Woohoo! I beat Spire IV! The first time I ever reached Z500 I cleared 5 rows of the Spire, and this was the second time.
It took 49 hours: an afternoon to reach 495, then ran map 501, then ran Bionic 515 overnight “Tier First”. Around 24 hours in, I finally had the Dagger from zone 511. Kept running Bionic until I had all zone 515 equipment.
Then on to zone 500, where I set my breed timer to an hour with all 5200 nurseries and waited for my full Magmamancer bonus. I’d overdone my Health - when I finally ran the Spire I was untouchable except with Corrupted Sharpness (not quit enough Fluffy to remove it completely). And then a night of grinding through rows 9 and 10, and probably 10 hours chipping away at the last Echo.
There’s an Achievement for clearing it in 48 hours. Maybe in a couple weeks I’ll try again. I have Balance C2 active on this run, and I bet I could shave off a couple hours with a different challenge or with no challenge.
Making my first forays into Magma now. Any advice for when I should start worrying about collecting Magmite instead of working on my population? Also, how much effort should I put into buying Magmamancers?
I think you should do several runs gathering nothing but Magmite. Use it to buy Efficiency upgrades, which will increase housing per tick. When you’ve done that, you can start by gathering fuel, then switch when the tank is full. Don’t try to save Magmite, you’ll lose 30% on portal.
In your first few runs through the magma, megamancers will only make a tiny difference. You have to wait 2 hours for them to take full effect, and they only add a few percent. As you progress, they become more and more useful.
I’m in a similar boat. I’ve had this running for many months now, have about 5.4M all-time helium with 45 portals, 266% extra damage from achieves, and perks set to Perky’s recommendation for level gain. I’ve done all the available challenges that don’t require days of micro-managing (e.g. “Life”). I still grind to a halt at around level 135, and even getting there takes 3-4 days. Getting to 145 took me over a week. It seems like I’ve been stuck at more or less this same state for at least two months, getting just incrementally better and collecting helium. But I see people here talking about getting to 500+ in an afternoon. At my current rate, I expect I’d be at that level in about a decade.
I can’t help but think I’m missing some major advancement mechanism.
You’re not portaling often enough. Do the dailies, and portal every day - even if that means portaling at level 90. You’re wasting a lot of time on incremental grinding.
Agreed. In the approaching two years I’ve been at this, I’ve done week-long runs exactly twice, and runs of length 3-5 days maybe 4 or 5 times. The vast majority of my runs have been one or two days long. They were two days long when I first started playing since there was a lot of micromanagement involved and having the trimps mind themselves during longer grinds optimised the use of my personal time, though not my progress rate. Since unlocking enough automation that it’s practical, I’ve done mostly one-day runs.
Knowed Out, I don’t know if that advice is applicable to your situation, but doing daily challenges is a good way of increasing helium gain.
I’ll try that. What should I be spending my helium on? – all the “big” ones are up to the point now where they take multi-hundred-K helium investments to improve.
All of them are doable. The trick is to run each one of them quickly. Stop as soon as it becomes a grind. Then move onto the next. You might only pick up about two or three percent from each of them, but after running them all that will give you a 45% boost. Then you can run them again. The boost will be enough to carry you further and increase your bonus.
So you guys are saying once it gets to a long grind, portal and take a Daily? Makes sense I guess. I just feel like I keep spinning into the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
It’s only worth grinding if you are close to getting an Achievement or other bonus. If you’re at level 158, then grinding to finish 160 is worthwhile. If you’re at 162 then grinding to get to 165 is pointless.
As I get into Magma, how should I deal with the loss of my Nurseries? I’ve only made it a zone or two in so far before portaling, because I’m focusing on magmite and helium at the moment. I feel like I should be firing my Geneticists to get my breed time back to 30 seconds, but that means shrinking my health even deeper in addition to the overheating effect. Should I be investing more in lumberjacks so I can build more nurseries? Or should I be pumping more of my helium into Power and Toughness?
Early in the magma, you just have to accept the loss. When you get a bit further, don’t build nurseries at all until the last few zones. Only build as few as you need to stay fast. Save as many as you can for later. Only build more when you start to slow down.
