Useless Distractions

[pxib]

Once you reach a particular size, and if you can find a quiet enough corner of the map, going around eating THE SPIKY GREEN THINGS IS almost pure profit. They're always "worth" however much a player of similar size would be... but there's a maximum number of pieces you're allowed to split into, and if you can reach it and still have a part larger than the spiky balls that park can eat them like free food. It's risky, but it's a nice way for a large blob to clear spike fields or for a medium blob to get some free food.

edit: I accidentally the whole object of the sentence.

[Xanthippe]

I've been having some fun with this playing FFA but feeding other players, which sometimes forms a team, and then playing cooperatively. Or not eating anyone on purpose but seeing how big I can get. This is a very fun distraction.

[lamaros]

I ended up playing this for six hours straight. It was fun, but something is clearly wrong with me.

[Ragnoros]

Nah. As has been bemoaned on this forum numerous times, modern games are broken messes. A few simple rules and a challenge to overcome is all it takes for a fine game.

[Pennilenko]

I need help. Somebody please help me.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Glad to know I'm not the only one still playing this but I'm no where near that level.  How many times have you ascended now?

[Pennilenko]

Just four times.

[Pennilenko]

[Merusk]

How many ascensions is that?

[Pennilenko]

How many ascensions is that?

4

With this current ascension, once I get all of my bats I will be able to really start socking away the expansions and what not, even without any bats purchased right now each swarmwarp gives me 3.3 days of time warp.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Holy crap!

I've ascended 3 times at home and 4 here at work but ain't anywhere near that level.  I've been slacking apparently.

[Samwise]

Um.

Meat
Meat is delicious. All of your swarm's creatures eat meat.
You own 1.15373e322 meat.
You earn 4.53402e319 meat per second.

Bat Mutation
Increases power of all abilities by 2,500.00%.
You own 1.00000 octillion bat mutations.

Warp Mutation
Increases Swarmwarp's power by 5,200.00%.
You own 1.00000 octillion warp mutations.

Clone Mutation
Increases Clone Larvae's maximum by 3,900.00%.
You own 1.00000 octillion clone mutations.

Lepidoptera Mutation
Increases energy generation by 100.00%. Creating more has diminishing returns, but increases this to a maximum of 100.00%.
You own 1.00000 octillion lepidoptera mutations.

Swarmwarp
Warp time around your swarm. Instantly travel into the future, gaining 14 days 8 hours of production. Does not produce energy.

Clone Larvae
You produce 588.044 nonillion larvae per second, allowing you to clone up to 61.1566 duodecillion larvae.

[Pennilenko]

Damn dude.

[RhyssaFireheart]

 

[IainC]

I'm on 16 or so ascensions now (I'm just grinding to the last cheevo which is 20 ascensions then I will close the tab forever). My Swarmwarp puts me about a year into the future.

My 'strategy' now is mostly caretaking to get to the next ascension point as fast as possible. To that end I prioritise spending Energy in industrial quantities. Here's how it generally goes after ascension.

Hatch drones and upgrade them as fast as I can (generally this is rapid-fire alternate clicking on the hatch maximum and faster drones buttons. Once I've hatched as many drones as I can without getting a faster drone increase each time (usually around a quinquillion). I hatch maximum queens. This unlocks about 140 levels of twinning for drones. I buy that, hatch maximum drones again and hide that notification. Then I do the same again with queens until I'm at about the same point as I was with the drones. Rinse and repeat all the way up the meat tree until Overmind IVs or so. This whole process takes me about 30 minutes. The only other things I'm buying are Nexi and hatchery upgrades. No territory units as it just means I'm clicking in multiple tabs.

Once I get to the 5th nexus (takes a couple of hours) I dump all my energy into lepidoptera. I then come back periodically a couple of times a day to dump everything into Lepidoptera, bats and lightbugs. I buy a couple of thousand of whichever at a time because I'm not concerned about diminishing returns, I'm concerned about spending energy as fast as possible and doing 50 Swarmwarps optimally (buying all the upgrades and hatching max units between each one) is way too much effort. Once I've got to Overmind VIs and the top of the meat tree, I buy all the upgrades for the territory units - this is usually level 50 or so for each and buy the max of a unit about 4 or so from the top of the list (I found that this gives the best territory gain for meat cost rather than just maxing out the top one). After about a day or so I've chewed through enough energy that I can ascend within my current energy bar limit. I wait for that and then repeat the whole exercise.

[Samwise]

Yeah, ascending as often as possible is pretty much the ticket.  The return on mutations in terms of larvae production alone is HUGE and only gets exponentially better.

[Bungee]

Yeah, ascending as often as possible is pretty much the ticket.  The return on mutations in terms of larvae production alone is HUGE and only gets exponentially better.

The thing I'm asking myself is how could the concept of the swarm simulator be used in a game people would actually pay money for? I find it's quite similar to what Diablo does when you start on a new difficulty level with a character that already beat the game on another difficulty level. But then you already beat the game by then whereas here you start anew to get farther along after that. Or maybe there already are some games and I just don't know them (really only been playing DotA 2 for 2 years now...)

[ezrast]

Adventure Capitalist has microtransactions, if that's what you mean. No idea if anybody actually buys them.

[Bungee]

Adventure Capitalist has microtransactions, if that's what you mean. No idea if anybody actually buys them.

No I was thinking more in terms of an actual "boxed" game like an MMO or w/e. You would basically "avoid" the grind by just starting your character all over again and choosing some perks which let you fly through the early game stuff faster and then eventually get by the roadblock much easier than if you had kept grinding up come XP/SP/... the vanilla way.

Edge of Tomorrow keeps jumping in my head, but that already had a shitty game made.

[IainC]

In case you are curious what 17 ascensions looks like, I'm about to ascend for the 18th time (20 minutes to enough energy).

[Samwise]

I'm surprised the game doesn't keep generating more Overmind tiers after VI.  I've gotten as far as Overmind II, with 9 ascensions.

[Trippy]

Kittens Game

Might want to skip if you don't like the idea of kittens starving to death in Winter.

[Samwise]

I managed to save my kittens by madly clicking through the first winter.    I'd recommend to others that you wait to build 50 catnip fields before building your first hut.

(edit) Ah, once you science up Agriculture you can make your kittens self-sustaining by assigning them to be Farmers.  I was wondering how the hell those catnip fields were going to scale.

[IainC]

I managed to save my kittens by madly clicking through the first winter.    I'd recommend to others that you wait to build 50 catnip fields before building your first hut.

(edit) Ah, once you science up Agriculture you can make your kittens self-sustaining by assigning them to be Farmers.  I was wondering how the hell those catnip fields were going to scale.

This one doesn't grab me. You need to be fairly hands on as there are events that you have to respond to, also you need to routinely assign your workers around as the seasons change - I wasn't able to make my guys completely self-sufficient and have a science and wood output at the same time, I had to stop one or the other every winter to make them farmers. But the game moves too slowly to grab my interest given the level of attention you need to devote to it.

[Samwise]

I haven't played it for that long (it does require you to pay attention to it a little more than an autoclicker type game, although I tend to miss most of the astronomical events) but I've found that if I put one quarter of my kittens on farming, and have sufficient storage, they'll harvest enough catnip the rest of the year to easily make it through winter.

[NowhereMan]

It definitely requires more attention for optimal results, for instance the best use of kittens is sticking a load on as farmers in Spring to gather lots of catnip quickly and just go off storage for winter. On the other hand just have 25% or so as farmers all year round and it'll probably be fine. I like the tech advances and other stuff though.

[Pennilenko]

All my kittens died. I went back to swarm simulator. Swarm never dies.

[Trippy]

You just feed them to each other.

[Pennilenko]

You just feed them to each other.

You joke about this, but that's going to be the human race in a hundred years.

[ezrast]

All my kittens died. I went back to swarm simulator. Swarm never dies.

I thought I'd clicked on the Pet Death thread and got really sad for a second.

[MahrinSkel]

Apparently, it's possible to keep going after all of your kittens die. So, I can tell you from experience that Master (whatever) has about twice the productivity as Dabbling. Damn it, ran out of Spices when i was right on the ragged edge of farm production (33 kittens being supported by 3 farmers with a margin of +1.92 at -90%)...and trying to maximize wood output by trading for Catnip, then converting.

--Dave

[IainC]

If you want to see what a swarm looks like after ascending 20 times and getting all the cheevos, here's my save data.

[NowhereMan]

Mostly just had the Kittens thing on in background at work but it's actually developing in, at least apparent, complexity. Or at least there are more numbers running in the background than you're aware of initially that you get to see as technologies unlock. I hadn't realised it tracks kittens' skill levels at jobs, the longer they do one the better they get. It only really matters if you unlock civil service and get a census, when you can start individually assigning specific kittens to tasks.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, it gets quite complex, but it's slow as fuck and it needs more instructions.


Edited to Add :  Holy fuck, I've had this running for a couple of days and got quite far and, sadly, don't wanna lose my progress.  Can anyone tell me how the save button works ?  Because I'm in an InPrivate IE Session and I really, really don't wanna replay two days worth.

[MahrinSkel]

Yeah, it gets quite complex, but it's slow as fuck and it needs more instructions.


Edited to Add :  Holy fuck, I've had this running for a couple of days and got quite far and, sadly, don't wanna lose my progress.  Can anyone tell me how the save button works ?  Because I'm in an InPrivate IE Session and I really, really don't wanna replay two days worth.

It will link to your DropBox account (you can also get the text string and re-import it later, which appears to be the only way to get it onto a different computer).

--Dave