The proof is in the pudding
March 20, 2014 8:47 AM   Subscribe

 
This is pretty much how Wall Street makes money.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 8:54 AM on March 20, 2014 [6 favorites]


Opera is giving me a fraud warning on the link.
posted by Dr Dracator at 8:55 AM on March 20, 2014


noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 9:08 AM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]


NOW I AM A JOBS CREATOR!!!11!
posted by PROD_TPSL at 9:08 AM on March 20, 2014 [5 favorites]


When do I get cookies?
posted by fight or flight at 9:14 AM on March 20, 2014 [4 favorites]


Watching this money accrue all by itself is way more escapist for me than Ultima Online ever was.
posted by postcommunism at 9:17 AM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]


The proof of the pudding is in the eating. That is the proper phrase. Sorry, just feel like this is one we're going to lose if we're not vigilant.
posted by oneironaut at 9:45 AM on March 20, 2014 [20 favorites]


Looks about right - the more money you have, the more money you can make, and the less effort it takes. It would be great if perhaps 1 out of every 100 people who load the page was "born" with a great deal of capital, to the point where you could just sit back and watch the millions roll in without ever having to click anything.
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 9:51 AM on March 20, 2014 [5 favorites]


Oceanjesse, I was just about to send you a link to this. And then I saw it was you who discovered this. :D
posted by zscore at 9:53 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


I've just stuck it on Ian Bogost's Facebook wall. Am expecting to be FB unfriended within the hour.
posted by Wordshore at 9:59 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


With a small amount of javascript knowledge you can hack your way to quintillions in a matter of seconds.
posted by stephencarr at 10:07 AM on March 20, 2014


with a small amount of Chrome's inspect element I can change your username to 'cheater'

(ps do I buy a postdoc or hold out for that sweet sweet combinatorics)
posted by postcommunism at 10:14 AM on March 20, 2014


postdoc; combinatorics by itself doesn't get you money
posted by fragmede at 10:21 AM on March 20, 2014


n+1 tier items tend to surpass n tier items. But definitely get a revenue stream before creating proofs because they ain't free.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:21 AM on March 20, 2014


The proof of the pudding is in the eating. That is the proper phrase. Sorry, just feel like this is one we're going to lose if we're not vigilant.

Omg, that makes way more sense than "the proof is in the pudding." Proof of what? Why is it in the pudding? Shouldn't we take it out?
posted by aka burlap at 10:24 AM on March 20, 2014


The mathematicians cost a fortune and are of severely diminishing utility. I'm saving up for a second Wiles.
posted by jeather at 10:25 AM on March 20, 2014


I own 19.06K mathematicians, and my Tick length is 704 ms.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:35 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


14.81k manual clicks later, I have discovered not one, but two Algebras.
posted by ikalliom at 10:45 AM on March 20, 2014


Ugh I hate that I don't know when to save/buy. And I don't want to click at all.
posted by bbqturtle at 10:49 AM on March 20, 2014


Is it just me or do 2nd derivatives only add a 1st derivative every 10 ticks, not 5?
posted by JauntyFedora at 10:51 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


The 2nd Derivative says it gives you 1 1st Derivative every 10 ticks, but I'm getting one every 10 observed ticks on both Mobile Safari, Safari, and Firefox. Anyone else?
posted by egypturnash at 10:52 AM on March 20, 2014


Digging into the source, I find that this runs every time through the game loop:


//does stuff every five ticks
if(update.count === 10){
inventoryAdder();
update.count = 0;
}

//does stuff every 60 ticks
if(update.count2 === 60){
save();
moneyButtonClick(player.upgrades[4]);
update.count2 = 0;
}


And inventoryAdder() is of course a function that runs through the list of what you're supposed to get every five ticks and gives you new ones. So yeah, all the "does X every five ticks" buttons actually sell you things that do X every ten ticks.
posted by egypturnash at 10:56 AM on March 20, 2014 [4 favorites]


Monkeypatching javascript functions is exactly the sort of innovation in the derivatives market that odious government regulation seeks to stifle!
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 11:09 AM on March 20, 2014 [6 favorites]


I downloaded an auto-clicker app (they're easy to find on google) ever since I realized that I'm horribly addicted to these clicking games... yes, it's cheating... but these games are cheating me out of my life so it's all fair game. With an auto-clicker you can satisfy your urge to complete all the achievements in hours, instead of days!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:21 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


I... don't understand this 'game' at all.

Can someone ELI5 it for me?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:52 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


I loaded up on high schoolers and 1 grad student as I got started, then dumped everything into derivatives. Set it and forget it. Each tick is garnering me > $15K now, while a single click is of vanishingly small worth in comparison $7.50).

Eventually, I'll get some of those sweet tick accelerator guys.
posted by ursus_comiter at 11:52 AM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


Once you get one of the 4th generation things, just keep saving for those. I'm pretty sure it always makes sense.
posted by bbqturtle at 12:00 PM on March 20, 2014


Don't neglect the "upgrades" tab. There's a relatively affordable autoclicker, and the percentage-based tier upgrades make a big difference once you can afford them.
posted by mstokes650 at 12:01 PM on March 20, 2014


big difference

I'm not sure my 1% increase on my 10-20 of 1.01M undergrads is worth 1B... but for level 4, definitely!
posted by bbqturtle at 12:03 PM on March 20, 2014


The upgrades only multiply by the number of items you've hand-bought, but the outcome is applied to everything, including items you've generated from higher-level items. So it's worth it to buy lower-level guys to increase your multiplier.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 12:06 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


Ah, autoclicker! Now a post-doc seems rather attractive.
posted by ursus_comiter at 12:08 PM on March 20, 2014


I'm not sure my 1% increase on my 10-20 of 1.01M undergrads is worth 1B... but for level 4, definitely!

The wording is a little ambiguous, but all of your 1.01M undergrads (and all your other Tier 1 stuff) is improved, the amount they're all improved is based on the number of Tier 1 things you've manually bought. e.g., manually buying 100 high schoolers improves all of your tier 1 buildings by 10%. I bought enough stuff manually that my 1st-tier derivatives make $0.07 a click instead of $0.05...it's a pretty big difference.

on preview, BuddhaInABucket was faster with the enlightenment (but what else would you expect?)
posted by mstokes650 at 12:10 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


How do you get proofs I'm so confused
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:10 PM on March 20, 2014


I don't know why I am doing this, but I am doing the shit out of it.
posted by mullacc at 12:15 PM on March 20, 2014 [18 favorites]


How do you get proofs I'm so confused

You buy a combinatronics.
posted by bbqturtle at 12:22 PM on March 20, 2014


I am getting ~30B$ per tick and still seem no nearer to getting a Gödel. As for a Reimann? Feh.
posted by motty at 12:38 PM on March 20, 2014


I know that there are a lot of incremental games out there, but I picked this one to share because I thought it was totally dorky, and you don't really see a game mechanic like "buy this thing that buys this other thing that buys this other thing" in other incremental games.
posted by oceanjesse at 12:40 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


"buy this thing that buys this other thing that buys this other thing"

I would have enjoyed it a lot more if there was a chart with the increasing exponential growth over time, that scales down as you see fit, and you can watch it grow different amounts as you buy/upgrade different things.

And then the log could be told to you when you buy it to help make purchasing decisions. And they could integral the chart to show you your total money. And the actual money/over time chart should be more than exponential...

And then, for 50 Qu$, you could buy another chart. And then buy a thing that buys charts for you.
posted by bbqturtle at 12:44 PM on March 20, 2014 [7 favorites]


This is an improvement on progress quest. I went for a walk after getting some 4th derivs and came back to enough money for an algebra, then the whole thing kinda takes off. Be careful with algebras; the cost/proof is actually cost/proof/tic, so you can't decrease the upkeep by spending proofs.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 12:45 PM on March 20, 2014


Wow, those upgrades are worth it. I'm at a 3.124 multiplier for the first tier, and each new one I buy increases my per tick by about 100k.
posted by jeather at 12:46 PM on March 20, 2014


An nice reminder that when you're in logarithm land, everything looks like a line...
posted by dilaudid at 1:02 PM on March 20, 2014 [3 favorites]


The proof of the pudding is in the eating

It's the pudding that proves the brulé
posted by zippy at 1:03 PM on March 20, 2014 [5 favorites]


It turns out that Qt is between Qa and Sx. (trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion.) Riemann remains distant.
posted by advil at 1:29 PM on March 20, 2014


Huh. I can't speak for the others yet, but the '3rd Derivative' item actually only seems to increase your 2nd Derivative total every ten ticks, instead of every five like it claims.
posted by JHarris at 1:54 PM on March 20, 2014


If the proof is in the pudding, I'm hoping that it's wrapped in foil.
posted by bonehead at 2:06 PM on March 20, 2014


I have this idea for the ultimate click game.

There's a number, 0 on the screen, and beneath it a button.

You click once, it turns into a 1. You click again, it goes up to a million. Click one more time and it changes to an infinity symbol.

Now you can play again! Even more fun!
posted by JHarris at 2:06 PM on March 20, 2014


Finally got a Gödel. It can be done.

Up to ~500B$ per tick with 10 4th Derivatives, 10 Algebras, 10 Factory Architects and 10 Postdocs.

I also have ~30K mathematicians and tick length is still > 700ms.

I'm not sure a Reimann is going to happen any time soon.

I'm beginning to think this may be the point, though the joke, if there is one, eludes me.
posted by motty at 2:12 PM on March 20, 2014


I have just over 30k mathematicians and I'm just under 700ms tick time.

Just spent what would have been my first Godel money on a tier 4 upgrade instead.
posted by postcommunism at 2:16 PM on March 20, 2014


I got under 600ms with around 2.1M mathematicians, with an 8.9x tier 1 modifier (not sure if that affects mathematicians or not). I'm sure a Riemann is possible but there's not much more to do interactively at this point in the game, so I may not make it.
posted by advil at 2:24 PM on March 20, 2014


p.s. for those of you new to and/or mystified by this game/genre, try either candy box 2 or a dark room for similar addictive mechanics but deeper gameplay...
posted by advil at 2:26 PM on March 20, 2014


I would have enjoyed it a lot more if there was a chart with the increasing exponential growth over time, that scales down as you see fit, and you can watch it grow different amounts as you buy/upgrade different things.

You mean like Dripstat?
posted by oceanjesse at 2:29 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


I think if I had to do it all over again, I would just stick with the Derivative/Combinatorics/Computer columns and just wait it out.
posted by oceanjesse at 2:33 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


oceanjesse: I think if I had to do it all over again, I would just stick with the Derivative/Combinatorics/Computer columns and just wait it out.

But the HS Student column has the most value for money when you buy them to improve the multiplier upgrades.
posted by JauntyFedora at 2:38 PM on March 20, 2014 [3 favorites]


I'm trying a single click strategy with no high schoolers because I have no intentions on supporting underachieving students.
posted by vuron at 2:42 PM on March 20, 2014 [5 favorites]


Also, is this really trying to make a political statement like some people are implying with their comments? Derivative has a different meaning from the financial world when it comes to mathematics, and a lot more relevant given the other columns of purchases.
posted by JauntyFedora at 2:42 PM on March 20, 2014


I at first thought it was mocking clickers in general, i.e. "a derivative clicker game."
posted by postcommunism at 2:44 PM on March 20, 2014 [6 favorites]


So I seem to have some of everything but I haven't budged the cost/proof. Is there some way to reduce it?
posted by Mitheral at 2:51 PM on March 20, 2014


The odd part of this thing is that the prices of the individual devices spike so quickly that there never is the sort of runaway exponential growth that I'd expect this to demonstrate. Instead, you get to 85 postdocs and a couple Riemanns, and you find that it still takes a few minutes between purchases.

I may or may not have programmed a macro with xautomation to just click the damn thing a few hundred times per second.
posted by fifthrider at 2:59 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


You have polynomial growth competing with exponential growth. After a short while, no matter the clicks, things will become expensive enough that you have to wait.
posted by Hactar at 3:13 PM on March 20, 2014 [3 favorites]


I just want... one... Georg Riemann.... dammit...
what am i doing
posted by Baby_Balrog at 5:00 PM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]


Also, is this really trying to make a political statement like some people are implying with their comments? Derivative has a different meaning from the financial world when it comes to mathematics, and a lot more relevant given the other columns of purchases.

A financial derivative is not a mathematical derivative, but the latter are used to model the former with differential equations, so they do coincidentally end up closely tied w/ Black-Scholes and all that.

The whole theme of applying "derivatives," money, computers, clicks, and mathematicians to make more money is apposite.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 5:17 PM on March 20, 2014


oceanjesse: “I think if I had to do it all over again, I would just stick with the Derivative/Combinatorics/Computer columns and just wait it out.”
vuron: “I'm trying a single click strategy with no high schoolers because I have no intentions on supporting underachieving students.”
I started over to a single click because I don't want to wear out my fingers clicking.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:30 PM on March 20, 2014


The proof of the pudding is in the eating. That is the proper phrase.

Only if you're a time-traveller from the distant past. "The proof is in the pudding," in use since the 1920s, is by far the more popular form. It doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense, but idioms rarely do.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:18 PM on March 20, 2014 [2 favorites]


Maybe I should have titled this post "the derivative is in the proof."
posted by oceanjesse at 7:22 PM on March 20, 2014


all these clicky games are blatant puppet orgs funded by Big Mouse. wake up sheeple
posted by threeants at 7:42 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


BuddhaInABucket: The upgrades only multiply by the number of items you've hand-bought, but the outcome is applied to everything, including items you've generated from higher-level items. So it's worth it to buy lower-level guys to increase your multiplier.

I'm not sure if anyone's noticed it upthread, but just in case:

The multiplier increases offered under the Upgrades tab increase production of a whole tier based upon the number of manually-purchased items within that tier.

But note! The count of manually purchased items is across all items in that tier! And the multiplier thus raised counts for everything in that tier!!

That is to say, if you've bought a multiplier upgrade for the first tier, and you've got the manual-purcahse 1st derivative cost up to something prohibitive, but you've neglected Computers (which cost proofs, not money), High School Students (which are easy to ignore because clicking is tiring) or Mathematicians (you hit diminishing returns rapidly with those), go back and buy them up manually. Watch the income-per-tick ratios for the other items in that row; they'll all increase as you buy them. This is easiest to notice with the Computers, but it affects all the categories.
posted by JHarris at 8:25 PM on March 20, 2014 [4 favorites]


You can double your income relatively cheaply that way, especially if you've already gotten up to the multi-trillion level without taking advantage of it.
posted by JHarris at 8:26 PM on March 20, 2014


Riemann will come out tomorrow.
Bet your net per tick that tomorrow, there'll be Riemann.
posted by ursus_comiter at 9:00 PM on March 20, 2014 [3 favorites]


My big roadblock in understanding this game is that the buttons are badly laid out. The fourth column should be between the first and second columns. It would represent the flow of the game better.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:00 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


Also I think the thing I love about this sort of game is the way they illustrate scale. Even when you're generating a lot of money or cookies or whatever per second, the incredible size of millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, and so on becomes plain.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:12 PM on March 20, 2014


The order of the math column is all wrong. It should be Algebra, Calculus, Combinatorics, Number Theory. According to Gauss, Number Theory is the queen.
posted by axiom at 9:18 PM on March 20, 2014


I'm in the peculiar hell of Only making $190 trillion a second.
posted by wotsac at 10:24 PM on March 20, 2014 [1 favorite]


Only if you're a time-traveller from the distant past.

(・_・ )

(;・_・)

(; ^ _ ^)_/¯        (゜o゜)?

posted by obiwanwasabi at 4:20 AM on March 21, 2014


I left this thing running overnight and still can't afford a Riemann, even getting 411B$ per tick.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 5:26 AM on March 21, 2014


I couldn't leave it running overnight, but at last gasp I was getting something like 20Qa per tick with sub 500 times and a Riemann was still (still!) nowhere on the horizon.

And why did I even want to keep going? I know that I would just click him and then I'd have one and that would be it.
posted by postcommunism at 5:31 AM on March 21, 2014


Jeez, I was clicking like mad last night but now clicks are basically worthless. I'm at 518.49B$ per click but net 2.37Qa$ per tick, and my tick length is down to just a little more than 500ms.

It's really fascinating because of all the things you can do. Once you buy the multipliers, it makes sense to crank each tier's manual purchases up to the nearest affordable multiplier given your current rate; that improves each item in the tier. So even though I have 12.10T 1st Derivatives, it's useful to buy more because I've nudged the money from 1st Derivatives up to 0.63$/tick from 0.05$/tick. Computers, which I'm getting most of my money from, are giving me 25$/tick and I have 108.77T of them. I keep buying Gödels to get time cranking down at a good rate, and look forward to getting Riemanns which should pretty much put the thing in overdrive.

It's fascinating to watch the 4th order effects, particularly in the flow from proofs to cash, where one chain is used to manipulate the other. The upgrades give you ways to distribute your money to make even more.
posted by graymouser at 6:46 AM on March 21, 2014


I'm at 5.15 Qa$ per tick and a tick interval of 499ms. With current reserves of 60 Qt$ my 700 B$ per click doesn't even register. Kind of sad really.
posted by Mitheral at 7:31 AM on March 21, 2014


Okay. I must set myself free from the destructive influences of the clicking game. The math has been going on in my head for far too long. It's lent, for God's sake.

Money: 73.66 Qt$ Proofs: 1.92 Qt
Money/tick: 21.00 Qa$ Proofs/tick: 406.35T
Net money/tick: 18.97 Qa$ Cost/proof: 5.00$
Money per click: 6.27T$
Tick length: 481 ms

Total money earned: 138.15 Qt$
Total proofs found: 2.68 Qt
Total clicks: 49.26K
Total manual clicks: 26.92K

posted by Baby_Balrog at 7:35 AM on March 21, 2014


I'm at 259 net Qa$ per tick, 5.58 Qa proofs and a click is worth 76T. I do buy a lot of students. I only have one Riemann -- I have to buy one more Sx$ upgrade and then I will just keep going with them because they amuse me.

I really want to look into the source code to see how the tick length changes because I have a 1st tier multiplier of over 10 and 33B mathematicians and a tick is still 445 ms.
posted by jeather at 8:01 AM on March 21, 2014


Ah. It's an exponential decrease based on the log of mathematicians.

player.updateInterval = 1000 * Math.pow(0.97, Math.log(player.buildings[4] * player.mult[0] + 1))

The game has been updated to 0.02. All your upgrades are worth less.
posted by jeather at 8:06 AM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]


Factory architects are really worth their cost once you can afford some of them because they put computers into overdrive. I guess that just goes to show that maybe the Randroids are really on to something.

For a while there I was afraid that the cost of proofs was going to make purchasing too many algebras too expensive but the computer multiplier seems to have solved that problem. I hate having to buy a ton of students just to make the level 1 multipliers nice.
posted by vuron at 8:09 AM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]


Version 0.01 for life then, I'm not giving up my sweet sweet multipliers to government oversight.
posted by vuron at 8:10 AM on March 21, 2014 [3 favorites]


Anybody else come back to this and find the timer function stopped?
posted by lumpenprole at 8:27 AM on March 21, 2014


Never mind, seems to have fixed itself after several restarts.
posted by lumpenprole at 8:36 AM on March 21, 2014


My Godels don't seem to do anything. This makes me sad.
posted by Shutter at 8:37 AM on March 21, 2014


Anybody else come back to this and find the timer function stopped?

Yes, tried it in both Firefox and Chrome and that tick ain't tickin'.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:45 AM on March 21, 2014


Total proofs found: 3.24B

It sounds like a lot, but it was mostly just coming up with bijections between different sets enumerated by the Catalan numbers.
posted by Wolfdog at 11:20 AM on March 21, 2014 [3 favorites]


God help me, I saw this last night and started playing it and then this morning came to read the thread and got to thinking about my Cookie Clicker game and went and did a reset of that to get myself another 20K heavenly cookies. CLICKING ON DERIVATIVE CAUSES ME TO CLICK ON COOKIES. THIS IS THE TRUE FACE OF SKYNET. HELP.

But, yeah, this one's pretty charming in its own weird way. I appreciate the direct application of the concept of derivative functions to the supply chain, it's a nice self-aware twist.

Napkin math says I can buy my first Reimann in just about exactly three hours, though I didn't account for the growth rate so that'll actually be somewhat less than three hours in practice. I am amused that the nature of the growth curves in the game means "somewhat" is a basically uselessly vague descriptor.
posted by cortex at 11:31 AM on March 21, 2014


The thing this game was actually useful for: teaching me that different countries have different definitions for the same words representing very large numbers. Also, yes, spend money on multipliers when possible. Riemann is achievable, but even with many of them (him?) the rate of tick length reduction is still slow.
posted by ancillary at 11:33 AM on March 21, 2014


So far so good on my one click playthrough. I find that the tension for me is having enough patience to not start expanding a certain item before I have enough money or proofs to bring it to a round number.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:37 AM on March 21, 2014 [1 favorite]


At 1.2T or so mathematicians, I broke the 400 ms barrier!
posted by jeather at 11:42 AM on March 21, 2014


Huh, it can't count past a Decillion. Ok I guess I'm done. And before you ask, yes, I cheated.

Total money earned: 37137.74 Dc$
Total proofs found: 10.76 Nn
Total clicks: 592.74K
Total manual clicks: 8.85K
posted by ancillary at 11:55 AM on March 21, 2014


I went to sleep and woke up with $30Sx. Bought a Riemann and one of each upgrade at that tier, then quit the game. (After saving of course. Let's not be hasty.)
posted by JHarris at 1:54 PM on March 21, 2014 [2 favorites]


With 89T Mathematicians, the tick length is 344 ms.
posted by wotsac at 2:54 PM on March 21, 2014


They earn the power to become Timeeaters?

Momo is a fantasy novel by Michael Ende, published in 1973 and has creatures looking kind of exactly like businessmen who eat time. (Well they roll up the petals of time flowers into cigars they smoke)
posted by yoHighness at 4:12 PM on March 21, 2014


Huh, I came back to the computer I was playing on last night and suddenly it doesn't tick anymore.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:12 PM on March 21, 2014


I refreshed and now it's ticking. Whatever.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:22 PM on March 21, 2014


It's evolved beyond time. Your tick length picked up an imaginary component and your money's gone fractal. It tends to happen when you get too many mathematicians.

(yes, all of the preceding was made up)
posted by JHarris at 6:24 PM on March 21, 2014


I just reloaded the page after having shut it down for awhile, and it's stopped ticking. Reloading again doesn't seem to be helping. Hrmph.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:35 PM on March 21, 2014


It the change to version .2. Same thing happened to me when firefox crashed on me.
posted by Mitheral at 7:59 PM on March 21, 2014


Even tapping into the power of all the Computers, High Schoolers, and Mathematicians of thousands of worlds, my money per tick is still only in the Quintillions.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:38 PM on March 22, 2014


I'm still in the quadrillions per tick. MUST BE NICE
posted by lordaych at 4:12 AM on March 23, 2014


I'm up into the Sextillions per tick, though my net is only 1.27 Sx (1.25 when I started writing this comment). The key is getting your multipliers up as much as possible; each Computer is making me $50.02 / tick and there are 28.10 Qt of them. You want to spend as much as you feasibly can on increasing the multipliers at each tier. The student column are the most cost-effective for these purposes, and each type counts as a manual purchase just like every other.

For reference, at 151.09 Qa mathematicians and a first tier multiplier of 25.01, the tick length has gone down to 272 ms.
posted by graymouser at 9:50 AM on March 23, 2014


To me, the most interesting thing about this variation on clickery is the tension that arises in the early/mid build between cash and proofs, where the cost of proof production can actively outstrip the rate of cash production. I clicked like the dickens and didn't let my cash go negative before I got out of that cash production deficit, so I don't know how the game handles it (does it take your balance negative, putting you in a potentially inescapable hole? does it decline to produce the proofs you can't afford thus slowing production but keeping you solvent?), but I definitely enjoyed the little ripple of terror that came with the situation.

At this point I'd like to see a clicker-alike try and take that farther and do something with a whole system of interleaved resource production/dependency issues, make the ongoing maintenance of your game state be as much about keeping output balanced (maybe specifically in the face of somewhat different resource-specific growth curves/profiles) so that your ever-expanding machine of production doesn't come grinding to a halt overnight out of a mismatch in supply vs. demand.
posted by cortex at 11:30 AM on March 23, 2014 [3 favorites]


I've been thinking about the same thing -- I have in mind to build a knitting themed clicker, and I'd like to include balancing elements in it.

There was a little balancing needed in CivClicker, because the Wonder pulled from all the types of resources and if you had so many tanners, for example, that they used up all your skins, the Wonder wouldn't be able to progress as quickly as it should have, because it didn't have enough skins to do so.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:39 AM on March 23, 2014


I give up. With a total 2.76 Oct$ , I don't see what there is to do to make the game interesting anymore.
posted by wotsac at 5:20 PM on March 23, 2014


Cortex, I tried it again, and fucked up for a few minutes with regards to cash/proofs. You can't go into the red (unlike this game).
posted by oceanjesse at 9:20 AM on March 25, 2014


Dang it, man. Now I'm growing a zoo. Although I'm being my typical penny-pinching self and staying clear of debt; took out just enough of a loan to get profitable and then cleared the ledger.
posted by cortex at 1:17 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


And actually, the weirdly-impermanently-linked version two of that game, Incremental Zoo II, seems like an improvement over the original and is in fact sort of charming me so far. The interplay of price levels, zoo patrons, and (expandable) upper limits on per-level stock makes for a nice natural short-versus-long-term, attentive-vs-inattentive play planning sensibility that only really showed up in Cookie Clicker with the addition of wrinklers to balance rest time vs. active golden cookie hunting.
posted by cortex at 5:09 PM on March 25, 2014 [1 favorite]


This is easier than 2048.
posted by chavenet at 4:54 AM on March 28, 2014 [2 favorites]


Does Zoo II ever end? I'm up to Lions now and no sign of running out of species yet.
I'm hoping for a Twilight Zone twist to Humans.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 6:50 PM on April 3, 2014


I got to dolphins, there are allegedly orcas after that but I lost patience with the game because for all the things I found charming about the early-game mechanics, the mid and late game are just utterly samey. Cookie cutter iteration over your last four or five animals, unlock a new animal and everything just shifts but with nothing new to do about it.

I ended up restarting, getting enough animals unlocked to get my credit limit up into the millions, then borrowing max credit, selling all my animals, and pouring all my cash on hand into expanding the meerkat enclosures, and then sitting back and letting the debt roll in as a sort of demonstrative riff on the world's most ambitious failed meerkat preserve.

I have 0 meerkats, and room for 35,828,200 more. And so far I'm $74B in debt.

One of the things I find disappointing in retrospect is that there's a hard limit on the rate at which your animals can breed, which makes the lower tier animals literally nothing but a bother once you get up past breed six or seven. Because on the one front there's the increasing cost of creative potential per-meerkat value—it'll take longer and longer to recoup those scaling-up costs of enclosure expansions, for sure—but there's also the practical limit of even generating enough meerkats to justify even bothering. If stuff accelerated continuously such that on day one I could generate 50K meerkats but day two would compound on that and give me a million, then, yes, okay, we're in business. But in practical fact the game has a hard limit of 1 per second (even when birth and death rates are farther than 60 points from each other, apparently), so generating more than 86.4K per day is impossible and even that's highballing it.
posted by cortex at 7:47 PM on April 3, 2014 [1 favorite]


the mid and late game are just utterly samey

Yes, me too. The visitor income rapidly becomes irrelevant compared to the profit from breeding high-tier animals, and soon after it also becomes trivial to buy down the clock to get to the next tier.

Still: Cookie Clicker update, eh? Still a very long way to go until Bicentennial though.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 9:28 PM on April 3, 2014


who could possibly want more than one Georg Riemann?!?     ;-)

1 Sp$ !!! no cheating, running 2+ weeks now.

Total money earned: 1.11 Sp$
Total proofs found: 19.20 Sx
Total clicks: 667.30K
Total manual clicks: 26.40K
posted by gkr at 3:01 PM on April 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


I decided I'd be done with my one click game when I got to a million automatic clicks. Since I had 65 auto-clicks per 60 ticks, by my calculation that happened at around 1:30 this morning, for a game duration of 15 days and 4 hours or so.
Money:           740.00 Sp$    Proofs:       26.29 Sp
Money/tick:       15.51 Sx$    Proofs/tick: 310.72 Qt
Net money/tick:   13.95 Sx$    Cost/proof:    5.00$
Money per click:  15.11 Qt$

Tick length: 250 ms

Total money earned:  4.18 Oc$
Total proofs found: 80.95 Sp
Total clicks:        1.05M
Total manual clicks: 1

Version 0.03
Now there's just the matter of a zoo and leaky virtual machine to deal with…
posted by ob1quixote at 1:51 AM on April 6, 2014


Did anyone get out of the low Octillions without cheating and without getting bored and giving up?
posted by wotsac at 10:42 PM on April 10, 2014


I started in again fresh on Derivative Clicker a week or two ago and am now in those low Octillions and I think that's just where the curve of acceleration just loses its oomph. It'll be a long way to Nonillions and the next set of incremental multiplier upgrades, and in the mean time the cost of actually purchasing individual bit of infrastructure will continue to climb very fast with reinvestment so driving up the curve by purchasing more buidlings for the multiplier upgrades to work on is also more or less done in.

I think Octillions is just the end-game, period. Barring some well-hidden surprise, I don't think the game has an answer. I'll let it keep running for several months anyway because apparently that's the sort of thing I like to do, but I expect it'd be more engaging to sit down and do the math to figure out when I'll crack nonillion than it will be to actively look at the page.

In the meantime, Project Meerkat Debtsplosion is a runaway success; I have gotten my debt up to a healthy $3.7 duodecillion, with no signs of slowing. Still no meerkats, though.

Decided to round out my clicker revival with Clicking Bad, which I never got to when it first came out, and I declare it: amusing. Though the "I better think about this" angle goes away pretty early on once risk factors become incredibly manageable and money laundering gets relatively affordable. Right now I'm pushing on towards the last couple of tiers of infrastructure, but sense of engagement on that front is sort of flagging.

And in Cookie Clicker news, Orteil put out some nice little quality-of-life updates in the interface: big news announcements now stick around until you dismiss them (hitting new cheevos, notably), while minor ones autofade after a few seconds (you popped a wrinkler! etc), so you can get up in the morning and see what milestones you hit. Plus more detailed mouseover information on buildings, which makes it easier to track progress against a new tier of total-baked-per-building-type cheevos as well. Also there's a new kitten. It's very expensive. It'll be a couple more days of straight saving before I can get there.

But he also briefly broke the game such that maybe people's Heavenly Cookies were disappearing? Yikes. Yikes. Apparently the game was already in Just Won't Load state by the time I got there, so other than panicking in Cookian despair I didn't have much to do but wait till it did reload okay, and then all my HCs were still there, so no actual problem. But he did give folks the option of retrieving some "lost" HCs as a one-time thing through the game interface, which is nice. I didn't, because I am pure of heart, but.
posted by cortex at 7:33 AM on April 11, 2014 [1 favorite]


And while I'm at it, I ran up a civilization to topped-out empire yesterday in CivClicker, which is interesting in how it allows you to build for a comparatively really aggressive turn rate throughough (keep your food production constantly high and you can turn out more workers quickly and keep constant expanding; keep your woodcutting and mining high as well and you can keep building stuff quickly, generating byproducts, ect) but doesn't really have any way to capitalize on that during significant away times and so you're giant engine of productivity will overnight mostly accomplish nothing for all but the first 10-30 minutes you're asleep. Takes most of the "idle" out of Idle Game.

But interesting and sort of ambitious in complexity at least. Dev has declared it done but has GPLed the code base so maybe someone else will run with it? Interface is a sort of a terrible fractured-spreadsheet mess by the endgame.
posted by cortex at 8:20 AM on April 12, 2014


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