Oh, and I’ll be running metal maps instead of my usual gardens, and will probably splurge on golden maps for the Metal challenge2. Oh, and I’ll bump up Looting a few points to near where it would be in a non-challenge2 run. (I respecced out of several points of looting for challenge2, as there’s no helium looting during the challenge part of the run so it’s proportionally much less important)
It’s difficult to remember when I did what, but I don’t think I had a long-lasting slump buying the early levels of Coordinated. How many levels of the perk do you have, what’s your total helium, and about how much do you pull in from a standard run?
499k total, 0 levels, and about 80k per run right now, though I’m trying to work to change that.
Well, in that case a good daily should let you get the first two levels or nearly (possibly with the help of some respeccing), which should get you a noticable boost. Unfortunately the current two look pretty miserable, but maybe the next one? And there’s a minor boost waiting for you at zone 125, and two very worthwhile challenges at 130, so there are gains to be made in the foreseeable future.
What do you spend all that Food on early on?
(maxlevel 191 perspective here) Tribute, for gems, which in turn are primarily for collectors/warpstations. All production (including drops) scales with population, so anything that increases your population helps everything else with positive feedback.
I have enough metal and wood just running garden maps and from zone loot (though if I want to fiddly micromanage I’ll sometimes make some extra wood for huts/houses at like level 9, since I don’t do any maps until 15 or now 18, but often I’ll not bother anymore.)
So what do you do before you get tributes? I know it’s only a couple minutes to blow through those early zones, but do you just let the Food accumulate?
I do let food accumulate some, usually I’m buying 160-220 tributes immediately when they unlock. It’s only a few minutes, as you point out.
Probably obviously, I will go ahead and use food to buy huts/houses and then slightly later, explorers in anticipation of gateways.
I will go ahead and buy mansions, hotels, and resorts when they unlock with those gems, too, so it’s not like there are no early uses for gems.
A thought about challeng[sup]2[/sup]'s
The first two I ran up to z150 for 20% bonus each. It took well over a day each.
The third I ran to z70 for 7% bonus. Only took 100 minutes. I plan to do the same with the rest of them. That will get me3 a pretty big bonus fairly quickly. I can go back later and run them all the way, and it will be much easier with the bonus.
How many of the early housing units are you usually buying? I find I can easily get through the Wormhole with only 10-20 of each, but is it better to accumulate a lot of worker trimps early on?
Usually 50-70. You can do it with 0, as in the challenge, but more population is more production, so why not buy some? Well, except no wormholes, and one less than however many gateways I can afford until level 50, where I suddenly no longer care 
Makes sense. I’ve been spending one day each, but partly that’s just because that fits within my play time reasonably. Sometimes I’ll let it run an extra day if I don’t feel like doing another run immediately, but basically that’s just minor He and DE from a few, slow late levels.
I usually go for 100 each of buildings from Huts to Resorts. Generally no more than 50 Gateways. Not sure why, just nice round numbers I guess.
I don’t like portaling and having to babysit the game buying housing etc. I’d make a lot more helium if I portaled everyday, but it’s just easier to let the game run for a couple days.
You guys who portal everyday, are you using an autoplayer or something?
For me, the outright most addictive game on the Internet is the slither.io game.
No, seriously. Go on there and play it. It’s fucking fun as well, as addictive as fuck.
link?
Fun for a few minutes.
Right now I’m farming for helium in the z120 range, and I find that it takes me about 8-10 active hours of playtime to make it there at this point. I don’t use any outside tools - just the AutoStorage and AutoUpgrade you get from challenges, and I let it run in the background while I’m tooling around online.
I managed to unlock a few of the Bionic Wonderland cheevos on my last run, which along with the Robotrimp has given me a nice boost to damage.
What’s everyone think of the Golden Upgrades? I’ve just been going with Battle thus far - I haven’t been lacking in void maps, and at about 500k Helium per run, the Helium upgrade looks negligible to me.
I always get battle, unless I’m doing a Daily Challenge with a fat helium bonus, in which case I go for helium.
Golden Upgrades start out negligible, but become more important the further you progress.
I’ve got >600% achieves, and the GU’s now come every 35 zones. I can get to z180 or so, so that’s five GU’s.
The bonuses are cumulative. If I get the helium bonus (1% per level) then after z140 it’s a 10% bonus, and at z175 it’s a 15% bonus. That’s worthwile on a daily challenge.
Yeah, helium if I’m doing a helium challenge, otherwise battle seems like the most sensible thing to me.
One thing to consider is how the growing golden upgrade bonus interacts with the different upgrade types. For battle, I don’t care that I only get a 0% or 3% or 9% bonus in the early parts of the run, since I’m flying through the zones at maximum speed anyway. The important thing is that I have 45% during the part where I have to stop and grind for prestiges and population, first for a few minutes at a time, then eventually an hour or more.
For helium, it’s similar: the exponentially growing helium drop rates means that most of the helium drops are concentrated in the part of the run where your bonus is larger. But void map drop rate is flat. The part of your run when the bonus is low counts as much as the part where it’s high. More actually, since for the last ten zones or so running void maps is no longer feasible, so any further drops at that point are wasted. And even if I got the full bonus at the start of the run, it would still only add up to roughly one extra map per run. So it doesn’t really ever seem worth it.
I just got my first ethereal heirloom, and it really sucks. It has almost every single one of the modifiers I didn’t want.
11.2% crit chance
400% crit damage
128% player efficiency
150% trimp health
And it costs 2400 nullifium to replace a stat on ethereals, so I feel like that’s probably not going to happen. On a related note, what is going on with the shield drops? On average I probably get four shields for every staff, which seems weird.