Qfiffle [2557282]

R+ for turning our 2am conversation into something that makes actual sense to people other than ourselves (hopefully) :P

masheen [2625139]

I'm personally at that point that I feel I still can't justify cans. I still remember Body Bagger saying that he spent all his cash on cheap SE's back in the day, didn't live in a PI (IIRC) and he knew that at some point in time using SEs would make him far stronger than everyone else. Can't be done today to that extent. I think I'll do the can merit and just do the basic training like I mostly have been doing. I used to feel bad if I missed a day where I didn't take the 3rd xanax but the thing is that rehab is also costly and it's not the end of the world.

Anomalousman [2534256]

(Re)Quantify Your Impatience - Midgame Training Guide

This is an updated version of "Quantify Your Impatience: A mid-game training guide". The new changes to late-gate gym gains change many of the trade-offs for training vs SEs. I reworked through the calculations and conclusions, but for simplicity, I decided to write this as a fresh start.

In Torn, the limits imposed by finite money and cooldowns mean we can never maximise everything. So the commonly accepted strategies involve a kind of implicit balance between competing goals. This guide is focussed on battle stats, which is the common target for the bulk of those resources. The point of this guide is to highlight that for midgame training, that balance is determined by your patience. In a way that actually requires you to quantify that impatience.

How to get the most stats - infinite money version
If you had infinite money, you'd start the game with 10 increments of MCS, and sports sneakers. You'd use strippograms to 99k happy every time you trained with FHCs, 4-5 times a day. Then as soon as an SE gave you more stats than a single FHC, you'd use pure SEs until you were the highest stat person in Torn, in your second year. You would match everyone's hardcore new exponential gym gains on your first day of each month. True, and also ridiculous. In late game, optimal stat gains are still money limited.

This isn't a guide on getting rich. This is a guide on how to train at the mid-game. How do you best set yourself up for that late-game stage?

How to get the highest stats - finite money version
The new always-exponential gym gains make the optimal training method more like people thought it was. You train with natural regen, 3 xanax a day and a point refill. Then you put all your FHC and can money into your best investment. Why? Because each stat will eventually reach a point where an SE gives you more growth for the same cash. So simply saving that money means that when you finally eat those SEs, you will have more stats at that point than you would have if you'd eaten that money earlier. And you can have some free extra booster cooldown along the way.

Let's call this "basic training". You double your natural regeneration energy in the gym for flying-level income. The announcement regarding the new gym used 1500e/day while living in a max happy PI as the baseline. That's the basic training scenario, with a small allowance each day set aside for ranked wars/missions/overdoses/events. Or snuffling through the dump. You do you.

Once you hit the old cap at 50m, your first billion will come in about 260 days. Your second will take about 240 days. So in 1.4 years per battle stat, you'll be up to the point where SEs become the outright best option to increase your stats via boosters. Five and a half years if you want that for all four stats, less for whores. You will keep up with the pack. If you actually manage 3 xanax per day, you'll grind up the lists.

This old-stat-cap-to-SE-training is what I'm calling the "mid game" period. Our next question, and the one that prompted me to write this guide, asks how a keen player might do better than basic training. Should she use cans and FHCs? Or save? Or maybe only use them on books?

Trade-offs for accelerating basic training
Boosters and books. Those are the basic tools for acceleration. There's a small tradeoff between cash efficiency and booster CD efficiency. This means that occasionally using an FHC is less effective for the same cash than continually using smaller cans. This is the (correct) reasoning behind the common wisdom: "don't do can training in bursts with expensive cans - only start can training when you can afford to do it sustainably".

But should you be doing can training at all? As we've discussed, the answer is certainly not if your goal is to reach the highest stats - in that case you should save that money. But now we're not looking at the extremes of infinitely slow or infinitely rich, we can see that booster training gets you up to decent stats faster, but gives less stats in the end. It's the instant gratification route. Where "instant" means "four years".

To decide, you have to figure out when you want to excel. This year? Next year? Four years? Ten? It's truly a choice, and not something that can be optimised. It's your goal. Of course, how you choose may depend on the exact tradeoffs. You need to look at them, and then quantify your impatience.

Let's start by looking at the crossover points themselves, and then how patient you'd have to be to ignore booster training on your way to supremacy. Prices change, but let's make some basic estimates to construct a table we can look at. We'll compare basic training, xans by themselves, training with damp valley cans (max voracity), and full FHC training. We'll look at growth you get in the gym vs the growth you get spending booster money on SEs.

Stat	Monthly % increase (1500e)	Monthly % increase (3 xan per day)	Monthly % increase (xan+rehab money as SEs)	Monthly % increase (Cans)	Monthly % increase (Can money as SEs)	Monthly % increase (FHC)	Monthly % increase (FHC money as SEs)
100m	108	54	0.76	13	0.9	43	4.0
1b	12.9	6.5	0.76	1.6	0.9	5.2	4.0
5b	4.8	2.3	0.76	0.54	0.9	1.8	4.0
10b	3.4	1.7	0.76	0.41	0.9	1.4	4.0
50b	2.4	1.2	0.76	0.29	0.9	0.96	4.0
100b	2.24	1.1	0.76	0.27	0.9	0.9	4.0
500b	2.02	1.0	0.76	0.24	0.9	0.8	4.0
1t	1.97	0.99	0.76	0.24	0.9	0.78	4.0

So the first thing we see is that, like points (which aren't shown), your xanax + rehab money is always best spent on those things and then trained the gym. Even when your rehab is as bad as it can get, which is the model used above. [Sidebar: maybe once your stats are amazing, you can spend your energy on mercenary work of various brands, and make enough SE money to come out ahead. Use the table later in this post to check what that would require.] The second thing we see is that cans and FHCs both become less effective for stat growth at around the 2b mark. Very close to the same as before the change.

But are you patient enough to wait for the big gains? Or do you want to rush out and drown in boosters now? (At these prices? Sheesh!)

Let's look at the tradeoff in terms of how many days of training that our boosters save:

We see that SEs are the outright winners pretty quick, but if you really hanker to get to 2 billion ASAP, you can spend some days of progress doing that. Obviously a better/worse steadfast will wiggle those horizontal lines proportionately. But also, you can get SEs cheaper than 450m.

That's in terms of stats, but what about timeframes? How patient do you need to be to wait for your first couple of billion?

Again, we'll use Ched's post as the baseline data (1500e/day, max PI happy. We'll add 10% steadfast, but for many that would be a wash with your energy overheads for sleep/missions/RW/monthly chain). We'll also estimate the extra SEs you'd have if you could afford FHC training, but saved/invested the money instead. We're picking a 1% weekly investment rate for that option. The details here will matter, but less than you think, and they won't change our fundamental conclusions.

This is what patience might look like in practice:

or, if you successfully invest that 1.8b per month:

But we can compare across a larger range if we track the top right point (patient until the last second) as a function of time, compared to the "instant" gratification route. We have to do this on a log scale.



What can we conclude? If you have the money, for about 300 days of training from 50m, full FHC training puts you ahead temporarily, but then having spent that money will cost you. If you care about stats beyond that timeframe, which is also about when you'd definitely switch from FHC training to SEs regardless of impatience, you will have more stats by saving/investing your booster money and smashing out a bunch of SEs then. If you keep investing for 1000 days before spending on SEs, you end the 1000 days at 100b in that stat. Do you want to be noticeably ahead of your peers this year but then behind them? All of these numbers are per stat, so if you're thinking "I'll be patient!", you are talking quite a while.

Quantify your impatience.

Actively using energy to make cash:
FHC-using people will get to high stats pretty fast, so maybe they can make up their cash via mercing? Their 19 month advantage will need to get them 400 SEs to get back to par. This may be possible.

In fact, money is so good at building stats that in the late game, actively using your energy to make money is still better for gains than training it in the gym. Fortunately for optimisers, the breakeven calculation is now super easy to do, because gym maps to a certain percentage increase per attack, and SEs cost a certain amount to grow by the same percentage:

Stat	Monthly % increase (1500e)	Money equivalent per 25E ($ million)
100m	108	26.13
1b	12.9	3.12
5b	4.8	1.09
10b	3.4	0.82
50b	2.4	0.58
100b	2.24	0.54
500b	2.02	0.49
1t	1.97	0.48

To adapt to your circumstances, simply multiply by your faction steadfast and any gym training specials from your company. You can see that someone with 1 trillion stats could get ahead by selling escapes. Activity is still king because cash is still king.

 

For easy reference, here is a graph to make it easier to see some of the numbers in between. Remember that patience is a factor here too. If your energy right now is worth $3m, but is about to be worth $2m, then it may well make sense to take an opportunity to make money instead of train.

 

A note about "SE range":
People talk about "getting into SE range", but they talk as though that's when you should take your SEs. "SE range" is about cheapest boosters. You can sell your other boosters to buy SEs, so converting them at their peak price tells you the opportunity cost for using them for training in the gym.


Currently, SEs become cheaper than FHCs above (about) 1.6b. SEs are cheaper than the cheapest cans at around 2.5b. But whether you take them as soon as they're cheaper is still about your goals and your patience. SEs always give greater boosts to stats when taken later, both in absolute terms, and in terms of days of training saved. An SE in late, late game (2% per month in the gym) is worth 2.5 times more energy than it is if you take it at 5b (4.8% in the gym). It's worth over six times more energy than if you take it at 1b. Take them when you get them, by all means. But "SE range" is about cost for immediate benefit, not about when you get the most out of SEs.

Books
Let's finish with the question of optimising gym training books. If you're ever going to use boosters, you should use them in conjunction with these books. Once again, you get the fastest stats by training with boosters, and the most stats in the end by saving the money. Books don't change that, they just change the trade-off. Let's look at a +30% gym gain book.

Month of...	Days of basic training saved	Cost (m)
Basic	0	0
Book + basic	9	0
FHC	12	1800
Book + FHC	25	1800

What can we conclude? A lot of gains of the FHC+book month is coming from the FHCs themselves. We get a week and a half from the book, and nearly two weeks from the FHCs. The extra benefit of combining them is clear - four extra days per book. So if you're impatient, but only a little, that's what you should do. It is standard wisdom "not to waste a book", which means go all in on them. We can now see that this is only true from a certain point of view. Your 1.8b FHC investment gets you exactly two weeks ahead during the book. That 1.8b is worth about two months of basic gym training ahead in the late game. Much more if invested. So it is an absolutely legitimate approach to use a book doing basic training.

The scenarios here are not exhaustive, but they more or less bracket your options, and you can interpolate to make your call.

Pick a goal.

Anomalousman [2534256]

(Re)Quantify Your Impatience - Midgame Training Guide

This is an updated version of "Quantify Your Impatience: A mid-game training guide". The new changes to late-gate gym gains change many of the trade-offs for training vs SEs. I reworked through the calculations and conclusions, but for simplicity, I decided to write this as a fresh start.

In Torn, the limits imposed by finite money and cooldowns mean we can never maximise everything. So the commonly accepted strategies involve a kind of implicit balance between competing goals. This guide is focussed on battle stats, which is the common target for the bulk of those resources. The point of this guide is to highlight that for midgame training, that balance is determined by your patience. In a way that actually requires you to quantify that impatience.

How to get the most stats - infinite money version
If you had infinite money, you'd start the game with 10 increments of MCS, and sports sneakers. You'd use strippograms to 99k happy every time you trained with FHCs, 4-5 times a day. Then as soon as an SE gave you more stats than a single FHC, you'd use pure SEs until you were the highest stat person in Torn, in your second year. You would match everyone's hardcore new exponential gym gains on your first day of each month. True, and also ridiculous. In late game, optimal stat gains are still money limited.

This isn't a guide on getting rich. This is a guide on how to train at the mid-game. How do you best set yourself up for that late-game stage?

How to get the highest stats - finite money version
The new always-exponential gym gains make the optimal training method more like people thought it was. You train with natural regen, 3 xanax a day and a point refill. Then you put all your FHC and can money into your best investment. Why? Because each stat will eventually reach a point where an SE gives you more growth for the same cash. So simply saving that money means that when you finally eat those SEs, you will have more stats at that point than you would have if you'd eaten that money earlier. And you can have some free extra booster cooldown along the way.

Let's call this "basic training". You double your natural regeneration energy in the gym for flying-level income. The announcement regarding the new gym used 1500e/day while living in a max happy PI as the baseline. That's the basic training scenario, with a small allowance each day set aside for ranked wars/missions/overdoses/events. Or snuffling through the dump. You do you.

Once you hit the old cap at 50m, your first billion will come in about 260 days. Your second will take about 240 days. So in 1.4 years per battle stat, you'll be up to the point where SEs become the outright best option to increase your stats via boosters. Five and a half years if you want that for all four stats, less for whores. You will keep up with the pack. If you actually manage 3 xanax per day, you'll grind up the lists.

This old-stat-cap-to-SE-training is what I'm calling the "mid game" period. Our next question, and the one that prompted me to write this guide, asks how a keen player might do better than basic training. Should she use cans and FHCs? Or save? Or maybe only use them on books?

Trade-offs for accelerating basic training
Boosters and books. Those are the basic tools for acceleration. There's a small tradeoff between cash efficiency and booster CD efficiency. This means that occasionally using an FHC is less effective for the same cash than continually using smaller cans. This is the (correct) reasoning behind the common wisdom: "don't do can training in bursts with expensive cans - only start can training when you can afford to do it sustainably".

But should you be doing can training at all? As we've discussed, the answer is certainly not if your goal is to reach the highest stats - in that case you should save that money. But now we're not looking at the extremes of infinitely slow or infinitely rich, we can see that booster training gets you up to decent stats faster, but gives less stats in the end. It's the instant gratification route. Where "instant" means "four years".

To decide, you have to figure out when you want to excel. This year? Next year? Four years? Ten? It's truly a choice, and not something that can be optimised. It's your goal. Of course, how you choose may depend on the exact tradeoffs. You need to look at them, and then quantify your impatience.

Let's start by looking at the crossover points themselves, and then how patient you'd have to be to ignore booster training on your way to supremacy. Prices change, but let's make some basic estimates to construct a table we can look at. We'll compare basic training, xans by themselves, training with damp valley cans (max voracity), and full FHC training. We'll look at growth you get in the gym vs the growth you get spending booster money on SEs.

Stat	Monthly % increase (1500e)	Monthly % increase (3 xan per day)	Monthly % increase (xan+rehab money as SEs)	Monthly % increase (Cans)	Monthly % increase (Can money as SEs)	Monthly % increase (FHC)	Monthly % increase (FHC money as SEs)
100m	108	54	0.76	13	0.9	43	4.0
1b	12.9	6.5	0.76	1.6	0.9	5.2	4.0
5b	4.8	2.3	0.76	0.54	0.9	1.8	4.0
10b	3.4	1.7	0.76	0.41	0.9	1.4	4.0
50b	2.4	1.2	0.76	0.29	0.9	0.96	4.0
100b	2.24	1.1	0.76	0.27	0.9	0.9	4.0
500b	2.02	1.0	0.76	0.24	0.9	0.8	4.0
1t	1.97	0.99	0.76	0.24	0.9	0.78	4.0

So the first thing we see is that, like points (which aren't shown), your xanax + rehab money is always best spent on those things and then trained the gym. Even when your rehab is as bad as it can get, which is the model used above. [Sidebar: maybe once your stats are amazing, you can spend your energy on mercenary work of various brands, and make enough SE money to come out ahead. Use the table later in this post to check what that would require.] The second thing we see is that cans and FHCs both become less effective for stat growth at around the 2b mark. Very close to the same as before the change.

But are you patient enough to wait for the big gains? Or do you want to rush out and drown in boosters now? (At these prices? Sheesh!)

Let's look at the tradeoff in terms of how many days of training that our boosters save:

We see that SEs are the outright winners pretty quick, but if you really hanker to get to 2 billion ASAP, you can spend some days of progress doing that. Obviously a better/worse steadfast will wiggle those horizontal lines proportionately. But also, you can get SEs cheaper than 450m.

That's in terms of stats, but what about timeframes? How patient do you need to be to wait for your first couple of billion?

Again, we'll use Ched's post as the baseline data (1500e/day, max PI happy. We'll add 10% steadfast, but for many that would be a wash with your energy overheads for sleep/missions/RW/monthly chain). We'll also estimate the extra SEs you'd have if you could afford FHC training, but saved/invested the money instead. We're picking a 1% weekly investment rate for that option. The details here will matter, but less than you think, and they won't change our fundamental conclusions.

This is what patience might look like in practice:

or, if you successfully invest that 1.8b per month:

But we can compare across a larger range if we track the top right point (patient until the last second) as a function of time, compared to the "instant" gratification route. We have to do this on a log scale.



What can we conclude? If you have the money, for about 300 days of training from 50m, full FHC training puts you ahead temporarily, but then having spent that money will cost you. If you care about stats beyond that timeframe, which is also about when you'd definitely switch from FHC training to SEs regardless of impatience, you will have more stats by saving/investing your booster money and smashing out a bunch of SEs then. If you keep investing for 1000 days before spending on SEs, you end the 1000 days at 100b in that stat. Do you want to be noticeably ahead of your peers this year but then behind them? All of these numbers are per stat, so if you're thinking "I'll be patient!", you are talking quite a while.

Quantify your impatience.

Actively using energy to make cash:
FHC-using people will get to high stats pretty fast, so maybe they can make up their cash via mercing? Their 19 month advantage will need to get them 400 SEs to get back to par. This may be possible.

In fact, money is so good at building stats that in the late game, actively using your energy to make money is still better for gains than training it in the gym. Fortunately for optimisers, the breakeven calculation is now super easy to do, because gym maps to a certain percentage increase per attack, and SEs cost a certain amount to grow by the same percentage:

Stat	Monthly % increase (1500e)	Money equivalent per 25E ($ million)
100m	108	26.13
1b	12.9	3.12
5b	4.8	1.09
10b	3.4	0.82
50b	2.4	0.58
100b	2.24	0.54
500b	2.02	0.49
1t	1.97	0.48

To adapt to your circumstances, simply multiply by your faction steadfast and any gym training specials from your company. You can see that someone with 1 trillion stats could get ahead by selling escapes. Activity is still king because cash is still king.

 

For easy reference, here is a graph to make it easier to see some of the numbers in between. Remember that patience is a factor here too. If your energy right now is worth $3m, but is about to be worth $2m, then it may well make sense to take an opportunity to make money instead of train.

 

A note about "SE range":
People talk about "getting into SE range", but they talk as though that's when you should take your SEs. "SE range" is about cheapest boosters. You can sell your other boosters to buy SEs, so converting them at their peak price tells you the opportunity cost for using them for training in the gym.


Currently, SEs become cheaper than FHCs above (about) 1.6b. SEs are cheaper than the cheapest cans at around 2.5b. But whether you take them as soon as they're cheaper is still about your goals and your patience. SEs always give greater boosts to stats when taken later, both in absolute terms, and in terms of days of training saved. An SE in late, late game (2% per month in the gym) is worth 2.5 times more energy than it is if you take it at 5b (4.8% in the gym). It's worth over six times more energy than if you take it at 1b. Take them when you get them, by all means. But "SE range" is about cost for immediate benefit, not about when you get the most out of SEs.

Books
Let's finish with the question of optimising gym training books. If you're ever going to use boosters, you should use them in conjunction with these books. Once again, you get the fastest stats by training with boosters, and the most stats in the end by saving the money. Books don't change that, they just change the trade-off. Let's look at a +30% gym gain book.

Month of...	Days of basic training saved	Cost (m)
Basic	0	0
Book + basic	9	0
FHC	12	1800
Book + FHC	25	1800

What can we conclude? A lot of gains of the FHC+book month is coming from the FHCs themselves. We get a week and a half from the book, and nearly two weeks from the FHCs. The extra benefit of combining them is clear - four extra days per book. So if you're impatient, but only a little, that's what you should do. It is standard wisdom "not to waste a book", which means go all in on them. We can now see that this is only true from a certain point of view. Your 1.8b FHC investment gets you exactly two weeks ahead during the book. That 1.8b is worth about two months of basic gym training ahead in the late game. Much more if invested. So it is an absolutely legitimate approach to use a book doing basic training.

The scenarios here are not exhaustive, but they more or less bracket your options, and you can interpolate to make your call.

Pick a goal.

Barbarian [1952322]

Do you have any thoughts on the actual ROI that can be achieved for the money saved? At a quantifiable point (30~b or so in market) you lose safe investments that can generate significant compounding gains on your cash. [quote]Calculation note: the FHC people will presumably be basic training and also gaining money from their energy after 3.4 years - do you think you can make up the effects of $200b? Your call.[/quote] I would love to hear more thoughts on this line, because while it is very true someone can out save and invest the money that you spent on FHC into something that produces a ROI, there is a pretty quick line where investments also stop being able to consistently pay. My question for this is pretty much based around this years until SE range - if we say it takes 4 years to get to SE range, is it reasonable to think that after 4 years of playing you will stay have any places that you can tuck money away for an ROI that will be meaningful compared to someone spending it on booster training. Great guide/thoughts R+

MrRightSA [2652679]

I'm in early to mid-game so there's not even a consideration for me to use cans or FHC's, but wouldn't your booster cooldown be better used on alcohol until at least 60 NNB? Higher NNB means better OC's which means more money. A 35+ NNB and in a MW means 4.5mil to 5mil per day income (and an extra 600k if using 1 nerve beer with +50% faction boost) whilst still growing the nerve bar.

Draco [1648828]

R+ Awesome Post. I've been saving around 10 books for a long, long time now telling myself that it wasn't the right time to use them. Just waiting for the perfect conditions: when I could afford to spend $1b+ in cans/fhcs, AND the faction steadfast lined up with the stat I want to train, AND there wasn't a chain/RW coming up, AND there wasn't a competition in that month that I'd miss out on, AND I didn't have many real life commitments so I could be active enough every single day. With the result that most of my books have been sitting gathering dust in my inventory for years now. Looking back now it seems pretty stupid to keep waiting for the "perfect" time to use them and end up not using them at all. Thanks a ton for this post, it was exactly what I needed to hear. Time to use some books!

Indefatigable [2517458]

Yes. True. That said. There is the fun part of the game. While it was questionable me spending 1.8b to read dirty energy during Halloween, those extra 20 attacks per day, idk, was it worth it, your right, probably not, but it was fun. That was an extra 160 attacks for the week. Imma gonna do the same this year with fueling to failure. No shits given. Also, great guide. The whole, you gotta maximize your book, mantra around here does get tiring and adds a stress that really isn't worth it in the scheme of things.