Feature Request: Additional Weights in Building Efficiency Rating

[kronikpillow]

Hello FoE Helper Dev Team,

First, thank you for your continued work on FoE Helper and for previously taking the time to respond to my questions regarding the Building Efficiency Rating panel. Your explanation helped clarify how the feature is intended to be used, and applying that guidance has had a measurable impact on my city’s long-term development.

Over the past 4.5 months, I’ve used the Building Efficiency Rating panel to set clear targets and evaluate buildings more effectively, particularly while adjusting my city’s balance between attack and defense. Following discussions within the Forge Nexus community with Beta and DE players, I shifted my focus toward higher defense. By consistently using the panel with clearly defined parameters, I was able to achieve the expected statistical improvements and significantly increase my attrition performance.

The feature has proven to be a very effective planning and evaluation tool, both for myself and for members of my guild, Lords of War. We have since adopted it on a wider scale within the guild to gradually optimize cities across our entire guild roster.

Based on this experience, we would like to submit a feature request related to the Building Efficiency Rating panel. Specifically, it would be very helpful if additional weighting options could be added for buildings that provide self-aid kits and, or at least in particular, mass self-aid kits. They have become increasingly rare and therefore more valuable, and being able to factor them into the efficiency calculation would further improve long-term planning and building comparison.

Thank you for considering this request, and for maintaining such a useful and well-thought-out tool for the Forge of Empires community.

Kind regards,
KronikPillow
Lords of War

[kronikpillow]

I also realized I forgot to attach a comparison illustrating the results achieved using the Building Efficiency Rating panel.

19.09.25

today:

The screenshots reflect a significant transformation of my city achieved through incremental redesigns guided by the panel’s evaluation logic. I’ve documented the full progression with screenshots after each redesign step. I’m planning to put together an in-depth, educational video explaining how to use this feature effectively, as I’ve noticed it’s often misunderstood despite its long-term potential.

I wanted to share this context as concrete feedback on how impactful the tool has been in practice for our guild. 😁

[outoftheline]

the issue with adding more things is mainly the available space we have. people are already annoyed with the merged values for battle boosts.
with standalone tools like excel, handling and displaying large amounts of data is way easier than withing a window inside a browser window.
there are a couple of quite important things still missing imo, like resource boosts (mainly forge points), which we want to handle differently from the other things, but havent gotten around to implementing.

for the selfaid and mass self aid, you basically just need the fragments to reach a certain threshold: 30 fragments for the mass-aid and in theory 15 (or a value a user can define themself) BG charges x 30 for the self aid. so, imo it should also be handled differently.

[kronikpillow]

Thanks for the explanation, that helps clarify how you’re thinking about this, especially around UI constraints and the distinction between linear values and threshold-based mechanics.

To give a bit more context on how the panel is typically used by endgame players in our guild, I’ve attached a screenshot of a real configuration we run in practice. In this setup, most values (FP, goods, treasury, coins, supplies, etc.) are intentionally disabled, and the panel is used almost exclusively for combat-related stats, QI values, and Finish Special Production.

In that configuration, the table ends up with a limited, focused set of active columns and remains very readable. The idea behind mentioning Mass Self-Aid fragments was not to enable everything, but to treat it similarly to Finish Special Production — as an optional, situational value that users can toggle when they are actively targeting that milestone.

A practical example is buildings like the Joyful Nutcracker Guardhouse, which rank very low in the current efficiency list due to weak continuous stats, but can still be strategically relevant while pursuing Mass Self-Aid thresholds. The intent isn’t to inflate such buildings long-term, but to better reflect their temporary usefulness when working toward a specific goal.

I completely understand the need to design for worst-case configurations and that some mechanics may be better handled outside the efficiency panel altogether. This was mainly shared as additional context from extended use, and to illustrate why the idea came up in the first place. Thanks again for taking the time to explain your perspective.

[kronikpillow]

Just to give a very concrete example of the situation I run into in practice:

I personally found myself with 35 mass self-aid kits, while having multiple buildings that produce fragments for mass self-aid kits, when reviewing buildings in the efficiency list, anything that produces Mass Self-Aid Kits tends to rank very low due to weak continuous stats. At the same time, these buildings are among the very few sources that help maintain full aid coverage across an event-heavy city when daily player aid isn’t guaranteed.

As a result, when deciding whether to keep or replace a building, I end up having to mentally override the efficiency score and effectively “re-score” those buildings in my head based on their contribution to maintaining aid coverage, rather than their raw efficiency output.

No pressure, just providing some user-feedback :)

[outoftheline]

that's quite a small amount of values, but i saw many others that consider way more stats or even just display them (setting the value to 0 displays, but doesnt score them).

mine is more extensive, too.

and my mass-aid hoarding problem had me remove more buildings with those items than i need in the long run.
imo the scoring should never be the only factor when deciding what to place and remove, which is why we have the building tooltips in there and the items column aswell.

btw if you want to find out how many selfaid and mass selfaid kits you're making you can hop over to the list in the productions and press the "group" button twice to have a list of (average) daily production.

we're always considering adding more stuff to the efficiency, so i'll add this to the evergrowing list of ideas.

[kronikpillow]

sorry i missed your previous reply, yeah indeed, the example there is quite small set of values, recently i've upped them to the top 5% of the a/d per tile in the game, after i figured out the Add Building option exists that allows me to add all buildings in the game :) honestly big fan of this feature, look at this transformation all thanks to this feature since we last talked :))

in relation to mass-aiding, yes atm i just ignore the scoring for those buildings that produce mass-self aid kids, so i guess that works as well :)

Thanks for your time and previous feedback