Talk:Expedition/@comment-24332640-20140625000844

I've been doing expedition #6 fully sparkled and I like it.

I know, I know, conventional wisdom says you shouldn't bother sparkling for an expedition that short. I think conventional wisdom is wrong here for a few reasons:

1. Bauxite is precious. This is still the best expedition for getting bauxite and even if you spend more fuel and ammo this way that really doesn't matter since fuel and ammo are way easier to replace than bauxite, especially if you have your other two fleets doing 21 and 37/38 (I usually have one fleet alternate between those two).

2. Sparkling for short expeditons can be totally managable if you do it right.

OK, let's expand on that last point. If you're trying to have a fixed expedition fleet and then resparkle every ship that loses its sparkle before sending out the expedition again then of course it isn't worth it when the expedition only lasts 40 minutes. So don't do that.

What I do is keep several ships in reserve, already sparkled, and when a ship loses its sparkle I just swap it out and immediatley relaunch the expedition. Then I can resparkle the ship I took out while the expedition is in progress and maintain my reserve of sparkling ships.

Furthermore, I stagger the sparkled ships in the expedition fleet so that they're not all losing their sparkle at once. Even with the system I'm using, resparkling 6 ships at once is a bit much. But the sparkle you get from 1-1 runs should last 4 expeditions so you should never have to replace more than 1 or 2 ships at a time if you set things up right. When you first start this out launch the expedition with just two sparkling ships, add 2 more the next time, etc. until the whole fleet is sparkling.

This may sound like a pain to set up, but once you've got things going it really doesn't feel like that much work to maintain. And it's totally worth it for bauxite.

(Also you'll get tons of small furniture boxes because great success pretty much gaurantees them I think...)