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It's a dom fight, make that sweet profit on your dragons if there are any you don't for sure want to keep.

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[quote name="Ygdrasill" date="2019-09-01 20:48:09" ] ^ [/quote] a really helpful guide indeed

@March
Thank you.

If anyone has suggestions as to things that should be included in this guide, please PM me. Most of the original was written a few years ago. I don't spend as much time in FR as I once did, but I want this guide to remain helpful.

@Ygdrasill hibernal den has changed the way I capitalize on dragon leveling and daily bonuses. My hibernal den is maxed out, so what I do is buy super cheap fodder when I see it, pre-level it to 6 (which is the price point for my play style at which time spent leveling crosses maximum payout on the graph of treasure/time i.e. treasure earned per second spent in the coli) and store it. Then each day, check the bonuses, pull out any leveled dragons from the den to immediately exalt for the bonus profit. Level up cheap fodder at my leisure and shove them back in the den. The other day I had 35 denned spirals I bought as cheap fodder (5-7kt or less) to exalt for the L6 bonus (>11kt average) immediately without lifting a finger. If I assume an average of 4kt profit per dragon, I made 140kt profit right away (though it is likely closer to 210kt since most of them were bought as 5kt hatchlings before storage and the profit was more like 6kt for each).

It amazes me how many people will level dragons higher than where the time/treasure graph crosses, without realizing that they're losing money in the end by spending too much time on one dragon to get it higher than necessary to profit. L7 pays out a little more money, sure, but the amount of time it takes to get to L7 also increases. So it actually costs me more time/money to take 2 dragons to L7 when in the same amount of time I could take 4 dragons to L6 and my net treasure gained is higher from 4 payouts vs the 2. The minimum I aim for is L5 because it's still profitable at least at normal fodder rates (I think 8200-8400t somewhere in there is the average payout for L5) and because the time spent to level a dragon from 1-5 is the same as the time spent to take it from L5-L6, so L5 for speed & profit - L6 for profit - anything higher than 6 is just killing time and losing money by earning so much less per second of coli play.


I tracked my own play style over 100+ battles (2-fodder Mire Millionaire build trainer in the Mire) for each level in order to figure out where my profit margin was maximized

Level 5
Average time: 1:18
Average payout: 8262t
Average bonus payout: 9530t
t/second: 106t earned per second
t/second bonus: 122t earned per second

Level 6
Average time: 2:13
Average payout: 9746t
Average bonus payout: 11015t
t/second: 73t earned per second
t/second bonus: 83t earned per second

edit: whoops sorry I only saw you said to PM, after I wrote all this in the comment lol

usually, i check the AH for gene scrolls and their prices. if one of them shows the chance of massive profit, i head to the nearest dom shop and buy a few scrolls to sell them. with the ghost gene rising up to 225 the other day, i made a lot of gems just based on that. however, as you said, if it tanks (as it did 4 hours beforehand), you might lose a whole bunch -- my advice is to watch the market before you buy/sell anything :p

@bonibaru do you find that the extra 1250 or whatever treasure justifies tying up a den slot indefinitely?

I just finished leveling my Mire Flyer this past weekend, so I'm trying to figure out what needs to change 'round here. What I HAD been doing was buying hatchlings, either flipping or denning them (auto denning any over 3 days, denning younger ones if I had loads of space toward the end of the day) depending on how much den space I have. I'd pull out any adults with the bonus or over 2 weeks old and sell them (so I'm not wasting coli time leveling fodder slowly when I could be leveling a the Flyer)

I'm almost halfway done with my free den slots, but I have a sizable pile of impulse buys and future projects that I won't have lair space for until lightning gets dom.

@LordJeanliness the answer is going to depend on your lair management overall. I have about probably 20 breeding pairs of dragons in total, and a handful of permas in storage, but mainly my game play these days is dom-driven i.e. community driven within my flight, and therefore earn-money-driven. My den is maxed - only 2 unacquired slots, and those are the boss familiar ones, and the familiar hoarder in me can't bring myself to give them up for one more measly dragon .... I have 20 L25 dragons kitted out for various purposes to make the coli more efficient (I have both a Mire Flyer and a Mire Millionaire build, for example). In other words I have a lot more space than dragons on any given day.

So for me, there's nothing else I'd be using that den slot for. Outside of a dom push, when they're getting stuffed full of pre-levels and held for dom week, they just sit there mostly empty. Maybe I use a dozen or so for storing hatchlings or project dragons that are a "maybe". I suppose the caveat of "use your hibernal den as a dragon CD/IRA/Money Market account, where you store them until they've earned a little interest" is to make empty slots work for you rather than just sit there not being capitalized upon.

In other words if no one else is taking that space, stuff a pre-level in there, and if you ever need it there's no harm in yanking them out and exalting them to make the space. You haven't had to feed them. They haven't cost you anything, no food during hibernation, just sat in 1 space. And you can take that space back whenever you want without monetary penalty - whether you exalt the leveled dragon today or next week, is all the same in the end (exalt bonus days aside). It doesn't cost you anything to let it mature from Xt to X+1250t.

@bonibaru Hm. I can't deny the appeal of not having my den slots being filled with hatchlings but rather filled with instamoney but my gut is that my ~85 fodder den slots aren't enough to make that worthwhile considering the hatchlings I buy are ~2kt cheaper than the fodder much of the time, but like I said, I'm trying to figure out a new paradigm!

Do you have any ballpark for how long you end up sitting on dragons? Because I can very easily work out how much tying up a slot for a max of 2 weeks (the age at which I sell if the bonus hasn't come up) costs vs the $$ I get from tying up that slot.