I don’t understand the slider on the housing generator. What’s the advantage to setting it below the maximum?
I think it’s because higher fuel capacity means you start overclocking later, which means a number of tauntimps will be essentially wasted. Given that tauntimps will make up most of your population towards the end of a run in the deep magma even if you’re overclocking the entire way, that can lead to lower final population. I don’t know what the optimal capacity is, but I stopped upgrading my capacity past 55 for that reason. The slider functions as a way to fix that issue for anyone that overleveled capacity.
Is anyone else finding that it just sits at the beginning of a zone until you hit the [Fight] button manually? And yes, I have AutoFight on.
Too weird.
It’s been a few months since I opened this last, but I’m pretty sure I’m running the Meditate Challenge2. Maybe it will normalize after I re-set?
I’ve not had that problem. The only thing I know of that would make the game wait to send a battle group while at full population is waiting for Anticipation to stack up. That sometimes happens at the start of a zone after a battle group is blown up by an Omnipotrimp, but that happens (at most) every five zones, and only if you had a group die shortly before killing the Omnipotrimp.
I’ve just reached zone 236 and the first bit of Nature. Hooray!
As I get deeper into Magma, how should I handle fuel vs. magmite?
I’ll repeat the advice I gave a few weeks ago.
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.
Spire VI. Between Ice and Fluffy, the enemy damage has been 0 throughout. Which you might think would be a good thing, but you’d be wrong. I’ve been on it for 463 hours now. Yep.
I’m to the point where I can’t make heads or tails of the orders of magnitude in the game. My damage is expressed in “Spa” my block in “Oog” and my health in “Uog.” The enemy health is in “Usp.”
I have no clue whatsoever how these orders relate to each other, beyond the empirical data that “Usp” is clearly substantially higher than “Spa.” Does anyone know of a site where I can look up the actual numbers and their abbreviations? Googling the abbreviations gets me nowhere.*
*Actually, the first hit it gets me is a job tracker for the University of Kentucky, which strikes me funny in a comédie noire sort of way.
I use alphabetic notation for numbers. Much easier to understand.
for example, I am right now on zone 365 on my current run. I have :
7.57 ao max health
460 ap block
157 al max damage
current enemy has:
6.27 ak max health
233 al max damage
al is a thousand time greater than ak. That tells me that my damage will totally destroy his health, and carry through to destroy the next cell. Far easier to understand the relative strengths that way.
You can just use normal numerical notation instead. Settings > Layout, upper-left option. Sounds like you’re on “Standard Formatting”.
After 588 hours I’m finally on the last cell. Unfortunately I had been running AutoTrimps which used fluffy in zone 699, so there’s no help for it. If I get through this cell in less than two days I’ll be chuffed.
Grim determination is never the best strategic approach to an idle game, but this time I’m just set on finishing. :rolleyes:
I’m into the 240s now and I’ve managed to start collecting poison tokens. Another run or two and I’ll be able to start farming wind and ice tokens as well. What’s the best way to invest them?
They don’t do much at first, but eventually they’ll be a big deal. I like to keep the Empowerment and Transfer levels about the same for each type of Nature. Don’t convert from one type to another just yet.
The Ice is going to be really nice to have. As you level up, the only enemies in Ice zones that will hurt you are Sharp. At some point Ice will be high enough that there’s no further benefit to upgrading; you deal 99.99% more damage and take 99.99% less damage, vs you deal 99.999% more damage and take 99.999% less damage. By then you should have enough Masteries to efficiently convert excess Ice into Poison or Wind.
In late-late game, you’ll want to collect some sweet weapon prestiges before completing each Poison region. Right now I’m at Zone 540 (Poison) farming a level 560 bionic map for prestiges. My Poison is 1000x my Attack. Those prestiges will hopefully carry me to Zone 551 where the next Poison kicks in, and then I’ll run Voids in Zone 555.
Personally, I focused on empowerment at first, then after a while started keeping my transfer rate at half my empowerment level, then after I hit empowerment 60/transfer 30 I put everything into transfer rate until it was maxed. There’s a table on the wiki page that suggests maxing transfer rate when you have empowerment 36, for some calculation of maximal efficiency. I don’t think it’ll make too much difference as long as you eventually max transfer rate.
For ice, I stopped upgrading it at level 100, because it’s a nice round number. That’s way more than needed. The way to think about it is this: sharp corrupted enemies reduce your HP by 20%. If each attack applies an ice stack that reduces damage by significantly more than 20%, the enemy attack will decrease faster than your health, and even sharp enemies will take many minutes to kill you.
Right. This is when I really started moving much higher with every run. Whenever you are in Poison try to leap-frog up the next few Bionic maps. Then you can just go to bed and leave the Trimps to catch up with their equipment level while you sleep. 
So my strategy for Magma thus far has been to try to wean myself off Geneticists (I’m at about 600 right now whereas pre-Magma I’d have about 1000 at 230) so that I can make it further into the run before I run out of affordable Nurseries (which seems to max out at about 2000 for me.) Is that a sound strategy going past the 240s? What’s the best way to cope once I run out of nurseries and have to start cutting geneticists to keep my breed time reasonable?
Huh, I never got a notification mail for your post, Smapti. Considering no one else replied either, maybe the mail system was down when you posted.
Anyway, yes, you’ll have to make do without nurseries eventually. The key thing is to keep upgrading the generator and Coordinated and Carpentry perks. You will eventually start getting so much population you can buy all your coordinations and have your fighting group stay a small fraction of your population. At that point the large ratio between your fighting group size and your population size is what will give you space for geneticists.
Got my first ethereal shield at 0.8% chance ( Z165 ish) 400 crit damage, 70% trimp block, 200% trimp attack and 246% player efficiency (??) this was after filling the empty slot. Okay not brilliant but at my stage in the HZE 180 I’ll take !
I’m not going to swap the player efficiency as its too expensive so I will just use it until I get another.
Questions are wth is player efficiency? i thought efficiency was clock speed.
On an unrelated point, I had level 3 siphonology as per perky, but I don’t see any great benefit of it so am doing my current run without.
thoughts please?
Player efficiency is the bonus to Food, Lumber, Metal, or Science that you, the player, contribute when you select that resource. Once you’ve passed the early-game stage, it’s essentially negligible except when you have Turkimp, in which case you’ll get a huge bonus to whatever resource you’ve selected.
Siphonology basically makes it easier to stack up your attack multiplier. Let’s say you’re on Zone X. If you go to maps and complete Map X, then you gain 20% attack for as long as you’re on Zone X, which can make it easier for you to finish that Zone and proceed to Zone X+1. However, you only get this bonus if the map you’ve completed is the same level as the zone you’re on.
Each level of Siphonology, however, allows you to get that same bonus on a lower-level map. So if you have level 1 Siphonology, and you’re on Zone X, you can get that attack bonus by completing Map X-1.
I’ve found that Siphonology becomes less important as you get into the post-Spire realm, but by that point the Helium cost is negligible anyway.
Ah okay, thanks for that Smapti
I’ll pay close attention to this on my current run:)
Siphonology is very useful at the end of a run. You can run a map up to 10 times to get a 200% bonus in the World. If you are at, for instance, level 250 then siphonology will allow you to run a level 247 map to get that bonus. Well worth having. And pretty cheap, as I recall. You won’t save a significant amount of helium by not having it.
ETA - What Smapti said.