at level one.

If you had access to 10,000 bot accounts this is probably the only information you need.
Simply upgrade this building to level one and watch the ROI flow in!
This investment is so good right now it should break even in 3 days.

drugwar-ROI-coke.png

It only costs $0.70 but it returns 0.9 Steem in a single round.
This implies that dumb money is just being absolutely dumped into this game right now.

Given that 8% of the reward pool gets leeched every day, we should expect this payout to only decrease 8% per day maximum. In reality it should decrease less than that because money is being pumped into the prize pool without extracting its worth from drug production.

This creates a payout equation of:

p + p(0.92) + p(0.92)^2 + p(0.92)^3 + p(0.92)^4

This would be the equation for 5 days payout. Each day it gets a little more diluted. In the case of this "bet" we'd expect to get a return of 3.84 Steem in five days, and the upgrade only cost 2.389 Steem. Also, @drugwars is sweetening the pot by adding upvote money and perhaps other rewards. My estimated payouts in game have been less than what I actually get.

Get in before the rules change;
they will be forced to change the payout structure within the next month or two.

Why? Because of this strategy for one,
but also because this system rewards accounts that aren't doing anything.

Think about this game a month or two out with nothing changed. The people who got in early will now have a bunch of high level buildings that they built for free using the initial seed money. New users who enter won't get any ROI. This game will die in a month or two if it isn't drastically changed.

I believe this is by design. The current payout structure is designed to onboard as many new users as possible right at the beginning and give everyone those feel-good positive feedback gambling loops. The rules will change once that euphoria period has subsided and dead accounts are leeching the reward pool.

poop-money-turd.jpg

On my main account I dumped 41 coins randomly into the game. I have access to two alt accounts where I tried to refine my tactics, but I still messed up a few times. It was then I realized that I was out of accounts. I contacted three friends who I had made Steemit accounts. They had all lost their keys (lol such a bad sign).

This made me realize it was time to figure out how to
claim these pending accounts I've been acquiring.

Pending accounts guide.

https://codebull.github.io/AccountCreate/

It was surprisingly easy to create the account @dexturd.
If I ever stop being lazy I will use this account to create an extremely rudimentary
exchange used for transferring around the shitcoins I create and buying/selling votes.

But for now, it's a @drugwars alt account!

Amazingly enough, this account has enough RCs to play (equivalent 3 coins) with zero coins being actually delegated to it. https://steemd.com/@dexturd. God bless the low RC costs of Custom JSON Operations.

This could either be considered a good thing or a bad thing. It's good for new users who don't have stake but it's also good for bots and Sybil attacks.

dont-gamble.jpg

Alright then! Back to the Strategy Guide.

Assuming you don't have several accounts to play around with, how much more Steem can we invest and still hope to turn a profit on said investment? We need to choose a cutoff number and stop investing there. Games like this have diminishing returns. To get the highest ROI you have to find the best deals and then have the self-control to stop paying.

Starting Resources

  • 2.5k Drugs
  • 5k Weapons
  • 5k Alcohol

It's tempting to do stupid stuff like upgrade the headquarters before you need to. Avoid this, Smuggle costs exactly 5K Alcohol and gives you 4536.0 Weapons / Day. Brewery costs exactly 5k Weapons and gives you 4536.0 Alcohol / Day. In fact, this is a pervasive pattern: All buildings that give Weapons only cost Alcohol and all buildings that grant Alcohol only cost weapons.

The Drug costs of buildings are irrelevant because we have so many extra. The drug production buildings pay for themselves through the daily payout. Therefore, ironically, Drugs become near worthless and abundant and should not be calculated in building costs. You'll have so many extra Drugs that you'll need to send a lot to the Heist.

You're going to be capped at 10K max drugs until you get Drug Storage. Buying Drug Storage and upgrading headquarters were two of the big mistakes I made on my alt accounts. Save the initial 5k Alcohol/Weapons to get Brewery and Smuggle to level one.

There is also a bug that where the front-end will show you having more than 10K drugs. The server knows you don't, and when you try to spend them there will be an error. Send 9999 Drugs to the heist and it will correct itself and show you at 1 drugs.

drugwar-buildings-weapons.png


Weapon FactorySmuggleBlack Market3D Metal Printing
11846129601728023040

We can see that 3D Metal Printing is the best deal on the $/Weapons/Day ratio. However, is it actually worth buying? Maybe. If you can leverage those resources into making more drug production over time it will be worth. This is much riskier than just straight up buying drug buildings though. More on this later.

drugwar-buildings-alcohol.png


BarBreweryCastleIndustrial Distillery
11846129601728023040

We see that Alcohol buildings are simply a mirror image of weapons. Again, buying 3D metal printing MIGHT be worth it. In fact, I accidentally bought Industrial Distillery on an alt account thinking it was pharma, but it was a happy accident so far.


Conclusion

The best way to make the highest % ROI in this game is to have thousands of bot accounts that simply buy the upgrade to one building: Cocina. Obviously, this isn't very glamorous, but what were we expecting from a game 3 weeks into production? Let's hope for some evolution.

Assuming none of us have this luxury, I've going to run several builds to see what works the best. One build will be Greedy (hoping to acquire more RIO later) and one will be an Economy build (least cost for highest ROI)


The economy build is simple:

Upgrade:

  • Cocina (level 1)
  • Pharmaceutical Lab (level 1)

Wait for your drug production to kick in and upgrade:

  • Brewery (level 1)
  • Smuggle (level 1)

After this upgrade support buildings:

  • Headquarters (level 1)
  • Drug Storage (level 1)

After upgrading Headquarters you pretty much have to upgrade:

  • Cocina (level 2)
    With Steem because it's such a good deal. (about 10k/$/day)

The more aggro build involves buying level 1 Industrial Distillery and/or 3D Metal Printing.

The first big goal is to research level 2 pharma lab without paying for it ($4.5 value).

It's also important to note that Drug Production buildings cost more Alcohol than Weapons. It might be worth it to just get the distillery and leverage those resources into getting the weapons production buildings.


This is about as far as you can go per account before major diminishing returns on ROI kick in.

The battle system is broken; you don't have to worry about defending anything right now.

The next payday is in 60 minutes. If you can get around the massive lag outs to to get level 2 Cocina and level 1 Pharma lab I believe you won't be dissapointed.

Disclaimer:

@drugwars controls all the funds and can end this party at any time. They are under no legal obligation to continue gifting the community with the reward pool.

This is Early Access, and we have to assume that a Sybil attack of this nature will eventually be squashed once they get around to stabilizing the server.

This should just be for fun to make a few dollars, if possible.


Sort:  

The game is currently set up as a pyramid scheme of sorts.

The game is totally broken.

Think about this game a month or two out with nothing changed. The people who got in early will now have a bunch of high level buildings that they built for free using the initial seed money. New users who enter won't get any ROI. This game will die in a month or two if it isn't drastically changed.

Hmmm... are you sure this isn't an allegory for something?

LoL. Well done.

i spent resources on alcohol and weapon production, then bought goons with them and raided bunch of people. Now i have enough to yield me 1 steem everyday. No steem vested in this game because its a ponzi scheme that will eventually fall.

That's pretty impressive for a free account.

Yeah, it's a ponzi scheme... but this is the very beginning of it. Obviously if you spent a tiny bit in the right area's you'd come out on top.

Also, I'm expecting them to change this game quite a bit. If they created this whole game up to this point in 3 weeks it's going to evolve a lot.

This is especially true considering how popular it's becoming. They are going to want to keep the gravy train chuggin'.

But now, battles are deactivated :p

Guess youre stacking units to farm all the Alt accounts as soon as there are battles again? @mightypanda

Not using any alts. I tried it out with my alt first. Once i was sure its not a scam, connected my main acct. Eos knights is more interesting than this one

Didnt mean ur alts. The alts of other people ;)

Posted using Partiko Android

Oh yea! I have upgraded storages so no one can steal my shit and now i will take out all the alt farmer accts

I made the mistake of not searching around the interface first, so i upgraded the non resource producing buildings... Now i have 0 resources to build, don't want to create a new account just for this, and the game looks a lot like a pyramid scheme/ponzi without any good foundation, it needs reworking, especially the economy like you said, in my opinion the hype will die out in 1 week max and the prizes will diminishing to a point that it isn't even worth playing...

Let's see what happens...

They are going to be forced to change the mechanics in a big way.
The rewards are going to change away from drug production to drug hoarding.

Otherwise all the inactive accounts will leech the prize pool without having to do anything.

This game has only been in development 3 weeks. Give it three more weeks and let's see. I agree.

I thought it sounded very ponzi-ish.

I too made the mistake of playing the game properly when I first started... but I've actually had huge problems of trying to get alt accounts into the game... bugs aplenty.

I'm focusing on drug production only and the game won't let me dump some more into the heist right now...I don't know if it's a bug or anything
At least I'll be getting back half of what I paid for the Cocina.

because of this bug it looks like the payout is higher than usual... best get in everything possible.

Thanks. I'll look into it.

I'm having that bug as well.
Their server is likely being taxed into the ground.

it looks like if you refresh the page you can add the funds to the heist that appear automatically.

Pretty excited and I'm off to a pretty good start! Thanks for playing

Posted using Partiko Android

Totally agree with you LOL 😂

Posted using Partiko iOS

Your post was upvoted by the @archdruid gaming curation team in partnership with @curie to support spreading the rewards to great content. Join the Archdruid Gaming Community at https://discord.gg/6yD2Emr. Good Game, Well Played!

This post has been included in the latest edition of SoS Daily News - a digest of all you need to know about the State of Steem.

Great tips as I have wondering the main driver of production. Too bad I made the wrong choices whe starting and really do not want to spend my Steem anymore!

Posted using Partiko iOS

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