Tuesday 24 September 2013

Marble and Copper Geologist

Copper and Marble are quite nice/important resources, and can be improved relatively cheaply through your Geologist's Science tree, so wanted to take a look at it with you and discuss it a little. I'll try to have a few more build ideas in the coming days. The thought with this build is that you may want to improve Copper and Marble if easy, but might not have any intention of investing heavily due to cost/time constraints.

Copper is generally a very important resource, and you can almost never have enough of it (unless you can afford 3x Endless Copper mines, in which case you, well,  might have enough). You want it to produce Tools for your buildings and Mine upgrades, and also to produce Bronze Swords for the endless stream of recruits you need for Adventures.

Marble is needed in a number of building upgrades, and after you need it less for that, tends to always be able to be sold for reasonable profit. There will always be other players still levelling up who will need it, and it's nowhere near as easy to stock up on as Hardwood Planks that you use at the same level.

This is the tree I'd recommend:
 
Looking at the skills from the bottom up, and left to right.
 
2 Manuscripts in "Hidden Stone Stash": 20% chance of finding treasure when looking for stone deposit. The best you can find is 25 Marble, which is a pretty poor prize, but you have no choice. You need 5 Manuscripts in the bottom layer to advance.
3 Manuscripts in "Natural Copper Vein": Discover 15% bigger copper veins. This makes the veins in Sector 2 (bottom centre) hold 816 Copper each instead of 710, and the veins in Sector 4 (middle left) hold 827, up from 720.
 
0 Manuscripts in "Two Marble in One": You might be tempted to take this, but is clashes with "Natural Marble Vein covered later. Skip it.
3 Manuscripts in "Quality Copper Mineshafts": 45% chance of producing veins that can be mined twice as fast. Once you have this skill, you can tell if the vein discovered by your Geologist has the Quality attribute by holding your mouse over the copper icon for a few seconds, and seeing if it appears on the popup. Sometimes I find I need to hold the mouse over the copper icon, and then move the mouse away, and *back* onto the icon for the tooltip to display.
If the popup only mentions the increased size of the deposits from Natural Copper Vein, it's not double-speed. If this happens, I suggest destroying the vein and sending your Geologist out again. This is easiest done by starting to build something else, like a well, and then selecting to build the mine (so that it's the second or third thing in your build menu). Then, cancel it from your build menu, and the vein will disappear, and you won't have lost any resources.
2 Manuscripts in "Natural Stone Vein": +16% bigger stone deposits. You need to put 2 Manuscripts somewhere to advance, and 16% bigger stone deposits is alright, certainly better than the alternatives.
 
3 Tomes in "Natural Marble Vein": 24% bigger Marble veins. Bigger marble veins is good, and will allow you to have more level 5 Marble Masons in production harvesting without worrying about running out before you get back from work.
Previously I mentioned this skill clashing with "Two Marble in One". The issue with these skills interaction is that currently if you take the Two-in-One skill, and it triggers and finds a second mine, the second mine will not get the 24% bigger size, only the original found mine.
Also currently, if there is only 1 deposit left to find, and the Two-in-One skill would trigger and find to, the whole thing fails (since there isn't 2 to be found), and the 1 deposit remains unfound.
Both of these things makes "Two Marble in One" not worthwhile.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for doing this little guide. I have found that I have made a mistake but i dont plant to give gems in order to get my books back so for now it will stay the way it is.

    So you dont think upgrading the last tiers is good enough or you just focused on marble/cooper in this guide? Maybe that was it regarding the title of the post...

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    1. Personally am still not sure there's enough value in the last tiers. I don't think I'll go any deeper than what I've got here.

      I'll stare at it all a bit more though when I have a little time, some of the upper tier skills aren't horrible, just may not really be worth the codex's used to get there. Especially with 2 more skill trees on the way (Generals, and overall Island trees), you may be better off holding off, at least until we see more trees.

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    2. But for example, I have a gold production working so i need those gold mines with bigger deposits and faster mining so I need to go further, if you know what i mean. :)

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    3. I know what you mean.
      I might not be qualified to come up with anything special since I don't go down the Gold path, I make my coins from other productions. I was generally under the impression that for Gold you were best off having just 1 or 2 mines, getting them to level 5, running them buffed, and never letting them run out (keep buying and applying refills). Otherwise the cost to build them wasn't worth what was coming out.
      Does the 24% bigger mines make them worthwhile without worrying about refills? I'm not sure.

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