OK thanks Ivan, no point in activating mid build to speed up duplicate completion then. One other thought, wondered why the U cost to instantly complete a building is constant, and not declining with time remaining to completion?
casino/church Personally the casino only became fun because I had achieved a lot of knowledge from playing my main game. Basically this game is really awesome. Look how involved and long this thread is. Casino/church strategy is like a built in expert mode. It involves luck and knowledge of what triggers gene. You need to understand all the concepts of cps, and land scaling. Gobs of patience is required at the early stages. Planting trees on limited land. Quite frankly it would be overly complex and would turn a bunch of people off. My main game wins by just generating huge cps, which allows me to play the casino, expand at will and really as others said wait for new content. I mean I can make more city squares and stadiums but its not really needed. I wouldn't say the casino/church strategy is more fun, but it does offer the obsessive player the greater challenge, greater reward thing. It is really ingenious, and I hope you don't do away with it.
I agree. If it is felt that the C/C approach is an exploit that compromises the overall game philosophy then why not make the ability to use it a reward achieved at some point of completion in a conventional level-up game i.e at that point enable a new game slot that allows the C/C strategy to be followed.
Hehe, now that I have restarted and begun a church/casino game, it seems the approach in under even greater negative scrutiny by Ivan and the designers. I have to say, playing it the way I (and several others before me) have, at Level 1, is incredibly slow and ponderous! You just cannot advance much in any given day, so it's so different than the "expand-in-spurts" kind of play that the traditional game offers. It has it's upsides, because you really focus on each maneuver, given that you only get 3 extra spaces of land/day, and that rate of growth only comes after you've struggled to "grow" 15 or more forest tiles to be able to gather your daily 25u from the trees. I cannot imagine this non-traditional approach threatening the traditional game at all, because I concur with the others that have suggested that there aren't a lot of people that would want to play it. I think most would play it the way we have, as a second run of the game after the first one got tiring, which could keep someone engaged with the game rather than walking away from it. Seems like that would be a good thing, from Chillingo's perspective. I will say that I considered buying 1000u for the first time, to advance the early game. I think I'll resist that urge now, given the fact that this approach seems to be viewed more critically than positively by the designers. If I was reading about how the designers were considering modifying the game to actually reward people that took this dedicated approach, I'd probably buy some u and stick at Level 1. (For example, at Level 1, the Pet Shelter still costs a quarter of a million bucks/spin, which takes me hours to raise, given my very small population, so it's not a strategy to play to try and get additional u). Instead, I think I'll probably just bypass the "stay at Level 1" approach if I don't get Bureaucrat as my second gene (still only one special gene at 26 population - when does the 2nd come, usually?) and just buy land to move up to Level 8 or 9 (forget which is the one to stop at), to get a small boost.
Hmm not sure how I feel about this. I'm personally feeling that the leetness of the CC strat comes from the ability to ward off unnecessary leveling up. This was definitely part of the design philosophy when we placed things like spirit and casino spins in the system. Our goal was to raise enough flags to the player so that they'll realize "okay wait, land is precious, I have 10 left. Let me see what I can do best with it." I think the emergence of the CC discussion is a direct result of that line of thought. Which is absolutely great (we've hit that!). But I guess we overdid it. Instead of players going on with a normal expansion game and carefully planning their steps, many are opting to reset the game. So I guess we've definitely swung the favor towards non-expansion a little too much. Given some loopholes in the system as well, I think we'll definitely have to plug the hole. But at the same time, we'll probably rebalance the scaling so that every level up feels like a mini CC game. Players should be thinking "okay, should I keep spinning to try and get AG gear, or should I expand now" at every level. So maybe the way to look at it is this: we aren't killing any strategies, we're finding a way to merge them. In any case, a possible fix to CC will only come out in 1.5, which is not anywhere near completion given its scale and scope. So we'll have a few weeks to think about this.
You know, Ivan, one of the frustrations I experienced with the traditional game was the uncertainties regarding the "penalties" of leveling up. You know, you level up only to find out that the Casino spins or some other feature have gone way up in cost. That's why I still like the notion I proposed a long time ago of allowing players the option of "leveling down" to recapture lower costs if they can do so by using the hotel and astroglass features. Because, at some stage, this game becomes all about the Casino spins, and making the astroglass features work for you, at least between the updates.
I don't agree with this at all. I few folks have reset their games, but most have started on a new device. So they now are playing two games which certainly increases the chance that they might spend more $$ on u. Especially since some might have stopped playing the game altogether (or certainly much less frequently) if there wasn't this new challenge. I do agree that the regular game needs to have more strategy put into it around land expansion. Except for the middle part of the game where coins and u are hard to come by to expand and grow, the game really doesn't penalize you for expanding as much as you want. And if you build duplicate buildings then there is even less strategic thought put into it. The increase in Spirit does add some penalty but it just slows people down. It doesn't make them think any more strategically. Now, my perspective is from someone that got the game on Day 1. So my regular game was very far along when some of these improvements were added. Someone starting today might feel differently.
This may well be the case for players mid game, I don't know. But I suspect nearly everyone commenting on this forum on such issues is either using C/C premeditatedly or is way up the Levels with high CPS's. Neither will ask themselves this question, so ironically we are probably not the group the game should be modified for. To quote Ben Kingsley in the film 'Sexy Beast', "where there's a will there's a way, and there's always ?!*+ing way". With a game this complex yet transparent someone will probably find a loophole somewhere.
I think most folks who comment on these forums would not be considered casual players of the game... even if they play it casually.
Well, if that's the case, we might just leave the strategy alone and continue patching the exploits bandage style. Again, plenty of weeks for us to decide on the matter. 1.41 really should hit any day now. And a new slew of balance, tweaks and gameplay features should tide most players over till 1.5. And on that note, we've finished 1 major milestone internally for 1.5. 2 big ones to go.
Looking forward to the new content. I want to be engaged on both games. Here are some issues that I have noticed: 1. Re: CC game - I said in an earlier post that the Church is not the issue, it is the Casino. You can play the CC strategy very effectively by stopping at Level 9 and never using the Church for most of the game to buy land. I think you recognize that the Casino rewards are skewed a bit. 2. Other than to "catch them all", there is not a lot of benefit to adding the new buildings from 1.3 and 1.4. They are very low cps and take up a lot of land. If you did this because you are trying to manage total cps better, I would rather you nerf some of the older buildings to a lower cps and make some of the newer ones more attractive. 3. Duplicate buildings - probably nothing that can be done now, but this has been the single biggest factor that removes strategy from the game (at least for me). I have 30 City Square on my regular game, so there is very little thinking needed for me. The game is on auto-pilot. I always generate tons of coins no matter how often I check in. I don't even care about AG Residences.
Well for me in my end game I only have a measly 3,052 cps with my 2 duplicate city squares and taverns. I'm at level 25 now, basically just spending as much time trying to get astroglass stuff now to replace my trees and spirit.
It really depends on how you play. I'm doing duplicate buildings but also "catch them all" and I want to be able to keep catching them all even as new buildings are rolled out. So I became very land-conscious after 1.4 came out. I haven't done much removal of old housing (just deleted a few Rocky Mansions) or trees or spirit (though I could - thanks to astroglass I have over 50 trees and over 100 extra spirit) but I am zealously only building taverns and only when I have space in new astroglass. Just today I reached the 20 million an hour milestone, which is a big deal. Using 375 land total. Any balancing that made the casino cheaper or more likely to give housing would help me, but for the most part I'm happy with how my city is working.
1) Yup, when the casino was first introduced, the Spin costs was at 6mill. Soon after we started testing the builds, players were focus on spinning and nothing else. Hence we upped the max cost. So maybe we'll have to dumb down the rewards a little. 2) We've shifted from introducing new buildings as CPS increasers to buildings that introduce new interesting features. If you've notice, many old buildings received special features and many of the new buildings have very important roles in the game. I think it's safe to say that new buildings are how players get access to the new 'cool' stuff in the near future. 3) Yup, in 1.0, duplicates was really the only way to go to solve the humongous need for coins. We've been addressing this over the patches (scaling rewards, high coin missions, scaling u conversion, bumper harvest). I'm pretty sure if any of you 1.0 restarts the game again from level 1 with the 'normal' strategy, they'll notice a vastly different, more diverse experience. Also on that note, 1.41 will see the introduction of several very significant balance changes. Previously an upgraded end game Utopia would require 680 taps to keep active for an hour. We've rebalanced all timers and that amount has been reduced by half (i.e. ~320 taps an hour). Additional, the Enterprise "doubler" IAP has gained a new ability: a one-touch megatap that further doubles all timers for one production cycle (cost: 1u). And again, Bumper Harvest, High Spirits and Utopium Leak are getting a major boost so that it will actually be possible for players to attain 24 hour buffs for at least one a day at a decent rate. As you can see, the focus on getting high CPS via duplicate buildings have been very much muted with these changes. I mean, you could still build 30 City Squares, but do you really need to when your base CPS is already 5.2k via Bumper Harvest WITH a 60% discount on timers and expansion costs AND an additional time doubler? The only thing left we need to do is perhaps fix the Casino or the Church so that players don't feel that getting a spin every 10m is VITAL for the game to be fun.
Ivan, I have a question, will all clones from here on out have a production rate of 1? Or was that simply an oversight in the last 2 updates? I ask because I used to use a lot of strategy when deciding which work place to place new clones. I would have to look at the clones production rate, the buildings multiplier, and whether or not I could fill all the jobs in the building. I would always juggle my clones from one building to another if it would increase their total CPS, but with all new clones only having a 1 CPS production rate, I just don't care enough to worry about that anymore.
Sweet!!!!! The megatap is brilliant, it will really allow us to play how we want. For example, since the bulk of my income lives in 50m cycles, I'll use it when I won't be able to check in for two or more hours, but not every time I check in. Are there any plans to make it possible to control how long a heart consuming building like the farm runs? I would love to, for example, at bedtime activate the farm for 1h 40m and hit the mega tap for quadruple normal overnight income. But it would be a shame to use all my stored hearts up just for that.
There's a reason why we kept them at 1 CPS for now. We had a really fun and crazy idea/feature for it, so we're keeping it all at 1CPS for the near future.
BTW, this is why you guys are doing such a great job with the game. My city is finished, totally and utterly, and in other game I would be bored and no longer playing, but since I know new stuff is coming I still want to crank out u and cash as fast as possible!
