War Tortoise: How to build at empty nodes

While answering a question in the discussion forum I started looking into how to make the most out of my empty nodes. As I discovered how the cost scaling works and reached a conclusion regarding how I should act I thought It’d be useful as a guide to share!
The mentioned thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2120250/discussions/0/4358996025341775119/

Get ancient asap for lumber and to start wild growths.

Two simple paths for how to treat an empty node for long-term cost- and node efficiency:
Path 1: Construct a passive building. (Gold mine/ Training facility)
Path 2: Construct a one-time resource building (Lab/lumber) then switch it out with a passive bonus building. Remember to get the node to lvl 5 before you switch away from the one-time resource building. Probably switch it out with what is currently the cheapest of the two passive buildings to save costs.

Choose your preferred path based on if your current goals demands one-time resources or not!

Exception if you’re rushing DNA for important evolutions (or rushing lumber mills). In that case you can build-and-destroy labs on the same level 5 node. Preferably spread this strategy out among several nodes if possible but if you’re early game your options may be limited and you’ll have to stick with one or a few nodes.

This was the original question I answered in a discussion thread, and yup! Every time you construct a lumber mill or a laboratory on a maxxed node you gain the resources you would’ve gotten had the node been a lumber mill/lab when you captured it, then levelled it up to max stars.

That means that if you have an empty node at lvl 5, then construct a lumber mill, you will get the lumber of a lvl 1+2+3+4+5 lumber mill (including wood multipliers from the ancient legendary tortoise, if it’s active).

If you then construct a lab on the same node then you will keep your lumber (minus whatever lumber the lab costs ofcourse) and gain lvl 1+2+3+4+5 worth of DNA.

If you then rebuild another lumber mill at the same spot, you’ll gain another “batch” of lumber.

It’s been confirmed in this thread that the passive bonus from training facilities disappear once you destroy it: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2120250/discussions/0/4358996025341775119/

We can assume this is also valid for Gold mines, because their scaling behaves similarly which i will go more into later.

To clarify before we start, with “passive” facilities I refer to gold mines and training facilities, and with “one-time resource” facilities I refer to labs and lumber mills. Also I refer to these constructed buildings as both “facilities” and “Buildings”. So when I say “facilities” I don’t mean “training facilities” unless it is specified.

All constructed facilities scale both with the number of facilities constructed before on the current node AND in relation to what facilities of the same type have been constructed before in the current world. The latter of these differs a bit between passive and one-time resource facilities.

All facilities scale the same way according to how many facilities of any type have been constructed on the selected node before, and the formula is easy:

If it’s the first time a building is being constructed on the node, the price remains unchanged at a (1x) multiplier. If it’s the 2nd building then it’s a (2x) multiplier, and if it’s the 3rd building then it’s a (3x) multiplier.

There are however two types of cost scaling in relation to previously constructed facilities of the same type:
Type 1: Passive buildings (Goldmines and Training facilities)
Type 2: One-time resource buildings (lumber mills and labs)

The scaling types differs as such:

Type 1: Passive buildings:
Every currently active facility of the same type that you have constructed (not discovered in the map) increases the base price of future facilities. For goldmine the increase is by 50 lumber and for training facilities it’s 100 lumber. This makes sense because you lose these passive bonuses as you demolish the buildings, and hence the base price decreases with it.

Type 2: One-time resource buildings:
For every type of this building constructed before, either on this node or on other nodes, active or demolished, the base price increases. 5 gems increase for lumber mills and 150 lumber increase for Labs. That means if you’ve built and demolished a laboratory on ONE NODE ONLY 100 times (not that I think you’ll ever have to do this), then the base cost of building another laboratory on any node has increased by 100 x 150 = 15000 lumber. Even if you have no other constructed labs on the map at all. This makes sense as you keep the facility’s resources even when you demolish the building.

So the formula for the wood/war gem price of facilities looks like this:

(Initial building cost + type 1 or 2 scaling increases) x (1+How many times a building has been constructed on this node before)

So if we say the first lumber mill costs 5 war gems, that you’ve built a total of 10 lumber mills in the world before and you’ve built 2 (of any) buildings before on the current node, the price of a new lumber mill would be this:

(5 + 5×10)x(1+2)= 55×3=165 war gems.

Sadly I’m unaware of what the initial cost of the different facilities are, but they are quickly dwarfed by the base price increase from building new facilities of the same type.

It’s nice to know, as implied from the information from this part, that it’s hard to ruin costs for later by screwing up in ignorance early game. For even if you screwed up maximally and built/destroyed a lot of different facilities on lvl 1 nodes then it won’t impact the cost of passive structures on other nodes, and the high cost multipliers on the current nodes won’t transfer to other nodes either. The only bad consequence will be the relatively low flat base cost increase on new labs and lumber mills. Not to mention your gems income will increase later in the game allowing for more resources for lumber mill constructions!

Also right now Ancient gives x100 lumber instead of x10. If the devs don’t change this then you’ve got access to plenty of lumber to experiment or screw up with.

Justification for getting the legendary tortoise “Ancient” as early as possible:

1. Massive lumber income increase which is very useful especially for early-game. (and important for this guide)
2. Getting wild growths started will be less annoying for later, so you don’t have to camp at every maxxed node for 10 minutes. Also they will get more time to grow, so they become more powerful. I’m unsure if there is a cap or not on how strong they can grow but I doubt it. (important so it competes with gorelock).

The competing legendary tortoises early-game would probably be Gorelock and Rindolf.

Rindolf: Most important trait imo is the winter miner granting tortoise keys and mutation keys. I assume these synergize with miners first evolution that grants up to +10% chance to find rare currency. While this is a good upgrade, equipment from tortoise keys quickly gets replaced by more powerful equipment and the mutations get more powerful as you progress in the game. Not to mention their drop rates are very low unless you heavily invest DNA into this evolution over other argueably more useful evolutions. It’s a nice bonus to have but his usefulness pales in comparison with Ancient and Gorelock.

Gorelock: 2nd passive possibly gives all of your squads 10x damage permanently for every generation you complete. Stacking multiplicatively. It’s an incredibly good buff, but over time is probably overshadowed by Ancient’s wild growth.

My suggestion as to how to progress with tortoises:

Once you get a tortoise to level 3000 you get both their passives permanently. This also requires you to invest an additional 200 gems to increase their veterancy level.

This is a slow process and not one to be done purely manually unless YOU ARE INSANE!!!

Packrat’s last evolution, “collecting gear”, automatically collects tortoise food when upgraded to level 2. (Even though it doesnt state so). Additionally, if you wanna go the extra mile, you can get the adventure mode upgrade that gives +25% tortoise food spawn rate.

Ancient is the most powerful early game, so I’d recommend to start with him. Once you get him to veterancy level 3 level 3000 then go over to Gorelock. Once you’ve maxxed Gorelock then whomever you pick next can be up to your taste imo. While the remaining tortoises usefulness are still plenty and picking the right tortoise is still important, they’re short-term or insignificant compared to the long-term importance of Gorelock and Ancient.

This may be useful to keep in mind, in regard to “evening out” the usefulness of training facilities and gold mines:

Lvl 5 training facility increases damage (multiplicatively) by 1.75x, which sounds like a lot, but enemy HP increases by 1.55x per new level (confirmed by devs in another thread in the discussion forums). So that means every training facility on average only allows you to push a bit more than one extra level. and that’s not taking into account how enemies also deal more damage to you!

Gold mines passive income (probably) stacks multiplicatively. So while the extra amount may seem insignificant at first it should become a decent amount as you keep building them. A maxxed goldmine gives a 3.5x multiplier so every 2 new goldmines built should increase your offline income more than tenfold.

That being said I can’t say I have actively paid attention to see if gold mines can become useful or not myself. It may be the case that the generated offline money is so low that any number of mines won’t be enough! Honestly I didn’t start constructing gold mines myself before I wrote this guide. But the theory behind it seems to indicate that they may be useful, atleast compared to training facilities. For even if each goldmine allows you to buy a bit more than one level more worth of upgrades, they’re able to compete with the training facility from a strictly theoretical standpoint. And while the scaling in this game is nuts, the prices doesn’t increase by 250% per level.
Hence I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think offline earnings may be useful even if you go offline many levels before your run usually hits a wall. But I’ll have to confirm this through further experience. If anyone can confirm this further, preferably with numbers, then that’d be appreciated.

Read the tl;dr part at the start of this guide 🙂

Justification for the two simple paths mentioned there:
1. Every maxxed empty node will become permanently useful by adopting a passive building.
2. Costs will remain about as low as you can get them while still allowing for the construction for one-time resources from labs and lumber mills.

Note that if you wanna build more lumber mills and labs for the one-time resources, then demolishing/rebuilding on several maxxed nodes saves costs compared to just building/destroying on a single node.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this was useful to you!