Common Progression timeline

[Shadolance]

Hey guys that are further ahead :)

How much time did it take you to:
- Beat Titan 1
- Beat Titan 2
- Beat Titan 3
- Beat Titan 4
- Get through mega wall
- Reach Evil Difficulty

I'm feeling I'm really slow. I'm reading the beginners guide on the wiki right now and the times mentioned there don't match my progress at all.

For example it sais 2 weeks into the game = Titan 2. Or the mega wall takes "a few days". I'm currently farming the very strange place which I managed to finally idle today. I'm rebirthing once a day for around a 10-20x in number so it's a boss or two a day. Didn't beat boss 100 yet.

I don't see at all how it should only take a few days to be able to beat the mega lands. Farming the boosts and the set for a very strange place is going to take a few days already. And then that's still a long way to go to reach the stat requirement for that area from the wiki.

Or is it that people really play this game actively? I could probably farm the sets faster if I was sitting there watching it all day. But I can't imagine that's what people do in an Idle game.

I just think I'm doing something wrong.

If it is of any interest, I'm currently sitting on 18 M Energy Cap (8M came from a set) and 500k Magic Cap.

I'm taking the fruit requirements as rough guides to what cap I should reach next on those. So next would be 3 M Magic.

My general way to do the rebirths is:

1. Put everything into time Machine to be able to generate enough gold for a drop chance gold digger and the blood ritual.

2. Do a good level of Augments. I calculated the best distribution with a website I saw somewhere around here.

3. When available do 32 levels of Advanced Training.

4. Use Blood Generated until now for Iron Pill.

5. Idle away in NGUs with Energy and Blood for Magic until the next day.

6. Put Money into Money pit and blood ritual to increase number.

7. Rebirth and start over.

Was experimenting a little with Wandoos too but that one doesn't help with adventure stats so it doesn't really help with the progression route from the wiki since that's adventure based.

Oh and I collect a few PP here and there of course.

Any ideas?

[pac230]

If you are already doing 24-hour rebirths so early in the game then things are going to be very slow for you.

At that point, killing bosses is still the biggest (sustainable) source of EXP, with Titans giving relatively little and Fruit of Kn being useless. You kill more bosses the more rebirths you do, so if you are already doing only one rebirth per day then your EXP income will be extremely low.

EXP is by no means the only aspect of progression in the game, but it's always a significant one. It is always good to be aware of where most of your EXP is coming from. At this point it's, in order: Challenges & set completions; bosses; Titans & Adventure drops; and Fruit of Kn in a very distant last place.

My usual advice at this point would be to do Challenges and be sure to max out earlier sets for their bonuses, even if they don't seem that strong to you. Then come back to trying to get into the Mega Lands, focusing on NGU Adventure Alpha, supported by some Advanced Training.

On Augments, you don't need a website or calculator: on any given rebirth, there is no point in using more than one type of Augment (plus its upgrade). You can do a 'speed test' of which is better by picking two adjacent Augs+upgrades and putting the same amount of Energy into each for a certain amount of time and seeing which comes out ahead. Then stick with that one (or compare it with the one on the other side of it) in future rebirths until there are major changes to your Energy stats or to Aug exponents (i.e. Laser Sword Challenge).

If you are trying to get into Mega Lands, you may want to do an awful lot more than 32 levels of Advanced Training!

What I do on a typical rebirth is something like this:

1. Kill bosses so I can reach a fairly high zone, then equip a Gold Drop+ set and kill a boss in Adventure to maximise the gold drop value that goes into Time Machine.

2. Spend the first ~30 minutes to 1 hour on temporary stuff that will be lost on rebirth: Augs, Adv Training, Time Machine, Blood, Wandoos. Often this means working on Time Machine and Augs until Advanced Training unlocks; then doing Advanced Training with Energy while the Magic goes into Blood; then focusing on Wandoos once it is fully booted up at 54 mins/1 hour.

3. At the 1-hour mark, when the first Titans spawn, equip the Gold+ set again and get a kill on the strongest Titan with it to further boost Time Machine. (If your strongest Titan isn't spawning after 1 hour, then this has to be adjusted. And, occasionally, your best possible gold drop will come from an Adventure Zone boss instead.)

4. During the rest of the rebirth, whose length will depend on my Fruit tiers and the respawn time (or some multiple of it) of the highest Titans I can access, Energy and Magic mainly go into NGUs, unless there is some target I am trying to reach for Adventure zone access or Achievements.

5. At the end of the rebirth, after fruit are harvested and final Titan kills made, I see how many more boss kills I can easily get with a few minutes of extra Augs/Wandoos investment.

[Ibn Battuta]

Don't judge yourself by someone else's timeline. Really. No one's situation is the same, the way you ENJOY the game is different.

That said, it seems that you are frustrated with your progress. That we can try to address.

For one, Advanced Training can offer quite a bit beyond 32 levels. It's an obvious low-hanging fruit.

Two, consider whether you can either buy additional Digger slots or else use the Adventure Digger to farm new zones. Ultimately, Drop Chance is "the way to go" between the two, but the elevated drop chance doesn't help at all with zones you can't farm. Obviously both diggers is best, though!

Three, have you completed all of the Basic Challenges? Doing all of them is worth a total of 35% adventure stats. In the end, other challenges are helpful, too, but this one is the most immediately applicable. I personally ran the 100 levels as slightly slower Basics as well, but that's "unfashionable". I find the free boost transformation to be worth it, but you do you. Likewise, a 24-hour challenge will improve your EXP slightly. No rebirth is iffy, but would help with Titan spawns. I suggest holding off until you can kill Titan 4, though.

Generally speaking, though, mentally rank all features from strongest to weakest.
Can you ride the strong ones further?
Is there anything you can invest in to make the weak ones more useful?
How can you nudge the so-so ones into working a bit harder?

It took me 20 days to go from beating Boss 90 to Beating Titan 4, fwiw

[lozchik]

I mean, this is an idle game. It's fine if it takes a bit to get through some parts, especially when learning the new mechanics the game throws at you. There's tons of people that try to super optimize every little part with tons of math. Then there's some that just put along and try to avoid obvious mistakes. I consider an "obvious" mistake not taking the time to do little things that make progression easier, like Basic Challenges as soon as they are available or maxing out sets/items that give rewards.

I beat Titan 4 a bit over a month or so after I started playing and didn't get to Evil until ten or eleven months after I started? I dunno. Even if you do everything perfectly, you'll be playing for a long time. I know I'm going waaaaaay slower than other players, but I enjoy just unlocking things at my own pace.

I happen to have two monitors, so I'll have it running if I happen to be using the computer for awhile, anyway. I only really worry about that if I'm looking for new armor from an area or titan or I want to try challenges.

[Chojoukif]

Looking at my old save files my timeline is roughly:
about a week for Titan 1,
3 more days for titan 2,
3 more days for titan 3,
10 more days for titan 4,
about 2 and a half months total until Evil
(Just to clarify I don't think this timeline represents the expected pace, you need to be playing fairly actively to achieve this pace (or faster) which I definitely was at the time)

Up until around mega lands (or titan 6 at the most) you can speed up your progress a lot through active play. After that the game starts to slow down a lot.

For strategy the best tip I can give you is to "always look for the path of least resistance", that is to say, identify the closest meaningful meta-progression goal (e.g. beating the next titan, increasing XP gain etc.) and identify the fewest steps to get there. Time machine, Augs wandoos etc. are not that important for meta progression, not to say that you don't need them, just that that's not the place to optimize. Important things are for example:
-your equipment loadout,
-how you budget your xp, AP,
-what perks to prioritize
-your magic, energy, power, cap distribution,
-knowing when to push to the next adventure area (e.g. by not rebirthing and allowing advanced training to build up),
-managing your beard growth,
-managing your challenges so that you are able to do them when the rewards become too beneficial to ignore, minimize the time spent climbing back up and the AP lost due to a low AP multiplier
-...

I am just stating the obvious here but at the end of the day that's all there's to it. Remembering to always prioritize the most important thing and planning ahead accordingly is what you gotta do to progress fast.

[Shadolance]

Oh wow. So many detailed answers. This game really has an active community :D

Thanks a lot guys. I think I'm gonna tweak my approach a little according to your suggestions but I'm going to stay an Idle player.

When I have the time do play actively I usually play other types of games. I like Idle games because they usually keep me motivated to stay with them for quite some time. This one is just especially slow I guess :)