To use strength sprinkler or not?

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Mystic
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To use strength sprinkler or not?

Post by Mystic »

I recently had reason to question whether I should start using strength sprinklers on my plants so have run a little experiment to see whether it is worthwhile.

My test batch was a selection of 96 plants across the range of plant types, with at least one representative from each plant type. The plants were all purple or bright purple, although I do not believe this is relevant to the experiment.

Plants were watered via a water sprinkler and treated with cure/poison sprinklers each day and had the strength sprinkler used every second day.

The costs of each sprinkler, per use, are as follows:

Water = 50,000gp per 1000 uses = 50gp per use
Cure = 150,000gp per 1000 uses + (6x3=18)gp reagents = 168gp per use
Poison = 150,000 per 1000 uses + (4x3=12)gp reagents = 162gp per use
Strength = 100,000 per 1000 uses + (5x3=15)gp reagents = 115gp per use

Note: I buy my reagents the old fashioned way by working the mage shop spawn, if you use the reagent stone in Trinsic, reagent cost will be multiplied by 5 instead of 3.

I then recorded the number of uses on each sprinkler per day. In the last column, for the days that I used the strength sprinkler I have added the cost to the following day, as this is when the effect of the strength potions should impact the need for cure and poison potions.

Image
*forgot to do strength on Day 4.

As you can see, the use of strength potions does reduce the need for cure and poison on the following day, but the cost of using them on every plant cancels out any saving and increases the overall expenditure.
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patrix
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Re: To use strength sprinkler or not?

Post by patrix »

Congratulations Mystic.
I hereby crown you with the Excelsior OCBD award for data collection and analysis.
UOEXOCBD.jpg
UOEXOCBD.jpg (17.97 KiB) Viewed 4032 times

May your flowers be forever productive.

Michi
Michiko in game

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle..
Irina Dunn
Mystic
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Joined: Thu May 29, 2014 1:42 am

Re: To use strength sprinkler or not?

Post by Mystic »

Oh, my, *blush*, thank you Michi :)

Perfect colour too!
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Isaac Newton
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Re: To use strength sprinkler or not?

Post by Isaac Newton »

I love seeing someone else also doing in game research.

You could have checked your data before even using the sprinkler. You only used 54 potions on day one. Those cost you 8850gp. Throwing strength potions would cost 11040gp. You needed to use a lot more cure/poisons in a day to have a chance for savings.

Strength sprinklers have one major issue. Since plants don't require strength potions, the sprinkler just tosses out the current charges until it runs out. So if you have more plants than current charges, not all plants get a potion first try. Then on the second use of sprinkler, lots of plants get a second dose. If you really want to use one, you have to grow 25, 50 or 100 (or some nice tiny fraction )plants at a time to not waste charges.

Another sprinkler issue: heal sprinklers simply will not throw out a second dose to really sick plants. A major pain for large plant factories when timing gets messed up.

Isaac Newton
Last edited by Isaac Newton on Tue May 05, 2015 6:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Isaac Newton

What sad times are these when passing ruffians can say ‘Ni’ at will to old ladies.
Mystic
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Re: To use strength sprinkler or not?

Post by Mystic »

Yes, I agree it was obvious from the start that the strength would not be worth it but wanted to have numbers to back that up.

To get around the uneven numbers for the strength sprinkler problem, I just got out enough mandrake to fill a keg to the point it would refill the sprinkler to 100 each time (so 480 mandrake instead of 500). Would be a problem if there were over 100 plants, but luckily we won't need to use strength anyway, as it's not worth it :)

I did not know that about the cure sprinklers, or do you mean heal? If I miss a day I usually click all the sprinklers (water, cure, poison) until they say I have no plants needing that potion, then go around with a "medic bag" (kegs of heal and strength) and give 1 heal to healthy, 2 heals to wilted and 2 heals and a strength to dying plants. This brings them all up to vibrant or healthy the next day and generally I don't worry about going back and redoing just the healthy ones as they still grow fine.

I did try the heal sprinkler once but it seemed to work like the strength and just put a heal on every plant, so I wrote it off as too expensive and wasteful. And even in large batches, manual plant management isn't too bad once in a while, especially compared to bees!
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Isaac Newton
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Re: To use strength sprinkler or not?

Post by Isaac Newton »

That should be heal not cure.

With over 400 plants now, I go for the sprinklers several times a day. I don't want to hunt sick plants if the timing messes up. At this point, I think all of my bee money is going to sprinklers. Fortunately I get my reagents for free.

Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton

What sad times are these when passing ruffians can say ‘Ni’ at will to old ladies.
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