Woot. To be honest. I'm enjoying playing both ways on two different devices, so glad to have the options.
Ivan, thanks so much for posting! I'm of course happy that you've decided not to nerf the strategy, but even more than that, I appreciate your willingness to share the development team's internal analysis with us. Really great stuff, there!
I figured that this was a niche approach that wouldn't pay off for most. Thanks for running the calculations to prove it.
I still don't understand golden hearts. What's the deal with them? Why do they show up, and what do they do? A few other questions for you experts out there! 1) Is there a counter somewhere that shows how much of the 25u / day you can get with trees? 2) I don't see where the game shows you your cps rate. Or are you guys adding it up manually? 3) So building duplicate buildings is NOT worth it? I would think it would be. It's fun unlocking everything, but I sure wouldn't mind a greater influx of money. Presumably, Tavern and City Square are the way to go(?) 4) Hey dev! If you want to encourage more casual play (and I think you should), buff the mine. Have it give out at least 5-8u / day. Or lightly punish the lvl 9 players by having the mine give out Level / 2 u per day.
Oh, and one more! 4) What determines the rebate you get from checking a guest out of the hotel? I'm totally confused about it. Granted, I was drinking...but I thought I saw that one rebate was 2u? And another gave me no rebate? What's up with this?
It is not clear what golden hearts are for. My understanding is that a future update will shed light on this. 1. No counter exists. 2. Cps is in the Business Center. 3. Duplicate buildings is a matter of preference. On my first game, I have many (many) City Squares.
Will probably have to explain why we will probably not do changes like this: Currently, active players who know understand the game mechanics are able to accumulate a large amount of utopium without problem. We think that the game is just fine for this group of players. The problem is that, on the other end of the spectrum, utopium/coin trickles too slowly. If you check in once or twice a day, you'll probably only earn between 1-2u a day and maybe 2-3million from activating your city once. This is waaaaaaay too slow for progression. So, we think the problem is that the problem is not one of overall balance, but one of play-style accommodation. Hence, we cannot make a change that will benefit EVERYONE as it will only maintain the gulf between the two spectrum of players. Rather, we need changes that will REDUCE the gulf. Using the suggestion you gave (which we definitely did talk about for quite a bit), increasing the Utopium gained daily from the mine will result in ALL players equally getting the buff. If anything, it will again slightly favor the hardcore/active players as they will be the most diligent in coming back to collect the Utopium. This is still alright, as EVERYONE has received a benefit and everyone is happy. BUT, here's what will happen. The hardcore/active players will still have way more utopium than the casual player. In an effort to keep these players involved in the game, we create new content that will consume these resources for these players. But because this stockpile is only possible for the hardcore/active players, the casual will be left in their original position of feeling that the game is too hard. Back to square 1. We can take the plunge and focus on balancing the game for the casuals and let the hardcores continue to power through everything and be bored with the game, but we'll lose the hardcore group. So either way, we lose something. In short, an increase in utopium mine collection will ultimately result in undesirable outcomes for us. Hence, solutions like this doesn't really do anything at all in the end. What we definitely will do is provide OPTIONS for casual players to catch up with the hardcore players. For example, some players have requested an additional double time IAP. This purchase makes sense to us as casual players will appreciate it, but hardcore players have no need for it (20x fully upgraded stadiums anyone?). Do note that this is an EXAMPLE of a solution that we think would help with the problem. We're still playing around with these ideas to see whether they work out.
Good to know. (I have been too lazy to figure it myself. ) Darnit. I just deleted a bunch of "surplus" decor thinking that even with 1.4, I was unlikely to need to expand.
Ivan: Thanks for the elaboration. Your thoughtful analysis of the challenges involved with "across the board" upgrades are always interesting. I'm in the casual player group; I usually play once or twice a day, for about 5 minutes at a time. If I'm lucky, I'll get maybe 2U from my trees a day. How about an upgrade (maybe 99 cents?) that guarantees that the first tap on a given tree for that day generates U? That would make a nice boost for casual players who don't spend 15-45 minutes tapping trees per day, while not allowing hardcore maximizers to exploit it with the "per tree" condition. You couldn't get 25u from one tree for example in 25 taps, since it tracks the variable per tree.
Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough reply. I (and many others here) appreciate it greatly. I see what you mean, and hope that you find some good ways to address the issue. Certainly playing with longer timers is a great start. Though I suspect there are quite a few other dials that might be tuned to excellent results. Have you considered playing with daily-reset diminishing returns? I loath people who argue with devs. But hold onto your hypocrite hat for a second...one subtle ramification to consider with the increased mine output is that, for a power user, 6u per day is probably only a gain of about 10-15%, whereas for a casual player, it may easily be a gain of 300%. This may sound a little specious, but a corollary to it is that hardcore players can do quite a few different U-requiring actions in a day, whereas a casual player going from 2 -> 6 cp earned goes from being able to do less than half of one top-U costing action a day to being able to do most of the U-costing operations in the game. That's a significant increase in gameplay value for the casual player, whereas the hardcore player simply gets X+1 action, where X is already a big enough number to have a real impact each day on their space colony. Sorry to be argumentative...just wanted to throw that out there as a point of consideration (though you probably have already thought of it!)
Cool, and...now I kind of feel like a jerk, since it's obvious you had no negative intentions. Anyway...thanks, and...moving on, heh. Did I miss seeing Ivan mention whether or not the 1.4 update will have content associated with the gold hearts? Hope so, since I kind of like the idea of reshaping my houses to generate these, assuming there is some kind of worthy payoff.
Great suggestion. This takes into account all the concerns we have currently. We actually have similar solutions in the pipeline. Only problem I have with your suggestion is that a guaranteed 1u additionally a day seems too little for a 99cent purchase. And honestly, there's nothing much you can do for 1u. I would rather a 2.99 (?) purchase that causes the first 10 taps or so to guarantee a utopium. That way, it's a great purchase for casuals, but the higher price tag would make hardcore players think twice before going for it.
I am interested from an academic standpoint how this plays out. I would think that the hardcore players are the ones most likely to pony up extra $$$. I am sure you are thinking of special IAP for the hardcore folks too.
Excellent point. The 300% increase certainly seems an impressive gain. In most cases, I would agree that it works out. However, to highlight why this doesn't ultimately work, I'll need to mention one of the central mechanical design philosophies we decided on when we starting building this game. In creating the economy, we tried to the very best of our ability to control for the devaluation of Utopium. Our goal was to preserve the feeling that 10 utopium early game is as valuable as 10 utopium late game. You can see very clear examples of this with the coin conversion rates and the way speeding up various things remain the same regardless of how long the wait timers were. The basic idea was that we wanted was: giving 10 utopium to a player regardless of how late/early you were in the game should result in the same appreciation. That 10u will enable you to do just as many useful things at 150 jobs as when you were at 20 jobs. With this in mind, lets work with one example. Suppose we buffed the Mine to give 2-3utopium a day (a net increase of 50%-100% for the casual player, a measly ~3% for the hardcore player), what can the casual player do now? He still can't afford a Shiny Tower, he can't afford a building speed up, he can't afford a 5u -> Coin conversion as well. The end result is that the casual player still has nothing to do beyond checking in, tap buildings, and collect free spins/mine. So even though it looks like an impressive 100% gain in utopium collection rate, it's still not enough for players to do any meaningful actions in game. What we're hoping to achieve: There should be methods allow casual players to check in, build a few buildings, maybe a decor or two, check for missions to complete in addition to the tapping and collecting of free spins/mine. Which is what the hardcore players are able to do right now.
Trust me, the mechanics junkies will LOVE the thursday patch. No extra IAP needed too! PS: Be warned though, the upcoming patch is about 3 weeks old from our internal development standpoint. We actually have taken the 3 weeks reflecting on some of the new features and have since heavily tweaked them.
I would consider myself a hardcore user, and I would definitely pay for this feature. It is not much money to guarantee more U.
I deleted a duplicate bronze plaza to try to optimise spirit per land but didn't get the one land credited. Plaza was won in the casino. Should all the house/tree/decor awards from the Casino credit land back if deleted? News ticker states new animals can only be awarded by heart generation i.e Casino only gives duplicate animals. Have 1 animal left to get (tier 5). Don't believe animal generation is random, same animals are last to be awarded for all of us to spread out accomplishment of achievements and missions over time and prolong the game. Those animals inevitably get duplicated soon after since I presume animal species numbers will tend towards an even distribution per tier. As someone rightly pointed out the sample size needs to be in the tens thousands + (not the thousands we have to date) to reveal this.
It's awesome when to hear LambdaMu's philosophy on this game. Everything that I read usually makes a ton of sense, and I can understand where the numbers are coming from. I think you guys have thus far succeeded in preserving the "specialness" of U. Ever since I have been on a Stadium rampage (in order to feed my gambling problem... ), 8u means the world to me. One way that might keep casual players more enticed is methods of raising the rate that trees drop U in the form of an IAP (or U purchase) that ties the spirit to the U percentage drop from trees, maxing out at 30% or something? I can see casuals dropping in the game and tapping 3-5 trees per visit. So if they were almost guaranteed 1 U per visit, I'm sure this would keep them happy. Another method I thought about was a tree picking building. Once the mechanic was unlocked, the building would pick 1 U per hour from the 25 U limit from trees and hold that U until the user clicked the building. This would give a reason for casuals to come back every hour or so, and made sure that each time they visited they got 1 U. This would just require the gene associated with the building would be unlocked decently early. I think the second method would be a little better just because it basically guarantees a U every hour. And it wouldn't stop hardcore players from actively playing as the hour wait is quite long, but still might be a little helpful to get the first or second U out of the way. On the topic of daily U income, any reason why some days I'll get 1 u, others 2? Simply just random?
All of the items from the casino are astroglass items. You can tell by the bottom of it. It'll be on glass instead of land. Astroglass items use up any land.
