Gauntlet Strategy
adonibyte
✭✭✭
in The Bridge
Hi All,
I know we have done this thread before, but I was just wondering what your current strategy is for Gauntlet. Since I don't have any Guinan or Caretaker, I really would like to take at least one Armus. My current strategy is as follow:
1. Select crew and start gauntlet within an hour or so of reset.
2. Not run any battles for at least a couple of hours or maybe overnight to let ranks build up.
3. Run high win rate battles trying to get 10 trophies per so I don't rank up too quickly. I try not to spend more merits than I earned in that refresh period, and never dil.
4. For the two or three refresh periods before the gauntlet ends (5-9 hour mark) I stop focusing on streaks and try for as much points as possible with the same merit spending policy.
This usually gets me 2 win streaks of about 18-20 and ranks me under 50. I was consistently under 20 or top 10 before Armus came out. I assume people who had multiple Caretakers had given up on trying to win and now are playing to get Armus FFE.
Any thoughts would be helpful. Thanks!
I know we have done this thread before, but I was just wondering what your current strategy is for Gauntlet. Since I don't have any Guinan or Caretaker, I really would like to take at least one Armus. My current strategy is as follow:
1. Select crew and start gauntlet within an hour or so of reset.
2. Not run any battles for at least a couple of hours or maybe overnight to let ranks build up.
3. Run high win rate battles trying to get 10 trophies per so I don't rank up too quickly. I try not to spend more merits than I earned in that refresh period, and never dil.
4. For the two or three refresh periods before the gauntlet ends (5-9 hour mark) I stop focusing on streaks and try for as much points as possible with the same merit spending policy.
This usually gets me 2 win streaks of about 18-20 and ranks me under 50. I was consistently under 20 or top 10 before Armus came out. I assume people who had multiple Caretakers had given up on trying to win and now are playing to get Armus FFE.
Any thoughts would be helpful. Thanks!
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Comments
Also, there is probably no need to wait more than an hour or so before starting your gauntlet. By that point you'll be at the bottom of the list anyway so you're not going to drop further.
1) Streaks,
2) Merit farm,
3) Max trophies.
Lastly, I don’t really shoot for a particular rank, though I prefer to land around 11-15 when I do. Winning each and every gauntlet to max out rewards is a pipe dream even if you game the start time and the rewards from 2-10 are frankly worth less than those from 11-15. This is because the volume of loot boxes is more important than the ever so slightly higher drop chance for the special crew in gauntlet vaults compared to chests/etc.
So far this strategy has never failed.
I pick my mount Rushmore (Guinan, Caretaker, M Picard, Surak) fifth spot goes to anyone that matches the selected skill (if not already covered in a decent capacity) and/or anyone with a decent proficiency with a 45% crit.
When I enter, if I am still awake after gauntlet reset then, if not one of the first things in the morning session, although I have been known to forget until about mid morning or midday equally it's not exactly high priority for me.
How I start, select from the far right and pick the easy ones till I hit a wall or risky 50/50 scenarios, stop let my rank drop when my crew has recharged then I do a merit refresh to get a new selection that is more in line with your trophy rank as you will have dropped. Keep the run going until day 1 finishes or you lose then - if the latter then play till all are out. After that its play as many rounds while also going for more ballsy 50/50s for more trophies and hope for a higher rank.
I find 11-20ish is the sweet spot i'd rather open more boxes than less.
I recommend you post any bugs in the engineering section of the forum
This gets bantered about frequently, but the logic is super backwards.
The implication is that DB makes it more likely for you to fail at an inflated rate (spoiler alert: they don't) to encourage you to spend resources so that you can balance out that failure.
If DB wanted to actually incentive spending, they would actually make you MORE successful than expected so you actually got more rewards. If they are making you more likely to fail (again, still not actually happening), then spending to revive/extend is actually less valuable and players are less likely to do it.
While I agree about the reality of spending to revive versus spending to improve rewards, I am going to have to side with barrydancer about the intent behind the design of the Gauntlet. It was neither the first nor last curious decision DB has made with regards to how to drive spending.
I would like to believe that there is a Gauntlet rework under development that works more like Skirmish event bonus rewards than it does currently. Granted, I have not spent dil on either item, but such a design change would signal a more player-friendly approach than we currently have.
Saying things like "DB made it frustrating, therefore it forces people to spend" is really silly. Frustrated people don't normally look at a money sink and continue to throw things into the dispose-all if they aren't getting some value out of that investment.
Any game that imposes on players "I don't want to get too many points" rule is by definition idiotic. That's why you simply can't formulate best strategy in this case. I have been starting my Gauntlet mostly a minute or two after reset and most of the time have been trying to get as many points as I could. Result? I got Caretaker FF.
There is only one "strategy" to win Armus. Simply play Gauntlet. The way you play it has no any meaning at all.
#gauntletsucks is eternal I guess...
That would be the case if DB was run by smart people... As sad as it sounds barrydancer is right and you are wrong.
My strategy is:
1) treat gauntlet as just a merit farm to buy 50/100 merit hard to get items in the store, and also to give you the flexibility to ignore missions during faction events. In this you won’t be disappointed
2) let iampicard do the math and just hammer away every 4 hours. For streaks use the default order it gives, for points, use the “best first” option which sorts by expected value return rather than win likelihood. Play through to complete crew exhaustion to get your Locutus in 2024 rather than 2025.
2b) as many have stated, never spend dilithium and either never spend on merit opponent refreshes, or maybe only at a 5 or 8 streak mark
3) trust iampicard’s crew selection. If you have to adjust the default parameters significantly to get the crew you “think” should be in play you are possibly succumbing to biased estimation of the value of trait boosts. I definitely was before IAP got me pause and rethink.
4) learn who the top 10-12 gauntleers are and favor them ruthlessly in begolds. There are far more power base skill and power voyager crew than power gauntlet crew, and the way it currently works the 2nd tier gauntleteers often aren’t worth passing up a better card for. Get the 2nd tier for other reasons than gauntlet alone and hope you can get the power crew over time
5) in many (not all) cases power gauntleteers may not be worth putting high in your Fuse queue, because their gauntlet proficiency comes at expense of base skill. There are exceptions (Gary seven, etc).
Is it common practice these days to tell someone they're wrong with no substantiation?
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Yea, I don't really get it. My point is, essentially, "DB has done a bad job at monetizing the gauntlet". Twisting that into some weird argument of "DB intentionally makes something frustrating to somehow force players to spend money" is just a huge violation of Occam's Razor.
In the end, I think we're saying very similar things, one just makes people feel smart because they aren't falling for "DB's shady marketing in frustration" when, in reality, DB has just failed to make spending actually "worth it" to begin with.
DB employees are the only people who know what gauntlet's objective was and how it's performing. We can speculate all we want, but it's all speculation and can't be proven.
I don't think that's the cost one must pay. It's just the easiest way to churn through gauntlet runs on the road to Locutus. I honestly think there's very little one can do to boost the chances of a gauntlet gold other than get good crew and play consistently, because based on reports here, the underlying drop probability is clearly calibrated WAY too low. The proper calibration should probably be something like "players who have reasonably good crew and complete most gauntlet cycles for the full duration of [Caretaker / Armus / whoever as reward] (six months? whatever) should have well more than a 50/50 chance of ending up with at least one copy."
That's clearly not the case based on the reports of longstanding players chugging away and never getting a gold. The expected value of the drop rate under sustained play is clearly way less than one, so many dedicated players get none, and then there's some out in the tail of the distribution who get 2, 3, 4 whatever by "lucky rolls". [Sidebar, that's hardly the worst place the game ROI calibration is off, right?: it should not take months of slogging to FF ONE gold. The whole ratio of player effort : progress/rewards in STT is just plain off, but we press on regardless].
Anyway ... if the underlying drop probability is set too low, I honestly don't think any strategies which boost # of completed wins by a smidge are going to make a whole lot of discernible difference to any individual player or be worth the effort. Even a factor of 2 boost might not make a discernible difference outside of a large statistical aggregate (which no individual player ever gets to experience): let's say the chance of getting a gold after 6 months of playing every 4 hours is 10% (just making up a number). Perhaps there's a brilliant gauntlet strategy that boosts that to 20%. (Getting all the power crew would probably do that by squeezing out an extra win or two from them before exhaustion). You would still end up with most players feeling miserable and cheated after 6 months, if they take the bait of "the gold is the point of this particular game mechanic".
So I go back to what many have said: it's a credit merit and occasional chron farm; just play patiently to get a Locutus in a couple of years; and then anything else along the way is just a pleasant surprise and happy accident. (I know, easy for me to say after getting 3 golds, but they literally all happened in the last 3-4 weeks for me, which again tells me "tail of the distribution statistical anomaly under underlying low odds behavior" not "I suddenly started doing something right", because I haven't changed my gameplay).
You don't need IAP to use Gauntlet as a credit merit farm, but turn to IAP if you are obsessive compulsive about maximizing your credit farm output. Otherwise pass and you probably won't notice any difference. You can emulate much of the same outcome by just learning "I am probably implicitly biased towards the seeming value of +25% and sometimes +45% trait boosts for crew who are strong in only one skill, versus unboosted crew who are solid in 2-3, unless I do the math and check".
(edited to correct "merit" when I said "credit". Too many dang currencies in this game!)
But, but, but... some players have won so many and some have won nothing. Welcome to statistical probability. The forum polls (admittedly a biased sampling) reveal that lots of players have won the gauntlet crew. Some win more, some win less, and some win none. This is all within the realm of probable outcomes. There's no conspiracy here. Luck happens - both ways.
For those using the iampicard tool or some other strategy aid... I have no problem with that, but you are not really playing gauntlet. If you aren't taking the time to think through your crew choices and the battles you should fight, then why bother at all? That is the game-entertainment side of gauntlet. If you just let a program make all your choices for you... eh, I just don't get why that's interesting for you. @Irial had a great post a few months ago about the process of selecting crew for competing in gauntlet. The strategic considerations in that post are part of what I enjoy. But that's me. Do what works for you.
I manually calculated win probabilities for a long time to help me make matchup choices. I wrote a number of tools to do it myself. This tool simply takes care of doing the calculations I was already doing, saving me a significant amount of time.
As an added side-bonus, I've been exporting my rounds as I've been playing for since July and have come up with quite the collection (around 4000 tracked rounds so far). It would be nearly impossible (not to mention inaccurate and prone to error) if I were to attempt to manually write down rounds each time I ran them.
Compiled data so far, in case you're curious: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sYlf7A6M-kaENSsxoHhiUrpNuv71zNRz50Izi-ARB6E/edit#gid=0
i think it's
01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101110
I appreciate the compliment @Ishmael Marx
Anyone who may be interested in reading the thread you mentioned can find it here.
Reading this paragraph, I couldn’t help but think of this:
“Ten percent of nothin’ is...let me do the math here. Nothin’ goes into nothin’, carry the zero...”
I agree that Irial's thread outlining a very different strategic approach was VERY interesting. basically targeting what other players were likely to pick and ensuring you had effective counters to them.
However, gauntlet is now one of MANY high frequency daily farming functions in the game (voyages, shuttles, daily missions for honor, cadets (with adwarps so takes more planning now), adwarps, chron bonuses for login time, etc etc). Many of us would not get half as many rounds of gauntlet done if it weren't for a tool like that to speed it up, never mind taking that long planning to counter other players crew.
STT is heavily impacted by how many hours you spend playing to maximize all the potential currencies. Gauntlet has such low odds of anything useful, for me it's only marginally better than the dabo wheel. I would rather maximize my rounds completed towards Locutus for the minimum possible time spent doing it, because it's nothing but a Merit farm for me.
You beat me to the punch. :-). Gauntlet is a low ROI activity, so I prefer not to spend time doing arithmetic over and over ... not fun for me relative to what I get out of it. But I do sink huge amounts of time into figuring out best faction event crew loading, which (to me) is a more challenging and fun optimization problem with immediate and real payoff. All a matter of personal preference....