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LET'S MAKE NUMBERS GO UP 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? Because those numbers aren't going to make themselves go up. Well, okay, yes they well. But they need your help to go up faster. Also it feels good to wake up in the morning or come home from work with 9 hours of income to spend. The Current Hotness: Realm Grinder  Started just over a year ago, Realm Grinder takes the classic prestige mechanic (resetting the game with a bonus to future playthroughs) to the next level. Once you've earned enough gems with normal resets, you can reincarnate -- a meta-reset that sacrifices all the gems you earned from previous resets in exchange for a new, different bonus. Reincarnations certain other features, challenges, and progression systems, and the real progression in the game is measured in how many times you've reincarnated. Combined with the variety of different races you can ally with, this leads to quite a lot of variety and complexity in what at first appears to be a straightforward clicker. Paradigm Shift Rabbit Holes    After a while people realized that making a single number go up by buying the most expensive building over and over eventually gets old. This generation of incremental games addressed that with a wide variety of different resources and a long chain of paradigm shifts that constantly alter which resource you're interested in and how you can most easily acquire it, which keeps the game from becoming stale for months. Despite its haphazard interface and obtuse terminology, Sandcastle Builder is an excellent slow burn with a lot of neat intricacies and subsystems, such as a disguised Towers of Hanoi minigame to unlock a series of boosts. Mine Defense takes those strengths and combines them with a more palatable presentation, though it does require an autoclicker. And if you don't mind the way it caps storage of certain resources, A Kittens Game is an accessable little Civ-builder with a wide variety of resources. The Classics    The games that started the genre, Candy Box, its sequel, and A Dark Room have a lot of strengths that their successors never really followed up on. Though they do involve waiting for numbers to go up, this is downplayed compared to exploring the RPG system and open world map. They're quick and very good; even if you aren't really into idlers, check them out unless you hate ASCII graphics. Goon Guilds    Most incremental games are single-player. But if you want to play with goons, you're looking for these. Amaranthine, essentially a text-based idle MMO, is the current favorite, with its own thread dedicated to making sure goons remain dominant enough to be despised by pubbies. Before that there was Idle Online Universe, which was popular for a while but the guild halls are looking a bit empty now. And there's always Clicker Heroes, a fairly linear clicker, but bright and colorful and with a solid enough prestige mechanic that it was popular even before it became multiplayer. Historical Relics     These are all notable for one reason or another, but I wouldn't recommend playing them. Anti-Idle is the first example of the genre by several years, but which for one reason or another has mostly remained forgotten even as the genre's popularity boomed. Cookie Clicker popularized the genre, created the first prestige mechanic, and standardized the clicker formula of buying buildings to make income go up, but with no real paradigm shifts and no updates for years it was left behind. Adventure Capitalist is a poorly-balanced bland clicker notable only for being the first major game to allow progression even while offline, but somehow half my steam friends list is still playing it. And then there's Progress Quest, a parody of the genre before the genre even existed, in which the player has no input at all. SHARK GAME  HELL YES IT'S THE GOON-MADE SHARK GAME THE ACTUAL BEST IDLE GAME
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May 13, 2016 01:55
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Eldercain posted:What am I supposed to be spending this helium on? None of these things seem especially spectacular. None of them is especially spectacular alone, but they're all very cheap at first and they're all essentially multiplicative with each other. It has a bigger effect than you think. Once you're able to push a few zones beyond Zone 21, Looting is particularly nice because its effect applies to helium gains (except for the flat 30 you get from finding the portal).
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May 14, 2016 13:20
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Meskhenet posted:Realm grinder r0 question. I don't see what the point of keeping Farms unproductive would be. They don't get a larger bonus from Grand Balance than any other building type would, so all you really care about is making your least productive building as productive as possible. That usually meant Deep Mines ended up as my least productive.
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May 16, 2016 18:03
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Vil posted:Druid(3,1) upgrade Mabinogion: Huh, I forgot about that. Still, that's such a marginal benefit that I'm guessing it's not worth the sacrifices you need to make to gain it.
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May 16, 2016 18:19
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Klungar posted:What should I be spending Rubies on in Realm Grinder? I bought one Assistant to help unlock Fairy Choir, but not sure what to spend the others on. The game stops being interesting once you've burned through the available content (took me about two months, though I guess I still have That Trophy). Gifts make that happen faster. As for rubies, the bonuses are so small that it doesn't really matter what you spend them on, but conventional wisdom is Max Mana Bad, Assistants Good, Other Options Decent.
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May 17, 2016 17:32
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CodfishCartographer posted:So I've been getting more into clickers lately after finding the last thread. I've been vaguely considering making one of my own for fun, so I've got a question for you guys: what do you like to see in clickers? What makes one clicker better than another to you? What do you hate about clickers? This can just be personal preference or whatever, just looking for input! I agree with what the others said, but also: Like: Being able to make appreciable progress if I go away from the game for 8 hours. Normally in an idle game this would be the case, but some aspects can make idle progress negligible -- most obviously resource caps, but also the game's pacing being just too fast while active (see lategame Shark Game for example). Dislike: The need for an autoclicker, and to a lesser extent any third-party program like the forecaster. MussoliniB posted:I just unlocked all of the researches up to level 135 and started R17. When do researches become more powerful than lightning forge? R16. Or 1 TVg gems (maybe 100 DVg), depending on what you mean by "when".
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May 20, 2016 02:01
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Klungar posted:I'm in R2 now and close to heading into R3, but I just noticed the Challenges. Are these things I should focus on now before I move on, or are they ok to put off until a later reincarnation? It's not urgent but there's no reason not to do them now. Especially the Good-aligned factions' challenges, which are quick and easy at the end of a reincarnation but impossible at the start. The Evil-aligned challenges can all be done at the start of a reincarnation, but require you to idle for longer.
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May 20, 2016 19:14
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Klungar posted:Thanks, I got all the Tier 1 Good challenges taken care of easily enough, but yeah, I'll have to set up the Evil ones before I go to sleep or something. Goblin's not too bad, it has a 1/6 chance of being completed every ten minutes, so on average it takes an hour. Undead and Demon are overnighters.
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May 20, 2016 22:10
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Shrimp Queens and Egg Brooders are very good things to make using the recycler to feedback loop. Lobster Berriers can be very effective too; I think there's one world type where every Producer's production is greatly diminished except Lobster Berriers, which are highly effective.
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May 21, 2016 04:58
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Irritated Goat posted:Isn't there a Trophy for being on a faction for 3 hours? or is it 3 days? You get "Because I like to grind" by not abdicating for three hours. You get the beard trophy by spending ~3 days in a single run as dwarves (or mercs with the dwarf beard upgrade). You get certain upgrades by spending ~3 days offline total in an R. You get certain researches by spending a total of 5 days as each neutral faction cumulative across all R's.
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May 27, 2016 23:08
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Ghost of Starman posted:So, uh... R0, ~8 Qi gems into Realm Grinder. I'm trying to balance out the alignments' playtimes so I can get Equality or whatever it's called, but I'm pretty sure I'm past the point where anything other than Titans or Druids are going to contribute meaningfully to my gem totals. Is there anything productive I can be doing with the couple of hours I'm going to be spending in each? I've cottoned on to using Angels to at least get my 'mana generated' and 'spells cast' stats up, at least. The vanilla factions are eclipsed by neutrals at the moment, but soon the neutrals will themselves be eclipsed by prestige factions (which are Good/Evil).
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May 28, 2016 00:06
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Ghost of Starman posted:For the first Goblin challenge ("Have Green Fingers Discount roll more than 1,000 seconds worth of production,") is there some sort of trick to keep your production low so it's easier to achieve, or is it literally just waiting long enough? It's just wait, but it's not so bad. You have a 1/6 chance of achieving it every ten minutes, so on average it should take an hour. Compared to the first Undead challenge, which takes something like 13 hours, that's no time at all.
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Jun 4, 2016 08:56
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Merijn posted:
Are you playing as Angels right now? Only the bonus from the challenge matching your current faction is active, and it might display that in a way that makes the others look incomplete. Could also be a bug. They're certainly not supposed to uncomplete themselves.
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Jul 5, 2016 17:45
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wow, ok. The depth of this game continues to surprise me.
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Meskhenet posted:In Trimps 10 wormholes is all you should be buying. You definitely shouldn't be doing Electricity now if hitting 60 is a stretch. If you mean Balance, then you may as well do it, unless the first 40 zones are such a small fraction of your helium gains that it won't help. Balance didn't exist when I was at that stage of the game, though, so take that with a grain of salt; try it once and see how it feels.
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Jul 6, 2016 03:24
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Meskhenet posted:With equality (in RG) 1 day 12 min of each alignment is fine. They have to be close to each other, not to the 1d mark.
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Jul 12, 2016 02:54
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Beat Infiroad in about two days. Got and maxed all the relics, got all the achievements except the last upgrade/promote/deicide achievements which would take another couple days. I never got stuck at any wall after unlocking boss rush, just reset whenever you're not moving completely effortlessly and your next run will put you thousands of screens farther. Also I can confirm that even at the end of the game all of your damage comes from the wizard, with a runner-up prize to the hunter for occasionally spiking to 90%, so there's no reason not to focus your mithral heavily on those heroes plus Merchant and General.
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Aug 25, 2016 12:29
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Huh, really? I've been noticing mine coming from Slayer, is that just because he's the one I clicked on for ALL MAX so he's a tier or two ahead? I remember Slayer putting out good numbers early but seemed to stop mattering once you get rush. Which isn't too surprising since unlike my top two he doesn't have a special ability that multiplies his damage by a ludicrous number of orders of magnitude. I tested it by clicking All Max on the General, and the result was Wizard was usually 100% damage but Hunter would occasionally spike up to 90%. All relics cap, the first-tier individual damage relics and the individual spawn frequency relics cap at Lv 9999 so they seem uncapped for a long time. The last tier of relics is Note to Princess Doll, you know you've reached the end of the content because you get a relic that doesn't do anything yet hinting at a future "challenge mode".
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Aug 25, 2016 13:32
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Came back to Realm Grinder because of the event. I've nearly reached Ascension. Do I need to do that long archwizard build run thing before ascending, or am I safe to ascend?
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Sep 2, 2016 19:59
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TTBF posted:Thank you. Now I got some Realm Grinder questions 1) Your orbs are still gone, but any alliance or upgrade you've already bought with orbs is free after any abdications/reincarnations. 2) Your experience is the same as mine.
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Sep 2, 2016 20:04
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Ineptitude posted:I could have been more accurate in my statement. I was talking in general, i see a lot of people wanting more content for RG yet virtually no one asking for more content in AdCap. Both of these games are very popular. AdCap has always been a low-effort cookie clicker clone with barely any content that would have been forgotten overnight if it hadn't gotten out at the front of the "offline progress" train. Nobody cares if it has content updates because it never had any meaningful content in the first place -- a "content" update would just be "yeah we added another x3 production upgrade that costs 1000x as many angels as the previous one did".
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Sep 9, 2016 08:09
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TTBF posted:I'm playing Realm Grinder and wondering how excavations work w/r/t getting artifacts. I've got 39 artifacts currently so I'm good at that, but I'm wondering more specifically about how reloading effects artifacts. I know that if I export the game, do some excavations, get nothing, and reload the game i'll continue to get nothing as long as I keep using that save. But what if I wait, increase my chance to find the item (by casting more spells or whatever) and try again? Would it be possible to get it or am I just gonna have to assume I won't get the artifact without really going deep into excavations? Here's how it works: when you reincarnate, the game randomly generates a long list of numbers between 0 and 1. Each time you excavate, it reads the next number in the list (or the next hundred numbers if you did a hundred excavations, etc). When it reaches a number, it awards you an artifact if your probability of receiving that artifact is greater than that number. For example, if the next number in the list is 0.2752, you will receive an artifact for your next excavation only if you have a 27.52% chance or better of finding a certain artifact, which you presumably don't. If you increase your chance to find the artifact by a trivial amount, then you're still very unlikely to get the artifact. For example, if your probability of receiving a certain artifact is 0.05% and the excavations you can afford don't drop the artifact, you know none of the numbers corresponding to those excavations are 0.0005 or less. If you increase your probability to 0.051% by casting another few minutes worth of spells, you'll only get the artifact if one of the numbers ahead is 0.00051 or less -- but since you already know they're not 0.0005 or less, that means they'd need to be exactly in the narrow band between 0.0005 and 0.00051, which is obviously very unlikely to happen. But if you increase the probability by a more significant amount, e.g. to 0.1%, then you'd be looking for numbers between 0.0005 and 0.001, effectively giving you a fresh new 0.05% chance per excavation independent of the old one. This also means that if you can't find a certain artifact in the upcoming excavations, you won't be able to find any other artifact either unless the other artifact is significantly easier to find than the first artifact.
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Sep 20, 2016 05:14
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Oodles posted:What's the latest favourite? I'm hoping it's not still RG. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 21:54
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Oodles posted:Do you mean Lazy Kings? Idle King seems a bit poo poo, or maybe I've not got into it yet. Oops I meant Lazy.
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Sep 23, 2016 23:18
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Agent355 posted:RE: trimps The most efficient way to farm is to find a map where your trimps can kill enemies in one hit (at least with Titimp buff). The limiting factor for determining what level of map you can run this way is typically your offense rather than your defense; if you're one-hit-killing everything, each group of trimps is probably lasting more than thirty seconds. So you generally want to get full use out of Anticipation. Of course, this can vary depending on what challenge you're running. On a daily where your trimps lose 4% of their max health after each attack, your fighting group won't ever live more than 10-12 seconds, so you should only push your Anticipation that far. As a rule of thumb, push Anticipation as high as you can without spending time dead.
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Jan 31, 2017 21:59
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Agent355 posted:I enjoyed kittens game for a few weeks but quit, I think I had hit the end of content at that time, or nearly. It must've seen some development since I played if there is space now. Short answer: Mountains. Long answer: If you've cleared Decay, each Gardens map has a +25% additive increase to its loot value. So instead of capping out at 153%-160% loot for the most expensive tier, Gardens maps will cap out at 178%-185% loot. So you're really only gaining an extra 15% multiplicative metal from each drop, which if you only want metal is nowhere near enough to make up for the fact that you're only getting 1/3 as many metal drops.
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Feb 14, 2017 22:36
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Sindai posted:If you do, the reverse is true, and gardens are better because base map loot also applies to the imps. Huh, I never knew that. Probably because I'm not quite at Motivation 2 yet (just reached 190's). Is that why in the lategame Miner Efficiency instead of Metal Drop Rate is considered the most important stat?
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Feb 14, 2017 22:55
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Ineptitude posted:Is this multiplicative with e.g. the bonus from achievements or additive? It's multiplicative with everything except other challenges^2.
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Feb 27, 2017 14:49
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GrossMurpel posted:nicknames you deem offensive. As you and I are both enlightened rationalists, we are both equally aware that our subjective experience of the nature of reality does not necessarily match the world in itself. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A panel may appear green but actually be blue. Rene Descartes himself was unable to construct a mathematical proof that "niggerdicks" is offensive, despite numerous attempts. What appears to be real may be shadows upon the wall of a cave. Though I believe myself to be posting upon the Something Awful forums at this moment, it is possible that I am but a brain in a vat, being fed delusions by a conniving demon for its own dark purposes. However, I believe it was the philosopher David Hume who best addressed this constant uncertainty. He was most concerned with the question of time: must the future always conform to the past? Just because the sun has risen every day, does that mean it will rise tomorrow? Just because gravity has pulled us downward every day, how do we know that tomorrow gravity will not invert? Certainly, in all previous cases we've seen, the future has always conformed to the past. But that is a circular argument: the future may have conformed to the past in the past, but we cannot from that conclude that the future will conform to the past in the future unless we presuppose that the future must conform to the past. If we are to rely on reason alone, then how can we prove that it is a bad idea to jump off a cliff? How can we prove we will not sprout wings when we do so? Hume's answer is that we cannot prove these things through reason alone -- and that that is okay. For in addition to our faculties of reason, we also possess faculties of instinct, which allow us to perceive the obvious even where Euclid has failed to prove it. Our species would not have lived long if we had leapt from clifftops on the offchance that we would spontaneously grow wings, and that is because we can -- and should! -- rely on our faculties of instinct to guide us through life. It is instinct that comforts us with the certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow, that grants us the insight that "niggerdicks" is an offensive username, and that urges us to plant crops instead of merely hoping that our hunger never returns. I would therefore urge you, as Hume would urge you, that the next time you consider arguing that actually "niggerdicks" isn't offensive, consult your faculty of instinct first and remain silent. Or, conversely, silence your faculty of instinct entirely and jump off a cliff you worthless loving piece of poo poo.
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Feb 28, 2017 22:33
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Kiranamos posted:I'm slow on the Trimps train where discussion 20 pages ago is relevant to me - I'm at 3 portals, doing the guide that got me Underachiever, Discipline, Metal, and now Size done. I'm at Z38 trying to get to 40 to unlock Balance and then do that, but it's really slowed down and I'm getting one-shot. I didn't take Block because I heard it's bad past Z30 and most of my equipment is level 6, some 7. I'm thinking I may as well just wait a day to see if I can push past it, but I wonder if the Balance challenge will be too hard to do this early anyway, so I should just portal and start stacking Carpentry? Balance makes the run harder, so if you're struggling to reach 40 without Balance buffing the enemies, you're not going to have an easy time running Balance. If you feel like you're getting stonewalled, feel free to just portal and put some points in Carpentry -- having Coordinations sitting unbought really hurts your progress.
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Mar 10, 2017 01:10
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Agent355 posted:How do I deal with earning mastery in trimps? I only just managed to eek out a run all the way to 190 after a deep run, so maybe I just can't handle it at all yet, but some of the first bonuses I can get would at least be a nice quality of life update. When do I start trying to do that? Start now if you like. Just switch to Scryer formation in world zones from 181 onward, except for the corrupted cells and the improbability. You'll average about 3 Dark Essence per zone (maybe a bit less since you'll be in damage formation for a few cells), so you'll be able to afford your first mastery at zone 184 in a single run. Also note that Dark Essence isn't lost when you portal. When you're evaluating which masteries to pick up, don't dismiss Bionic Magnet as obviously useless the way I did at first -- Bionic Wonderland 6 (and to a lesser extent 7) is a great place to farm.
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Mar 13, 2017 09:40
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junan_paalla posted:What do you recommend for the first tier 2 mastery? I'm torn between headstart I and turkimps II, void power seems like a no-brainer but I've had no problems with z181 voids for some runs now so I can put it off for a while. Headstart I for sure. If you take Headstart I and run your voids on 182, you'll earn 23% more helium from voids (on top of 182 having a slightly higher base value than 181). Combined with five extra Improbabilities having the double helium bonus from corruption, that's a major boost to your helium income. And if you ever do non-daily runs of Lead or Watch, you'll have the ability to run voids in a zone where both that challenge and the corruption helium bonus apply. Void Power's really nice because every three extra zones you can push before running your voids is an extra 15% helium from the extra corrupted cell. It's only an additive bonus, but you're early enough in corruption that it being additive isn't an issue. Turkimp Tamer I & II honestly aren't that important in my opinion. I only picked them up because they're required for Turkimp Tamer III later on.
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Mar 13, 2017 16:18
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DontMindMe posted:Been playing Realm grinder and I'm currently at the end of R2. Should I complete all these challenges that unlocked before moving onto R3? Out of the first wave of challenges, the Good challenges are all very easy to do at the end of an R, so you may as well pick those up now or you won't be able to again until late in R3. The Evil challenges all basically just care about time spent in an abdication, so you can do them whenever you feel like and there's no pressure to do them now.
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Aug 26, 2017 08:16
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Ineptitude posted:The game is kinda dragged down by how you get 20% more gold by selling something than it cost, and how the game inevetably requires you to do this. I never did this except one time to get Master Blacksmith, and I got to the end of the game's content in just a few days without ever feeling like it was slowed to a crawl. Just don't bother doing the sell loop and you'll still play fine.
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Aug 28, 2017 00:10
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CodfishCartographer posted:Does anyone still play A Kittens Game? I started it up yesterday and have kind of reached a wall. I'm on year 74 with 26 kittens in my village, and Theology is the only science I have available right now. I'm not sure what I should be going for - coal seems like the big resource at the moment to make tons of poo poo with steel, but it takes soooo long to make coal, my production of it is ridiculously slow. I've currently got 18 smelters and 16 mines, should I have more? Should I focus on something else? I want to make Steamworks, but Holy poo poo I can't make steel nearly quickly enough for it to feel possible. You're probably overvaluing Steamworks. It's nice that they give you uncapped idle production, but they're incredibly slow. Get hunters and amphitheaters -- that's how you progress in the sciences, and amphitheaters actually improve your production a ton.
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Dec 18, 2017 07:04
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CodfishCartographer posted:Oh, huh, didn't realize amphitheaters were so good. I made 10 of them, should I just keep pumping them up along with getting more cats to do more stuff? Yeah, basically before you have any prestige stuff the happiness penalty from overpopulation is brutal, and amphitheaters are really important for mitigating it. If you want more minerals, you'll probably get more of a mineral production boost from a new amphitheater than from a new mine or a new miner. You'll want hunters to get parchments, so you can get amphitheaters, Theology, and subsequent unlocks. If you're like me, you probably haven't picked up a lot of hunters up until now, but this is where they become important.
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Dec 18, 2017 07:37
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goferchan posted:Is there something I'm missing in researching Theology in Kittens Game? the amount of culture I need for it is almost 5x my maximum and all my methods of increasing my cap do so by very, very small increments. I think that's the next big upgrade to get for me Theology doesn't cost culture directly. It costs manuscripts, which themselves cost culture. Since you don't need to craft all 35 manuscripts at once, you only need 400 max culture to get Theology.
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Dec 30, 2017 09:09
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habituallyred posted:Take the "remove environmental regulation" option when the bribing happens. You will need some refined mana. Removing financial regulations works too.
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Jan 11, 2018 10:09
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Ineptitude posted:I didn't really feel like Technomancy changed all that much when you removed regulations. You either get a money or a stone/wood production boost and thats it. Is the big change supposed to be that you can now (slowly) acquire fuel? The big change is what you do once you get that fuel.
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Jan 11, 2018 13:07
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Heliotrope posted:I've gotten to around Zone 250 in Trimps. Should I focus on Coordinated, Looting/Carpentry II, or some other perk(s) in order to push further ahead? Coordinated and Looting II are the big ones, though don't neglect any of the "II" perks.
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Mar 27, 2018 23:57
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For Trimps, how do you make further progress in Magma once you're Coordinated enough to buy all the Coordinations? I'm at Z400 and I can't imagine getting to Z500 just from pumping Power/Toughness II.
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Apr 1, 2018 20:32
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