NinjAlin , you seem to be a complete town ahead.. and I'm setting alarms for the middle of the night.. what's the secret sauce? thks !
The generic optimal strategy for "close" manager levels :
1) Make sure you have enough production and shipping to never run out of stock for your current festival tier.
2) Cheap Festival Levels
3) Excess Production (right amount to get close to done 7 shortly after 5)
4) Excess Shipping (right amount to get close to done 6 shortly after 5)
5) Tier-Up Festival
6) Tier-Up Shipping
7) Tier-Up Production
Goto 1.
The basic idea is that if your city is relatively well balanced, festival levels will determine the rate at which you can do steps 1->5, but time to 7 will be determined partly by 3 and time to 6 will be determined partly by 4 as even a slight excess will build up significantly over the long wait time, and let you finish the "just as expensive" step 6 quick compared to step 5. If you overdo step 3 and 4 though then you unnecessarily add a significant delay to step 5.
Picking the right festival/shipyard/factory levels for 2, 3 & 4 before long wait periods can cut hours off (call it staging).
An example:
At Festival 3-Shipping 3-Fireworks 2 when going from 250/250/25 to 300/300/50 in my sim:
Without steps 2,3,4:
1) 2 Fireworks Levels to 27 (needed to not run out) (<2 minutes)
2) -
3) -
4) -
5) Festival 300 (~10.3 hours)
6) Shipyard 300 (~5.4 hours)
7) Fireworks 50 (~2.1 hours)
Total = ~17.8 hours hours to go from 250/250/25 to 300/300/50
1) 2 Fireworks Levels to 27
2) 13 Festival Levels to 263: (~0.2 hours)
3) 3 Fireworks Levels to 30: (~0.1 hours) (or 7 to 34 if you don't want to count on your drink factory) (~0.2 hours)
4) 36 Shipyard levels to 286: (~2.5 hours)
5) Festival 300 (~9.6 hours)
6) Shipyard 300 (~1.6 hours)
7) Fireworks 50 (~0.6 hours)
Total = ~14.7-14.8 hours to go from 250/250/25 to 300/300/50
You could further refine this a little by splitting the staging up into more steps - and taking it a bit further (since the time from 4->6 is bound by the shipyard at this point for instance, it's hard to cut off more time if you don't take that shipyard a bit higher. you might finish 5 faster by adding some extra festival levels, but still be waiting just as long in total to ship enough to finish 6).
With shipyard manager at 2 or 4 instead (while festival and fireworks are both still 3 & 2) (the other ones I've somewhat heavily simmed this year):
Shipyard 2: Fireworks stays at 25 (because you don't ship enough to need more), Festival & Shipping goes to 265/282 (~2.1 hours) then Shipping goes to 297 (~5.6 hours), then back to festival for 300 (~9.4 hours), shipyard 300 (~0.6 hours), Fireworks 50 (~0.6 hours). Total 18.3 hours to go from 250/250/25 to 300/300/50.
Shipyard 4: Fireworks goes to 40 (~0.5 hours), Festival goes to 276 (~0.9 hours), Shipyard stays at 250 (you already overship enough because of the higher manager), Festival goes to 300 (~8.5 hours), Shipyard goes to 300 (~1.9 hours), Fireworks goes to 50 (~0.5 hours). Total 12.3 hours to go from 250/250/25 to 300/300/50.
Similar refinements can be made going from 200/200/x to 250/250/25, but the time cut off is much less because the total time is less.
