7393 meters. 93814 gold. After playing several games a day for about three weeks, I'm free.
My advice to anyone still trying to get the loot score: Combo is essential. However, keeping the combo is a lot more important than making it go up as fast as possible. Don't be afraid to just breeze over groups of enemies that are hard to navigate. And if you take a hit and lose your combo, just back off and play it safe until you pick up some more armor.
It stops getting harder past a certain point, so don't worry about the difficulty outpacing you.
It might help to do a couple long runs without worrying about loot, just to get a feel for all the set pieces. Having the flow of every level segment memorized makes things a lot easier on you.
Note: Near endgame when you have most upgrades and just need to get three stars on all the later levels, speed is essential. You want to get at least one plant on an energy well as Soon As Possible. This means you'll just be creating and destroying plants as soon as you have enough gold in order to get there before the crystal's first or second spawn.
The point being, that 200,000 coins is perfectly attainable under the current system, as long as you put in the time. Gold comes faster and faster as your combo gets higher. Don't need buffed gold gains or lower prices. Just need to git gud, then the gold comes easy.
Protip: Flame scroll is the best powerup. Second is Wind scroll, because it helps you keep your combo even if you mess up a little bit. Gold can be good if you can't sustain high combos, but coin pickups are completely dwarfed by combo rewards as the game wears on, rendering it almost useless. Lightning isn't very good either, as Goliaths and Sweepers are never placed in particularly difficult positions, and most of the time, going out of your way to kill a berserker is a waste of time.
Once you practice and get up into the thousands with your combos, you can easily get thousands of coins per run. Once you have most of the stages and level pieces memorized, it's pretty easy to sustain combos well into the thousands. At that point it's more just sustaining your attention as opposed to actual difficulty.
If you find yourself overjumping or double jumping often on accident, do a slide after every jump. It might be kind of annoying to start, and you can underjump into walls if you do it wrong, but it ends up giving you a lot more control over your positioning.
I think it's funny that even after all these years, this game is too convoluted for Kongregate to acknowledge it with anything other than a medium badge for having barely gotten into the game.
The only way to earn energy is by waiting. There is no way to purchase or exchange for it. You can increase energy gain rate by purchasing lepidoptera or extra nexuses (up to 5).
I dislike the fact that your clicks are rendered pretty much useless as the game carries on. Not only is the flat amount from leveling Cid utterly irrelevant past 1M DPS, but the paltry .5% DPS per click upgrades only increase your DPS by 10%, even at the blisteringly fast pace of 20 clicks/second.
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 "Anti-Idle: The Game"){kind=icon}
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It's an easy badge :P