The game just got ~46% faster.

https://app.warera.io/article/6a903fb0125700f0fd4a2c5d did not touch the prestige button, same 65,000 XP penalty, same +50% bonus, same rule switching it off while you sit on the cap, all reread from the live config on patch day. What it rebuilt is the clock behind it, and that turns out to change more than a clock should.

Weeklies now pay 1,000 XP a week instead of 600. Monthlies stopped being a config entry that never fired and pay 2,000 a month. Dailies and the login calendar are untouched.

1. How much faster, exactly

There is no single honest answer, so here are all four.

the mission clock, before the login calendar +46.5% speedup

the full old clock, calendar included +41.5% speedup

if you never take the monthly set by hand +19.3% speedup

year one, counting the onetime milestone pool +60.2% speedup

Level 50 from scratch falls from 293 days to 207. The mid tier player I clocked at seven months from the cap is now just under five months away.

2. Who the speed up actually helped

Everybody got the same clock. Everybody's cycle fell by the same 29 percent, campers included - a full banker's point now takes 155 days instead of 220, exactly like everyone else's. So nobody was left behind in absolute terms.

What moved is relative standing, and it moved a long way.

The benefit is a hump, not a lift. It peaks at landing 30, which goes from +12.1 percent over never pressing to +31.7 a gain of nearly twenty points. It is worth +18.5 at land 35, +12.9 at land 40, and by land 49 it is +0.4, which is nothing.

A fixed calendar now holds more cycles, and strategies whose case rests on cycle count collect the windfall. The patch is a buff to dropping, concentrated in the middle of the ladder. If you were camping, the game got faster around you and your position got slightly worse.

3. The claim button now has a right moment, and it is not now

This is the one to act on today.

The prestige XP multiplier is disabled while you stand on level 50. Milestone tiers are claimed by hand, and v0.25.5 stopped the dots expiring so a claim is something you can store, and the same button pays different amounts depending on when you press it.

I had carried "does the multiplier actually apply to claimed mission XP?" as unverified since the first piece. So I measured it three cohorts, one four day window before this patch, best XP per day in each:

camped at the cap 401.2 best XP/day, off at the cap multiplier

below cap, never pressed 413.6 best XP/day, off nothing to multiply multiplier

below cap, pressed once 601.7 best XP/day, live multiplier

So: if you are at the cap, do not claim your milestones. The full ladder pool is 20,150 XP. Claimed at 50 it pays 20,150; held until after your next press and claimed on the climb back, the same buttons pay 30,225. 10,075 XP for changing nothing but the order, 16 percent of an entire prestige, free.

The hold costs nothing if I am wrong about the mechanic, which is why I am comfortable telling you to do it. Below 50 with no prestige, there is nothing to wait for claim now.

4. Every cycle got up to two months shorter

You press at 50; the only choice is how deep you land, and you cannot land below 25 because the penalty off the cap lands exactly there. Days from one press to the next:

25 press on sight 146.5 cycle before, 103.5 cycle now

30 157.8 cycle before, 111.5 cycle now

40 186.0 cycle before, 131.4 cycle now

45 202.9 cycle before, 143.3 cycle now

50 full bank 219.8 cycle before, 155.3 cycle now

5. The catch-up happens years earlier

Land 30 gets permanently ahead of a camper on day 2,016 instead of 2,863. Land 45 crosses on day 580 rather than 996. The full optimizer plan - open deep, taper shallower with age - crosses on day 1,883 where it used to need 2,601, and finishes +46.4 percent up. Pressing on sight remains the worst thing a war build can do at any horizon a human plays: -23.8 percent at three years.

6. The sceptic's answer flipped

Every simulation here is an optimistic ceiling: real accounts after pressing deliver 0.170 of a camper's output where the model predicts 0.534. So I re-run it all with sub-cap output discounted to a third the sceptic's answer.

On the old clock that answer was blunt under the discount the optimizer refused to drop a single level and returned pure banking. On the new clock it opens with 27 straight presses to level 25, then banks, and beats pure banking by 25.2 percent. The same ten-year plan that lost 3.5 percent under the discount now gains 22.8.

7. So when should you quit-proof your plan?

Any plan optimises to a date nobody knows. Land 49 is never behind a camper at any exit; land 45's worst moment is one percent down. Below those, every strategy buys its late lead with years underwater the ten-year plan bottoms out 51.5 percent behind and spends 5.1 years there first. Pick your row by the year you expect to stop, not by where a simulation ends. And read the columns knowing the clock moved: year 7 of that chart is where the old game's year 10 used to be.

8. Builders: the 13th company, the 14th, and where it stops

Every edition so far answered the eco question with "stakes are tiny, land 35 40" true of the landing, useless if you want to know what the points buy.

The companies skill runs 0 to 10 and gives you the skill level plus two slots, so you cap at 12 companies for 55 skill points. Every company after that is bought with prestige points, and the price doubles each time.

Each rung costs more than every rung before it combined. A point spent on anything else returns about $5.66 a day, so companies win outright for the 13th and 14th, roughly tie at the 15th, and lose after that. Take the first two, think about the third, and spend the rest elsewhere.

The income race is a few percent wide end to end - which is the finding. A builder cannot lose much by choosing wrong; only press-on-sight is meaningfully negative, at -1.6 percent. The optimal eco plan digs a shallow hole for six years and finishes +4.0.

If you do both: damage peaks at land 30, income at land 35, and they very nearly coincide. Land 30/35 and stop thinking about it. No half war / half eco build exists in the optimizer cache, so those are two objectives on one clock, not one blended character.

9. What has camping actually cost?

The multiplier is off while you sit on 50, so the bonus is not something you lose slowly it is unavailable until you press. Someone who pressed on day one has collected about 1,500 XP the camper beside them could not; over a full land 25 cycle the gap is 21,667 XP, a third of a press. 149 accounts are still at the cap having never pressed.

And one thing campers should not count on: the +50% retroactive payout in v0.25.2 was a one off to the 433 accounts that had banked above the cap. Nobody camping today has one coming.

The button did not get better this week. It got closer together and it finally has a wrong time to press the other one.

TLDR:
lvl30 prestige war good
lvl35 presige eco good
https://app.warera.io/user/697b55e4bcecf3b37667e0d1