They say in marksmanship you have to be fairly advanced before your rifle, pistol, or bow is the weak link - and not you. I am past that point with Empires and Puzzles.
Translation: I need a new phone.
I currently have a Nexus 6P (“More Human Than Human”) on its second battery because of this game. Side note: phone tech said that playing while it’s charging destroys your battery faster than anything. Lesson learned.
But the battery life isn’t the problem. The game is simply too much for this < 3-year old phone. Especially during titan battles, toward the end, everything slows down and most of the time prevents me from doing anything when the countdown timer is at ~2 (some sort of housekeeping/extra computation toward the end of the battle?). Drives me nuts and costs me points. Tired of seeing the team lit up like a Christmas tree but not responding to my furious tapping.
I’m leaning toward a Pixel 3 XL since my #1 requirement is having as many telecom bands as possible, as I move around the world a lot and just pop in a new SIM when I get wherever. But I don’t know how it performs.
As a phone repair technician myself, I’d say charging and playing at the same time doesn’t directly kill your battery. It does generate a lot of heat though, since E&P is very resource intensive, and charging a battery will generate heat by default. So you’re compounding heat from the processor along with heat from the battery charging which will stress out the battery and degrade it faster.
That said, literally doing anything on your phone will stress out the battery. Lithium ion is stressed when it’s above 70 degrees Fahrenheit which happens when you do anything. On Android you can download a battery monitor app (most of which I consider questionable garbage but recommend GSMonitor myself) and see that doing anything will do that.
The “best” way to preserve your battery is not to play E&P… which defeats the purpose in my opinion.
Most new flagship phones can handle the load E&P puts on it, so I don’t think you can make a wrong choice. But if versatility and battery swapping is your goal, I’d go with an iPhone. The vast bulk of repairs that come through my store are iPhones, and as a single model, they are market dominant so parts are uniform and common (iPhone 7+ is one model versus who knows how many devices supporting Android).
iOS is also better at throttling background apps, so E&P can get the bulk of your processing power.
I play on an iPhone 7+ that was heavily used by the previous owner for about a year without a battery swap, and according to screen time I average about 3.75 hours of E&P a day, so I’m not a light user. It hiccups sometimes for reasons I’m not sure on, usually when I’m playing music over Bluetooth at the same time, but it works fine.
Thanks for your reply, now I see why he said it accelerated battery degradation. Certainly gets hot! But battery life is my #3 concern after getting LTE globally and handling the game (and Google Maps - crikey!) with zero lag. Battery replacement was only $80 with an OEM battery and a tricky replacement.
Good to know all the current flagship phones can handle the CPU/GPU requirements with zero lag. Reason why I have stayed away from iPhones is I feel Apple is an ecosystem that works far better if you buy into it wholesale - iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc. Frankly, if they made a 17" laptop, I’d be there. But I’m a 20 year Windows user with 2 Win 10 laptops and I run the largest Java user group in SoCal, so I’m Team Android for now
Fair enough. I don’t think there’s really any appreciable difference between iOS or Android for the average user, and if you’re happy with Android, I’m not going to argue you change platforms.
I’m just speaking from a repair technician’s perspective.
Any flagship is going to be able to handle things snappy, and if you want LTE versatility, go with a GSM enabled phone, probably one unlocked from Best Buy. I don’t know the specifics of bandwidth frequencies, but GSM is used internationally whereas CDMA is more United States specific (I’m assuming you’re from USA here). GSM is generally Sim swappable and it’ll work with any active sim card whereas CDMA needs to be whitelisted to work on a CDMA carrier. You probably already know all this, though, but the short version is T-Mobile or At&t compatible is GSM and Verizon/Sprint is CDMA. Disclaimer: I only have a vague idea on the specifics here, so do your homework.
As far as repairability, the next best bet is Samsung standard line (S8, S9, S10) not plus or note line. Those are the second most common and most common non-iPhone, so you’re more likely to hit a local repair shop that can help with battery swaps. They’re a bigger pain in the butt to work on due to Samsung’s aggravating love of extra strong adhesive, and they’re more expensive to repair for the same reason (the screen is held down by glue and nothing else so there’s less salvaged parts floating around for that).
Which is not to say you have to go with Samsung. The pixel would probably be fine, but you’re likely in for a bigger Safari hunt to find repairs and may have to accept mail repairs or sending off to Google, so longer turnarounds.
I have had my Samsung s8 for 2 years now and have played E&P for 8 months. The phone works great and is internationally compatible. It doesn’t lag and I get 10 hours of phone time when playing E&P.
