I popped back into NGU Idle after an 8 month absence. Nice to have earned several hundred PP, a few million EXP, and a few hundred thousand AP in my absence. That’s one way to progress quickly, I suppose. It took me an embarrassingly long time lingering at the boss 110-ish point to figure out how to beat UGG. (I confess by the time I figured it out, I had the stats to autokill him.) Now I’m off to the (incremental) races again.
One of the discord idle channels I sometimes check out is chatting a lot about this game:
Also, I have a feeling this is older, but also getting some chat:
https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/
Damnit, that Space Travel one looks super interesting. Now I’ll have to try it, grrr.
@Clay posted about Evolve waaaay up at the top of the thread, (and I played it for a bit and liked it) but that was a year ago, and it looks like the dev has been doing continuous weekly-or-better updates since then.
This one stole a couple hours of my time this morning. It’s strangely compelling and has a pretty satisfying prestige mechanic. I like it.
Don’t play more than that. I tried it a week or so ago, and there’s fast progress until you hit a dumb wall. Ultimately if you’re seen leaf blowing mechanics you’re seen pretty much all the game has to offer that’s new.
I had a record amount of questionably organized meetings this week, so I revisited Prestige Tree. They’ve made a few nice changes. My favorite is that the bottom row machines that require you to keep re-speccing and building different quantities have been replaced with “The Machine.” The Machine has four different optimizations you just toggle between without any resets, that don’t require any level building to optimize. It’s also more clear how they affect the game. The result is that you immediately understand you’re supposed to change them to progress and you don’t feel inconvenienced by it. Good change.
They also added a couple other new zones that are fun enough. In general it also seems like progressions have been tightened up so you have to redo progress less often then before, once you get out of the first few rows.
4G, the creator of NGU Idle (I just reached Evil today!) has a new game out today: NGU Industries. Imagine Factorio as a clever idle clicker with 4G’s characteristic humor. It’s pretty good
No. No. NOOOO!
Well…maybe. Just a little…
Ooh, interesting. NGU never really clicked (sorry) for me. I wonder if this will.
Definitely liking it so far. Lots of dynamic space and production chain optimisation to do.
I got tired of idlers for awhile, but am back to try out a few:
Exponential Idle - It’s a text-based idler for mobile based around exponential math. I was hoping for something like Antimatter Dimensions, but this one isn’t really very interesting. Abandoned after a couple of prestige levels.
Bitburner - Woah, this one is super cool. It’s a hacker idler set in the year 2077. (Guess the genre.) In this one you actually write scripts in JavaScript to automate things. The aesthetic is really good, the scripting is unique and cool, and the manual is comprehensive and well-written. I’m just starting, but really liking it so far.
Idle Loops - Part of the fun of this one is figuring out what’s going on. But you essentially just queue up a task list for each loop and have to figure out how to optimize the task list to get what you want done. Again, just starting, but so far pretty neat.
While the idea is great, I think this would need a rethinking of both the UI and the economy to work.
The problem with the UI is that the game makes it very hard to actually do the kind of optimization that I assume is the point of the game. It doesn’t surface the key information, and the feedback loop is way too slow.
At a minimum, it should always show you the data for the previous full loop. Having to pause at the end of the loop, try to remember the key numbers, make you change, run the next loop, aand then compare the outcomes is just total rubbish.
Ideally the editing should be completely separate from the live run. It should have an edit mode that shows a prediction of what the outcome of a loop will be. But all the while, it’ll actually continue using your live version of the loop until you commit the edited version in.
As for the economy, it’s just really unsatisfying, indirect and slow.
My love-hate relationship with idlers means that I usually burn out on them after a couple of days, but I’ve been playing Synergism for a shockingly long time… Since August, maybe?
It starts with very little about it revealed, but pretty quickly opens up into a surprisingly complex system that keeps expanding as previous hurdles become trivial. I’m on the 5th reset tier and, from what I can tell, not actually very far into the game.
Yeah I agree with just about everything you wrote up. I wonder if it opens up more after you leave Beginnerland, but not sure if I care enough to play that long.
I may abandon Bitburner too. I really like the idea of making a game where you have to program in a real programming language. But the way the hack-security-growth systems interact is too ambiguous. Optimization takes either a ton of busywork or a ton of tedious coding. It might still be really good, but I’m not gonna spend too much more effort on it.
Gonna check this out!
Oh hey, I finally finished NGU Idle last week, final play time a little over 600 days. It could have been quicker but the end of Sadistic difficulty is an unfun slog and I stopped rebirths for a while in there. That said I’d still recommend the game.
The dev’s follow-up game NGU Industries by all accounts isn’t nearly as good and is officially abandoned already. The dev 4G ran into a bit of burnout (which is also why the ending of NGU Idle is abrupt).
Unfortunately, the dev tried to balance the new game in a bit of an automated fashion, by scaling costs to increase as you had more output, such that the next foozle you wanted to buy would always take a set amount of time. This lead to no real feeling of progress, which in an incremental is a bit of a problem. I only played that game for a month or so before I was DONE with it forever.
I’m still playing Evolve, which has been an excellent city-builder style incremental / mostly idle.
I played a bunch of Syngergism a while past… Unless it’s fixed, the later game has some serious issues where it turns from an incremental game into more of a weird puzzle game where you need to craft spreadsheets and do some very strange things with poor feedback (or you go to the discord and copy what people have done before you) to make progress. Fun for a while in the incremental section, then not to my taste. It does take quite a while to get to the weird stuff, and maybe by now it’s balanced out, so fingers crossed for current players.
There are a ton of scripts out there, ready to go. Uh, mostly. I sometimes found a script didn’t work quite like I wanted, so that lead to some work. But I got to the point where hacking “runs” were easy and fairly automated.
Gang runs were another matter entirely (and eventually you need to switch things up, for [reasons]). I had trouble getting some of the existing scripts to work, and there’s a weird thinbg where you have to repeatedly train and then in-run reset gang members and retrain them over and over and it got a bit too tedious.
Part of the problem is a lot of scripts claim to be easy to use but require you to have done many runs and unlocked some down the road stuff in the long term progression. Part of it is dated documentation.
I liked my time with it but doubt I would return. I think the main game needed more ability to inherently automate things without coding.
I played it to that point. So the thing is, you don’t actually leave Beginnersville. Even after unlocking the next area, you’ll still be starting every loop from scratch, and will have to take The Journey (with all its prerequisites) to take any actions in the next area. The minimal plan I had for getting out, with no mana left over, took about 7 minutes of non-accelerated time.
And that’s just the minimum. To get any meaningful amount of work done in the next area, you need to spend substantially more time than that in Beginnersville. None of the actions available in the next area appear to offer any way of speeding up or short-circuiting that. So now to make progress in the next area, I’ll need to have a basically immutable 10 minute block of actions at the start, and then I can start grinding on the seemingly identical progress bars of that area.
I started a game, and for some reason got 300k “offerings”, which could only be used in the Runes tab to buy a hundred levels in Speed Runes, which seem to have completely busted the economy. Is this how it’s supposed to work?
Honestly, I don’t know. I got the same boost, but it only lasts for the first few reset tiers. At this point, now more than a month in, I’m filling ~5000 levels of all the runes in a couple of seconds and starting over with each reset.
I looked at it as a way to see more of the game faster - 100 levels of speed runes may be a lot right at the start, but the boost it gives washes out pretty quickly.
I got that too, but it becomes quickly irrelevant, so not a huge deal.