In addition, separate experiments were done with exoOA-g1 using the charged protocol, however this time changing simulation options. First, we added YANK's 'PME_treatment' option meant to speed up and improve convergence of systems where a guest/ligand has a formal charge. Second, we tested a double annihilation scheme with soft core potentials rather than double decoupling. In both cases and with a combination of both we observed significant improvement in sampling of states between replicas for both the complex and solvent phase, and convergence of free energy estimates within a 10 ns timescale per iteration.