CotF/FT

CotF Raeli

As Raeli tiles are an extraordinarily valuable resource, we need to make a couple of decisions, as a guild, regarding the usage of our own ovens.

Usage Priorities

There are four major uses for raeli tiles:

• Mosaics
• Aqueduct
• Funerary Temple
• Trade

Mosaics

People generally do not need exorbitant amounts of tile for mosaic projects. Additionally, they tend to want small numbers of a wide variety of colors to work with. For this reason, I would argue that the most efficient use of resources would be to set aside a small number of *any* baked tile set in a 'Mosaics Warehouse'. Baking small numbers of particular colors to order is extremely time consuming, and has the potential for a great deal of waste.

Aqueduct

The aqueduct pump requires 50,000 tiles each of greenish, pinkish, and yellowish. Each individual tower requires a small number of yellowish, greenish, reddish, and bluish. We currently own 7 ovens (the color lists have not yet been posted).

• Yellowish - one oven
• Pinkish - one oven
• Greenish - four ovens (one of which is also 'yellowish')
• Bluish - one oven
• Reddish - one oven (this is also the 'pinkish' oven)

As you will see below in the Raeli Operation Skill section, even at truly significant Raeli Skill Operation dredging rates, ovens cannot generally hope to produce more than around 2K tiles per week. (And we will not even see those rates for some time.) Therefore, it should be obvious that our guild can, in no way, hope to build our own aqueduct pump, unless we quite literally intend to build it sometime next April.

Similarly, if we are part of an aqueduct guild, there *have* to be other members with significant abilities to contribute tile - particularly pinkish and yellowish. I would also hope that priority in building towers in any such guild would be given to members contributing signficant quantities of tile, as every tile used for aqueduct is time that oven cannot be baking it's other colors for things like Funerary Temple. It is a substantial sacrifice.

Trade

Trade is harder to predict, currently. We still do not know for sure what specific colors will be 'rare' in this tale. There are commonalities in the rarer colors, generally (they have a narrow ideal r-g-b field), but as the color map overlays the actual geography - things get messy. If a relatively common color exists almost entirely in locations without clay - presto, it's an unexpected rare. (Incidentally, people are having a hell of a time right now locating plums and orchids, which we have. But this could change.)

However, grayish tiles are currently marketable for people scrambling to build crematories. We will have to make decisions about the best use of the ovens capable of producing any readily tradable tile. The funerary temple 'color market' will not pick up for awhile though.

Funerary Temple

For those of you who have never done it, Funerary Temple is quite simply a massive, massive waste of resources. I say this will all fondness for the test, and am looking forward to gleefully wasting resources to do it. ;) But don't say I didn't warn you. (Actually, it's arguable that all architecture tests are massive wastes of resources. It's kind of how they are designed.)

The temple itself takes significant resources to build. The most annoying of these is probably the mirrors. It's probably a good idea to pull a stock of silver to cover all member's mirror needs, and have a barrel grinding party to get it done all at once. Fusing it to sheet glass is a simple process.

We have currently 7 members that I am aware of who are interested in doing Funerary Temple: LuluDivine (me), Shayra, Pinger, Miranni, Bessieloo, KebiRoz, and Mustafa. Let me know if this needs to be updated. Some of the following infomation will be old hat to some of us, and for others, brand new - so I'm going to attempt to be exhaustive.

Glory

A temple is evaluated on its 'glory'. Glory is calculated only by the number of tiles you have of each color. For every color, you have diminishing returns for each additional tile. Test Info

Tiles of the same color	1	2	7	14	49	98	343	686	2401	4802	16807	33614	117649
Glory for that color	100	135	200	235	300	335	400	435	500	535	600	635	700

Last tale, our ovens group had a goal of 2401 tiles per color (500 points). I would suggest we *begin* with a more moderate goal per color, as covering 7 colors with 49 tiles each is far better in the short run than 1 color with 343 tiles. The diminish glory returns also plays into the decision we must make below about equitable distribution.

At some point, scores for winning temples will likely hover around 60K. That would mean 2401 tiles of at least 120 different colors. It's impossible to predict how long it will take for scores to reach that ceiling, but when they do, one is essentially obliged to bake or purchase tiles of every obtainable color.

For this reason, there is some value to pushing our own scores early, to 'beat the rush' as it were.

Raeli Operation Skill

There is always a fair bit of confusion about the Raeli Operation Skill (which you will find in your skills tab). For most of you, unless you've been playing with the ovens a bit, this is probably at 0.

What does Raeli Operation Skill DO?

This affects the 'dredge rate' of an oven. In other words, after an oven has been baked, you set the oven to 'dredge' again - your raeli operation skill determines how fast the oven pulls up tiles for the next bake. The skill of whoever actually presses the 'start dredging' button will be used to determine this. There appears to be a small randomness factor as well, but as a general matter, higher skill = more tiles in a given timeframe.

How does my Raeli Operation Skill increase?

Your skill increases every time you hit the 'Stop Baking' button on an oven on a particular color. It is affected NOT by the number of times you do this, but by the number of tiles in the oven when you stop the baking on a particular color. I have a theory that stopping the oven on black actually will not increase your skill rate, but I don't have enough data to back this up.

The number of tiles required to hit new skill levels is an exponentially increasing number. Raeli Operation Skill For this reason, there is a practical limit on the skill. Last tale, Kebi, pinger and I topped out in the 17-18 level, after literally baking hundreds of thousands of tile. Even at this (rather insane) skill rate, ovens that we started dredging would at *maximum* produce between 2000 and 3000 tiles in a week. Being at much lower skill rates to start, we will not see these dredge rates for some time.

Level	# tiles needed
1	2
2	5
3	11
4	23
5	47
6	95
7	191
8	382
9	765
10	1530
11	3061
12	6122
13	12245
14	24491

Workloads

One major decision to be made is how to split up the labor. Interestingly, we have currently 7 ovens and 7 people wanting to pass. We will likely have more ovens in the future, and that can be dealt with later, but it seems reasonable to suggest that each person be responsible for baking one oven.

Last tale, ovens were generally supposed to be baked once per week. There are a number of reasons why waiting longer than this is a bad idea.

• • As each time you 'stop the baking', your dredge rate increases, allowing an oven to run for long periods of time on a low dredge rate is a waste.
  • As smaller numbers of more colors is substantially more beneficial to Temple scores than large numbers of a few colors, baking often (and thus more colors, potentially) has the best impact on scores.
  • As there are passes each week, weekly baking ensures the tiles make it from the oven to temples in time to capitalize on the value for passes.
  • Ferrying 20K tiles from an oven in the middle of nowhere sucks. I've done it more times than I like to remember, and it's no fun. Baking weekly means it's more likely you can carry it all back in one trip.

Color Assignments

First, it's possible we will be 'dedicating' the usage of one or more ovens to aqueduct color tiles. I don't think this changes the above work distribution suggestion - Shayra might bake an oven for aqueduct, and pinger bake an oven for funerary temple tiles. Everyone's still putting in work on ovens, which is the point, so everyone can 'share in the bounty'. I don't expect a lot of disagreement on this, just wanted to point it out.

It's beneficial, in my opinion, to have a central decision regarding color assignments (whether it's for aqueduct, whether it's for funerary temple and we want Peru this week, Chocolate the next, etc.). Otherwise we're in for a lot of wasted time, tile, and efforts.

I'm happy to organize this, as managing 7 ovens seems like a cakewalk compared to the 70 or so we had access to last tale. The key is really to keep track of which colors pop on multiple ovens, so you're not burning an oven with a rare color to some color 3 other ovens can also easily produce. And of course, not burning tiles we already have a bunch of.

Essentially, each person would pop to the wiki to check the page, and their ovens 'color assignment' before running to bake. Their oven would list the color it needs to be baked to next, the last time it was baked, what color it was baked to, and how many tiles it baked to that color. Once finished, the person would be responsible for either updating the wiki or chatting the info to a point person, and transporting the tile to either a central 'drop off' warehouse, or distributing the tile directly to each persons 'tile warehouse'. (This is another decision we need to make. I'll say right off that we had some problems occasionally last tale with bakers doing the distributions. Mistakes can easily be made, math get crunched, people missed. Having one person do distributions of a number of colors at once from a 'drop off' warehouse seemed to substantially reduce the mistakes.)

Equitable Distribution

At first glance, this seems simple enough: split all tiles evenly among the 7 players doing temple. But there are two issues that need a decision.

Equal or Queue

Equal distribution - This would simply split all tiles evenly, regardless of current score or color of tile. This is the simplest to administer, obviously.

Queue - Since there are only 1 (or 2) passes a week, some guilds prioritize one, and only one, person at a time, and all raeli tiles dedicated to funerary temple go to that person until they pass.

There are a variety of arguments that one or the other of these requires more work overall for all members, but in truth, it's pretty impossible to predict. It depends on a variety of factors not in our control. However, while any distribution system MUST assume that people will continue to do their part of the work even after they have passed, the queue system is particularly vulnerable. If someone passes, then later quits the game (for RL issues, for instance), that makes passing the later people all that much more difficult.

Last tale we used a hybrid approach. We distributed equally unless a person was within a small range of passing - once that happened, that person who was close to passing got a 'priority bump'. Ovens would be set to colors they needed, and all tile of those colors would go to them until they were at 2401, with any excess being distributed as normal.

Buying your own tiles

The stickier point is whether we take into account tiles a person has bought on their own, on the open market. (Which actually won't really exist for awhile yet.)

It seems patently unfair to penalize a person for buying their own tile, at first glance. But there are three different basic approaches

• Distribution depends on tiles on the temple, no matter where they came from. For example: Pinger buys 100 pink tiles, Shayra buys 50, Kebi buys 0. Shayra bakes 300 pink tiles. Pinger is given 50 tiles, Shayra is given 100, and Kebi is given 150, so that each person has 150 tiles at the end.

• Distribution is blind to the temple. In this situation, each of the 3 players would be given 100 tiles, ignoring the tiles they bought. At the end, Pinger would have 250 tiles, Shayra would have 200, and Kebi would have 150.

• Hybrid. (Again, this is what we used last tale) Distributions were blind to tiles UNTIL the total tiles of a particular color on a particular temple hit the magic 2401 mark.

There were a number of reasons we went with hybrid approach last tale. It *did* seem patently unfair to penalize someone for buying their own tile. However, after 2401 tiles, the glory per tile was so severely diminished, that it started to seem wasteful. If Kebi buys for herself 2401 pink tiles, and Shayra buys none, and 49 tiles are baked - those 49 tiles mean 300 points for Shayra. They mean only a point or two for Kebi. There's an argument here for who can make 'best use' of the 49 pink tiles.

Practially speaking, you should really be buying tile that we can't or won't be baking, honestly. It seems a silly use of resources to purchase substantial quantities of tile that we are fully capable of producing a bit later on, particularly when there are tons of colors we *won't* be able to produce. Of course, last tale we would often find or be given ovens with colors we thought we'd never be able to produce, so there were a lot of people who bought tiles we ended up being able to bake after the fact.

Practical Operations

People sometimes find raeli oven baking confusing when they've never done it before. As this can have pretty bad consequences (if the oven has dredged a lot of tiles and you're baking a rare color for instance), I thought I'd go over the basics here.

• First, we should probably build a WH at every oven. Even with the 'verify take all' option on, we've had countless situations of people being weighed down in the middle of nowhere by 5K+ tiles.

• Ovens only have three commands. Start dredging, start baking, and stop baking. THERE IS NO "STOP DREDGING" COMMAND. I can't stress this enough. When you walk up to an oven, it should be actively dredging. The window will read "White(XXX)", where XXX is the number of tiles it's already dredged (that are waiting to be baked). The only command that will appear (other than 'take'), is "Start baking".

• When you press "start baking", the oven will consume 25 cc, and beging the baking/color timer. The dredging animation WILL NOT STOP. Don't worry, it's baking. The only command now visible is 'stop baking'. If you hit this, and you'll suddenly have 500 white tiles, instead of the coral you were supposed to bake. The only animation change is that there is usually black smoke now coming out of the oven, but honestly, you'll only see this if you're zoomed in pretty close.

• Keep the window pinned. The color swatch will update *automatically*. It does not need to be refreshed. The timing lists for color is APPROXIMATE. Yes, if your color says it pops at 1 hour and 45 minutes, you're probably safe to walk away for a bit, but don't push it. If you move your avatar away from the oven, the color swatch will NOT refresh.

• Please note the timing of the NEXT color on your oven. Some colors will stay on an oven for 10-15 minutes. There are some that will appear for literally 30 seconds. Be aware.

• When the color you want appears, simply click 'stop baking'. You then may take the tiles from the oven, or leave them to be picked up later (but please don't do this much, it's just a pain later). You CANNOT take tiles from an oven, even tiles that were baked weeks ago, while that oven is currently baking. You can take tiles from an oven while it's dredging.

• After the oven has been stopped, the color swatch will read the color it was stopped on. You MUST then make sure you click the new command on the oven, 'start dredging'. You will know you've done it correcty when instead of reading "Orchid (435)", it reads "White(0)", and the color swatch reverts back to white. Leaving an oven not dredging just means wasted time the oven is not producing anything. It's also a mistake that is unlikely to be noticed until the next person (you or someone else) goes to bake that oven, and realizes there is nothing there to bake.