I keep reading all these posts where people missed their event objective. I was waiting for someone to HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD for why.
@GateKeeper started writing an almost complete 4 part recipe, but left out 1 ingredient that could make it successful from failure for the masses..
You should thank @MooingCat this morning for adding the last ingredient (in a very subtle way, too...) 1 sentence, buried in 12 pages of complaining and blaming INNO for personal event failures.
I resisted the expose, because (as I wrote to
@Fenix privately), it's not INNO's job to leave training wheels on your game bicycle. Someone said that "Wow, it's not free anymore". Well that's partially true, but it's really never been free - ever. Someone else said "only 20% are going to get this based on leagues". Yes, 1 out of 5 will get this without spending much (recipe cost is 150 diamonds), and 4 won't.
4 won't. 4 out of 5 will fail (and whine and moan that Inno screwed them). Inno didn't. Inno built a event with mathematics and you know from the start that you have to be in the top 20% to have a chance at a "FREE" event prize. If you want the event prize and can't "get there from here" to figure it out, you're going to have to pay for it with diamonds/money.
That's the bottom line.
So I'll expand on what
@MooingCat generously gave you in a probably-overlooked sentence above with a bit of math education that ANYONE can understand. It will provide you with the intellectual bridge (if you choose to walk over it...) to live Forge Bowl 2023 success. This is exactly what I did here in beta - and I have a full event building sitting in my Iron Age beta city - after having spent ONLY 150 diamonds for the ULTIMATE coach.
If you take the time to read this entire story (I'm a published author, so to me, not everything is summarized...), you'll be ready for live.
Look over all the coaches. Which single one "energizes" the plan to "cross the goal line"?
The most important coach for this strategy is...
The progress coach, and then the league coach for icing the deal to make sure you stay in at LEAST the BRONZE age for the final upgrade you need. So if you need both, the
ULTIMATE COACH is your dream come true.
The other coaches are superfluous to you
IF your goal is the building.
By buying the ultimate coach, 1 time (especially on the last day with the daily special being favorable to you...) It's going to RAIN down prizes you want over the quantity of stars you have to spend.
But again, if the daily special isn't favorable, don't change your event goal - just execute and take all the daily specials you make and sell them - haha.
For me, ironically, I spent about 10,000 stars the 2nd to last day, and the daily special was the Winner's Plaza selection kit. I could care less about them in the IRON age in beta, but I got over 20 of them. Big deal. That wasn't my goal, but the stars and planets aligned so that I got something of potential value, but not today.
If you want the building, the math of what the progress coach does is super important.
Here's the KEY: Always pick the player with the smallest RUN cost (no matter WHAT prize they give you... it's not about THEIR prize, it's about their COST), and just take 1 hour and blow out all the stars.
Why the lowest costs? Because it's an iterative process and with the progress coach, the deal is you're getting 1 extra yard for every run you do. That means you want lots of runs! Repeat:
LOTS OF CHEAP costing RUNS!!
Using that math = let's build a simple ILLUSTRATIVE example model:
If the football field is 100 yards to cross the goal line, and you only have 2 runners, one that does 50 yards/run and one that does 10/run, here's what happens to your total yardage when you use both to go 100 yards:
RUNNER A (50): 2 runs x 50 yards makes 102 yards = 100 total from the runner, and 1 extra yard x 2 runs as a bonus
now for the other runner - same idea.
RUNNER B (10): 10 x 10 makes 110 total yards awarded to you (use the same math paradigm as the 50 yard runner)
The goal is to MAKE LOTS of extra yardage to zoom down the field to the goal line and for that extra yardage to keep accruing into your field position (and favor). This seemed to do just that.
I didn't get super-quantitative on the costs (actually
@MooingCat confirmed my suspicions above....) , I just have a good sense of numbers and took pulse points mathematically as that 10,000 was diminishing from spending it.
But you know what this was doing? MAKING LOTS OF YARDS and the 10K wasn't going down very fast, ether
I found everything was working nominally and that assured me that my hypothesis of relative costing per yard of running within a tolerance I could accept, and one that would get me the upgrade kits in the quantity I would need. Its a feedback loop to make sure my theory was still on track.
It was.
So back to the example: if the relative costs of those 2 runner types is near parity to each other for their yardage , that 10 extra yards achieved by the lowest COST runner for the same cost as the other higher cost runner, over 10,000 star costs, will easily give you MORE upgrade kits, and you'll succeed in the event if your goal is the main prize.
Any whiff of deviation of the single goal I set (get the event prize for 1 fee of 150 diamonds...) to get other things offered in the event - puts that at risk, and then you get caught short and in INNO's spider spun web as a meal.
To get out of the web costs you more diamonds than it should (or cash).
Is this the only strategy to get the prize? Don't know, but can't believe it's a single threaded event to a single solution.
I repeat, FoE isn't Pay2Win. That's myopic. It's think to win.