Shop Heroes: Make a shop, build a city, sell to the rich [Android/iOS/PC]

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Shop Heroes: Make a shop, build a city, sell to the rich [Android/iOS/PC]

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Dragongem: Nov 9, 2009; Heroes of the Storm
Goon Tournament Champion

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloudcade.shopheroes&hl=en
IOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shop-heroes/id938185444?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4
Facebook: https://apps.facebook.com/shopheroes/?fb_source=appcenter&fbs=126&fb_appcenter=1
Kongregate: http://www.kongregate.com/games/cloudcade/shop-heroes
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/506140/

Last Front Page Update: 8/17/2016. Now on Steam!!! (windows only). Also added the Arena!

Welcome to the new up to date OP for Shop Heroes! The old thread is now dead, though it is available at (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3743118&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1)

What is this?

Shop Heroes is a shop simulator where you take up the role of a shopkeeper in a traditional RPG town selling weapons, armor, and items to the local adventurers. You then reinvest that money into your shop or your town so that you can then make more money, which you will reinvest, and so on and so on. Its a fun little time management game that gets a lot better if you're playing with other people. If you've played Swords and Potions, this game might seem very similar, since the developers of Shop Heroes are partially developers who broke away from Edgebee, who developed Swords and Potions. Nonetheless, Shop Heroes has made a lot of improvements on the Swords and Potions formula, and is an entirely different game.

The developers are pretty active and update the game once a month. So far every patch has introduced new cool things and has been received very positively!

Why should I play?
You should play because you like making money and figuring out new and clever ways to make tons of mad cash and/or gems. Also this game is not micro-heavy so especially later you can queue up some long crafts and quests and then check it hours later. It can take a lot of time or very little, it is at your pace.

Okay but what about the $$$?

There is a premium currency. However, the game doles them out pretty regularly via raids, bulk orders, and leveling. Plus you can trade for gems when you make shiny fancy items.

The good news is that although there are lots of things to spend gems on, there are currently only up to five things worth spending them on. They are:

- Auto Pre-craft slots (The game will automatically make any pre-requisite items when you make the final item)
- Additional Fusion Slots (Fuse more times at once!)
- Upgraded Quest Slots (Quests will auto complete, meaning your heroes will start resting the moment it is done)
- Buying keys for chests or quick cash (Chests have recipes, which all have various skills you can give to your heroes).
- Upgraded Trade Slots (Can sell up to 50 items at once, request up to 100 at once (nice for highly requested items), can cancel at any time).

Literally every other use of gems is not worth the effort. No content is "gemlocked". A completely F2P player held the top position in the game for months. There are packages every month that you can buy that have some neat recipes, but they're not gamebreaking.

The "best" package to spend your money on is the Wizard Package. You get access to the Wisdom Ocarina, which is a high-end item that sells for fat stacks of cash and is not amazingly hard to make.

Your Shop

Upgrading your shop is one of your main priorities in the game, since the furniture you place determines effectively what you can make in the game. Furniture is broken down into the following Categories:

Resource Bins: Items that hold a specific resource like Iron or Wood. Levelling these up increases your overall cap, as well as how much the bin itself holds. Note that you can place up to 3 of each bin; all of them have a separate timer so 3 bins = 3x the resources!!!
Workstations: Your workers need Workstations to make items, and the level of each workstation caps the total effective skill of your workers.
Racks: Restore Energy when you sell an item of the selected category. Energy is used to tell customers to buy different items, or to get them to pay a higher price for an item.
Counter: Your counter increases your max energy. There are other furniture pieces that also do this, but they're entirely premium, and not that worthwhile anyway.
Fusion Cauldron: Fuse lower quality items into higher quality items! This is a really good way to make some money on the side and make epics for your heroes.

Your City:

You and up to 24 other players will work together to build up a city, which will increase the level cap and availability of adventurers and workers, increase the speed of resource generation, and a lot more. Cities are massive goldsinks, but the benefits are amazing, and any gold you put into the city stays with you, the player. This means that if you jump ship to a new town, your donations weren't a waste. Donations to buildings will also provide short term boosts, so even if you aren't able to push a building to a new level, you and your neighboring shopkeepers will still benefit.

Quests:

Questing is the other big part of the game. In it you equip your heroes, send out parties, and get resources which you can either sell directly (for a large short-term gain) or make into shiny gear to sell and/or equip your heroes. Quests have an overall power level, which you must break in order to go on it, and a recommended power level (in the upper left), which is what heroes should have in order to not be "injured" which prevents them from getting loot and has a longer recovery time.

Heroes need equipment, which is given to them by you, the player! Equipment gives the heroes power, but it has a chance of breaking depending on the quality, level, and item preference. The big breakpoints for items with a "white" icon for a hero:

Normal quality, within 1 level: 3.0%
Great quality, within 1 level: 1.5%
Epic quality, within 1 level: 0.0% (it cannot break)
Legendary quality, within 3 levels: 0.0%
Mythical quality, within 5 levels: let's be frank you won't have one of these

Heroes also have skills, which either prevent items from breaking, buff your team, reduce recovery time, and all cool stuff. Use them wisely!

City Raids

City raids are quests that your entire city goes on! They are live from Thursday evening US time to Sunday evening US time, for 72 hours. Gems and keys are available, so help your city! There are quests for every level, so even the low people can help. Note that there is some level gating on rewards, and you need to participate to get rewards.

Arena:

Arena is a pvp mode where you fight against other teams. You set up your team, with their items and some sort of ability that affects people in your lineup. Positioning is important, as skills affect people to your right or your left! You can get crown jewels for your city, which enables the mayor to buff buildings with decorations, and get bags for winning 10 games in a row. You get 1 free ranked play every 8 hours, and there's no real penalty for losing, so go at it!

To unlock arena abilities, you have to go on personal quests. They are accessed by tapping the "!" on a person in the inn. They require specific items to go on that quest and you need to have the minimum power as well. The quests do give a minor amount of gems so it's not bad to set them up overnight.

Goon Players and Cities:

Goons have been coordinating via this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kqbmgS50YFzUvEdk4EeuMKSD9opqHDImBC61LM157N4/edit#gid=0.

There are three main cities and their mayors:
Boatmurdered (Dragongem)
Xtanstic (Xtanstic)
Murderville (Bad Munki).
Topaz City

Each of them should have slots available. If there aren't you can build your own shiny city or join one of the eight million pubbie cities! Joining a city lets you take advantage of the resources available, which helps you grow faster and eventually contribute more.

Latest Patch Notes (September)
http://forum.shopheroes.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7481

Levels 51-99! More grinding! Mayor's tab! Floors and Walls! (they're cool)

Happy shopkeeping! Post tips, tricks, and how you selling precrafts to whales who have way too many gems and gold to spare.

Dragongem fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Sep 27, 2016

# ? Mar 17, 2016 04:32

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 08:14

Dragongem: Nov 9, 2009; Heroes of the Storm
Goon Tournament Champion

Awesome guide post by Nullify:

Null1fy posted:

Here's a guide nobody asked for in terms of optimizing play for this dumb game

Shop Heroes is at face value an incredibly simple freemium investment per time per gain style game. The complexity develops if and when you decide to transition from it being a fun game to play while you take a poo poo, to obsessively micromanaging your crafts every 5 to 15 minutes, all day, every day. Don't judge me. I started playing around September of last year and I spent a few months playing the wrong way - especially for how often I played. Let me help you learn from my mistakes!

It should be no surprise that when it comes to freemium games, the perks of paying are going to set you far further ahead than if you don't spend any money. Shop Heroes is no exception. One package in particular has allowed the gap to narrow between the top wealthiest individuals and new players, which is explained at the end of this guide in the 'printing press' discussion under advanced play. The management team likes to point at a few free-to-play players ranked in the top 25 in defending the practicality of remaining free-to-play but those players are the exception, and by large margin you're going to get far more mileage out of the game by chipping in a few bones to the CloudCade pot.

I'm going to tailor this guide toward those of you looking to pursue efficiently playing the active time management style. Active and inactive time management are the two styles of play this game supports, and active time management is always going to yield higher results than inactive time management. In this guide I'll provide a few general tips, an introductory guide to set you in the right direction, and I'll finish off by covering some of the more 'advanced' play in the game.

Some Tips

Regardless of if you decide to stay free-to-play or pay there are a few things you should do:

Try to get into an established city. Goon cities are almost always recruiting. Access to T2 and T3 workers will help considerably. T1 workers only have 5 skill points per level. T2 get 7 per level and T3 get 10. One T3 worker is the equivalent of two T1 workers!

Save your blueprint fragments. Wooden and leather chest recipes become extremely easy to obtain if you plan appropriately, and there are no recipes you will be able to take full advantage of early on to profit off of or to equip your heroes with.

Save your wooden and leather keys and gems. The gems are going to help you purchase some premium content and the keys unlock some solid recipes you will want to start working on, once discovered. It isn't until iron keys that you get a decent amount of money worth listing on the market.

Not all recipes are created equal. There are recipes that are used as precrafts to popular higher level recipes that will sell faster, and for more money, on the marketplace. I focus this guide on one crafting strategy that better utilizes your early game to progress faster into the midgame.

In the beginning, do not purchase items of higher quality than 'good' for your heroes. Early on 3.0% break chance items are going to be destroyed beyond belief and you'll be questioning CloudCade's scripting integrity. If you do put any epic quality items on your heroes, pay special attention to how soon they (the hero's) level. Break chance is calculated after they level up, meaning a 0% break chance epic might become a 0.5-1.0% break chance after they level.

Selling your resources generally outweighs crafting items using them, with the exception of popular recipes. Resources are going to be one of your most direct avenues of income until you have a "money printer" item (one that sells quickly on the trade house, or of high value to heroes).

You are best served focusing on one or two items for your first set of workers. Focus placing skill points into the skills required to bring down the crafting time on a few select recipes.

Music is disproportionately better than any other item type. Pound for pound you will not get as much return from any other item line than music.

On Fusing: it is generally accepted that the best route to mythic is the following: 2 normal-> good; 2 good-> great; 2 great-> flawless; 2 flawless-> epic; 3 epic-> legendary; 4-5 legendary-> mythic.

Starting Out

The goal here is to conserve, conserve, conserve. It's going to be tempting to spend like crazy the first twenty or so levels because you level quickly, are rewarded with quite a lot relative to your income, and the game encourages expanding beyond what your income-per-growth supports. So don't. You only need enough shop space to have the following:

3 Wood Bins

3 Hardwood Bins

3 Leather Bins

Sawbench

Sewing Table

Arts and Crafts Station

1-2 Storage Furniture

Fusion Cauldron

2 Music Rack

Carpenter on Woodworking

Leatherworker on Textile Working

Tailor on Arts and Crafts
With everything above, you need at minimum the 4th shop upgrade which is very easily achieved within the first day of playing. The first goal is to unlock harps. Harps master at 'good' quality, meaning every exceptional craft (great or better) is instant profit in either gems or max-coin pricing. Selling them for gems will take a little longer, but yield slightly more income. Every 17 great harps can sell for 2 gems a pop, buying you a leather key that can be flipped for 2.5 million on the trade house instantly. The flip-side is that the great harps will also sell for max coin on the trade house instantly, so you can pick whichever way to unload them you prefer. Make use of your fusion cauldron to upgrade those good quality harps into great ones!

Considering how often you can craft harps, level your resource bins and workstations to best support your worker's skill level and ability to continuously craft them. The name of the game is streamlined business - when you're not spending resources, you're not making money. It is also a good time to increase the number of crafting slots. I think that 5 to 6 should be easily obtainable on harp profits. Once you're earning some steady income on harps, the hands-down best method of leveling is going to be buying flawless quality items within the purchasing level range of your heroes off of the trade house. I believe heroes can purchase items 7 levels higher than themselves and you want to offload the highest level, highest quality, items that you can as they yield more experience. Chest-unlocked blueprint items provide more experience to your shop but will cost more on the trade house given their rarity.

Eventually your income-per-shop growth is going to be stunted from harp sales and you'll be ready to advance to Nordic lutes. Nordic lutes don't master at any higher quality, but any exceptional craft that you make is going to be insane profit. Right now on the trade house good lutes request around 300,000 and greats request around 850,000. Greats can also just as easily sell for 5-7 gems meaning you can start to save up for iron keys to convert your gems over to coin at about 65-68 gems per 20,000,000 gold. Nordic lutes might actually beat out golden strings in crafting time per profit now, as well.

Intermediate Play

This is the part where I started to notice a big pull toward spending real dollars. Items begin to diminish in reward-versus-investment, and the time spent crafting advanced items for less money is less efficient than continuing to crank out pre-crafts that fetch premium. It's your call on whether to spend money at this point, but I'll guide you toward the best ways to fund CloudCade on a budget should you decide to feed their machine.

First let's continue with our game plan on not caving in to giving our hard earned bones to the corporate overlords, and instead going au naturel. The goal is to get to golden strings which require the following skills:

Woodworking

Arts and Crafts

Magic

Rune Writing

Textile Working

Jewelry
Additionally, you will have to place a workstation for the Metalworking required to craft silvered flutes, two recipes prior to unlocking golden strings. The big inhibitor here will be the worker slots. Up to five workers will feel manageable however, that 6th worker costing discounted around 38,000,000 is going to be a big investment. I encouraged you to previously save everything as the conserved keys and gems at this point might help ease the burden of expansion costs if you need to convert over some of that 'premium' inventory into coin. However, I am confident that through city raiding and conservative saving, the expenses will be manageable without having to dip into your savings.

Golden strings currently request around 650,000 standard, 750,000 good, 3,500,000 great and 10,000,000 flawless. That's some serious scrill. You for sure want that easy 10 million from flawless, so you're going to need to set your workers up in such a way that promotes an increased yield of higher quality items. So now you have an added focus in your game plan: Mastery. I recommend the following six workers:

Sculptor on Woodworking and Mastery

Seamstress on Textile Working and Mastery

Artisan on Arts and Crafts and Mastery

Jeweler on Jewelry and Mastery

Wizard on Rune Writing and Mastery

Sorceress on Magic and Mastery
With each worker 1-for-1 invested in their respective skill and mastery, they will each quickly level to support in excess of 100 in their skill and mastery. 600 mastery is going to be a big game changer. You're going to notice around a quarter to half of your crafts begin to bump up in quality. Further, that setup minimizes the crafting time for golden strings increasing your revenue. At this point I expect you to have a solid grasp on the shop-side of the game and how to upgrade to best serve your crafting demands.

Advanced Play

I'm going to cover income generation, optimal worker and shop setups, adventuring parties, and unlocking blueprints to equip your heroes with. Optimization is the real meat and potatoes of Shop Heroes. It also takes the most time to see noticeable returns on. I'm talking weeks-to-months of play, or longer without investing any money.

Creating a printing press

The hayday of making insane money from keys, roulette wheel spinning, and any other prior strategy are long past. Now everyone is on an even playing field with the option of either crafting wisdom ocarenas, or frostfire harps if you're lucky to have gotten the blueprint; both of which are music line crafts. See what I meant by music being disproportionate? And believe it or not, you can actually become a top-tier player with incredible luck and savvy saving by unlocking frostfire harp from a dwarvish chest (GOOD LUCK!) without having spent a single dollar on the game.Those flawless golden strings that go for premium are the precrafts to frostfire harps, by the way. So unless you've established a steady gem income to open the dwarvish chests to fish for frostfire harps, the wisdom ocarena is your only practical option. The ocarena is a premium content blueprint which means spending $20 on the Wizard Package and it's the very last blueprint unlocked. Valkyrie's wisdom (the staff) is no simple craft and it takes some time getting the flawless ice staves to unlock the ocarenas. And, once you finally have them unlocked, you need a hero that can equip them at level 40 (Azula was my first to 40) to even sell them to your heroes. If you have a hero like Alicia or Azula even able to reach level 40 in your town, my best advice is to save as many ocarenas as you can while waiting for your heroes to catch up. You will always be able to sell a few immediately for a fair price on the trade house request section however, each one sold on the trade house won't contribute to the massive shop experience gained when otherwise sold to your heroes.

Optimal worker and shop setups

For workers:

Seamstress on Textile Working/Mastery

Alchemist on Alchemy/Mastery

Artisan on Arts and Crafts and Mastery

Giant* on Magic/Mastery

Jeweler on Jewelry/Mastery

Master on Weaponcrafting/Mastery

Wizard on Rune Writing/Mastery

Sculptor on Woodworking/Mastery

*Substitute the Giant for the Sorceress if you don't have the Advanced Shopfare package. Cut the Master if you can't afford the 8th worker slot; you won't need him to craft music items. Tinkering, Armormaking and Metalworking aren't leveled at all in this build so when crafting items that use them, it's best to boost the town buildings that cover those skills. In my town we basically keep every skill building boosted 24/7. Currently I have about 1600 mastery with the above setup, and there are people in my town with nearly 2000 with the same workers nearly maxed out. The giant is so, so good. I'd say that the 5% crafting speed bonus is pretty minor but him as a tier 4 worker and the blueprints he provides (especially Balmung at endgame) are incredible. Support II doesn't exist on any other item, and legendary is not that difficult to fuse in the current era of the game.

When it comes to optimizing your shop; once your workstations support your worker's skill levels (plus boosts from town buildings) and your resource racks can support nearly-continuous crafting of your big ticket items, I say expand and upgrade as necessary. I currently have the 1.5G shop upgrade I'm still trying to level the recent item racks I added to my shop, so I'm pretty comfortable at that size right now. I focused on my fusion cauldron, workstations and resource racks all in about equal measure, then I completed my counter, resource racks, storage bins and now finally the lesser utilized item racks.

The extra fusion cauldron slots are indisputably the best gem purchases you can make. It quadruples your fusion productivity and it can't be upgraded any other way than by spending gems. I cannot emphasize how important these upgrades are. And it sucks that it's a gem-only purchase because the second best gem purchase, advanced crafting slots, are huge convenience upgrades. I am so spoiled by my six slots, and once I finish off my golden chest blueprints I'm going to start converting my golden keys into gems to finish off the remaining three.

I would say only purchase one advanced trade slot, if any and none of the advanced quest slots. The advanced quest slots will help early game but you will absolutely regret spending the gems later on when your heroes are fully energetic (100% rested after quest completion). The trade slot is fine if resources are your main form of income but I'm still not sure the 1000 gems are best spent here before you max out your cauldron and crafting slots.

Adventuring parties

I royally messed this one up for the longest time by not taking advantage of my heroes skills. There's really only basic setups and 'holy poo poo we're balls to the walls decked out to wreck major face' setups when it comes to heroes. Until you've got a solid printing press I'd advise to just adventure as normal while modestly working on getting wooden and leather chest blueprints unlocked. Basically three things need to fall into place to optimize your heroes: the hero's buildings need to be high enough level to unlock their 3 level-based skills (Oneira and Louca might give you issues), you'll need to have a few blueprints unlocked and mastered, and you're going to actually need to have the items at a high enough quality to utilize their effects. I use two teams of six heroes:

Alicia as leader

Louca

Odette

Kuro shobi

Azula

Oneira
and

Darthos as leader

Kurul

Lancaster

Edward

Mojian

Albert

The all-male team is going to be way, way more difficult to equip so let's focus on the female team. I think the best way to introduce the concept of infinitely sustainable teams is to explain a few key skills. Note: skills, in percentage, are additive in their effects unless specified as unique (i.e. you may only have one instance of Thunderbolt on a character).

Energetic reduces the resting time by a fixed percentage. Alicia is able to be sent back out immediately once she completes a quest; Alicia is 100% energetic.

Support prevents the specified number of items on other companions from breaking. Items are rolled for breakage after all modifiers are applied (hero level, % break reductions, etc) from left to right on the hero party stack. What that means is early on when you have fewer high quality items of low break percentages, you want to place your heroes on your hero stack with low chances of breaking an item closer to the front of the stack, ending with your most fragile heroes at the end. Prior to having unbreakable teams, I placed Louca in the 5th slot and Oneira in the 6th slot.

Survival is a bit mysterious. The theory is that it takes a fixed % (to fail) off of the top when calculating the failure rate of individual party members. No one likes a downed party member, especially on the tier 3 quests that can have up to 20 hour recovery windows, so it's a very important skill to have as much of as possible in your team that their gear may provide. Darthos and Alicia are the only leaders that increase survival by 25%.

Healer reduces companions' recovery time when injured by a fixed %. It's posited that healing caps at around 90% (so that you can't have instant recovery on downed heroes). Whatever it may be, the sooner your dudes are back fighting the good fight, the better.

Resourceful prevents a fixed number of items on your dude from breaking. Stick your lovely break chance percentage items on them. I had 2, 20% break chance, items on Kuro shobi when I first made the female team (falcon eye and moonwalkers for energetic) and never had a single break.

So how do we stack the female team to our advantage using these skills?

Remember way back when, when I told you to hang onto those keys? Now you're going to be thanking yourself for holding onto them. You're going to go fishing for blueprints. I wish I had someone tell me when I first started out to hang onto my blueprint fragments. Now especially, with the implementation of city raids, it's almost criminal to spend your fragments on anything less than golden chest blueprints. If you can stomach the tedium, get your phone or tablet and put on some good movies or tv series Saturday and Sunday, and fixate on the trade house key and chest window. Refresh the window like it's going out of style and you'll be amazed at the influx of keys trading hands on an hourly basis. You have to be quick to snatch them up - they sell in a second(s). There's really no other way to cost-efficiently unlock those early recipes. If you're not able to snipe keys on the trade house the only other option is to use the more expensive option in gems to get them. I've completely filled out my wooden, leather and iron chest blueprint line by sniping keys from the trade house. I'm nearly done with golden chest blueprints.

What you're trying to find are the following:

Colored Powder level 8 remedy, Energetic I at flawless.

Falcon Eye level 8 bow, Energetic I at flawless.

Moon Walkers level 15 footwear, Energetic I at flawless.

Lion Boots level 12 boots, Leader I at legendary.

Equip your female team like so:

Alicia legendary lion boots.

Louca flawless+ moon walkers, flawless+ colored powder.*

Kuro shobi flawless moon walkers, flawless falcon eye.

Odette flawless+ moon walkers, flawless+ falcon eye.*

Azula flawless+ moon walkers, flawless+ colored powder.*

Oneira flawless+ falcon eye, flawless+ moon walkers.*

* + denotes using items of higher than referenced quality, when possible.

That's a pretty good basic starter setup. You *might* get a break if you use only flawless however, with 5 instances of support you are very unlikely to break. Do not equip more than those items unless you have epic+ quality items with 0% break chance until most of your gear is sub-5% break chance. You're not going to be a happy camper if that legendary item you spent a day or two fusing up breaks because you over-equipped your heroes. I think with the bare-bones equipment package listed above I could do the Floating Island or Pyramid with the ladies. I also might have put a few sub-2.0% break chance items on Oneira to bump up her power to make her more resilient on the harder quests.

The male team isn't much different, they just require far more items and of higher quality. You're looking at needing, minimum, legendary qualities on Noble Plates, Moon Boots (not to be confused with Moon Walkers), Falcon Eyes, and Colored Powders to get your break percentages down low enough, and instances of support high enough, to enable a nearly-unbreakable all male energetic team.

End

That's about all of the wisdom I've got to impart onto you, dudes and dudettes. I hope you got something out of this otherwise I was a big toolbag for wasting my time writing this poo poo up. And it did take some time. Feel free to ask questions if I didn't cover something you were hoping to read up on. I'm pretty active on the forums and especially this dumb game. Too bad it doesn't have private messaging.

Tips:

Tiers for what to spend gems on

Definitely worth it
- Upgraded Pre-craft slots
- Additional Fusion Slots

Worth doing if you know why you want to do it
- Upgraded Quest Slots
- Upgraded Trade Slots
- Buying keys to opening Gold/Magic/Dwarven/Primal chests

Never ever worth it and pretty much a waste of gems
- Buying keys to open wooden/leather/iron chests
- Opening chests with gems
- Literally everything else

Blueprint Fragments
You can get blueprint fragments from the following sources:

- Roulette
- Daily Task
- Bags
- Quests (I think only second + have a chance to have it available)

The innkeeper offers 3 lines of recipes, "Warrior", "Rogue", and "Mage". You can check the shop heroes spreadsheet to see all the recipes in a line. You buy them in level order. It is highly recommended that you stick to one path, since the blueprint fragment costs increase quite a bit even into the iron/golden stuff.

I have no idea which is the "best" one. I'm doing warrior.

Bags and Chests

Bags contain items, resources, and blueprint fragments. You can get them from quests or the 7 day daily roulette.

Chests contain the above but also can have recipes. These recipes all give an item which can bestow a free skill when you master the item and when it is at the proper level. Some of these recipes make you skillions of money.

Wooden, Leather, and Iron aren't ever really worth buying keys for. If you get them via the raid they're worth opening, because they can help you progress faster in the blueprint fragment chain.

Golden are okay since you can get some very nice recipes for heroes and your hero levels may be around there at that point.

Magic and up are things you open after you've played for months and you can't unlock new recipes. Yeah, it's super annoying to be honest but I've played for I think 10 months and I haven't run out of things to unlock yet, so you probably won't need to worry about it. :v:

Recommended Worker loadouts until you can cover all skills:

Delfin posted:

2 workers: Armorer and Carpenter (Metalworking, Armorcrafting, Woodworking, Weaponcrafting). This will let you crank out basic weapons and armor effectively. I always try to keep these four skills active.

3 workers (Level 12): Armorer, Carpenter, Tailor (adds Arts & Crafts and Sewing) or Druid, Blacksmith, Leatherworker (adds Sewing and Alchemy). You can swap out these configurations to work on either herbs/potions or bows for a while.

4 workers (Level 18): By now your city should have 2nd tier workers available, so take advantage of them. Blacksmith, Tailor, Artificer, Druid (adds Sewing, Arts & Crafts, Tinkering and Alchemy; missing Jewelry, Magic, Rune Writing) and Leatherworker, Fletcher, Jeweler, Druid (adds Sewing, Arts & Crafts, Alchemy, Jewelry; missing Tinkering, Magic, Rune Writing) are both good. Again, swap out configs if you need Jewelry or Tinkering for a given day's run of stuff.

5 workers (Level 24): 10 skills means now it's just a matter of identifying what you want to be missing.
Fletcher, Luthier, Artificer, Jeweler, Sorceress is missing Rune Writing, which cuts you off in Staves, Robes, Hats, Scrolls and Remedies past a certain point.
Enchanter, Blacksmith, Tailor, Artificer, Druid is missing Jewelry, which cuts you off in Rings and Pendants quickly, and eventually in Heavy Armor and Gauntlets at least.
Jeweler, Leatherworker, Fletcher, Druid, Enchanter is missing Tinkering, which cuts you off in Bows, Guns and Projectiles at least.

By this time your workers are leveled up to the point where making wholesale swaps gets pretty expensive, so it's not a bad idea to pick one of these and stick with it.

Dragongem fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Apr 16, 2016

# ? Mar 17, 2016 04:32

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

Tip for newbies for the new thread: fiddle with the Quest interface's autofill and make it work for you. You can pick a quest that you can't do with your available heroes and it'll try to get as close as possible. It's set to adjust the autofill if you use the side arrows to switch to another quest, but you can override this by changing any hero or even just removing one and placing it back before you change quests.

So when I feel lazy, I can just click the toughest quest, remove and put the rightmost hero back, switch the quest down in difficulty til everyone shows happy faces, then accept that team and repeat for the rest.

Note that it's not too intelligent about heroes' special abilities, though. My best team relies on one hero's leader ability to boost survivability for only female heroes. I can beat my current hardest quest with all green smiley faces using her and all female heroes. However, the autofill frequently won't pick her for leader and will end up with red faces trying to just meet the minimum requirement.

That was a lot of :downswords:

but basically just dick around with it and you will learn to send off some quests quickly and when you need to hold its hand for others.

Maybe someone else can go into gems and the trade house and knowing what they're worth in gold, how to convert them, and how to profit from people who don't understand their value. I don't think I could explain it concisely.

# ? Mar 17, 2016 07:10

kinkouin: Nov 7, 2014

GDocs url needs fixing in OP.

On another note, regular updates means this game is "fun" :smithicide:

# ? Mar 17, 2016 08:14

Dragongem: Nov 9, 2009; Heroes of the Storm
Goon Tournament Champion

kinkouin posted:

GDocs url needs fixing in OP.

On another note, regular updates means this game is "fun"

Fixed the doc, thanks.

Also from the patch notes thread it looks like the new quest system will have everyone who succeeds bring back resources. So our resource influx might increase significantly!

# ? Mar 17, 2016 14:12

LLSix: Jan 20, 2010; The real power behind countless overlords

Dragongem posted:

Fixed the doc, thanks.

Also from the patch notes thread it looks like the new quest system will have everyone who succeeds bring back resources. So our resource influx might increase significantly!

That'd be awesome.

# ? Mar 17, 2016 17:25

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

I updated this sheet to have formulas for Magic Keys:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y5p1UUUIQQNKHF0eyQkXVJbE3Rt9Ck8WOtTuCp2w87s/edit?usp=sharing

I didn't actually fill in the values for Magic Keys though since I'm not at a place where I can check, but you will want to fill in all the highlighted cells with new values when you use it anyway.

For those who haven't used it for it's just a set of quick formulas to help calculate how much gold you can get per gem you want to sell by laundering them through the various types of keys.

I didn't include Wooden because the gold cap is too low, and actually the cap is too low for Leather by now as well, but the formulas will show you why if you fill in the current values. Let me know if you have any questions on how to get the values, though I did include some hints on the sheet.

# ? Mar 17, 2016 22:29

Silvergun1000: Sep 17, 2007; Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Are the goon cities full or do I need to be invited to join one? I didn't see any of them on the list of cities in game.

# ? Mar 18, 2016 01:22

Dragongem: Nov 9, 2009; Heroes of the Storm
Goon Tournament Champion

Post your ID (in your profile, it has a number) and one of us will get you an invite

# ? Mar 18, 2016 02:15

RubberBands Hurt: Dec 13, 2004; seriously, wtf

Silvergun1000 posted:

Are the goon cities full or do I need to be invited to join one? I didn't see any of them on the list of cities in game.

Edit in your name here and you'll get scooped up. I need to check the spreadsheet again, but am always phone postin' and people don't update when they're in a city.

(BTW, I'm on top of MURDER HILL in MURDER VILLE, but the monkey has always been on top of the org chart for MURDER LEGAL PURPOSES)

# ? Mar 18, 2016 02:20

Silvergun1000: Sep 17, 2007; Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Sounds good, thanks! My ID is Silvergun#21641.

Edit: Got invited, thanks!

Silvergun1000 fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Mar 18, 2016

# ? Mar 18, 2016 02:47

Pseudoscorpion: Jul 26, 2011

The last thing I need in my life is another lovely phone game.

Pseudo#48229, let's get this train wreck a-rollin'.

# ? Mar 21, 2016 06:53

Dragongem: Nov 9, 2009; Heroes of the Storm
Goon Tournament Champion

Pseudoscorpion posted:

The last thing I need in my life is another lovely phone game.

Pseudo#48229, let's get this train wreck a-rollin'.

Tossed an invite to Boatmurdered!

Also, on patch notes, the gem prices got released for fusion and cauldron slots:

Quests:
Slot 1: 250
Slot 2: 500
Slot 3: 750
Slot 4: 1000
Slot 5: 1500
Slot 6: 2000
Slot 7: 2500
Slot 8: 3000
Slot 9: 3500

Trade
Slot 1: 1000
Slot 2: 1250
Slot 3: 1500
Slot 4: 1750
Slot 5: 2000
Slot 6: 2500
Slot 7: 3000
Slot 8: 3500
Slot 9: 5000

Fusion
Fuse 2: 1000
Fuse 3: 3000
Fuse 4: 5000

The quest ones might be worth getting 1 or 2 of if you have extra gems to spend. They essentially are auto completion slots, so you don't have to

"Enhanced" Trade slots are silly and worthless IMO.

The fusion ones... ick. Having 2-4 fusion slots is super powerful (fusion is a huge timesink, which is why you can make a lot of money with fusing stuff for high-level precrafts) and it feels really money-grabby to me. I would get these if you have the gems and are of a decent level.

Also the patch is probably coming out after maintenance today, which starts at 10:30 CST

Dragongem fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Mar 21, 2016

# ? Mar 21, 2016 14:11

Zila: Jun 21, 2013

Dragongem posted:

The quest ones might be worth getting 1 or 2 of if you have extra gems to spend. They essentially are auto completion slots, so you don't have to

"Enhanced" Trade slots are silly and worthless IMO.

The fusion ones... ick. Having 2-4 fusion slots is super powerful (fusion is a huge timesink, which is why you can make a lot of money with fusing stuff for high-level precrafts) and it feels really money-grabby to me. I would get these if you have the gems and are of a decent level.

Also the patch is probably coming out after maintenance today, which starts at 10:30 CST

Patch is out and little bit buggy. Supposedly the new upgrade quest is starting the rest time at the same time instead of at the end of the quest; lets you start another quest right away.

You get everything brought back from a quest now instead of the 1/2/3. Not sure if you still get a bonus for finding loot if you have more people. Pretty nice though since you can run 2 or 3 people and not be missing out.

Also upgraded trade slots could be useful for requests with the increases to 100 since they moved to a fifo system.

# ? Mar 21, 2016 18:47

Bad Munki: Nov 4, 2008; We're all mad here.

Dragongem posted:

There are three main cities and their mayors:
Boatmurdered (Dragongem)
Xtanstic (Xtanstic)
Murderville (Bad Munki).

Just fyi, I was never involved with Murderville, that place is a dump, nobody goes there, bunch of losers. Xtanstic was my city, great people, great city, people tell me that all the time, really tremendous. Love it. You're gonna love it.

Buuuuut, I haven't been playing really for a while now, so I stepped down, our current mayor is "Danny," I think he came over from the now-abandoned Trumpville?

# ? Mar 21, 2016 18:54

LLSix: Jan 20, 2010; The real power behind countless overlords

The upgraded quest slots are very nice.

# ? Mar 21, 2016 19:07

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

Dragongem posted:

The quest ones might be worth getting 1 or 2 of if you have extra gems to spend. They essentially are auto completion slots, so you don't have to

"Enhanced" Trade slots are silly and worthless IMO.

The fusion ones... ick. Having 2-4 fusion slots is super powerful (fusion is a huge timesink, which is why you can make a lot of money with fusing stuff for high-level precrafts) and it feels really money-grabby to me. I would get these if you have the gems and are of a decent level.

Context, since you didn't cut and paste what the upgrades actually do:

quote:

Added Upgraded Quest Slots (Heroes automatically rest when quest timer is expired) (We'll post pricing soon)
Added Upgraded Trade Slots (50 offer, 100 request, no cancel penalty)
Added Extra Fusion Slots (up to 3 more, accessible from the cauldron)

I could probably use one extra fusion slot but I definitely want both the trade slot and quest slot upgrades.

A 50 Offer trade slot will really mess with the current price dynamics though and it's definitely going to kill selling artifacts for more than 2 gems since it'll take forever to remove the undercuts or even the people who posted the same price before you. I still want one or two of em anyway because my slots sit empty far too long when I'm not at home. I could even see using the 100 request sometime when someone's being an absolute bitch buying out all of the lower artifacts to resell for gems. Though that may be much less of a problem since they sound like they're giving out way more artifacts in general. They might all take a massive price dive from these changes.

I usually end up having to sit and wait for rest times when I start to play because I had to collect quests I left over, so that quest upgrade will be really helpful as well. That can easily mean one more quest that I can send off each time I play for each slot.

I haven't tried fusing to sell off the precrafts for other people, I might have to look into that avenue. I don't like making stuff that doesn't unlock more blueprints though, and i don't know what the precrafts are that people need until I have them myself. Maybe just one extra slot for my own precraft fusions then.

# ? Mar 21, 2016 19:08

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

Oh, I missed the FIFO thing. That will make the trade house even crazier... if you can cancel freely you can put your giant fuckoff supply in at the same price as someone else and still get yours sold first, then cancel it if you get someone in front of you and put yours in front again. I can't imagine that sticks around :psyduck:

CrashCat fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Mar 21, 2016

# ? Mar 21, 2016 19:09

kinkouin: Nov 7, 2014

Zila posted:

Patch is out and little bit buggy. Supposedly the new upgrade quest is starting the rest time at the same time instead of at the end of the quest; lets you start another quest right away.

You get everything brought back from a quest now instead of the 1/2/3. Not sure if you still get a bonus for finding loot if you have more people. Pretty nice though since you can run 2 or 3 people and not be missing out.

Also upgraded trade slots could be useful for requests with the increases to 100 since they moved to a fifo system.

Wait so, how does the upgraded quest slot work? There's a lot of conflicting info. The game says no rest time but you guys are saying something else above.

As for quest rewards, I'll let you know in a few hours. I just sent out a 6 man party for a quest so I'll see if I get anything extra.

EDIT: Seems like the update also made the market really weird to navigate sometimes - it's not sorting right. If it is, it's rendering badly.

# ? Mar 21, 2016 19:11

Zila: Jun 21, 2013

CrashCat posted:

Oh, I missed the FIFO thing. That will make the trade house even crazier... if you can cancel freely you can put your giant fuckoff supply in at the same price as someone else and still get yours sold first, then cancel it if you get someone in front of you and put yours in front again. I can't imagine that sticks around

That's lifo and how it worked before and I abused it. Put stuff at the same price and have yours sold first. Never needed to undercut just relist.

Now it's first in first out so if you put something up at the same price you have to wait for everyone else's to sell. If you want yours to sell first you will have to undercut. It's really big for requests for max gold items like precraft and keys since eventually you will get your item as long as you keep it up.

kinkouin posted:

Wait so, how does the upgraded quest slot work? There's a lot of conflicting info. The game says no rest time but you guys are saying something else above.

As for quest rewards, I'll let you know in a few hours. I just sent out a 6 man party for a quest so I'll see if I get anything extra.

Upgraded quest slots are supposed to trigger rest time automatically after the quest duration so you don't have to check right away. After the quest the people will be on rest for whatever time they need based on healing/energetic and then will be ready once you collect the quest.

Say you have a 4 hour quest and the hero's rest for 2 hours. You set the quest and sleep for 8 hours. You can then wake up, finish the quest, and send that same team out again instead of waiting.

Zila fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Mar 21, 2016

# ? Mar 21, 2016 19:24

Trifoil: Apr 26, 2008

Would like an invite, valimar(sa)#83430.

# ? Mar 21, 2016 21:11

PhrenzZ: Dec 26, 2012

~~I've also really gotten into this over the past few days and could use an invite, Phrenz (phrenz#81205).~~

Edit: Thanks!

PhrenzZ fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Mar 22, 2016

# ? Mar 21, 2016 21:52

MisterBibs: Jul 17, 2010; dolla dolla
bill y'all; Fun Shoe

Bad Munki posted:

Just fyi, I was never involved with Murderville, that place is a dump, nobody goes there, bunch of losers

Murderville is Cool and Good and greets you with people donating more money than God to everything. :colbert:

# ? Mar 21, 2016 22:52

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

Zila posted:

That's lifo and how it worked before and I abused it. Put stuff at the same price and have yours sold first. Never needed to undercut just relist.

Damnit, that's what I get for posting without a proper night's sleep :doh:

# ? Mar 21, 2016 22:58

Silvergun1000: Sep 17, 2007; Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

So maybe I'm really dumb but I can't figure out where to access raids. I know they don't open up again until Thursday but I had no luck during this last weekend's event. Can't really find any good info on it online either.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 00:43

RubberBands Hurt: Dec 13, 2004; seriously, wtf

Silvergun1000 posted:

So maybe I'm really dumb but I can't figure out where to access raids. I know they don't open up again until Thursday but I had no luck during this last weekend's event. Can't really find any good info on it online either.

They're on the top left of every screen, you probably were under cooldown from recently joining the city (to prevent various abuse I imagine)

# ? Mar 22, 2016 00:51

LLSix: Jan 20, 2010; The real power behind countless overlords

Zila posted:

Upgraded quest slots are supposed to trigger rest time automatically after the quest duration so you don't have to check right away. After the quest the people will be on rest for whatever time they need based on healing/energetic and then will be ready once you collect the quest.

Say you have a 4 hour quest and the hero's rest for 2 hours. You set the quest and sleep for 8 hours. You can then wake up, finish the quest, and send that same team out again instead of waiting.

I have 3 gemmed quest slots. The way it works is that those slots have 0 rest time for all heroes sent on a quest via those slots. I read the tooltip the same way you did, but the way it actually works is so much better.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 00:51

Dragongem: Nov 9, 2009; Heroes of the Storm
Goon Tournament Champion

Jeez the resource market may implode, sell while you can

# ? Mar 22, 2016 01:04

LLSix: Jan 20, 2010; The real power behind countless overlords

Anyone know what the yellow icons in the special loot do? I got the yellow hammer once and I didn't notice it doing anything.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 01:10

Zila: Jun 21, 2013

LLSix posted:

I have 3 gemmed quest slots. The way it works is that those slots have 0 rest time for all heroes sent on a quest via those slots. I read the tooltip the same way you did, but the way it actually works is so much better.

Pretty sure it's bugged right now and starting rest time at the same time that the quest is going so they overlap. Someone tested it with starting a quest and using the inn to reduce the time and the heros had some rest time left. But enjoy it while you can if it's a bug.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 01:23

Silvergun1000: Sep 17, 2007; Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

RubberBands Hurt posted:

They're on the top left of every screen, you probably were under cooldown from recently joining the city (to prevent various abuse I imagine)

Oh that's probably it then, thanks!

Also I've been having an issue since the patch where when I log in, I get a message that I have an upgrade that is completed but as soon as I hit ok, I get another message telling me I've lost sync with the server and need to restart. Even closing the app and starting it again doesn't seem to help. Any ideas?

# ? Mar 22, 2016 01:26

kinkouin: Nov 7, 2014

Zila posted:

Upgraded quest slots are supposed to trigger rest time automatically after the quest duration so you don't have to check right away. After the quest the people will be on rest for whatever time they need based on healing/energetic and then will be ready once you collect the quest.

Say you have a 4 hour quest and the hero's rest for 2 hours. You set the quest and sleep for 8 hours. You can then wake up, finish the quest, and send that same team out again instead of waiting.

Nice, I guess time for me to stop hoarding keys to get some of these then.

EDIT:

Just got a quest back with 6 dudes. Can confirm: You get all the mats. Then it's a roulette on "special" loot (gold, items, gems) that you get 1 item out of all of them. Cant buy extra loot like you used to.

kinkouin fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Mar 22, 2016

# ? Mar 22, 2016 02:55

Null1fy: Sep 11, 2001

With the massive influx of resources, it's becoming apparent that it's far better to craft your resources than to sell them. T3 resources are headed to plunge lower than T2.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 04:26

Zila: Jun 21, 2013

kinkouin posted:

EDIT:

Just got a quest back with 6 dudes. Can confirm: You get all the mats. Then it's a roulette on "special" loot (gold, items, gems) that you get 1 item out of all of them. Cant buy extra loot like you used to.

There is also other things that can show up like chests, new loot bags, repair items, heal all, and 2x exp.

Pretty nice though so now you don't have to only send in 4/6 people to hit the loot break point. I wont feel bad sending 3 left over guys to some random quest.

Not sure how people with gold % skills work though.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 04:51

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

Dragongem posted:

Jeez the resource market may implode, sell while you can

It's a fire sale! Good thing I mostly only kept around the quantity I could use.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 05:29

Phyresis: Nov 2, 2004; I can't sleep, I hope I stay awake

Cause I've been running, running, running all day

Long nights, no peace

I feel like everybody's eyes on me

can I please get an invite? jon#98645

# ? Mar 22, 2016 05:45

MisterBibs: Jul 17, 2010; dolla dolla
bill y'all; Fun Shoe

kinkouin posted:

Just got a quest back with 6 dudes. Can confirm: You get all the mats.

I love this change because, gently caress, did anyone ever spend gems to get a few more mats? Felt like a waste of gems.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 05:58

Clocks: Oct 2, 2007

Ugh. Incredibly annoyed with the new patch because it seems to have broken my ability to buy heroes new equipment from the auction house. Like clicking the button to buy something literally does nothing. What's worse is I'm on iOS and it takes 1-2 weeks to even approve a patch if they've burned their hotfix allowance.

That said I do like the other changes. I'm impressed with their ability to monetize new things. I had a ton of gems lying around from a couple packs and I basically blew them all and still have plenty of slots I'd upgrade if I could. New fusion slots, upgraded trade slots, and the upgraded quests all seem really useful.

I imagine they'll fix the instant rest from the upgraded quest but even then it's still useful for anyone who doesn't have time to micromanage their game the moment their heroes stop questing.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 06:26

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

Yeah, I am not getting instant rest from the upgraded quest slot, but it does look like they count rest from when the quest finished as intended. Of course if I don't come back to collect my quests in time it will look like instant rest, so i dunno. I guess if you're lucky enough to have a bug with that enjoy for now.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 07:32

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 08:14

LLSix: Jan 20, 2010; The real power behind countless overlords

Phyresis posted:

can I please get an invite? jon#98645

Sent you an invite to Boatmurdered.

# ? Mar 22, 2016 13:58

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Shop Heroes: Make a shop, build a city, sell to the rich [Android/iOS/PC]

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