Prefix
If you are like me, you have two major concerns when attacking: the victim’s defense and how much money they are carrying. The actual value I will have taken from the victim by the 10th attack is typically of little interest to me because my experience from previous attacks tells me whether the series is going to be lucrative or not, or if I should cut my series short to pursue better options. But it may be import to know exactly how much you will earn in a series of attacks or when exactly to stop attacking. Three scenarios explain what I am talking about.
Scenario 1
You have been attacking and pillaging for hours and you have three stamina points remaining. You enter a hood and observe that the owner is carrying around a generous sum of cash with your name on it. The question is, do you immediately rob them with your remaining stamina then head for home or do you wait for some additional stamina points to recover before beginning your spree? If you attack now, you will only get three stamina’s worth of cash. If you wait to regain a few more stamina, you introduce some additional risk in that they could spend or hide that unsecure cash while you are waiting, but the reward would be greater, but how much greater? What do you do?
Scenario 2
You are a criminal with high income standards and have no interest attacking someone if you cannot make more than a certain amount. Obviously you can attack the victim until their cash dropped for each attack is less than your payout floor, but that ensures you have robbed them one too many times and used one too many stamina points before figuring that out. So, when do you stop attacking and go search for more lucrative prospects?
Scenario 3
You have a substantial amount of cash in your pocket and are about to take a break from CC for a few hours. You know that if an opponent stumbles upon your hood while you are away, they will certainly attack you until you are too beat up to fight (i.e. 10 hits). If they do, how much will you lose from their spree? Is taking that chance better than the certainty of the bank’s 10% penalty?
Analysis
The answer to each scenario can be found by analyzing the exponential decay function that makes up the attack model in CC. An exponential decay function looks like this (clicky) where y is the amount remaining after a period of time (or events), a is the original amount, x is the amount of time (or events), and b is the percent decrease for each event in decimal form. That equation tells us how much the person will have after x attacks, but we want to see what we will get from each attack. That function is below.
Plugging in the constant for dollars lost per attack, b, we get the following function:
To use this function in context, if a victim is carrying a cool $150,000, we will earn $9,841 on the 5th attack. Clicky.
Okay, that is cool and all, but in my opinion, this is much more useful in table form. We will use $10,000 as our starting cash to make everything readable.
The second to the last column, Total Cash Taken, is computed by the following summation, where n is the number of attacks and k is the attack number.
The Grand Finale
What does this all mean? It means that as you attack an opponent, the amount you receive becomes exponentially less and less. We all knew that, but now we know by exactly how much for each attack.
It also means that the first four attacks are quite lucrative compared to the last four. If you are trying to get the most bang for your stamina points and you are at a level where most opponents walk around with cash in pocket, it may not be worth your stamina to rob opponents more than five times before moving on to the next victim.
Some of us will look at this and decide that anything below X% is too little payout, while others will finally understand why some people get so pissed off when you attack them ten times (because you just took 65% of their cash), and yet others will wonder why the F I took the time to write so much on something so simple. I don’t have a good reason for that last one. I was actually trying to figure out what the maximum percent stolen is (65.1%) and things got out of hand.
The Answers
Remember those three scenarios? Well, here are the answers.
Scenario 1: I would personally do a hybrid of the two options; attack for three, wait for one or two stamina to return, then attack for the rest of my stamina, assuming the reward is high enough and I have the patience to wait that long. That way, if the victim sees me on his news feed, I at least got away with three hits worth of energy. If the reward is huge, I would attack then recharge then attack again until the person is too beat up, but that has only happened for me a couple times.
Scenario 2: It would ultimately depend on where your threshold is. If I will not attack/rob for less than $5,000 and the victim has $10,000 like the example above, I’m not going to rob him more than 6 times. We kind of already have a threshold in our mind and we know when we are approaching it, but this quantifies thing so we know exactly when to stop.
Scenario 3: This one fails to factor in your stats compared to others at your level and how much money you are actually carrying. If you are sitting in the top 5%, you can probably get away with leaving all your money in the open. But be warned, if that one opponent does crash your tea party while you are away, they can get away with as much as 65.1% of your cash.* That is significant, even for the richest of us.
* As whocarewhatmynameis pointed out in this post (Clicky), there is a maximum loss of $30,000 per hit. That means, "if a player has a large amount of money on hand, the maximum amount an opponent can take is 10*30K=300K. Equilibrium between decision to bank vs not to bank is at $3 million, above which it is better not to bank (i.e. to keep on hand) provided you plan to spend the money before 'player is too beat up' cycle ends." On that same note, $570K is minimum starting amount your opponent must have to get 10 hits at $30K each.
Notes:
This information pertains to releases v2.0.2 and v2.2. It may not be applicable for later releases if the attack rules are changed by the Crime City developers.
There is a four image limit per post, so two images have been made links instead. My apologies for the inconvenience.
Also, the original images were uploaded to my forum profile and linked from there to ensure image links will remain preserved as long as my profile is left intact. That album is here (clicky).
Originally Posted by whocareswhatmynameis
