Voyage event encounter VP - some observations
weakinteraction
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in The Bridge
Introduction
This thread is intended to share some things I've worked out about the encounter VP in voyage events. I was contemplating making a post like this in the last voyage event, but I was still optimistic that the devs were going to buff the rate at which VP accumulates; given that this event turned out exactly the same, I've decided it probably was worth making this. This is very much in the spirit of sharing what I've learned from my own mistakes.
Important note that I've decided to put up here rather than keep repeating all the way through: I am only considering encounter VP here. Exactly how passive VP works remains a mystery to me. From different voyages I've run, it seems to accumulate at somewhere between 20-25% of the rate of encounter VP if you use no bonus crew, up to roughly 100% on a fully bonus-crewed voyage (plus of course you get the extra antimatter, which is a big help in going longer).
Less important note: there are eight graphs here. If that's not your thing, stop reading now or maybe skip to the end. (And if that is your thing, please accept my apologies in advance for how rough and ready they are.)
Two escalators and one staircase
There are three different things which increase over time. Two of these increase automatically, but the third depends on success in encounters. I have started thinking of these in my head as two escalators and one staircase (although how you could be on a staircase on an escalator on an escalator I can't quite wrap my head around, so it's not a great analogy).
The first escalator is the base number of VP awarded in each individual gauntlet-style fight (I'm going to call these "mini-encounters"), which starts at 10 and goes up by 10 each time:
The second escalator is quite a bit slower, but the number of mini-encounters gradually increases over time:
(I don't have concrete data beyond 22 hours, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the pattern here is "three threes, four fours, five fives, six sixes ..." though I would be surprised if there wasn't a cap somewhere, just because otherwise you'd run out of space at the top of the screen for the symbols.)
The staircase is that each time you successfully pass all the mini-encounters, your reward multiplier goes up by 1 for next time:
Combine all this together, and VP per encounter rises quickly with encounter number; this leads to the following pattern of cumulative encounter VP up to each point:
Which looks the way I think we would all expect it to.
This thread is intended to share some things I've worked out about the encounter VP in voyage events. I was contemplating making a post like this in the last voyage event, but I was still optimistic that the devs were going to buff the rate at which VP accumulates; given that this event turned out exactly the same, I've decided it probably was worth making this. This is very much in the spirit of sharing what I've learned from my own mistakes.
Important note that I've decided to put up here rather than keep repeating all the way through: I am only considering encounter VP here. Exactly how passive VP works remains a mystery to me. From different voyages I've run, it seems to accumulate at somewhere between 20-25% of the rate of encounter VP if you use no bonus crew, up to roughly 100% on a fully bonus-crewed voyage (plus of course you get the extra antimatter, which is a big help in going longer).
Less important note: there are eight graphs here. If that's not your thing, stop reading now or maybe skip to the end. (And if that is your thing, please accept my apologies in advance for how rough and ready they are.)
Two escalators and one staircase
There are three different things which increase over time. Two of these increase automatically, but the third depends on success in encounters. I have started thinking of these in my head as two escalators and one staircase (although how you could be on a staircase on an escalator on an escalator I can't quite wrap my head around, so it's not a great analogy).
The first escalator is the base number of VP awarded in each individual gauntlet-style fight (I'm going to call these "mini-encounters"), which starts at 10 and goes up by 10 each time:
The second escalator is quite a bit slower, but the number of mini-encounters gradually increases over time:
(I don't have concrete data beyond 22 hours, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the pattern here is "three threes, four fours, five fives, six sixes ..." though I would be surprised if there wasn't a cap somewhere, just because otherwise you'd run out of space at the top of the screen for the symbols.)
The staircase is that each time you successfully pass all the mini-encounters, your reward multiplier goes up by 1 for next time:
Combine all this together, and VP per encounter rises quickly with encounter number; this leads to the following pattern of cumulative encounter VP up to each point:
Which looks the way I think we would all expect it to.
4
Comments
However, what the analysis above doesn't take account of is the fact that the first 8 encounters all happen within the first 2 hours. If we look at it over time instead of by encounter number, we get this:
The first two hours are almost a perfect straight line; if we add a line to project that outwards:
This means that you have to get to the 16 hour dilemma before you've earned more encounter VP than you would have done by repeating the first 2 hours 8 times over.
My takeaway from this is that the way the first set of encounters are staggered makes the first two hours by far the best way to gain encounter VP for most players who aren't using resources to keep voyages running longer and/or Quip their crew.
Which is a shame, because that's the babysitting bit everyone hates.
In fact, theoretically, if you were willing to completely forgo sleep, you could lather, rinse, repeat doing the very first encounter at 1 minute throughout the whole event and still reach the 130k threshold for the third copy of the purple crew. (I suspect this isn't quite true as my calculation only allows for the minute of voyaging, not the time it takes to set up the crew and do the encounter at either end, which is probably longer.)
1. Don't use encounter skips overnight
I'm pretty sure the devs intended the encounter skips, especially the gold ones, to have the same effect as the "double the rewards, triple the time" shuttle boosts of allowing players to sleep without falling behind. If I recall correctly (I may not), in the beta they awarded the full VP you would have got from the skipped encounter, but then they were nerfed to only preserve the reward multiplier. At this point they became worse than useless. Here's the encounter VP over time for a voyage where you put a gold 3-encounter skip on after the 4 hour dilemma:
I think this is the root cause of the common complaint that long voyages didn't accumulate anywhere near as much VP as players were expecting; especially if you're using multiple skips on the same voyage (e.g. maybe you do one overnight, do a dilemma when you first wake up, and then put on another skip to get through the work day), you're going to be a long way behind the curve.
As I said in the event thread, using purple fast forwards to catch up is a much better tactic as you don't sacrifice any of the encounter VP. I think the skips are effectively useless, except for the very early stages if it helps you fit the babysitting into your schedule.
2. Whatever you do, stay on the reward multiplier staircase
Everything up to this point has been based on the assumption that you keep passing the mini-encounters and so preserve the reward multiplier. If you lose it, you fall behind very quickly. Here's an example where you get unlucky and lose on the final mini-encounter at 6 hours, but manage to pass all subsequent ones:
You can see the absolutely yawning gulf. If you do end up failing, it is definitely worth using the gold crew restores or dilithium to keep the multiplier going; if you absolutely can't, I genuinely think it's better to recall and start again so that you get back on the staircase from the beginning.
My main account went out to 40 hours or so in phase 2 (thx, revival tokens). Time is relativistic once you start using fast forward boosts - the voyage wasn’t actually actively running for 40 of the 48 hours (I like to sleep and even do a few things during the day besides STT!). The exponential vp curve is real (as I’m sure the top leaderboard folks would concur). There were a few tricky battles that even my quipped crew needed the big crit bonus boosts as a safety margin but otherwise it was manageable. Rank 223 when the party ended.
My much newer alt account could only get to 7-8 hours (and doesn’t have a stash of tokens yet). For that acct, doing the early “babysitting” encounters still felt worthwhile for vp since the voyage wasn’t going very long anyway. Not sure I’d want to devote the time to test it, but the idea of doing a series of very short voyages to maximize vp as a newer player strategy is interesting.