This is a walkthrough and guide on the Flint Jump 2.0

This guide is broken down into 3 sections for ease of reading. These sections are "Basics", "Strategy", and "Math". This guide is intended to help advanced players complete the Flint Jump 2.0 with minimal fuss with references to problems I encountered and common misconceptions about the Flint Jump 2.0, including the common fallacy of lack of good defense.

Basics
Without a doubt the Flint Jump 2.0 can make any family a contender... provided at least 4 people are active. This fundementally changes the game again to that where naps are a requirement or strong core defense.

During our many Flint Jumps (40 to 65 planets at a time for about 500 planets) we learned many lessons. The three most important lessons are:

1) Make sure people presend fleets. Nothing is worse than waiting for fleets.

2) Make sure people know who they are picking up from. We lost over 6 mil of income in the very first jumps due to bankers randomly clicking hovering fleets.

3) Enforce jump systems where a rc jumper has a portal near 3 or 4 systems and one player fills a system. I found an rc jumper with 15 planets to 30 planets of his own to be best.

The Flint Jump reduces costs. A banker making Living Quarters can cost up to 30 times that of Flint Jumped infra for an equal OB level. Spread over 50 planets this can add up fast! 50 planets to 3520 living quarters was typically costing us 135 million gc

Now initially we just built planets to 300% ourselves and jumped after that. However in due time this was too time consuming so we had people prebuild planets to 300% for us (pro note: have them add infra after 300% equal to laser count if razing lasers!). This keeps the longer infra building out of the jumpers hands and pushes the expensive part to the jumpers.

But I digress! I forgot to start you on how the jump works. Essentially a captured planet has no NW. This is also true of explored planets.  This means if you capture 1 million buildings intact in one tick you will only gain 4 million nw (plus planet NW) the next tick. This is a game mechanism method to prevent very high empire build costs.

So you have to have two builders and one person to pass planets up. Player A (builder) takes planets built to 300% already. He makes it to 700%. He messages Player B (builder) when done and Player B takes them when finished. Player B makes the planets to 1500% and messages player C (who passes up planets) when done. Meanwhile player A has started more planets right after his nw drops provided the bank has enough.

Morale even in fam can be a problem so all three needs to have morale planets. Additionally sometimes Player C must capture two jumps to get enough NW to pass upwards. Sometimes it can take two to three passes as well.

Calculate your costs in advance

[Empire build costs plus one] * [Construction Bonus / 2 ] * [ (Current Planet OB + Planned Planet OB) /2 ] * [Base Infrastructure Costs]

If someone takes the jump planets retake and defend or retake and raze. Don't let them get free infra and they will be dissuaded. Rebuild later. Don't take Flint Jumps for granted... problems will occur.

Strategy
As mentioned above preplan jump systems. This will allow you quicker response times as well as to make the jumps more secure. Additionally if your portalled in the systems lasers can be used to increase defense.

Lasers is a big increase in defense and it is possible to put 50 per planet if portalled in the same system... or more. Imagine 200 lasers per planet and 3520 total infra on average... who is going to raid that? Fighters is also another great defense tool.

Plan your naps carefully. If napped all on left but not right then jump planets on the left. Common sense!

Sometimes you just need prebuilt planets regardless of initial infra. We often took planets at 300% and built them to 700% then razed the not needed infra and made another 700% jump then finished with 1500% jump.

Cash Factories are cheap filler infra for bankers, RC's are cheap for resourcers. You dont neeed 100% Living Quarters.... if your planning 400 mil pop but also have 100k cash factories it won't hurt him badly for spare income.

You need to make sure you plan for two things when making plans for infra. Wars and Infra. I never made enough refineries and I regret that. We would have had to buy the market out for enough endu if we warred until the refinery jump happened. Same for Octo.

You don't need to stall normal infra growth for a Flint Jump. Keep a portion of funds set aside for normal growth plans. Empties with 300% empire build costs are still cheaper to full build than planets at 500% OB to 600% OB.

Always be prepared with lists of planets you can take. Keep a spare portion so people can be late or missing (learned from our inactives).

It is best to focus on 1 player at a time and move him up and out of range then to the next.

A Jumping family can get 150k infra up a jump with ease mid round, if not 300k. There is no faster way to respond to market conditio9ns that this. Iron and endu maxed out? Jump them. We did this fairly often. Food high? We built normally for food and we jumped half food and half iron one jump. Suddenly we made enough food for our needs.

Both builders should have tax offices so you can mass produce some of those also.

We had 100 planets explored in family and prebuilt with LQ's and we took 100 planets (first, so he would drop some NW) prebuilt from Easyway in two jumps and then the other 100 in two jumps. Having a list helps and planning ahead what your doing helps.

We jumped 1 popper early to 12 mil income and then worked on ressies and a cf banker before converting a second banker to pop. This is so we only ever had one waiting for pop to come in.

The player handing up planets, if sufficient science and low of enough base NW can also build a layer if you want. Your empire build costs need not be 0%. We actually made a decent amount of infra at 200% costs for a while. For the bigger jumps we dropped as low as we could though.

Now to cover defense. We escaped with naps with most fams. We did not nap two major ones, 37 and 45. We did think we napped 37 so when they attacked we were fracked. 45 was never a danger but 37 was. However we could have spent a billion gc and 75 million iron to clear them if we knew otherwise and then continued our jumps. A strong family with adequate savings can get out of problems. There is simply not enough fams for continous dangers anymore.

I covered lasers but not Defense Stations. We could have maxed ours out with ease and then used them in systems just handed over. This would have protected 80-90 planets just jumped if lasers and stationed defenses were present.

Honestly if Tico had logged on early enough to make wizzies our fighbt with 45 would have been cake enough to do jumps still.  They were no where near our jump systems and they were easy prey.

Math
Say you have a banker with 200,000,000 populstion on 300 planets. If no science this is roughly 303,630 living quarters and 202,420 tax offices. His income is (Revalon Banker) is (200,000,000 / 30 * 1.6 * 1.8) = 19.2 million gc a tick and his nw is (200,000,000 / 40) + (300 * 800) + (607,050 * 4) = 7,6628,200 nw. For arguments sake lets make his NW 12 million by saying he needs a lot of fleet for defense.

His empire build costs is (12,000,000 - 10,000) / 10,000 = 1199% or essentially 12 times the cost. He wont have a major construction bonus. Therefore a new empty costs 2400gc to make a single Living Quarter.

A Research Center (RC) Attacker of 110,000 NW and a 99% construction science has a cost of 101 gc to make the Living Quarter.

Therefore if you assume a pop banker to be 400 million pop in infra eventually you can assume x cost to get there, where y cost of a well planned Flint Jump can be as low as say .03 times the other cost.

Let me put this in perspective. We jumped Easyway on 200 planets to 600,000 Living Quarters at a cost of about 550 million gc. If he had tried adding 150,000 Living Quarters to himself from the above 200 million population scenario using 50 new planets his cost would be 3,300,000,000 (3.3 billion) gc to make.

If your making CF's and you have 18 hours to do it and are taking 300% OB planets you will run out of morale. They make in 3 ticks at 99% science. Take, build, 3 ticks, pass.... 1 tick, take 50 more.... ugh. I found that 120 planets a day (income allowing) was optimum.

Once you make 50 mil a tick your in the sweet zone. 7100% costs about 64 million a planet for LQs but you get 15,840 infra per a planet. Save for a day and jump 50. Or go with CF's for 39 mil per planet. Even with CF's your income is 9,345,600 a tick from just CF's on 50 planets. Imagine 200 CF planets built like this with another 50 planets built with TO's. 52,335,360 additional income after 5 days (4 for CF's and 1 for Tax Offices).

I dreamed of a pop banker with 300 planets with a mix of LQ's and TO's with 7100% OB. 177,914,880 income a tick before science. I even dreamed higher. It's all possible.

Welcome to Imperial Nap and Build.