I got one self aid kit from my city outside blinking boat in the water. I visit one my friends city and used motivate. Immediately it got blurred and cannot use motivate any more in my friend city. When I return to my city it showed 24 hour timer running for motivation.
Self aid kit is doing the same job. Only difference I saw was instead of my friends I can only do the motivation. The moment I used the kit it disappears from my inventory, which is similar to blurred behaviour of motivation while visiting my friend city. Until this everything was same. When the building shows the box on top with star icon and collecting it makes the star getting disappeared. So this was the accepted behavior. If I knew this earlier I could have not used the self aid kit on the building. Self and friends aid having timer concept difference made me confused very badly.
I actually thought of using the finish special production item after motivating the building. I got those items from the summer event. But it can be used per collection. So many items need to be combined for meeting my expectation. Building gets motivated then finish special production item then collection, then only use the finish special production item till the motivation expires. But it does not work like that. Once collected motivation disappears which means everytime building needs to be motivated to get the star items presented in the building and to collect immediately finish special production item comes into action. I did not expect like this.
I DO NOT LIKE THIS WAY!!
But this has always been the way it's been. Motivation is for 1 collection - i.e. in the older simpler times whether you had a 5 minute production running or 24 hours production running, you still only got 1 collection.
Self-Aid simply replaces your friend's aid for a single collection so you don't have to depend on it - and it's perfectly paired with finish special production. Typically the best use of finish special production is immediately after you've collected the building, so no timer is wasted. But it usually also requires an aid and waiting for an aid would be prohibitive so using a self-aid kit allows that usage. Self-Aid kits are generally more plentiful than finish special productions, so you wouldn't usually need additional value from them.
The exception might be if you produce a lot of Finish Special Production items in your city but not a lot of self-aid kits. Generally I rely on a number of Sacred Tree of Patience in my city that makes a lot of finish special production items. I think there's other options but I don't know what they are off the top of my head. Coupled with Joyful Nutcracker Guardhouse to have a mass self-aid kit to use each day for all the tiny buildings.
