Mineral Upgrades Explained (Updated)

First of all I wanted to say that the Line Rangers community is pretty awesome. I met some really nice people over the course of playing this game and running this blog. Some of my posts were inspired by the things they've said or questions they've asked.

In addition, I am pleased to say that after contacting some extraordinary players who reside in Asia, they've given me permission to bring their research and analyses to the English-speaking Line Rangers community. These guys churn out content faster than I can attempt alone here. It's happened about twice already: I'd think of something I wanted to test and a day later they've already finished and published it. I'm sure you will agree that their findings are relevant and extremely well done.

Upgrading Minerals

When talking about mineral upgrades, we must first differentiate between:
    (1) mineral upgrades that are available with increasing player level, and
    (2) the mineral upgrades that are done during battle in a stage
For clarity, I'll be referring to the player level upgrades using coins as "production upgrades" and in-stage upgrades as "mineral upgrades".

As I mentioned in my basic battle strategies post, what you do with the first set of minerals at the start of a stage is crucial. When and how you upgrade your minerals can make or break your performance. Why should you upgrade minerals at all since it costs you precious minerals? Doing so does two distinct things:
    1. Increases the rate of your mineral regeneration
    2. Increases your maximum capacity of minerals

If you've ever wondered whether upgrading minerals was worth the time and the investment, then read on for the answer! Here we discuss the break even time for individual mineral upgrades, and for quick powerlevel-to-8 upgrades.

Or... TL;DR, if you read nothing else, read the 2 red bold texts within.

[Updated June 9, 2014: The original author has a supplemental article to address additional mineral upgrade possibilities after the issues raised in the Comments section.]

The Numbers: Pay As You Go

The information below is brought to us by members of LINE Rangers台灣社團 who created this article, entitled "Should you upgrade minerals to Lv. 8?," on AppGuru. These numbers relate to the "pay as you go" type of mineral upgrading during stage battle. Please click on the link if you wish to follow through the numbers and tables below. 
    Author: 楊濟安 
    Editor: 小為 
    Research Participants: 小為，尤俊杰，陳安安，ShawTim，楊濟安

The data collected is based on a player level 80 with fully upgraded mineral production. 

The first table shows the following data:
    Column 1 (black color): mineral level
    Column 2 (red): amount of minerals regenerated per second at that level
    Column 3 (blue): regeneration rate (minerals/second) increase per level 
    Column 4 (green): minerals gained per second between that level and mineral level 1

Interesting side note: The increase in the regeneration rate is not the same for each level. If it were, the blue column would all be the same #. Why must Line make things so complicated?

So from this table you can see that the amount of minerals you gain after you upgrade to level 8 is approximately 34 minerals per second, bringing the amount of minerals you can regenerate in 1 second up from 164 to 198. If you get 198 minerals back per second, how does that affect our deployment choices? 

The author figured out that if you pick Sol, Macho Moon, Xan, Opera James and Alice on your team, the amount of minerals you would need to generate per second in order to deploy all of these rangers back to back (as soon as their cooldown is over) is 275. Essentially with this team, you require more minerals than you can generate, resulting in times when you cannot deploy your rangers. Conversely, if you pick Glenn, Scott, Bella, Opera James and Alice, the minerals you need per second are 194, which almost fits perfectly. But when you consider also that you gain minerals each time you kill an enemy unit, you will eventually find that you have more minerals than you can spend, resulting in wasted minerals. No, I'm not suggesting that you punch in some numbers every time you make a team change, but it's something to consider if you are running into inefficiencies on a difficult stage. 

The second table shows the following data:
    Column 1 (black): mineral level
    Column 2 (red): mineral cost to upgrade one level
    Column 3 (blue): accumulated mineral cost to upgrade to that level
    Column 4 (green): seconds required to break even on cost of mineral upgrade for that level

This table shows that at level 80 if you upgrade minerals to level 8, it takes 3 minutes and 27 seconds to recoup the cost of the upgrades (3380 minerals). This is a significant finding because the cutoff for the Hurry Up phase is 3 minutes. If you do not expect to hit Hurry Up, then upgrading to level 8 has wasted more minerals than you have had time yet to regenerate. At mineral level 6, it takes just under 3 minutes to break even. Most stages take less than 3 minutes to clear, so you can safely conclude that you need only get up to level 5 or 6 to get the most out of your investment. 

Remember, this data is based on level 80 mineral production, and the rates may differ if you are lower. But the concepts highlighted by the study still apply. 

This is why knowing your strategy before starting is so important to winning a stage. For example, there are stages where you can afford to start off slowly and produce just what you need to hold the enemy off. You are upgrading minerals slowly in order to overwhelm the enemies later in the stage (such as stage 97, 98, 100). There are stages where you are just stalling, waiting for mini bosses to group up (108, 120) or biding time to a Thomas or otherwise strategically saving up your minerals and rangers to unleash at a critical point. If you want to optimize your use of minerals for that strategy, then you should definitely consider how much mineral you need and how much you can afford to invest in upgrades at any point in time. Every time you invest in a mineral upgrade, you are temporarily cutting production of rangers. If you want to get the most you can out of it, you should determine the safest time to pull this trigger, and how much time you will have to reap the benefits of the upgrade.

Supplemental Article: Powerleveling Minerals

Shoutout to reader Chun Lok, whose astute observations sparked the authors of the article to write a supplemental article. The addendum is here: Should you upgrade minerals to Lv. 8: Continuous Upgrade Edition. Please click on the article if you wish to follow along with the data in the new table. This method of upgrading is what I generally refer to in my blog as "powerleveling minerals."

The previous article described the situation where a straight upgrade to level 8 was not possible. The assumption of that piece was that the initial 1270 starting minerals were not used to upgrade minerals, therefore they isolated each upgrade as an independent consideration during battle. The new article, however, addresses specifically the situation where the player will power-level their minerals from level 1 to level 8 back-to-back at the start of the stage. The condition of the experiment is for level 80 mineral production and level 80 mineral max limit.

Table columns 1, 2, 3 and 4 should look familiar as they were in the first article. They are: 

    Column 1: mineral level
    Column 2: amount of minerals regenerated per second at that level
    Column 3: minerals gained per second between that level and mineral level 1
    Column 4: accumulated cost to upgrade to that level 
    Column 5: time to pay off cost of that level, in seconds (Column 4/Column 3)
    Column 6: upgrade time to that level, in seconds. Note that level 2 and 3 require 0 seconds because it is sufficient to use the initial 1270 minerals to upgrade.
    Column 7 (highlighted yellow): total play time required to break even (Pay off time + upgrade time)
    

From the last column's numbers, you can deduce that if the stage requires less than a minute to clear, then not upgrading at all is the most efficient. For stages taking longer than 2 minutes, you will reap gains out of upgrading to level 8. 

The author stated that in practice even with nonstop tapping of the upgrade button, level 1 to level 8 took him 16 seconds, not the 10.98 seconds that was predicted in the table. (It took our reader 11.77 seconds, which is closer). There is some loss of efficiency between the reality of gameplay and ideals with which the table was calculated (assuming you could hit the upgrade button as soon as you had enough minerals, which in reality would be very unlikely). So there are obviously going to be some discrepancies in the break even points of both this article and the first article. We should treat them more as a reference/guideline, not hard rules. Armed with this information, you'll ultimately have to decide for yourself which strategy is most effective: 

1. Don't upgrade, directly deploy rangers
2. Upgrade a level, then deploy rangers
3. Upgrade all the way to level 8 before deploying any rangers

Player Mineral Levels

Finally, I wanted to just mention that if you upgrade your mineral production rate with coins, you are effectively increasing the rate of mineral regeneration outside of battle. Let's assume for example that you're player level 75 and that in battle your mineral level 8 gives you 185 minerals per second, meanwhile you have spent 2500 minerals in order to get to level 8. If you spend coins to upgrade your mineral production once, you will regenerate 185 minerals per second at mineral level 7, effectively saving you from spending a bunch of minerals to upgrade that last level while in battle.

Many players say they don't think that spending coins on increasing the mineral max limit is important, or not as important after a certain level. That's a little bit true and false. Consider Bernard, who costs 1000 minerals to deploy at level 80. He's a tanking ranger, so unless you start the stage with 1000, you won't be deploying your tank! Yes, you can get by with less and then upgrade minerals in the stage to eventually raise the max capacity. But let's not forget that you always start the stage with a full set of minerals. If you had the choice of starting the stage with 1270 minerals instead of 900 minerals, wouldn't you want to start with more? If you start with more, you can either get a head start on mineral upgrades or you might be able to deploy rangers. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide whether it's worth the coin-sink to raise the starting maximum. If you twisted my arm, I'd say put your coins into production first, then mineral max, but I certainly would not ignore the mineral max limit category.

This was a lot of text. Hope it was helpful information to everyone! Special thanks to contributors to the discussion & article authors!