When trying to win (Extreme) Research Challenges it is important to plan ahead what research you want to do so that you know you are going to score enough points to win the challenge, but not unnecessarily score too many points. Also you will now your resource and speed up requirements up front so that you know you know you have plenty. The research planner tool helps you do exactly that. By using it you get the most out of your hard earned gold and speed ups.
This guide will take you step by step what you need to do. Most of it is one time effort and the data is stored for you, so that afterwards you can win one Challenge after the other with minimal effort.
First you Register yourself on the website via the Register button at the right top of the menu bar and afterwards you login under the new account.
To be able to accurately suggest a list of possible research projects for you and correctly display your discounted research time, including the time after Helps, it is important to fill in information about the status of your account, this should be done via the Game Parameters item in the My Games-Guide menu.
Not all information is a necessity, but you need to fill in your Research Speed Boost, your Headquarters and Research Facility level in the Buildings section and the status of ALL your research projects. Remember to use the Submit button to commit each change.
Example of filling in a boost:
Example of updating the building levels:
Example of updating a research category:
How it looks once you filled in everything:
Once you have filled in you already see the list of currently available research projects for you. This in itself is already useful, and is the basis for the Research Planner.
This is not an absolute necessity, but I can recommend to fill it in anyway. Often while you have more or less the same power the game will keep giving you the same Extreme Challenges each time. If you take some time to fill these in, including point targets and payout in gold and speeds, you can just select one of them later. This can be done via the Extreme Challenge Types menu item in the My Games-Guide.Info menu.
Above is all preparation work and besides some occasional updates (e.g. research boost, or Extreme Challenge Types) you don’t have to worry about it anymore. As long as you use the Research Planner your Research Project status will be automatically updated.
First select the Research Extreme Challenge Planner from the Tools menu and if you are working with it for the first time, or you start to plan for a new Extreme Challenge you can click on “Plan New Extreme Challenge” in the table.
The next window is the one where you will be selecting the research projects you plan to work on. As a first step, if you know the Extreme Challenge you will do, you can scroll down and select it from the table. This way you know what your payout will be and you can compare cost to payout. Note that any changes is this page will be committed and stored in the database automatically, so no need to look for a Submit button.
Now you can start adding research projects to your selection by clicking the Add button next to a research project in a table. If you do that the project will move to the upper table, while the lower table will automatically be extended with newly unlocked research projects. You can also use the Remove button in the upper table to discard the choice, but in that case you have to keep the prerequisite requirements in mind yourself.
You will see the total resource and time requirements for the selected projects in the upper table (the time requirements is taking into account your research speed boost). The middle table contains a comparison of your selected Extreme Challenge Type and the selected research projects. The third row contains the speed ups you need after maximum helps (based on the HQ level you provided). For Mobile Strike you can disregard the comment about Speed Up Boost for now, this might be introduced later, as was done with Game of War, where every speed up used gave an extra boost of 10%, so if you used a speed up of 30 days, 33 days was deducted from your timer.
Once you are happy with your choice you can go to your favorite Help Alliance and win the Extreme Challenge, and once you are done, you click the Completed link, your planned projects are considered completed, and your profile is ready for the next Extreme Challenge.
Compared to Game of War Mobile Strike is not very generous when it comes to Extreme Challenge Payouts vs Research Project Requirements. In the realistic scenario you still have to invest 117 speed up days to win this challenge, which is a still quite a low level.
I work a lot with kpower/day ratios (for research projects how many 1000 power increase is there per day of research time, for Challenges how many points do I need to score per Speed Up Days (and gold converted to Speed Up Days) that I get as prize) to compare various things, which is why this is also displayed throughout the website in many places. It allows you to for example to distinguish between various Extreme Challenges which one is most attractive when it comes to payout vs power point requirement.
Although it goes a bit out of the scope of this guide, what I also often consider is combining some troop training with my research. If you look at below screenshot from our Troop Training Calculator to train T3 with the same points target as I used for the Research Planner in above example you will see that the amount of days is a lot less (based on 7 lvl 19 Banks and skill points maxing out Troop Training I and II) and with troop training it is also easy to meet point targets exactly. So once you have used the Research Planner to plan some research projects and you have a hard time finding the right research projects to complete it (or they are just too darn expensive), open the Troop Training Calculator and train some troop to win the Challenge.
Hope this tool is as useful for all of you as it has been for me in Game of War and Mobile Strike. If you encounter any problems, or if you have any questions, leave a comment. Also, we are currently quite complete when it comes to the data on the available research projects, but if you miss anything or have any corrections, let us know as well.
Contributed by: GamesGuide on July 7, 2016