Nugget #3 - Neighbors

[ShibuyaCloth]

"Neighbors" is an important part of the game. It is even a necessity! They are useful for:

• Goals: you often need special items
• Bonus: when visiting a neighbor, you get a small bonus: 1 energy (10 per day), 5 coins or 1 XP
• Social Points: when visiting a neighbor, you can "tend" a building (heart floating above). It doubles the amount of XP given at the next gathering. A "Visited" building will also glimmer. Having a lot of heart will increase your social score, thus improve your visibility in the community list.
• Chat: if you like cluttering walls

Neighbor Storable: No Info: Helps you with Quests, Bonus, Social Points, Chat, and many other things. Accessiblwe throug the the "Main Menu" - "Social" button. Type: Special Source: Storyline Link: https://forums.storm8.com/showthread.php?77505

How Many
A good question and highly dependent of your gaming style! However, there is a minimum you will need to have an efficient pool. Primarily, during timed goals/events, neighbor interaction is often requested. If you have too few of them, it can impact your success.

During timed events, requesting neighbors will yield a maximum of 20 responses a day. Assuming some margin error, a good safe minimum would be to double this amount. Thus 40 should be your bottom line. If you need to add neighbors you have a thread for that.

Active Neighbor
Only active neighbors can helps you with quests as they need to answer you. Therefor your neighborhood should be populated with active players. There is no simple and direct way to know if your neighbor is active or not.

Some pointers you can use to identify the "active" state. Note that you need in general more than one of those clues to validate activity:

• The current or last timed event items are present or in progress
• The neighbor has one or more social hearts (Note: hearts stay until the player logs into the game; decay is initiated when you login)
• You can "visit" buildings, a heart floats on top of it. (Note: you can visit buildings even from inactive players, the "visited" flag resets after sometime, leaving the building open for a new visit)
• Check if crafting / animated builds are moving (Windmill, Sawmill, Workshop, Potion Shop, Magical Forge, etc.)
• Crops are growing
• The realm layout has changed (you Know Your Neighbor after some time)
• Your wall or news feed has traces of your neighbor's activity
• The neighbor's wall is active (cleaned, self-post, etc.)
• They are active on the forum

Social Rating
The social rating increase your visibility within the community and to certain extends shows you are an active player. The higher your social ratings, the higher changes are you are visible in the social community tab, thus people will visit you and eventually "visit" your buildings.

Social rating will be a nice boost when you have a young and growing dominion, once you have reached full maturity (have done all goals), it becomes more a personal choice. Getting XP boosts from buildings are very welcome to level up fast.

The social rating is defined by the 4 hearts in your overview page; tap the star on the upper-left part of the screen to show your overview page. Gaining social ranks is done by visiting buildings with a heart floating above it in another realm, each visit provide 1 heart. Number of hearts needed to reach the next level:

Level 1:       5
Level 2:      20
Level 3:     100
Level 4:     500

Social hearts have a limited life time span. Each day a certain amount will decay. The precise decay formula is unknown for the moment but a first analysis suggests:

1. The decay starts 2 days after acquiring the point.
2. Decay rate is 20% of the current level every day, so at level 3, you lose 20% of 100=20 points a day.
3. If the decayed point is greater than the remain points for the current level, the decay continues on the level below, but not more the 20% of that level. Example, social rating 3 with 5 point left, the decay will claim 20 points. You end up with a social rating of 2, and 16 points and not Level 2 with 5 points.

Requests
You will need, for many goals, something from your neighbors. When you issue requests, your neighbors can accept or refuse it. But, a neighbor needs to explicitly perform the answering action. Now some rules apply:

1. A Castle Story day starts at 0:00 AM PDT (Converter).
2. You can request a neighbor only once a day.
3. You can answer as many requests as you want.
4. You can only receive 20 answers a day, +1 additional from the Stormie's Castle.
5. Request will backlog until answered by a neighbor or is decayed (number of days unknown, looks like <7 days). Thus a request sent 2 days ago can be answered and validated on the current day, and counts toward the answered day.

In conclusion, if you send out >40 requests to active players just before the end of a CS day, you can get 20 replies back, then the following day 20 more responses. For people living in a time zone where the CS day switch is in their night, they can cumulate 40 responses overnight (max 42 due to Stormie's Castle).

Note: Do not send out too many requests if you know you need to send another one for another goal in the same or next day. You might clog you request pipeline!

Downloads

• Nuggets (PDF)

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