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Do you find that your games have too much gameplay in them? Does it disappoint you that you can't make progress in a game while you sleep? Do you enjoy the pointless grind of MMOs, but wish they didn't have so many graphics? If so, you've come to the right place! What??? Idle games, or incremental games, are a loose genre of browser games in which the player is rewarded, usually with a gradual income of some resource, for leaving the game window open in the background without actually doing anything in it. Often these resources can be spent to buy items that make the resource come in faster, so you can buy more items, so you can get even more resource. Some games, called Clickers, have a big button you can click to manually get more resources, but they are usually outpaced by your idle income very quickly. Most idle games have either no graphics, ASCII art, or at most perhaps a few still images drawn up in Flash. Why??? It's a dumb Skinner box thing. Numbers getting bigger makes lizard brain happy. That being said, outside of the pure Clicker games there's usually something more than just numbers going up. A lot of the fun comes from seeing what new mechanics or aspects of the game world open up. Especially in the early games like Candy Box and A Dark Room, exploration or RPG aspects can end up overshadowing the actual number-goes-up portion of the game. Other times, new and different resources and ways of earning them appear. But to be honest, a large part of the fun is going to sleep at night and waking up nine hours later to have a mountain of cash to spend. This is stupid. Okay yes it's very  and stupid. But unlike that farmville game your cousin still plays, at least these don't clutter up your facebook news feed. And they're good for running harmlessly in a background tab when you don't have time to devote to a Notable idle games: Candy Box !  One of the early idle games that kicked off the genre's popularity around spring 2013, and one of the greats. Though you can improve your candy and lollipop income a little bit, the real focus is on the RPG system that opens up. Before long the focus is less on how many candies you have and more on figuring out how to use the potion brewing system to get past quests full of monsters. ASCII graphics. Has a sequel, Candy Box 2, which follows a similar formula with a larger world, and is also very good. Anti-Idle: The Game  One of the oldest idle games from long before Candy Box, and also one of the longest to play. Despite the name it has a large idle aspect, but also has a variety of mini-games to actually play. It's probably really good but my computer hates it for some reason. A Dark Room  Released a few months after Candy Box 1, and shares a lot of its best aspects. A bit more emphasis on building up your resource income, but it's not so much about getting larger and larger numbers of resources as it is about converting resources into other resources. The main focus is exploring the large open world map that opens up and the story behind it. ASCII graphics. Cookie Clicker  The turning point for the genre, this has only a single resource, no RPG or exploration system, no complex mechanics, and nothing to do beyond "spend cookies on buildings that earn you more cookies". But unlike its predecessors, it has a colorful non-ASCII visual interface and allowed your numbers to climb into the quadrillions, so it proved massively popular. Spawned a lot of clones, usually titled "_______ Clicker", that were basically the same game except with slightly different building prices and a different name for cookies. This is arguably where incremental games became recognized as a genre, and where their focus shifted from using idle income to support a basic RPG system to focusing entirely on the idle income and making the numbers as huge as possible. It standardized a lot of the genre's conventions, such as having the player click to gain currency for the first portion of the game until idle income becomes reasonable, increasing the costs of resource-producing buildings exponentially, and including a standard "Prestige" system in which you reset your progress in the game in exchange for gaining a static multiplier for all your earnings in the new game. Has its own thread. Derivative Clicker  The only other "______ Clicker" I'll mention, and only for its unique mechanic: instead of just buying buildings that earn you money, you can also buy buildings that build buildings that earn you money, or buy buildings that build buildings that build buildings that build building that earn you money. This means that even your income rate improves while you idle (and the rate at which your income rate improves also improves while you idle, and...) Beyond that, it's a pretty standard "make numbers bigger" game, but it's my favorite of the pure Skinner Box games. AdVenture Capitalist  WARNING: REQUIRES UNITY  The Cookie Clicker clone du jour, mainly notable in that unlike other idle games you still earn income even if you don't have the game open. The idea seems to be to make it hard to quit playing; even if you stop for a while, if someone links it again it tries to draw you back in with an entire month's worth of income waiting for you. Sandcastle Builder  By far the most game in an already genre. Created by a weird community of dorks that got really, really obsessed with a single page of xkcd, and full of weird in-jokes nobody gets. The visual interface is also pretty ugly.Despite all of this, it's one of the most intricate and mechanically interesting incremental games, the new techs it introduces regularly shift how you're earning castles so that it stays fresh, your tools give each other exponential boosts so it never runs into the "I have 200 of this tool, getting to 201 will barely make a difference" problem, and it has a lot of neat tricks like a one-time Towers of Hanoi-style minigame of locking and unlocking certain boosts. It's one of the longest, slowest (most things only happen every half-hour), and most elaborate incrementals out there, so if you can stomach the awful obscure in-jokes it's worth a look. Has its own thread, which seems mostly dead now, but contains a very long walkthrough that's somehow more impenetrable than the game itself. Kittens Game  Combining some of the extensiveness of Sandcastle Builder and the village-building, non-xkcd-ness of A Dark Room, this focuses on building up a civilization of kittens in the forest. Start out with a few dark age farming huts and progress your civilization through the industrial era. Interesting for seeing what new technologies and resources appear, and for lowish resource caps downplaying the "sit around waiting for hours while money trickles in" aspect. This is the current popular one that lead to this thread splitting off from PYF Flash Games. Most of these games have their own subreddit, if not their own wiki. There's a subreddit for incremental games here so you can be the first to get your hands on the latest Something Clickers, and a list of many more incremental games here.
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Jul 30, 2014 23:19
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With most games, later in the game they make things harder to buy by making them cost a million or billion times more. Catgame keeps the actual numbers low and instead says "You need 50 of this stuff, each of which costs 50 of this stuff, each of which costs 50 of this stuff, which you get at about 1/50 the rate of your main resources". Even with lots of Workshops, the Wood --> Beam --> Scaffolds --> everything else chain hurts a lot.
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Jul 31, 2014 04:52
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Noxin of Shame posted:How do Angels work? Is it the higher your bank roll when you reset, the more angels you get? It's based on your total cash earned, not how much money you currently have available to spend. Each angel requires slightly more cash earned than the previous one and their "price" doesn't go back down when you reset, but since the cost increase is only linear your improved income outpaces their rising costs. If you played Cookie Clicker its an exact copy of how Heavenly Chips worked there. big duck equals goose posted:Mmm.. so how much autism will I need to enjoy this video games? It ranges from very mild autism (Cookie Clicker works on pretty much the same principle as Farmville, which is dumb but not exactly autistic) to staggeringly high levels of autism (Sandcastle Builder).
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Aug 1, 2014 01:59
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Fellis posted:Is there an easier way to increase your science in Cattegame? I need titanium for like every major new thing right now and the only way I can see to get it is to get cargo ships and trade with zebras but I need 55k science and every science building is expensive as hell and I'm like 10k science cap away. Do you have Observatories yet? They improve your science quite well, and they shouldn't be oppressively expensive. I'm a bit ahead of where you are, and you're at the part where the game gets much more idle-able. Steamworks let you idle for slabs, beams, and manuscripts; before long you'll also be able to idle for plate and a bit of titanium; and your gold, iron, faith, and coal caps will be so high that you can basically idle for them too.
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Aug 2, 2014 06:06
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dis astranagant posted:Steamworks and mints are kind of a red herring. They're handy for when you're going to bed but are massively inefficient until super late game techs. Same goes for calciners once you get them, the titanium rate simply doesn't compare with getting a bunch of cargo ships and constantly trading with the zebras. Eh, a handful of steamworks with printing press are my best source of manuscripts, and therefore my best source of compendiums. Mints I don't understand at all, though. Long before I unlocked mints my hunters had already been bringing in way more furs and ivory than demand consumed, and slowing down my gold income is the last thing I want to do.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:39
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The start of Kittens seems like it's timed to make sure winter wipes you out. If you play fast and know what techs are coming you can get to farmers before winter arrives, and if you play very slowly you can avoid buying huts until after winter, but natural first-time play is pretty much guaranteed to strand you in the middle with a bunch of starving kittens.
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Aug 5, 2014 21:39
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I just bought Refrigeration, which says it increases your catnip limit by 75%, but my catnip storage didn't seem to increase at all. What gives?
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Aug 6, 2014 02:05
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Geight posted:In cattegame, is there another Science building I can acquire before getting the 10K+ techs, or do I just need to start stocking up on Academies? It'll be a while before you get any new science buildings. Buy up those academies and libraries.
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Aug 6, 2014 03:36
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dis astranagant posted:The manuscript income from printing presses is really minor unless you're idling for days on end. Culture and catpower are easy to get and all you need to make manuscripts. On the other hand, later on you really don't want to go through a crafting chain of furs --> parchment --> manuscripts --> compendiums --> blueprints. FirstPersonShitter posted:Does the steamworks even do anything without any upgrades? Yes, they do! They reduce your coal income by 80%.  Dr. Arbitrary posted:Are purchases that cost Angel Investors permanent? You lose those upgrades when you reset, but you are not refunded the angels you spent.
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Aug 7, 2014 02:50
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dis astranagant posted:On the bright side, once you get concrete you're one upgrade away from resetting with roughly +20% happiness, +50% all production rates and +5% storage. Wow, those are some nice bonuses. I just researched Nuclear Fission and I'm at about 150 kitties, is it worth resetting now? milward posted:These games are great. Right now I "play" Derivative and Cattes at work and investors at home. Reset currency applies its multiplier to the effects of all buildings at that tier. It does not multiply future reset currency gains. When you reset at tier 3, all your T2 currency gets converted into T3 currency at a 5:1 conversion ratio, then all your T1 currency gets converted into T2 currency at a 5:1 conversion ratio, then you gain T1 currency based on the proofs/mathematicians you've produced this game. Any other reset currency you already had that wasn't converted (e.g. T3 and above) stays where it is. Where you are now, your options are to reset at tier 1 (adding your new tier 1 currency to your existing tier 1 currency) or to reset at tier 2 or higher (turning 55 of your tier 1 currency into 11 tier 2 currency, and adding your new tier 1 currency to your 1 leftover tier 1 currency).
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Aug 7, 2014 07:39
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Megazver posted:So are there any other games like Candy Box 1-2 and A Dark Room where there's more to it than just the Skinner Box? Nothing on quite the same level as those. There are a couple of poor man's candy boxes out there like The Gold Factory that aren't as good but might scratch the same itch, and a couple of the others like cattegame and Sandcastle Builder have enough interesting stuff going on that it's more than a pure Skinner box. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 20:20
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Catgame: ziggurats are annoyingly hidden, since they don't appear until you buy megaliths but you have no incentive to buy megaliths until they appear, so I only just found them. But aside from buying a tear for the karma bonus, what benefit do their techs really provide? They just seem to provide more income of unicorns and ivory, but you can't spend unicorns and ivory on anything other than more ziggurat techs for more unicorns and ivory (and unicorn pastures but catnip is pretty irrelevant). Is there any payoff in other resources? Since ziggurats cost blueprints and minting ivory costs gold, pursuing those techs will set back my main production, so I don't want to bother if it won't help.
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Aug 14, 2014 02:02
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In Clicker Heroes, someone mentioned when it first came out (before the prestige system existed) that some of the multipliers didn't quite stack properly and would only apply to heroes bought either before or after the upgrade was bought. Was that fixed at some point?
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Sep 2, 2014 08:45
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The real benefit of Morgulis is that he lets you treat your hero souls like any other currency - always spend all of them, don't worry about maintaining a stockpile, don't risk being set back several days by accidentally clicking Buy 100 instead of Buy 10 on some other ancient and losing your entire stockpile.
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Oct 6, 2014 22:47
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Taran_Wanderer posted:Though you need to make sure you always keep one Hero Soul, as his bonus is them, not a global one. I just accidentally spent my last one so I'm languishing a bit. That's not true, though? When you spend your last soul on Morgulis, your DPS doesn't go down.
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Oct 7, 2014 01:53
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The glass ceiling puzzle is equivalent to the Towers of Hanoi, where locking or unlocking Glass Ceiling X corresponds to moving disk X.Sage Grimm posted:Yeah, I didn't mind the mechanic so much as the glass blocks it cost me. And I'm glad I don't have to do it past 9; that last push was exhausting. I'm into the low Wololo prefixes of things, logicats and their rewards being pretty much the next step up. But since you have to be heavily engaged to proceed, this is going to take a while. At least I can't get bored of the logic puzzles! You can go infinite almost immediately if you're willing to abuse the Temporal Duplication mechanics.
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Nov 30, 2014 07:20
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Ineptitude posted:I have been "stuck" in Sandcastle Builder for a while now. I have infinite sand/castle/glass blocks+chips, infinite all 12 tools, 100's of G's of Question Qubes and Logicat Levels, 230ish discoveries, hundreds of levels of panther rush, and level 50ish vacuum generator. The last upgrade i bought was Aleph One. Since you have infinite tools, presumably you have most of the Achronal Dragon boosts like Thunderbird. The one you're missing is Shadow Dragon, which requires AC 888 and 9TWW Achronal Dragon power, plus a couple of other things. Boost your AC, get Shadow Dragon, get Shadow Feeder, get bonemeal. If you're ever planning on getting the Prizes, this is the time to do it - bonemeal lets you Molpy Down with the Bag of Holding, keeping a lot of your Stuff and earning Prizes. Otherwise, you should let the Shadow Feeder gather bonemeal and spend flux crystals boosting your Time Lord level (you may need to turn off Vacuum Cleaner for this).
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Dec 1, 2014 20:04
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LAY-ZX posted:Does anyone here still know anything about Sandcastle Builder? I did a hard reset after taking a look at the godawful endgame grind, and now I'm at the glass phase but I can't for the life of me remember how to get temporal duplicates. I checked the wiki, but it says the temporal duplication boost requires you to have Crystal Dragon, which in turn requires that Achronal Dragon has already eaten some duplicates. Time-travel around a bit and you'll accumulate temporal duplicates. If you don't have time-travel, solve a logicat puzzle during the same mNP you buy something that costs infinite castles like a locked crate/vault and you might get a temporal rift as a reward.
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Dec 16, 2014 00:45
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Robo Reagan posted:Anything you need to know about Sandcastle Builder? Can you play it blind or do you absolutely have to follow a guide? I get that it has a lot of moving parts, but step by step following a guide isn't very interesting. You can play blind. Molyping down on NP3 is good advice. The other general advice I'd give is to not run away from bad-seeming things that happen, since they tend to pay off if you stick with them.
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Dec 19, 2014 22:54
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Yeah, don't bother with an autoclicker in sandcastle builder.Eldercain posted:Other generally harmless advice: Toggle the poo poo out of chromatic heresy when you get it for a pretty nice QoL boost Speaking of which, mash the Save button. The game doesn't autosave by default, you have to unlock it.
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Dec 19, 2014 23:54
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jon joe posted:What are some of the most efficient methods in shark game? Shrimp queen makes shrimp, shrimp makes algae, recycler turns algae into sponges, spend sponges to buy more shrimp queens. After only a couple of cycles you have ten billion algae and the recycler can turn it into anything you want.
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Dec 25, 2014 05:16
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Sage Grimm posted:Holy poo poo Sandcastle Builder pacing grinds to a shuddering halt after the multiple resets for the Prize Bags. My last big milestone was hitting infinity Flux Crystals and even that took several days. Now I'm grinding Bonemeal and after like two weeks or so (wouldn't be surprised if it's been a month) I still have another 50 loving levels of Panther Rush before I unlock another Boost. There are only two other things to work towards: Vacuum Cleaners and Mysterious Maps. The former requires me to either invest a tedious amount of time travel back and forth for Overtime or waiting until I hit infinite Blackprints which is predicated on Panther Rush levels pushing it that high. The latter requires a ton of Discoveries so I could do a tedious amount of time travel (seeing a trend here) to speed it back to shortpix ONG timing or just let it happen naturally. What do you need bonemeal for? Since using it to get infinite flux crystals I haven't used it again, thank to ninja ritual I have enough goats that mustard is better for buying panther rush upgrades. I'm a bit ahead of you and it just seems to get slower. The vacuums stage consists of sitting around for weeks doing nothing.
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Jan 4, 2015 22:16
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Sage Grimm posted:Because I haven't hit upon your method, apparently. I can generate the bonemeal required faster than I can get mustard and Beachball's autoclicker causes my browser to stop rendering itself if I run it at max. I'm not at 444 CDSP which would speed up mustard generation, hence my bitching about it. Oops, you're right, I forgot it took so long to get to 444 CDSP. Goddamn I did that over a month ago now and it feels like nothing at all has happened since.
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Jan 4, 2015 23:34
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Grey Elephants posted:Best way to really start pumping out science in Shark Game? The gate requirements are usually in the billions if I have it as one of the needed resources, and I can't recycle into science. I'm in a Shrouded Ocean right now. Recycle into kelp, kelp generates sea apples, dissect sea apples for science.
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Jan 7, 2015 19:38
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Seravadon posted:What is the definition of a long time? I'm sitting at 76 kittens currently in year 2093(I only spend part of the day actually paying attention to it so huge swathes of time are actually idle for me). At 76 kittens you'll only get a few points of karma, since you get karma equal to your kitten count minus 70. Reset after you get Concrete Huts.
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Feb 23, 2015 17:24
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Pidmon posted:At what point would you recommend a first reset with kittengame? I've only just got up to calciners/oil wells (5/6 respectively) and I'm around 80ish population. Reset after concrete huts. At this point you'd only get a few paragon so it's not worth it yet, but unobtainium/metaphysics would take forever on a first run.
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Mar 23, 2015 05:27
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Ineptitude posted:Why is it recommended to reset Kittens Game once you have around 100 kittens? (Concrete huts) I had over 140 kittens when I did my first reset at Concrete Huts, and I definitely didn't go into space that run.
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Mar 27, 2015 14:47
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khy posted:I need a new one! Sandcastle Builder
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Apr 17, 2015 18:08
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Despite the default interface, Sandcastle Builder is really good. It's probably best to stop playing after the Prizes stage of the game, though, but that still gives you a good 2+ months of content.
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Apr 17, 2015 18:20
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Sindai posted:Is Sandcastle Builder as slow as it looks to start with? Every time I look at it I notice castles quickly take a ridiculous amount of sand to create and give up again. It's slow by idle game standards, but not as slow as it might seem. Spend your castles on castle tools, not sand tools. The sand cost of castles will go back down.
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Apr 18, 2015 01:29
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Wulfolme posted:But it's not just the integral of the one above it. It follows some binomial coefficient pascal triangle bullshit. Everything I follow tells me that Tier 1 currency is worth more than anything higher, which just seems like it can't be right. It doesn't look like an integral at first because the higher currencies update discretely (every ten ticks) rather than continuously, but it's basically the integral. Your cash grows linearly in time with your first-tier buildings, quadratically in time with your second-tier buildings, cubically in time with your third tier buildings, and so on. No binomial coefficients are involved. You see Pascal's Triangle from a third-tier building making your first-tier buildings go 1, then 3, then 6, then 10, then 15, and so on, but that's because the first tier is growing quadratically in time based on your third tier.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:41
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Phssthpok posted:Binomial coefficients are the correct way to model growth based on forward finite differences. The growth is quadratic, but strictly less than c*x^2 for the same c. Oh, duh, of course if Pascal's triangle is showing up you'll get binomial coefficients, they're the same thing. Nevermind, I'm being an idiot.  It's still basically just cx^2 for all practical purposes.
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Apr 24, 2015 16:12
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Len posted:I'm supposed to get access to that if I "molpy down" after newpix 3 but I did that on newpix 9 and I'm not seeing that as a boost to buy. Is it a boost to buy? I dunno. The wiki is kind of vague and is acting like these things are common knowledge. If I recall correctly, the boost should become visible to buy when you reach newpix 2 after molpying down on newpix 3 or later. The triggering event is "on the ONG, advance to a newpix that isn't your highest newpix".
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May 24, 2015 04:07
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Fargin Icehole posted:Maybe it's just me, but i rerolled because I had Siyalatas levelling up and I felt that spending maybe hero souls that give you 10% DPS per to get another 25% idle dps felt counterproductive The idle dps from Siyalatas stacks multiplicatively with the dps from hero souls. If you have a hundred or so souls, spending 15 of them on Siyalates more than doubles your effective dps, because they're doing more work by tossing in a separate x2.25 multiplier than by increasing your x18 multiplier to x21.
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Jun 5, 2015 06:12
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That "ascend at level 125" calculator tells you how to optimize your souls/time that has passed in the real world ratio. But what you really want to optimize is your souls/time spent interacting with the game ratio. Most people would rather leave the game running for an hour and return to get 40 souls than click furiously for an hour and get 50 souls.
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Jun 27, 2015 10:11
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In Clicker Heroes I just got the Masked Samurai up to 4100. Which hero should I put all my gilds into now?
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Jul 5, 2015 10:35
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Bloodly posted:I barely understand what the classes are or anything. Is there any detail on them at all? Yeah, I'm not sure what most of the upgrades do. What is a sink, and why would I want the dungeon to have more of them? Tougher monsters sounds bad, but the upgrade system seems to think they're good? I had no idea what most of the classes/races would entail so I just told the game to spawn nothing but Orc Barbarians. It seemed like a safe bet that those would be decent, and so far they're doing well.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:05
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Virigoth posted:In Roguathia I just unlocked the "bigger party" upgrade. Are these two separate games running now or are these guys sharing a dungeon? I haven't actually seen them interact or be near each other. They share a dungeon, I've seen them run around in the same room. They don't seem to interact at all though. It seemed like I was seeing more deaths after I bought bigger party, when my characters were previously invincible. I think the fact that they're now stealing xp/loot from each other might be a problem.
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Dec 4, 2015 18:03
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Omi no Kami posted:Should I be spending my early SP on stat boosts, or on random new classes? The classes seem far more useful, but I don't like the word "random". You can only have one stat boost of each tier (lesser/greater/utility/buff) active at a time, so buy one lesser stat boost and then buy other stuff.
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Dec 5, 2015 19:01
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I just got to the part of trimps where new housing costs helium I don't want to spend helium 
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Dec 31, 2015 05:28
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