Yeah definitely; I'm down to my final gene aside from the hitchhiker and I need a dodo. I spent 40 million coins trying to get it and 7 out of 10 times I only got coins back. >_> really need to lower the chance of coin duds. ;3;
It cost me something like 1,750,000,000 coins in quick surprises to get all the animals I needed for the missions. RNG can be lousy, sometimes. My advice to anyone struggling with it is to treat it more like a casual game than I did, doing some quick surprises but also some heart-tapping surprises each day. You'll get the animals you need eventually, and when you do you'll have some fun splicing to do!
It only takes about 4 days of tree tapping to get the 100u to just stright buy your way out of a special gene mission, less days if you get lucky at the Casino. My advice, just don't be in such a rush to "finish" as fast as possible. Be thankful that you still have goals to accomplish rather than just waiting for the next update with nothing but tree and building tapping to hold you over.
That's the issue for me. I really feel the latest update and additional content is aimed and balanced towards the people that have the game running constantly and not the casual user. I love the *concept* of the update, but the execution is awful. The numbers to do anything are ridiculous, so much so that it's painfully obvious you will eventually have more fun with the game if you stop levelling. This seems SO backwards. Leveling should ALWAYS be a reward but, in this game, it feels more like a penalty now. As a casual player, I'm getting roughly 2-3 animal finds per day and 3-6 Utopium. I log in twice a day, and so my income is pretty pathetic. I can't afford to spend money on either the casino or the pet shop as I'm still saving money in an effort to expand more land. Not that it really matters at this point because the next genes I need to unlock are SO FAR BEYOND the time investment I plan to have with this game that I have no clue as to when the game will allow me to proceed, which is a major difference from the original game. (ie. At my pace, I knew I was slow and that it'd take 3-4 days to save up money to expand, but I least I had an inkling on when I'd get another burst of play in.) Will I get the 3-4 animals I still need to unlock a gene in the next week? In the next month? As stated, love the *concept* of this update, but I think it's only going to accomplish two things... - The portion of your player-base that has 1,000u and billions of coin saved up will tear through the content in no time and return to being bored - The casual user will quit in frustration from the glacial pace of doing anything that require quest genes. Here's an idea that I want to put out here to see how it percolates; "What would happen if you completely removed the land space cap?". Let it sit in your head for a bit. You may come to some of the neat conclusions that I did.
This is more or less how I've been playing it and despite enjoying it 90% of the time I'm still getting a bit annoyed about the very random wait for the last couple of animals I need. I'm in no way fed up with it and am happy to pay the u to buy out the missions I need but it does get a little bit frustrating when that's all I need to continue. Still the only freemium game I've ever really enjoyed tho
I have collected about 630 animals when get all including tier 5. Considering there are another 50% for u and coins and 80% of my surprises are from gene pool, at least I had 1000 times surprises with 50-70k for each... So that was around 50m to get all animals with optimized sequence pre 1.3, still a huge amount though. BTW is there any body knows why racecar driver cost 1 land no matter you have garage or not? That must be another bug stealing 8u...
I don't entirely agree. I think that people who are casual but not new players are feeling the most crunched. For a totally new player, they have all the time it takes to get from 1-155 to collect animals and be ready for missions. For a constant player, they have the resources to throw money or u at the missions. But for a casual but long-time player, already at 155/155 but with no lvl 5 animals and no saved u or cash, it's a problem.
Yeah exactly, I play the game every day for about 15-20 minutes (early on it was much longer sessions) ever since release day, and I'm completely stuck. I earn u very slowly, and spending coins on quick surprises feels like a total waste of cash. As for tapping trees to get 25 u per day, the ratio of u to coins per tree tap is low and I don't have time or the will to devote an hour to tapping trees. Maybe this game is just not gonna be fun anymore for people like me, I guess I can accept that but it sucks cause I've enjoyed this game for a long time. Maybe I'll suck it up and buy 250u next time there's a sale, but by that point I may have lost interest. If upcoming content updates follow this same direction with the animal and high u requirements I'm definitely going to quit.
The problem with missions, as someone else said before, is that they aren't really missions. You can't just go and get the animal you want. You can't just go and get utopium. It's all random, and takes forever.
Since I have an iPhone and an iPad, I thought I'd try playing from the beginning on my Phone, giving the "stay low level" thing a try. So, there's the starting point. At the moment, I'm trying to determine at which level you don't want to go past. I got the animal shelter at Level 3 and the cost to get a surprise was 250k. I *Think* I saw another post saying that was the value they had a Level 9, so I'm going to make an assumption that Level 9 is the ideal cap. (ie. the cost of shelter and casino is constant until that point, but your "rewards" scale a bit) My current priorities are the Shelter (done!), the Church (for free expansion), the HQ (for missions and genes), and the Casino (for spins). If my assumption of Level 9 is correct I should have access to more buildings quickly to help increase revenue and decrease heart costs. I think the next best for me are; CSI (long money generation), Enterprise (once I restore my IAP), Hotel (to re-purpose the inefficient initial houses I had to create), Research Lab. I'll keep you posted on how I progress. (And, hey!, the game's fun again, which is important) Current Level: 4, Land Use: 40/60 (with 11 of that trees)
Ok, so I can now confirm what someone had posted earlier. The two people with the heart next to it have to be part of a formula for a new person AND they have to be ordered in the same way as the formula. So Architect + Assistant doesn't work but Assistant + Architect does. I am trying to only have housing that creates golden hearts, but I am stuck at Gardener. He should be teamed with Farmer. You need Gardener to make the Farmer but the Farmer needs to be first in the housing. I may have to skip that one and fix it when I get the Hotel. Having said all of this, it is still unclear what Golden Hearts do. I filled them all up and got a Tier 5 animals (so far so good). The next time it was Tier 3 (not so great). Also, there is a bug (feature?). If you have Golden Hearts and leave the game. The next time you log in, the Gold hearts are now regular.
Update #1: At Level 5. Shelter cost is still 250k. At this level you get new residences, and I built two, but I think that may have been a waste as I should have plenty of room to build the 5k, 2-person homes, and then get rid of them after the hotel and casino are finished. One funny stat so far: Animals I've found through heart rewards.. Tier 1: 0!! Tier 2: 2 Tier 3: 2 Tier 4: 2 Tier 5: 1
Nice digging! It may actually be worthwhile (at some point) to create your homes so that there are gold couples and non-gold couples. If the theory is that more gold hearts = better chance at higher level animal, having both will let you 'aim' for the level you'd like. (Since, you can easily change where in a house the heart goes)
Problem is I'm a casual player - I don't have time to sit for 30 minutes straight tapping trees, I just refresh all my buildings a few times a day, which means I get about 8-10 u a day, including the daily mine bonus. With all the other new content, including the 100u gene in gene pool, completing the mission with 100u is a goal that may be even further away for me than finding the missing animals.
The Animal Shelter Surprise is $250K at Level 2. I have not been able to get to Vet on level 1 (yet). Assuming that there is no step up from Level 1 to Level 2 then it definitely appears there is almost no penalty to increasing your land through expansion up to a certain point (maybe level 9). The one downside is the increased need for decor but the casino rewards should eventually balance that out.
Well using the top example of each (Stadium for WCI and City Square for CPS) you would need to start the City Square 6 times to make more coins than 1 tap on a Stadium. However, if you were on top of it (i.e. set alarm timers) you can theoretically start the City Square 24 times during 1 cycle of the Stadium. Which means that if you were so committed, the City Square can produce over 4 times the amount of income that the Stadium can produce! However, you have to keep checking on your game whereas the Stadium is more of a once a day building.
Just to clarify some things for people here: 1) When balancing the game, we're not targeting the "hardcore" pixel people crowd. Our goal is always for the larger "casual" audience first. The Church/Casino strategy is not something that we intended, but was a by-product of our balancing towards casual players. We're happy to let this strategy still be viable, but if it ends out being a dominating strategy, we'll have to do something about it. 2) We always try to encourage ACTIVE gameplay over PASSIVE gameplay. Our goal with this game is to always have something to do when it's launched and players will be rewarded for that. Hence the emphasis on the Heart Packages, Trees and building refresh times. With that said, the ACTIVE gameplay might be too heavily favored at this point of time. We currently are internally assessing ways to help the casual player that checks in 2-3 times a day for a 5 min session. 3) This first launch with the Mission system is kinda our large scale 'proof-of-concept' test. So far, we're getting results that almost exactly mirror our expectations. As such, in the future, we're able to calibrate missions better. We're happy with the difficulty level of the Jack Frost, Hitchhiker and Musician gene. As some may have pointed out, we really didn't want players to blow through the missions faster than we can churn out the content. We're thinking of alternate ways of completing these missions. 4) Finally, as some of you all mentioned, we actually balance the game from the perspective of a NEW player first, then try as much as possible to accommodate for current players where possible. Sometimes, it just isn't possible to get the experience right for everyone as a result. But again, we're always looking out for solutions to make the game just as fun for anyone regardless of progression level.
Stuck at 202 people/genes. And where I would have gene missions there are two blocks with x's so I assume there are no more gene missions. Do more unlock at a higher level? I'm level 20 or 21 now.
