Understanding Gas price and limit

In order to get the best experience playing Angel Battles 2, it’s important to understand the difference between gas price and gas limit and which values to select. It can help by thinking about a car. Gas Price is how much you are willing to pay per unit - for instance (1.7 Euros / Liter). Gas Limit is how big the tank is, say (50 liters).

Gas Price Too Low - If you only want to pay 1.6 Euros/ Liter, then you have to wait until the supply / demand dynamics of gasoline cause the price to drop below this level. So, transactions with prices too low may take a while to go through. You might be waiting outside the gas station before you are able to take your trip.

Gas Limit Too Low - This is a problem. If the limit is too low, you might run out of fuel, and become stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Gas Price Too High - If you are willing to pay more than the market rate for anything, surely someone will quickly sell it to you.

Gas Limit Too High - This is NOT a problem. If your tank is 50 liters but the trip only takes 40 liters, you still have the 10 liters left for the next trip.

EVM Chains (Ethereum / Polygon / Etc)

Before you send a transaction, you must specify both the gas price (in Gwei) and limit (in gas units). Then, metamask will multiply these together to estimate the cost for your transaction.

Metamask estimates that this tx (attacking in a battle) will cost 4 cents
Metamask estimates that this tx (attacking in a battle) will cost 4 cents
The transaction actually ended up costing less than 1/3 of one cent.
The transaction actually ended up costing less than 1/3 of one cent.

However, when you view the transaction on the block explorer, you see that the transaction only used 5% of the gas limit, and thus the cost was significantly lower.

https://polygonscan.com/tx/0x860f359a2cac11c31b0423a30b4fa8bb9a2ec8c9271681151561a34b77075d06

So, why send extra gas in the first place, if it just makes users think that things are more expensive than they are? The reason is because if the gas limit is too low, the transaction will fail entirely, and you will lose all of the fee and gain no benefit.

If you see one of these on a block explorer, you can try the tx again with a higher gas limit.
If you see one of these on a block explorer, you can try the tx again with a higher gas limit.

Can’t Nerds Do Something About This?

Failed transactions need to cost gas because they cost network resources - if they were free then attackers could flood the network with them and bring it down. They still can, but it comes at tremendous cost so it does not happen.

There are many things that engineers have made to improve the user experience. The first one is that there are gas trackers where you can see current prices. Sometimes metamask will set them, but it can be inconsistent.

https://polygonscan.com/gastracker#gassender

Angel Battles needs to err on the side of providing more gas, because battle actions are not simple - sometimes for instance you might win a battle and receive rewards, move spots on a mountain, etc.

Another thing to note is that the minimum gas fees on polygon are 30 gwei. In the accounts section you can set defaults for Angel Battles, so you do not need to change them in your wallet each time.

Set the values to 0 to have metamask try to guess based on current network traffic.
Set the values to 0 to have metamask try to guess based on current network traffic.

In any case, the fees on Polygon are SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than mainnet, which is why our game (and all other similar games) have moved to scaling solutions.

If you still have questions, come ask around in the Angel Battles discord.