- Most importantly, there are /two/ levels which have a negative money payout. If you're not paying attention and just go offline while playing those games, you can end up with hundreds of thousands or even millions of debt. At that point, the time needed to just get out of the debt is so insanely long that you're better off hard-resetting the game. /This should never happen/. Even if for some godforsaken reason you want to have a location have a negative money payout, at least make sure that the money can't go below 0, because otherwise you run the risk of this kind of scenario.
All in all, I have to give this game a 1/5, and that's just because it's actually functioning. There's just absolutely nothing 'good' about this game, while at the same time there are plenty of flaws.
Post 3/3
- All the upgrades to is increase your income, and the only thing to spend income up is more income upgrades. Now this sounds like a basic Idle game, and to some extent it is, but the thing is that /nothing else/ gets upgraded. You don't get improvements to clear rooms faster, either through clicking or through auto-workers. You do not get the ability to increase worker efficiency (less workers needed per room, or inversely the ability to assign extra workers to the same room for faster cleaning). You do not get to buy workers, though it's not like you ever need more than what you get anyway). You do not get to improve Tick Speed, et cetera. In short, the speed the game starts with is also the speed the game ends with, which is to say abysmally slow.
page 2/3
Aaaand Level 9 (Swampvillage) does it again; you have to pay for the honor of working there. This one is especially notable because while the Trash Payout is the highest, it's not even that much higher than the immediately preceeding one (500 versus 400, for reference). On that note though, considering I now need to clean a billion (yes, an actual billion) cities to get to the next stage, which according to my math would require almost a millennium on autoplay, I'm considering this game to be done.
So, what do we have in conclusion?
- The first stage of the game is for all intents and purposes identical to the last one. The only difference is the payout and the grid size. There's not even any real flavour changing; no colors, no special messages after the first unlocking, nothing. Sure, your payout per second increases, but...
1/2
EDIT: Actually, no, I found what's going on. The fourth area (The Junkyard) has a negative payout. You actually /lose/ money by working there. I am still going to assume that is a bug, because it is terrible design otherwise.
So... I don't know how it happened, but I just turned the game back on, and now I have negative 1547635 Money. With my current income being about 1.5 MPS, it will take just about 12 days to get rid of this deficit. So... Yeah. That's not supposed to happen.
From the looks of it, the production multipliers do not get completely reset upon Rebuilding. The visible number does, yes, but the game still remembers whatever the rank was before Rebuilding. Only when you attempt to buy another Production upgrade does the game go 'oh, wait, the Rank changed! Lemme fix that!' and changes the Production multipliers accordingly, which is why it looks like the Multipliers goes down upon buying something.
@romeolord I mean, I know /why/ it happens. I meant it more as in: "Why even program it that way in the first place". Like I said, if your soldiers die, you have recruit them all over again. The Gold Cost is negligible for the most part, but the DM cost is far more problematic. Given that I still only have a DM rate of only 14-ish per second, completely replenishing my army of ~250 Tier 1 units, ~250 Tier 2, ~150 Tier 3 and 3 Tier 4s just to where it was (which obviously was not enough, because otherwise they wouldn't have died in the first place) would take 16384/13 = 1260 seconds, or almost twenty minutes. And again, that's just to get back where I was, not to actually get past the boss that wiped everything.
On a more serious note: Dark Matter is WAY too big of a bottleneck in the early game. It's almost useless for mining units, where whatever the highest unlocked unit requires an exponentially increasing amount of the previous unit (that is, Rank 1 needs 100 of Rank 0, Rank 2 needs 1000 of Rank 1 and so on), which would be fine on its own, except you can't buy the previous rank at any reasonable speed, meaning the actual highest rank takes forever too. The same problem applies with soldiers, which too require ten times as much Dark Matter for each next level on top of an ever-increasing Gold Cost. Add this to how soldiers can be actually killed off (Why?!), requiring you to train them all over again, and end result is that the game quickly becomes really, REALLY slow.
There's one minor potential problem with the Auto-upgrade function, in that it also automatically purchases Special Features (that is, the first level of them, filling up a slot in the process). This isn't a problem anymore once you get all three slots unlocked, but before then you either will have almost all your Square Men with Rocket Launchers instead of the Vacuum, or you have to keep the autobuyer turned off for an insane amount of time.
Bug report: If Speed goes above a certain level (most likely with the help of the Speed Doubler powerup), the yellow Squareman starts to clip through walls when moving vertically if you are in Manual Mode. This includes the outer bounds of the field.
I like it. A decent sized Idle game with not too many walls, a balanced progression, just enough change over time to keep things interesting, not /just/ buttons to click to make numbers grow bigger faster, and an actual end to reach. Pretty nice, honestly.
(Also, I found an easter egg :P )
Actually, come to think of it, the Prestige is especially useless because it pretty much requires you to grind on the most valuable gem anyway, so by the time you can Prestige you have already finished the game anyway.
So, there are some serious balance issues here:
- The increase to Click Power is exponential (Roughly *1,1 the current value, meaning it about doubles every seven points), while the cost stays the same at only one Blue Point for each. What this means is that once you can break the green gem in a reasonable amount of time, you can quickly get an almost infinite amount of Click Power very fast. On that note, this also breaks the Click Power display, which is not at all designed to hold that big a number.
- The Autohitters suffer from the exact opposite problem: that is, their cost increases exponentially, while their DPS increase stays completely static.
- On that note, most of the Auto-DPS'ers are really weak for how much money they cost at any given time.
- The Prestige is useless, because you can easily reach the last thing without ever using it.
Bug report: If you click one of the Tap buttons, drag the mouse off (either intentionally or just by moving too fast), then release the mouse button, the flipper will stay stuck in the upright position as if you're still holding the button. It's easily fixed by clicking the same button again or by tapping the corresponding arrow key, but it's there.
@NormaTheNorman: The main reason I can see to not have automated Lobbying is how you need Political Favours to actually do any lobbying in the first place. Since the cost of PFs is constantly increasing, you'd want to make sure that you get as much oomph out of each PF as possible, which means you'd want to raise your Max Credibility first (Remember, each time you discredit rivals, you get a one-time bonus to your Readers equal to your current Credibility). If you had automation on during this time, you would keep burning PF points on weak Discredits while you could have used them later on for far more bonus Readers.
Of course, there's still the problem that this system in general scales terribly against the constant Readers you get from all written Articles anyway, but that's a different issue.
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No it doesnt and its fixed.