I finally limped into Z75, desperate to complete a Void map to get Auto Storage… but this may take a week!
Auto Storage is great to have. It’ll be worth it.
The void probably won’t take too long, though. Make sure you get Gymystic in cell 45 or 55, and then run a forest or garden map on Repeat Forever for a few hours to buy gyms. Maybe fire some farmers and get some lumberjacks first. Try to get your Health + Block above a septillion before entering the void. If you can block the entire hit, then the void imps’ special abilities won’t affect you. Gyms are less valuable in most 60+ zones, but with Gymystic the maps (including voids) get really easy in zones 75 and 100 (and I assume 125, but I’m not there yet).
I just bought the last Exotic Imp-ort. Now what should I spend bones on?
Bone Portals, from what I’ve read. I have enough to buy one but I think I’ll wait for awhile.
I’ve been saving mine up with the intent of buying heirlooms once I reach zone 201.
Portals don’t quite seem worth it when I can get much more helium from a good daily challenge, but mostly I don’t like them because I can always get more helium for the bones if I wait a while longer, while heirlooms eventually max out. 
But if you buy bone portals now, you can spend the helium on perks that increase your speed of helium accumulation. Ok, it won’t get you heirlooms, but that’s my philosophy on buying bone portals fairly soon after I get enough bones for them. As I type this I’m on a Crushed run since it offers the highest amount of helium for where I’m at outside of the daily, as the daily doesn’t count towards bone portals. I’ll probably be buying two portals immediately after, depending on how well the presimpts drop bones.
Coordinated seems really, really expensive, at least at the level of helium I have, compared to the minuscule benefit it has per level. I can get a lot more perks that actually help me all the time for the amount I would need to spend to get a 25% attack/health boost 2% of the time. Or am I misunderstanding what exactly it does? Yes, once I get enough helium that the other perks aren’t as efficient it will be a quite nice way to use helium, but it might be awhile before that happens.
Probably, or you’re underestimating how much reducing the scaling factor of coordination adds up over a run. Let me give a very concrete example. Right now in my current run I have 111 coordination upgrades. The size of my battle group, with 8 levels of Coordinated, is 8.11B. Without any levels of Coordinated, it would have to have been 192B. So in other words, my trimps are fighting as if they were a force more than twenty times as large. Putting that amount of helium (1.22M) in direct health or attack wouldn’t have gotten me even a doubling of power, I don’t think.
Fair warning though: the very first level of Coordinated was underwhelming. By the time I got to the end of that run I think I had only one extra coordination. But the way coordinations round the number of trimps up every step means there are boundary effects that make some levels of Coordination more or less powerful than others, and I think the first one is one of the least useful ones; the effect was very noticeable even with just two levels.
Correction: 1.22M is the cost of my next level of Coordinated. Total spent is 3.58M.
Yes, it does make some amount of sense to avoid buying Coordinations while on Electricity, as the amount that your breed timer increases is greater than 25% (a consequence of exponential breeding) while your damage output goes up only 25%. Thus, if your Trimps are dying at the same speed (5 hits), it doesn’t help to get more Coordinations. However, eventually you can get enough Nurseries that you can keep the breed timer to below 2 seconds, which is about how long the Trimps last at max Agility. It is rather annoying right after the planet breaks when you’re severely hurting for more breed speed to have to decide while you’re not actively playing between reading useless Coordinations and not reading the very important Mega-Resource books.
I personally found it not particularly hard, although like all the helium challenges I didn’t try them until I could comfortably get to the end point of the challenge while unencumbered. Eventually you’ll get to level 100 and the daily will be far more lucrative though, although you’ll want to do one long run with Electricity for the size of your Bone Portal until you get Crushed. My best Electricity portal was 150k, and now after finishing the challenge part of Crushed I’m over 400k (though much of that is the bonus from finishing Scientist V) and looking to see how long I can push this run.
I guess I don’t see how .98 ^ 8 even comes close to 8.11/192, so even with boundary effects there’s something about the calculation I don’t understand.
Ok, I guess the 2% reduction must apply for every Coordination book? That is, the next level always takes (.98 ^ Coordinated level ) * 1.25 * the amount that it took to read the previous book, not just (.98 ^ Coordinated level ) * 1.25 * the amount it originally took before applying Coordinated. I assumed it was the latter.
The perk doesn’t apply to the size of your fighting group directly, it applies to the increase from the upgrade. So with eight levels of the perk, each coordination upgrade increases the size of my fighting force by 25% * 0.98^8 = 21.269%. This means that after 111 coordinations, my fighting group is approximately (1.21269/1.25)^111 = 0.035 times smaller. The rounding at each step means the actual fighting group size multiplier is 0.042 instead, but I’d call that good enough.
On preview: yes, exactly.
I bought golden maps once, it’s decent but not dramatic. I may do that again when I do a multi-RL-day deep dive. I’m letting the bones mostly stack up, but from what I understand the Toxicity and later the Lead challenges the way to go if you’re planning to buy portals from the bone trader. They’re both said to be competitive with the better challenges in terms of helium gained, plus the bone trader would give you the full amount with the multiplier, unlike a daily.
I’m about to start on a Toxicity run, to be followed by heading deeper (currently deepest for me is Z171.) Toxicity gives a x3 multiplier base, but the stacking buff can also give another +225% on top of that, for a total of 975% (like a +875% daily). The downside is you’d have to attack 1500 times in each zone to get your buff up to that multiplier. Lead is simpler, 3.5x for everything, plus all even zones have that doubled to 7x. Also competitive with the better dailies (assuming that’s the approximate depth you’re doing dailies to.)
Well, I didn’t have it quite right in my formula, but I did figure it out to be what you mentioned after buying it and trying to reconcile my calculations with what I was seeing. I was applying the .98 ^ X to the entire amount, not just to the 25% increase, which made it seem a whole lot better. It’s not quite as good as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still decent.
The reason I thought the decrease didn’t just apply to the amount that it was increasing is that the perk says that it decreases the number of Trimps needed to read each level, not decreases the amount of the increase.
I’m baffled by this explanation. Decrease the amount of increase? Say what?
I’ll give it a shot…
Normally, when you buy a level of coordination, the number of Trimps in your fighting group increases by 25% (rounding up) from however many Trimps were in your fighting group before the purchase. Similarly, the attack, block, and hp of your forces scales up with this +25%, as does the number of total Trimps required to purchase the next level of Coordination.
Now, what Coordinate does is multiply that +25% by .98 to the power of whatever level Coordinate is at, except for the attack, block, and HP which continue at the original +25% bonus amount.
So, with Coordinate 12, instead of +25% more Trimps each level of Coordination requires only 25% x (.98[sup]12[/sup]) = +19.6% (rounded up) more than the previous level did. I use Coordination 12 as an example because that’s where it crosses the +20% threshold and is therefore a sort of milestone.
Ignoring the rounding, this is effectively lowering the base of the exponential growth. Coordination 100 was 1.25[sup]100[/sup] Trimps, with Coordinate 12 it’s only 1.196[sup]100[/sup]. When you stop ignoring the rounding it gets trickier to calculate and is a bit more, but it’s still a big difference.
Boy, things are getting expensive. I have Syphonology and Coordinated now, and they’re pricey, while also trying to keep Carpentry at 50% of my helium.
Coordinated was where I broke with the 50% rule to sort of ‘50% after coordinated is bought’ rule. I’m spending a bit more total on coordinated than I am on carpentry at the moment, and I’m not even up to the Truth guide’s suggestion that I should buy coordinated until each level costs 2-3x a level of Carpentry.
Siphonology is an oddball, though it’s a short-term problem as you can only buy three levels of it so over time it’ll become a small and ignored expense.