Maverick got the Ambitious Assignments Challenge out of the way pretty quickly. He understands why it is a problem for many, however, so he decided to write out some tips for it.
Table of Contents
Completing 30 Port Quotas (Biggest Issue in Ambitious Assignments)
Yes, it’s not the first item in the list, but it’s the one that causes the most issues, so I decided to tackle it first.
Some players will get this one out of the way very quickly, while others will struggle a lot. The reason is that the difficulty of meeting a Port Quota depends on the Rank of your Shipping in Kingsmarch. Players who interact with the League Mechanic during the campaign will often get close to finishing it by the time they get to maps. Players who only visit Kingsmarch after they reach maps and max out Shipping quickly will struggle, even high-volume players.
Unfortunately, there is no way to downgrade the Rank of your Shipping. There is, however, an easy but somewhat annoying alternative: starting a new character in another League. As long as you don’t pick Standard (doesn’t have Kingsmarch) or Ruthless (has different Challenges), your progress is shared. The easiest candidate is Solo Self-Found, but if you’re feeling adventurous, you can make a Hardcore Character, too.
When playing with this new character, leave your Shipping at Rank 1. Do, however, upgrade Mining and Farming (unlocks resources required for quotas) and optionally Smelting (1 bar counts as 5 Ore to meet quotas, though at Rank 1, the advantage is minimal).
Have at Least X Stockpile
This paragraph is about the following requirements of Ambitious Assignments:
- Have at least 10,000 Blue Zanthimum in your Kingsmarch Stockpile at once
- Have at least 5,000 Verisium Bars in your Kingsmarch Stockpile at once
The requirements for this are the following:
- Recruiting/City Hall Rank 2 (to establish Smelting and Farming)
- Mining Rank 6. Further upgrades will increase the amount and rarity of Ore you find, which is helpful to get there faster
- Smelting Rank 7. Further upgrades will help a little if your workers are having difficulties keeping up. The benefits are marginal compared to Mining and Farming upgrades, however
- Farming Rank 7, though increasing the Rank further will increase the crops you produce every hour
After you fulfill the above requirements, it’s just a matter of allowing your Stockpile to grow. In other words, don’t send out these goods in shipments (and, optionally, don’t use them in upgrades for other buildings when possible).
Be Careful When Upgrading Your Smelting Rank
I understand you want to complete Ambitious Assignments as quickly as possible, but there is a disadvantage to upgrading Smelting. When Smelters become idle, they will smelt any available Ores into Bars, even the ones you don’t assign them to. You will need some of these Ores (not Bars) when upgrading buildings, so your Smelters can sabotage you here.
Before you establish Smelting, consider upgrading:
- The Recruitment/City Hall to Rank 3
- Mining to Rank 3
- Shipping to Rank 3
Before upgrading Smelting to Rank 2, consider upgrading:
- The Recruitment/City Hall to Rank 4
- Shipping to Rank 4
Consider doing the follow upgrades before upgrading Smelting to Rank 5:
- The Recruitment/City Hall to Rank 6
- Shipping to Rank 5
Consider doing the following upgrades before upgrading Smelting to Rank 7:
- The Recruitment/City Hall to Rank 8
- Shipping to Rank 7
If you don’t pay attention to the above points, the issue isn’t as big as with Port Quotas. You can simply remove all Smelting workers from their jobs temporarily until you make the relevant upgrades. It will be a temporary hit to your Kingsmarch productivity, though.
Disenchanting 30 Unique Items
To fulfill this part of Ambitious Assignments, you’ll need to meet the following requirements:
- Smelting Rank 2 (required to smelt Petrified Amber Bars, necessary to upgrade Mining)
- Mining Rank 4 (required to mine Bismuth Ore, necessary to upgrade the Recruitment Office/City Hall)
- Farming Rank 2 (required to farm Pumpkin, necessary to upgrade the Recruitment Office/City Hall)
- Recruitment/City Hall Rank 5 (required to establish Disenchanting)
- Disenchanting Level 11
Upgrading Disenchanting all the way up to Rank 11 is going to require a lot of Gold and Thaumaturgic Dust.
The best way to get Thaumaturgic Dust, is to disenchant Unique Items, but that is not very helpful in the context of this Challenge. The best alternative is to disenchant items with high item-level modifiers. You can get these from Shipping out Bars (not Bismuth and Verisium) and as rewards from your Atlas Runners. You can smelt these if your Disenchanting is at Rank 2 or higher.
For the last upgrade, there is also the option of running Maps with Domination Scarabs of Apparitions. These will drop a lot of Influenced items, which give a lot of extra Thaumaturgic Dust if your Disenchanting is at Rank 10 or 11. You can also get some items that will help you for the final step of Ambitious Assignments.
Claiming Rewards From Atlas Runners
To complete this part of Ambitious Assignments, you’ll first need the following Kingsmarch upgrades:
- Smelting Rank 5 (required to smelt Bismuth Bars, necessary to upgrade Mining)
- Mining Rank 6 (required to mine Verisium Ore, necessary to upgrade the Recruitment Office/City Hall)
- Farming Rank 5 (required to farm Orgourd, necessary to upgrade the Recruitment Office/City Hall)
- Recruitment/City Hall Rank 7 (required to establish Mapping)
In theory, leaving your Mapping at level 1 is sufficient to complete this Challenge. Upgrading it to level 2 is very recommended, though. You can then have a level 7 mapper, a second level 5-7 mapper and 2 cheap miners/farmers/shippers/smelters run Scoured Level 1 maps at 100% Completion rate. If there is casualty, you’ll then have a 50% chance that one of the easy to replace workers will die instead of one of your mappers.
If you’re not short on Gold, I recommend upgrading your Recruitment/City Hall and Mapping to Level 8. You can then have a single level 8+ Mapper run Scoured Level 1 Maps, accompanied by 5 cheap workers without Mapping Skills. Your Mapper will then only have a 1 in 6 chance of dying even if the 1% casualty rate kicks in.
The above suggestions are mainly for those who want to complete Ambitious Assignments while not spending too much Gold. Those less concerned about Gold and looking to get 36+ Challenges, may want to consider working on Gear Grinding Goals at the same time. That Challenge has the requirement to “Claim Rewards from Rare T14+” maps. This will require at least 3 Lvl 10 Workers and some low-level workers or a similar setup to do at a low casualty level.
Feel free to check out this sheet to see which teams of Atlas Runners can tackle which content.
Final Step of Ambitious Assignments: Recombine 15 Item Level 75+ Items
The requirements to establish Disenchanting are the same as the for Disenchanting:
- Smelting Rank 2 (required to smelt Petrified Amber, necessary to upgrade Mining)
- Mining Rank 4 (required to mine Bismuth Ore, necessary to upgrade the Recruitment Office/City Hall)
- Farming Rank 2 (required to farm Pumpkin, necessary to upgrade the Recruitment Office/City Hall)
- Recruitment/City Hall Rank 5 (required to establish Disenchanting)
If you want to get Ambitious Assignments out of the way as quickly as possible, you now have all you need. You just throw together random weapons without caring about the outcome. This is relatively inexpensive in terms of both Gold and Thaumaturgic Dust. If you don’t want to pick up Rare Weapons yourself, you can ship out some Orichalcum or use weapons Atlas Runners bring in.
If you want to make a little profit without spending too much time/resources, I recommend POEGuy’s strategy. Summarized, it works like this:
- Run maps with the Domination Scarab of Apparitions.
- Sort the Influenced Rings it drops by Influence.
- Get “Curse on Hit” on half of the rings for each Influence. Some rings may already have this modifier. For the others use Harvest Crafting – reroll item with a caster modifier.
- For the other half of the rings, use a Deafening Essence of Scorn to add Crit Multiplier. You could apply a few Essences until you get some other decent modifiers, but it is not required.
- Combine a ring with Curse on Hit with a ring with Crit Multiplier. Both Rings should be of the same Influence. Hope the item gets both. If not, odds are very likely it will have at least one you can use to try again.
- Finish the item with a cheap Bench craft such as Life or Resistance if there is room for it.
If the Recombinator hits, you can usually sell these items for close to a Divine at minimum, up to a bunch of Divines.