Ew, my Warpstations are starting to develop an eerie cast that’s freaking my eyes out. I keep thinking there’s a blurry spot in my vision, or on the computer screen.
Thanks for the advice and info Some Call Me… Tim. I don’t have the Carpentry yet to handle that and I’m not headed quite so far yet, but it’s something to aim for.
I’m trying for 10 WSs per Gigastation for now, and trying to keep up with Coordinations has got me down to one or two zones per day. Slow, but I’ll end up with as much helium from this run as all my previous runs combined.
How do you all like Geneticists? I employed 120 of them, then saw my down time took a lot longer than usual, so I fired them. Maybe there’s an optimal point where the extra health is an equal benefit to reproduction rate, or a Perk makes them worth using, but I’m not seeing it right now.
Geneticists should be bought for a particular purpose and sold as needed, more is not always better. Basically, breeding slows down twice as fast as hit points rise. So, if doubling your hp is required to do any damage at all to an Improbability, slowing your breeding by a factor of 4 might be worth it. It’s not worth it in general without a particular reason.
The other vanilla use for geneticists is when your breeding is faster than you can fight again when your trimps die, or roughly one second. If your breeding timer (which you should turn on in settings if you haven’t already) is less than a second, there’s not much of a downside to buying geneticists until it takes a second or so to breed. Free HP.
Where geneticists really shine is in combination with the Anticipation perk. With all purchasable levels of Anticipation you’ll do seven times the damage (+600%) if you took 30 seconds to breed the current Trimps. If you’re doing something where you’re not dying as often as every 30 seconds, this is awesome.
Later in the game (Zone 170, I’m not there yet either) you can unlock Geneticistassist, which automates buying and firing geneticists to adjust your breed timer to 1 second, 10 seconds, or 30 seconds.
Woo, made it to Z80 and beat The Prison this AM. Only made it to Z65 last time, so this is an improvement. I should probably portal and do Trapper. With all the He from this run, I should be fairly well set up for it. My He/hr is holding fairly steady, but I’m seven Coordinations behind. I just don’t really feel like portaling at the moment.
Yes, absolutely. I currently have carpentry at level 31 and haven’t needed any wormholes for a while now since Resorts can support over 1,500 trimps each.
It says I have spent 284K Helium on Carpentry, so I would guess quite a few more at that rate. Daily quests for 300%+ Helium really pay off, though; my last run made almost 150K Helium.
I upgrade when buying a station is more expensive than an upgrade + 1 new station. Why buy a station when you can have two, bigger stations for the same price or less? This seems to happen at around 7 stations.
The game doesn’t allow you to buy them in the order of which is most economically efficient first. Once you buy that gigastation you can’t go back and get those warpstations from the previous rank.
Comparing the unit cost of the next level 1 station to the current station is beside the point. The first few warpstations after you buy a gigastation are obviously worth buying, but you’ll get that opportunity to buy them every time independent of whether you get the gigastation early or late. Since you’ll get them either way, the cheapness of the next gigastation’s first few buys shouldn’t be involved in your decision of when to upgrade. The question is only whether the expensive warpstation pre-gigastation is worth it.
If you’re going to look back after a few zones when you run out of Gigastations to buy and regret not buying those early warpstations, you might want to plan ahead and buy them when they’re available.
I don’t get it. Is there a point where you stop getting Giga upgrades?
I’m currently on Z76. I’ve currently gone up to nine warpstations @ 726K trimps. I’ve got a Giga, and plenty of metal and Gems to spend. I’m also 4.56M trimps away from a coordination.
I can buy 2 warpstations. I gain 1.4M trimps, and it’s another 45 minutes of running Gem maps before I can buy another one. Nowhere near getting coordination.
Or I can Gigastation, then buy 7 warpstations at the reduced price. Next station I can buy in 20 minutes, if I want it.
Why wouldn’t I Giga? Where’s the advantage in waiting?
Yes. They appear in every zone from Z61-Z69. Then every two zones in the 70s, three zones in the 80s, five zones from Z95-Z170, then 10 zones from Z180-Z220. You probably aren’t concerned about the high zones, but they get extremely limited, as early as the mid-70s - especially if you’re spending them so quickly.
Let’s try to make a simplified setup, say that you have only one gigastation upgrade available and you decide that you need to get a total of 100k trimps from these warpstations. This gives us two tables, one for the price and efficiency of warpstations initially, and one table for after we buy the one gigastation.
WS, metal price in Qa, cost per trimp in T
1 1. 100
2 1.4 140
3 1.96 196
4 2.74 274
5 3.84 384
6 5.38 538
7 7.53 753
8 10.5 1050
9 14.8 1480
Table for after one GS (price up 75%, capacity up 20%.) Buying the gigastation itself is the first entry on this table, as that can be thought of as including one warpstation with purchase.
1 1.75 146
2 3.06 255
3 5.36 447
4 9.38 782
5 16.4 1368
6 28.7 2396
7 50.3 4189
8 88.0 7330
Your two strategies are
A: buy whatever’s cheapest per trimp at the moment, or
B: plan ahead and buy the cheapest combination from both tables that gets you over 100k.
With strategy A, you will buy the gigastation and switch over to the second table after the second warpstation, as a third warpstation costs 1.96 Qa metal while the gigastation is 1.75 Qa metal for 20% more population. In the end, to reach the 100k goal, you will buy 2@10k from table one and 7@12k from table 2. 104k trimps will cost you 117 Qa metal.
With strategy B, you will plan ahead and buy the combination that’s cheapest overall rather than at the moment, buying 7 from table 1 and 3 from table 2, as that gets you over the 100k threshold while minimizing cost per trimp to under 777T. 106k trimps purchased this way will have cost you 34 Qa metal. Also, future growth over 106k trimps will be much cheaper starting at 4 in table 2 than starting at 8 in table 2 with strategy A.
In practice you’ll get earlier production for earlier gigastation upgrades, so the best tactic is somewhere between the extremes of A and B.
