Getting a combo a turn earlier means getting everything else a turn earlier, and getting the next combo three turns earlier, and the one after that 5 turns earlier.
First, no, that is wrong. Things don't compound this way. At best, getting a combo a turn earlier means getting the next combo a turn earlier and the
next combo a turn earlier, and so on. You can see this easily by comparing us to the group that started last year. We hit red a year after they did - does that mean that we would hit yellow a year an a half after them assuming equal talent? Of course not.
Second, this completely neglects the fact that we got the combo a week earlier
by sacrificing something. If we paid the equivalent of two actions to get our combo a week earlier, we would be behind by the opportunity-cost of those two actions. If we make up those actions later, the cost of making the up has to be subtracted from the advantage we got from getting the combo earlier; if we don't, the opportunity cost of whatever we gave up has to be subtracted instead.
For example. Right now, we could get to Mid Silver Physique a week earlier by spending a Starlight pill. We can then carry happily go on with our lives by having reached that bonus one turn earlier - but we now don't have that pill. Instead, if we held off, we would have reached Mid Sliver a week later, but would still have the pill in reserve, and the boost it could give us might be greater then what we got from an extra week of being at Mid Silver in the other case.
Actually, let me take a step back and suggest what is perhaps a more apt way of thinking about the issue. What we've got is an interplay of two things: progress and time. The amount of progress we get per unit time grows at certain thresholds of our current progress (it is more complicated then that since progress is heterogeneous, but bear with me for a minute). Our situation is that we have a pill that can provide some immediate progress. Using this pill now means that we pass a threshold and start getting better returns on our time. Alternatively, we can wait some time and use the pill later, providing us a greater amount of progress in the future. However, because we will be getting better returns on time in the future, a fixed amount of progress in the future is worth less time than the same amount of progress today.
With this perspective, the question is: how much time do we save by using the pill now, vs how much time will we save by using it in the future?
If you can provide a compelling reason that a single physical roll now saves us more time than a use of the pill later (with the correspondingly higher physical roll and the art bonuses), then that would be a compelling reason to use the pill immediately.
