The late game balance is still off. Once you get over level 100 it gets hard to defeat people that are 10 levels lower than you. That's even using the gold trick to get better equipment than I would have not exploiting that. I understand that better mentors helps this out, but that's just going to shift the imbalance up a few levels, not really solve the problem that the enemies start gaining sharply faster than the player.
I would have gotten "sort by colors" with a lot less guessing if white was actually white. I kept trying to figure out what goes with gray. Why isn't it white? I get why black isn't true black but... why isn't white white?
macdjord, no it's not winnable without basically cheating by exploiting a bug in the chip creation. However you can get a lot higher rates than you were talking about. Use the narrowest board for maximum rates. You only need 2 multipliers per loop.
Well, can't even get past the first part of the tutorial. "Drag and drop the items onto the portraits"....OK... How exactly? Apparently it's impossible on Mac. Oh well, I give up.
To summarize:
1. Fix the bug where labs accept gold and break
2. Make it possible to win in less than 800 years without cheating
3. The tutorial needs to be clearer
4. Make it possible to pause the tick and edit
5. Make the "converters" all 1 output (not splitters) so we don't have to send gold back to our labs in the first place.
The average rate bounces around a lot, for example mine goes down by millions just because I moved the mouse over something. Maybe it would save some cycles to not draw the progress bar once programs start to run idle quickly. Maybe also add some smoothing to the average.
Some feedback: There needs to be a way to see how RAM and CPU affect idle processing. It's silly for RAM and CPU to be sitting at 0% while your programs are cranking away. Upgrading CPU and RAM often increase idle run speeds, but it's hard to tell what the effect is going to be since it's not clear how idle running programs are even using it. Basically we are shooting in the dark trying to figure out what the best program mix is and what to upgrade next, because only the programmer knows how all these things interact.
The only way to know what's optimal is to just uninstall things and reinstall things and then see what happens to your average rate.
Yeah it's only the beginning that's kind of a grind. Unfortunately a lot of people won't ever see the cooler stuff at the end because they will quit after 20-30 frustrating minutes. Just making the lowest candy worth 2 instead of 1 would help balance the early play without throwing off the later gameplay.
Also I don't know if you want to go in a more realistic direction in terms of ATC, but really the arrival pilots should enter a rectangular traffic pattern until cleared to land. If you did that, maybe get rid of clearing them to taxi since that's ground's job not ATC anyway.
It may take away from the gameplay, but it is annoying when planes taxi into each other on the far end of the runway. A pilot being told to expedite off the runway shouldn't punch it right into another plane taxiing in front of them.
If you do expand the game, I think you should retain some of your balls when you die. Like maybe you lose half every time you die. Or make it like sonic the hedgehog and all the balls fly out of you and you can scramble to recover some.
Fourbits: THELs are underpowered and expensive. He needs to make them stronger when fully upgraded considering their cost once you figure in the massive energy infrastructure.
Kimouru: I don't think the power lines limit the power transmission... but it's good to spread out your power in case the grid gets damaged.
 "Sword Fight"){kind=icon}
 "Exit/Corners"){kind=icon}
 "Idle Power"){kind=icon}
 "Idle Sword 2"){kind=icon}
 "Computer Evolution"){kind=icon}
 "Ching Chong Beautiful"){kind=icon}
 "Paladog"){kind=icon}
 "Into Space 3: Xmas Story"){kind=icon}
 "World Creation 2"){kind=icon}
 "Escape The Room"){kind=icon}
 "Airport Madness: Time Machine"){kind=icon}
 "Bloons Tower Defense 4"){kind=icon}
 "Balls in Space"){kind=icon}
 "Civilizations Wars"){kind=icon}
 "Infectonator : World Dominator"){kind=icon}
 "The Space Game: Missions"){kind=icon}
Pure white looks pretty icky in the puzzle screen. I'll try and lighten it up a bit, though, it IS kinda dark.