Notes on economy in Valorant

First off, word of warning: this isn’t really meant to be a guide and isn’t organised as a guide, it’s more just some notes from personal thinking and exploration of Valorant’s economy. Think there’s going to be useful things in here for both personal play and organised play (particularly for those coming from a League background moreso), but it’s not tightly formatted towards those ends.

Anyway. One of the precepts that I came into Valorant with was that whatever cash number was required for every member of a team to make a basic full buy — namely, everyone gets a rifle (note that every single time we refer to a rifle throughout, we are specifically talking about either the Phantom or Vandal unless indicated otherwise, the other two guns classed as rifles are…not useless, but they clearly don’t fill the same role), and everyone gets full armour (Heavy Shields) — was going to be the pillar that everything else revolved around economically.

Why those two? There are longer answers that could be given by those with more CS-specific expertise, but to sum it up as painlessly as possible, the range and the damage of a rifle means you can pretty much take any position and any duel theoretically with a rifle (you probably don’t want to challenge an AWP/Operator with one but a) you could and b) the rifle is still a lot cheaper than the sniper), whereas while lower-tier weapons can be useful, they lack the same sort of versatility in that regard. For the shields…if you both have the same gun, you fire all your bullets into them, and they fire all their bullets into you, the person with less armour dies. You don’t want to be the dead person, and you can’t buy an Infinity Edge, so take armour.

I should note here that: strictly running the numbers, it seems like Heavy Shields don’t have a huge advantage over Light Shields in a straight-up rifle fight — three body shots add up to 117, four to 156, and Light vs Heavy is an effective 125 vs 150 HP — and the importance of the second stage of armour in CS is specifically that it gives you a helmet and stops you dying to most non-rifle headshots (which doesn’t apply in Valorant). Still, it does matter against force buys (a SMG taking an extra shot to kill you can be big), and I know that I’ve dropped into the sub-25 HP range on enough rounds personally that I would tend towards wanting it and planning around having it until proven otherwise.

So, this is the assumption that I’m going to start building out from here. This makes the key figure $3900 — $2900 for a Vandal, $1000 for Heavy Shields.

As a reminder, income is as follows:

* Round win: $3000/$3000/$3000/$3000
* Round loss: $1900/$2400/$2900/$2900
* Plant: $300
* Kill: $200 per (individual)

For the purposes of creating a basic framework for economy, we largely exclude plant/kill gold, and we largely exclude abilities. The former point is pretty simple — kills are never guaranteed, plants are more reliable on attacking side but not 100%, and if you’re $200 below a base buy, you might as well be $2000 below. The latter is because the former will probably offset them mostly on a long scale, and on shorter scales…you’re going to know what purchases you need to make round-to-round, agent-to-agent, game-to-game, and so on, so adjust your expectations here accordingly.

EARLY ROUNDS

To start, let’s chart out the total money received (from round wins and losses) across the first four rounds under any possible scenario, to get an idea of what we’re talking about here in terms of just how raw money is flowing in:

ROUNDS 1–2

The very first question that absolutely nobody who’s played either League or CS will ask: do you want to spend the entire $800 on R1? For long-time players of either game (or similar games), it’s a self-evident truth that you spend everything at that point, because the impact of $800 is higher than it is at any other point in the game, because a loss on R1 makes a loss in R2 likely, and it can always snowball out from there (less of a concern than in League of course), and the ability system further pushes you in that direction by patching up the holes in a couple of potential buys.

But…is it actually true for Valorant? Well, for the most part, yes. There are things that you can do off a thinner buy on R1, and I think in organised play, there might end up being something to coordinated R2 force buys off a relatively cheap pistol (Spectre plus Heavy Shields is $2600), and we will talk a little more about other considerations along these lines later.

Talking on a more personal level though…let’s just start with R2. Remember, across R1 and R2, there are three scenarios: you accrue $6800, $5700, or $5100. The magic number is $3900; you need to keep $3900 of that money going into R3 in order to buy. Let’s first look at it from the losing side of R1: I will have either accrued $5100 or $5700 total going into R3. Always assume the worst anyway (doesn’t matter if you’re $200 or $2000 away etc.), but here in particular, your team overall is on an eco, so statistically, you should lose. So, we assume $5100, which leaves $1200 over. If you kept some or all of your initial $800 from R1, these are your options:

* Bucky at $900 (spend <$300 on R1). Nothing I’ve seen yet makes me think this is worth buying over just getting a Shorty for $200 or similar — yes, you could kill two people at once with it, but they would have to position so hideously poorly as a team that it’s not all that realistic.

* Stinger at $1000 (spend <$200 on R1). This one is a little interesting — R1 Shorty at $200 or full save and hope for a kill for Light Shields R2 at $400 both feel like cromulent options all things considered, and while I tend to think that the Stinger is worse even than the P90 in CS that it is clearly taking piano lessons from (the accuracy on it feels even more scattershot than a P90 somehow), it is a guaranteed kill at a slightly higher range than things like the Shorty and Frenzy.

* Marshal at $1100 (spend <$100 on R1). I guess I’ll say this now anyway: there are going to be players, including in organised play, where the magic number is not $3900 but something higher to incorporate regular Operator buys. That number feels a lot less certain than $3900 is, because of how sidearm and shield dynamics are going to work out, so I’m going to try to avoid going too deep on it here overall. Anyway, the short version is that if you’re going to spend that way and target the Op (oh, that’s why they call it that), you do genuinely need to be close to empty on R1 (the lowest figure for that build is Operator + Light Shields at $4900, and again, two losses gets you $5100 for R3), so doing that and then getting to choose between Marshal R2/rifle R3 and empty R2/Operator R3 seems like a good path.

So: unless you have one of those plans in mind, just buy R1, and don’t buy anything over $400 R2 if you lose unless you have some kill/plant gold to enable it.

For the team that wins R1…honestly, if you bought R1, you’re in a bit of an awkward spot here. Conventional wisdom, genre convention, whatever, tells you that you run an anti-eco — you buy SMGs, you buy Heavy Shields, maybe someone gets a rifle and Light Shields if they went off R1, maybe someone gets a different type of gun; if you lose against their eco, you’re in trouble, but the tools you have mean you shouldn’t really lose (and you’ll take minimal damage in the process).

The problem is that between helmets not being a factor, abilities making it far harder to hold corners and tight spots, shorter game length (12 rounds per half against 15 in CSGO), two consecutive losses taking you safely over the line for everyone to buy on R3, the amount you’re able to do with the Marshal…there’s a lot that I think makes anti-ecos weaker than they are in other games. (could find surprisingly few stats on this, and not going to go through every round to check buys, but for a CS:GO comparison, a quick scan says that teams in Flashpoint S1 playoffs were 50–18 on the round immediately after a pistol round, so 74%; if I had to name a number right now for Valorant on the same basis after a couple of months of play, I’d honestly probably say low-60s%?)

So: do you go super-light on R2 and treat it as pistol+? Assuming I bought R1, I have $4900 guaranteed available across R2 and R3 — so $1000 discretionary spending for R2. That’s $600 more than the opponent, but we’re still talking bottom-end guns, no shields, for the most part; in the very best case (where I also spent extremely light on R1), I might get a Spectre and Light Shields (and, to be fair, I again do tend to think that you want Light Shields on an anti-eco in Valorant rather than Heavy; the Ghost headshots for 105, the Marshall body shots for 101, the Frenzy 1HS+1BS is 104, and there’s not all that much that will kill you straight-up from 125 and not 150 on paper).

I think it’s definitely an option, I don’t know if it should be the default (probably not?). I will note that two wins will produce $6800, or $6000 on a R1 buy; that hence just barely lets you get a Spectre and Light Shields ($2000) and still have enough to rebuy rifles and shields against the opponent’s R3 buy, so you can avoid completely screwing yourself into a situation where you’re matching SMGs against rifles on R3 as long as you’re conscious of it.

The other question: if your teammates are all force-buying (i.e. spending every penny of that $1900 or more they got on R2 to contest the round), do you do the same? Probably not; we’ll talk a little more about it in the section on later rounds, but basically, even if your team isn’t going to be able to buy R3, you’re building up a surplus that will matter down the line, and also the loss bonus capping out at $2900 means that (assuming they’re buying something like Spectre + Shields) they’re basically never going to stumble into there finally being a round where they can buy just by pure attrition (we’re talking between 6 and 8 rounds deep here).

ROUND 3–4
There are two R3 scenarios:

1. WW vs LL: The team that lost twice has now accrued $5100 ($4300 without R1 spend) across those first two rounds, and therefore if they saved appropriately on R2, will get a full buy here. The team that won twice has accrued $6800 ($6000). As mentioned, even on the winning side, if you spent too aggressively on R2, you can get stuck having to hold onto your SMG, rebuy shields, and be up against rifles at this point.
2. WL vs LW: Both teams have accrued $5700 to date, but obviously unless you went super-light as the WL team on R2, this is just an eco for the WL team so that you can full-buy again on R4. My first instinct was actually that you buy rifles here as the LW team, but unless they’re completely ineffective, I think you do want a cheap anti-eco here too; more below.

For R4…I mostly charted this out initially to see if there was anywhere where the margins were so tight that making tiny savings somewhere back in R1 or R2 would make a difference later. Let’s look at it a slightly different way.

HAE = Hard Anti-Eco ($2600, Spectre & Heavy)
AE = Anti-Eco ($2000, Spectre & Light)
EE = Eco-Eco ($0, no buy, but $3900 on R3)

We assume for the below that players are spending all $800 in R1, not buying anything at all on the ecos (not true or best practice but good enough for the moment), are fully buying out of the eco in R3 at $3900, and are buying rifles on a R2 eco win. If they’re over $3900, they’re fine to buy, if they’re far under it, they’re not — it’s a question of whether there are any that are within a few hundred of it, and where hence R1 buys etc. would matter:

The answer is basically no — there are a few outcomes that give you $3300-$3400, but remember that the baseline here is that you spent precisely $0 on the ecos, so I don’t tend to think that going empty on R1 chasing those is worth it (also bear in mind that those bottom six scenarios are all ones where you started out 0–2). The interesting one is what I like to refer to as ‘the ol’ tilter’ in blue — you lose pistol, you win an eco, and then you lose against THEIR eco, which gives you $2900 against an almost certain full buy.

Early rounds don’t matter for this one; what matters is the R3 buy. If you go for an anti-eco instead of rifles there, you save $1300-$1900 roughly, and hence that takes you firmly above for a guaranteed rifle buy on R4. Of course, the issue here is always that you’re still tossing your SMG and the money it cost away R4 in a situation where you’re already not in the best of economic shape; still, tend to think it’s worth it.

LATER ROUNDS

I’m not going to chart past R4, because it’s not really worth it; at this point, variable money is stacking up, you’re buying more and more abilities, and there are enough factors going this and that way that it doesn’t really matter anymore.

With regards to juggling your economy down the line…

* next round (R+1) is always easy, because it tells you exactly what your minimum balance is in the buy screen. Remember that ultimately, everyone is working off the same baseline money-wise; if you’re guaranteed $3900, and your teammates all have less cash-on-hand than you, they’re not going to be able to buy next round, so plan your own moves accordingly.

* next two rounds (R+2)…the single number to remember is $5400. If you have a minimum balance next round of $5400, you will always be able to buy on both of the next two rounds, because assume you lose this round (R+0) and have to buy again, R+1: round bonus of $1900, you have your $5400, spend $3900 (=$1500), R+2: you lost R+1, round bonus of $2400, you have $3900 left. If you’re already on a losing streak, this target number will be a bit lower ($4900).

* next three rounds (R+3), same rough thing but for $6400. R+1, $6400, spend $3900 for $2500 left. R+2, you lost R+1, round bonus of $2400 ($4900), spend $3900, $1000 left. R+3, you lost R+2, round bonus of $2900, $3900. This time, it’s not quite 100% guaranteed (you’re netting $7200 across the three rounds in loss bonuses, and there is one scenario — ‘the ol’ tilter’, LWL — that only gets you $6800) but it’s overwhelmingly likely. The true guarantee would be at $6800 instead of $6400. This again is a bit lower if you’re already on a losing streak.

* even further (R+???), essentially what you’re asking here is “just how does my eco/reduced buy here work with regards to my ability to keep buying later on?” I’ve found it easiest to treat it in terms of a surplus/deficit-type thing (including the $2000 Spectre/Light Shields setup for comparison) — every time I’m buying a rifle, I’m spending more than I’m earning, and every time I’m ecoing, it’s the opposite. This works out as such:

Averaged out, one such full eco will roughly mean two more rounds down the line where you can buy rifles; schedule any saves towards the middle portion of the half accordingly.

To conclude: we’ve had the benefit with Valorant that the devs have been quite unashamed about the fact that they’re drawing inspiration from CS in particular, and that’s let us very quickly import a lot of the precepts on how to handle things like personal economy from CS; it’s not a case like e.g. the early years of League where most players (even those who played WC3 DotA) really didn’t have much to draw on, and so you had everyone trying to figure out the most basic things with regards to builds and gameplay concepts and so on.

A lot of these precepts are going to turn out to be broadly right, a few are going to need adjusting, and a few will be wrong with how Valorant plays. Even looking at a relatively straightforward aspect of the game in the form of economy, you can already start to see that playing out. Will be fun.