Act! Addict! Actors! — Budget Calculator and Card Inventory Tracker
Tracking your personal A3! Inventory and predicting your future gem balance!
Hello! In this part of my A3! x Data series, we’ll be looking at how I started this series in the first place by making spreadsheets to manage my in-game inventory. If you’re not familiar with the A3! game, do check out this series’ prologue for a quick explanation as well as the first part of the series, which goes through compiling and analysing all of the characters’ basic information. The second part of the series goes into teambuilding tactics, and actually the tables I go through here are the root of how I determined each character’s “metaness”, while the third part which analyses past event results can be found here! As usual, I highly recommend viewing everything in the actual spreadsheets, linked in the next paragraph! Scroll to the end for the picture version of this article if you’re in a hurry, and I hope you enjoy this guide to how I supplement the in-game inventory management tools!
Gem Budgeting
After I made the Event List, I thought: Why don’t I use the list to help me budget for future events? Introducing the cousin of my A3! Information spreadsheet, the A3! Budget Calculator! Do note that you should download a copy of the calculator for your own use instead of trying to edit the one in the link!
When you first access the spreadsheet, you should see the Instruction sheet below. Try to read it to get an idea of how to use the tracker! My apologies if the instructions are a bit of a mess, I’ll keep working on them if they need clarification. Credits to my friend for the Homare doodles! The doodles are also part of a A3-themed Telegram sticker pack, do check it out!
I’ve included two types of trackers depending on how obsessively you want to track your gems. Choose between Super Ultra Easy Mode and the Gem-grubbing Yakuza:
Don’t be too scared by the wall of numbers, I promise that you don’t need Chikage’s cheat skills to know how to use them… Basically the trackers help you to track your past expenditure and predict your gem balance for future events, assuming you follow the spending/earning patterns you enter into the table! The tracker also helps to see if you exceeded your original budget for each event.
Instructions in case you decide to ignore the Instruction sheet: Fill in all the white cells based on your actual spending for current events and predicted spending for future events, and let the calculator estimate how much you’ll have by the time the event you want to whale for comes around! Also: the colored columns are automatically calculated, so please do not edit them.
How do you even predict your future gem income? Gem spending is pretty simple since you’ll mostly spend on gacha/SP refills, but there are so many ways you can earn gems… This is where the Budget Guide comes in! It includes the number of gems you’ll earn from the most common sources, such as daily videos and event prizes. I’ve also calculated rough estimates for the number of gems different kinds of players should expect to get based on how hardcore you are. Do note that if you do 1 10-pull for an event, you’ll need to fully bloom the SR card to recover the gems you spent for the gacha.
I don’t have time to do all the calculations/the wall of numbers is still scary…
No worries! I’ve included pre-filled templates for both tracker types. The templates assume that the player is fairly devoted to A3, being able to fully bloom the SR and do a 10-pull for every event. If you’re still reading this post, I think this is a pretty conservative estimate since you’ll have to be fairly devoted to Mankai if you’re even thinking of gem budgeting… but I digress. If you’re okay with a general estimate, then use the templates and modify them to fit your own game activity (for example, if you want to whale for I Come with the Night, then increase the values in the Gacha Funds and Expected Budget columns). If you prefer to start afresh, I’ve also included blank templates for you to play with.
How does the Calibration column work? I’m confused…
The Calibration column is basically a combination of the Other Income and Other Expenditure columns in Sakyo’s tracker, so it can take in negative values too. The purpose of these columns is to account for gems which don’t fit into the other categories, as well as to quickly fix the predictions if they’re not tallying with your actual balance. I’ll use the Calibration column as an example to explain why right now the values are set to 38:
We just finished SHINOBI Adventures at the time the tracker was made, so all the values for income and expenditure should be based on our actual gem history. However, if the calibration column was set to zero, you’ll realize that your actual balance when Queen Camellia starts a few days from now is higher than what’s predicted because you didn’t account for daily rewards from non-event days. The number might be even more off if you get gems from ranking up/character birthdays/login bonus etc., and errors accumulating over time will eventually make the predictions very inaccurate. From my assumption of a consistent 4-day break events, I roughly estimated that daily rewards will get you about 38 gems (4 days + 1 weekly gem bonus).
So the Calibration column is basically used for course-correction, and the same idea applies to Sakyo’s Tracker too!
This Budget Calculator is meant to complement the A3! Information spreadsheet, so do check there for updates to the event list! Channel your inner Mankai Accounting Department and happy budgeting!
2 months into using the sheet, and I can say that I am very ashamed by how often I’ve gone overbudget. OOPS.
Rank Tracker
I also made a quick rank tracker to visualise my ranking progress for each event. It’s really simple, just fill up your event results in the respective tables and the charts will let you visualize your progress in ranking hell! Events are separated by the way they’re counted (points and items), and events which don’t track by either methods have their own table while the rank table is exactly what it says on the tin.
Card Inventory Tracker
Does this look familiar? If it does, you’re not seeing things because this tracker’s structure was initially slightly adapted from my BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! Inventory Tracker, which was then used for the Event Tracker that I wrote about previously. The tracker was created with the goal of being able to quickly determine which character/attribute combinations my inventory’s strengths and weaknesses lie in.
The original version required me to enter all values manually, which made updating the table rather tedious. Version 2.0 preserves the “SSR-SR-R-N” number code format to represent my cards, but now all the user needs to do is fill in the number codes, and all the other cells will format/fill up automatically! The key to achieving this was a custom formula which could parse the number code and summate all cards based on rarity, character and Troupe. Conditional formatting took care of the colour scales (to quickly spot which character you own the most cards of), rarity colouring for easier reference as well as the “Link Skill Reference” table, which collates the highest rarity colour for every character in an even more condensed version of the tracker table. This table is a new addition since A3! has slightly more flexible teambuilding restrictions compared to BanG Dream.
The tracker also features this chart which neatly sums up all of the numbers in the table.
Additionally, there is a chart which contains the number of character/attribute appearances from future events (taken from the Character Meta List) and allows you to superimpose your inventory’s colours in order to see if you will be sufficiently prepared for future events!
This concludes this installment of the A3! x Data series! I hope you enjoyed the article, please check out my Carrd for more stuff that I’ve done in the name of my A3 obsession~ As promised, here are the Instagram-friendly versions of this article!
