weather control

[jonno697]

Hi, Is the new weather control station worth it, and best way to use?

[ToniMil]

You can not use it. With all the buffs you will get bigger losses than without them. I tested 20% more damage and I got a lot more losses.

[SmurfAsH]

It's funny to have if you enjoy to recalculate attacks.
For guide-follower: not worth it.

No effect is good enough compaired to the cost.

Hard Frost - splash to defense units. Only makes sense if/when using (regular) Swordsmen
Bright Sunshine - increased HP to all. Can't see any real gain - not really worth it.
Heavy Fog - flanking to all. Could be useful for "slackers" (using one kind troups), but not really worth it.
Hurricane - increased damage to all. Can't see any real gain - not really worth it.

[Dorotheus]

As SmurfAsh says this is not a building for those who blindly follow guides.

I used DSOsim to look at sector 1 of Young Woodcutter using Hard frost on my normal attacks, The only difference was all attacks and blocks finished sooner and the losses were exactly the same. If I were to use a Tavern for the block the block would normally last between 300 to 620 seconds, with hard frost the block would last between 280 to 360 seconds. Replacing the Tavern with a MoD the block would normally last between 160 to 650 seconds, with hard frost the block would last between 150 to 220 seconds.
Troop losses were exactly the same for no buff and hard frost.

As yet I've not had time to look at the other 14 possible combinations as the buffs are stackable providing you are willing to pay the 500/1000/1500 gem cost for stacking the buffs.

The reason why I got the building is my economy rules out the need for Love garden(s) and my playstyle rules out use of the Observatory. All I've learnt so far is this building needs to be looked into deeper before coming to a conclusion of was it worth it for me.

[Jim_B]

Adding flanking to all troops and then using vargus to negate the enemy's bonus might be worth investigating

[Fanfas]

And rumour has it, it works well on MCC chains where most troops already have splash damage and yours not. Haven't tested it yet though. But if anything it'll end up being and overpriced very good looking deco... kinda like the christmas tree but expensier :)

[MikeLido]

It'll be a little more useful than the Mad Scientist is. :rolleyes:

[rathbone93]

Testing out the hard frost feature... Did a YWC with one; had to recalculate all blocks (typically, reducing number of ms by 2-5), but didn't save any troops. Did a 2T with one; again, recalculated blocks, and possibly saved 2-3ms over normal losses. It does affect mounted swords as well, but if you think through it, it's extremely unlikely to make much difference in any attacks that last 1 round where the enemy camp has first strikers, as they would have wiped out all of your ms already before they had a chance to use their splash damage. Might allow slight updating to the multi-round boss camp attacks and saving a few ms.

At the moment, it fulfills a similar function to horsemen statues.

[Kit_]

Testing out the hard frost feature... Did a YWC with one; had to recalculate all blocks (typically, reducing number of ms by 2-5), but didn't save any troops. Did a 2T with one; again, recalculated blocks, and possibly saved 2-3ms over normal losses. It does affect mounted swords as well, but if you think through it, it's extremely unlikely to make much difference in any attacks that last 1 round where the enemy camp has first strikers, as they would have wiped out all of your ms already before they had a chance to use their splash damage. Might allow slight updating to the multi-round boss camp attacks and saving a few ms.

At the moment, it fulfills a similar function to horsemen statues.

if doing ywc, you should be using sunshine, not hard frost
use frost on the mcc ventures instead

[sparkz]

Adding flanking to all troops and then using vargus to negate the enemy's bonus might be worth investigating

Vargus is not worth it.

By doing as you suggest you essencially force yourself to use a 195 general in every situation, even those where you normally could use 285 major with much better effect.


The reason why I got the building is (...)

The reason I got this building is that its so bad I assume it will have to be reworked in future, which has potential of it being useful in some ways.

[Urd123]

Vargus is not worth it.

By doing as you suggest you essencially force yourself to use a 195 general in every situation, even those where you normally could use 285 major with much better effect.



The reason I got this building is that its so bad I assume it will have to be reworked in future, which has potential of it being useful in some ways.

They have not reworked the Mad Sci yet - they have not even bothered commenting on the massive response there have been here,- so my guess is. In your dreams.

[Jim_B]

I just did a woodcutter with added splash.

Plus side:
I only needed to resim one block, and a few minor tweaks to others (taking out a couple of MS mainly) - they all held, including the final with enough time to send 14 generals for lossless on final leader.

Minus side:
I resimmed every attack. The only change in losses I could find was a couple of attacks where I could use swordsmen rather than Mounted swordsmen. The cost in extra brew to replace the swordsmen cancelled out any saving in battle horses and swords. The only benefit seemed to be a few minutes saved in the elite barracks.

Adding splash damage on Alis looks pointless.
There aren't enough (any?) attacks where Vargus can be used with added Flanking to save troops on high level addies.
Not tested the other options yet,
Not gonna use gems to have multiple buffs active.

Verdict so far... Useless.

Still, I like the pretty sails going round...

[Jim_B]

if doing ywc, you should be using sunshine, not hard frost
use frost on the mcc ventures instead

Thanks to the stupidly long cool-down I can't actually test this for real right now.

However, without any weather buffs at all my losses on YWC are around 180ms. (170ish if I exclude some optional camps I hit with Mary for the XP)

I have simmed every attack that isn't a block and I cannot get any significant savings anywhere using sunshine. That's before I even bothered checking that my blocks will hold - which I very much doubt without a lot of resimming (for no benefit).

Still just a pretty ornament.

[Mannerheim]

I think the building is great. I have used it with the scouting post so obviously I go for the max XP and do not even think about blocking unless there are insane losses in some camp. Did almost all of my 2nd Thieves during event with it. The buffs change a lot of MS losses to S in many advs. 3rd Thief for example is zero MS losses with the hurricane.

YWC in general is a poor adventure to "waste" any of the special building buffs but if I would, the sunshine would save me over 30 minutes of buffed barracks time and when the observatory works you could do 4 cutters with the same buff so that is over 2 hours saved in time. Now multiply this 3 times a week, or daily when additional copies can be bought. Now when I do the same with Wisdom XP runs the saved time per week jumps to days, plus it's not time saved but bunch of things in the unit resource costs.

[AbsoluteZ]

Please elaborate if you would. I usually use S over MS if the increase in losses is about 75-80% or less, since bread and brew are so cheap and easy to produce (or buy if you really get pinched).

Does the weather station actually provide much of a net gain in efficiency, reducing overall losses? I assume that it would help on some camps and hurt on others, but I'll readily admit that I haven't investigated it thoroughly enough to re-sim all my attacks on any single map. The few I did though were not very promising.

Edit: As a quick test, I sim'd the two camps for which I still use MS on 3rd Thief with hurricane...

wiki#10 (L3) -- 70mb70scn1GrT
Vargus 18MS+167AM w/o hurricane (avg loss 16.3MS+0AM, 100%win)
Vargus 18MS+167AM w/ hurricane (avg loss 18MS+167AM, 0.01%win)
Vargus 18MS+177AM w/ hurricane (avg loss 18MS+177AM, 0.21%win)
Vargus 28MS+167AM w/ hurricane (avg loss 28MS+154AM, 27.54%win)

wiki#30(C23) -- 40sw50mb40scn
Vargus 13MS182MM w/o hurricane (avg loss 11.4MS+0MM, 100%win)
Vargus 13MS182MM w/ hurricane ( avg loss 13MS + 66MM, 100%win)

These results are so bad I have a hard time believing them, but I'm not really anxious to verify them in-game. It could be the simulator tsomaps.com is not set up properly. I typically use dsosim2.de but oddly enough the weather functions were deactivated. I feel like something is not right here. If I could read German I would hop on their forum and check it out but, well... I can't.

[Mannerheim]

I don't personally use MS on either one of the camps with any of the buffs nor even the same general in all cases. The overall benefits are down to the players generals and skills and it does not make sense to compare individual camps as the buff affects the whole adv. Only buff that will not change the outcome of the camps to more losses is the frost. All others can switch between less or more losses per camp.

edit: I also noticed that you did not even really change the attack troops in those attacks which is completely wrong when determining results. You of course need to attack with a different combination when damage has changed on both sides.

[AbsoluteZ]

You're right, it was just a quick and dirty test to see if I could easily produce some positive results where I use MS on 3rdT. It seems to me that the amount of work involved in re-examining every single attack on any given map, then adding the results, with 4 different buffs (not to mention the combinations if you want to gem out of cooldown) is just not worth it for a relatively marginal benefit. Not saying that a few hours of barracks time is entirely insignificant, or that you're wrong to say the building is "great", but it could have been much greater. I might be able to hammer something out that works for me, but I think the majority of players will never use it unless a step-by-step guide gets posted to wiki someday.

[jonno697]

do you activate station before starting adventure or do you do it after adventure started?

[SnowBlizz]

do you activate station before starting adventure or do you do it after adventure started?

Before adventure starts.