Calculating the "effective level" of a SteemMonster

Today I have been pretty quiet online, as I am focusing my efforts on the Google Sheets spreadsheet which I have been working on in preparation for the SteemMonsters Wiki. I think I have achieved a bit of milestone just now, and I wanted to share it with everyone. I'm not sure if @jarvie, @o07, @clove71, or other more experienced Steemians than me have already worked this out themselves, but I'm pretty chuffed with what I have accomplished, and as is my normal nature, I want to share it with everyone. I'm not only looking to share this solution so that others can use it, but I'm also sharing it so that others can check it, confirm that it works, and even suggest improvements.

What the function does

We all know that SteemMonsters cards have a level, and you can "level them up" by combining cards. But did you also know that the level of the Monster card on its face may not be the effective level of that Monster when it is in play in a battle or tournament? The effective level of a Monster is dependent on the level of the Summoner who summons it into the battle. If your Summoner is of lower level than your Monster, then you may not be able to summon that Monster at its full strength! You can still summon that Monster, but its effective level will be less than the "face level" of the Monster.

This function which I have created will calculate the effective level of a Monster, given the level of the Summoner who summons it, and given the "face level" of the Monster itself.

How does the function work?

First, I have copied the details of the Summoner's stats from the main SteemMonsters.com website into my spreadsheet, as in the example below.

What this tells us is that my Level 4 Lyanna Natura can summon Common  Monsters which are up to Level 5, or Rare  Monsters which are up to Level 4, or Epic  Monsters which are up to Level 3, or even Legendary  Monsters which are up to Level 2. If any of the summoned Monsters are already over those thresholds, their effective level when summoned will be reduced to the maximums listed in the chart. Let's take a look at the Google Sheets formula that I came up with to calculate this.

In the above example, the contents of cell F2 is the rarity of the Monster in question. The contents of cell H2 is the "face level" of that Monster. The static row $38 contains the Summoner's details, so cell $P$38 is the fixed location of the maximum level of a summoned Common  Monster for the Summoner at this level. Cell $Q$38 is the fixed location of the maximum level of a summoned Rare  Monster; cell $R$38 for a summoned Epic ; and $S$38 for a summoned Legendary  Monster.

Once we know what the maximums are, then we can compare the maximums to the current Monsters. This is where the second part of the formula comes in to play. What the equation IF(H2<=$P$38,H2,$P$38) is saying basically is, if the face level is less than or equal to the maximum level for a Common, then the effective level is equal to the face level, otherwise the effective level is the maximum level for a Common.  As you can see from the formula, this equation is repeated to compare Rares, Epics, and Legendaries  as well, depending on the outcome of the outer IF() statement which checks what the rarity of the current Monster is first.

I hope this all makes sense, and is somehow useful to someone. From here I can continue to work on the information which will eventually end up in the Wiki, and I can also create a SteemMonsters Team Calculator, to help determine the best Team given a certain mana cap. That is still to come, but no doubt this equation above will be a big part of that too. Please do let me know if you come up with a better or faster way of doing this!

Oh, one other thing to mention, before I forget, is that I created a new simple icon to represent the "effective level" of the Monsters. It is basically just the white star as currently used on the main SteemMonsters.com website to denote the level, with a mathematical "equals" symbol on it. Feel free to use the idea wherever. I am releasing it under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) license. I have an example here, using the SteemMonsters background to offset the white, for those not using the night mode settings.

I play SteemMonsters, a collectible card battle game on the Steem blockchain. You can see my card collection in PeakMonsters.

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