Early evil advice request

[Cap'n Crazy]

Hey all. I just made it into evil, and progress is (unsurprisingly) rather slow. That in of itself's not terribly surprising, but judging by the achievement percentages (admittedly not a great metric, I know), it looks like I should have managed to scrape up a trillion EM a while ago and I'm nowhere close to that. I hesitate to say I'm playing it wrong (I mean, it's an idle game) but I feel like I've either missed something or am doing something spectacularly dumb.

Anyways, I threw a copy of my save on google drive (sorry, pastebin would be easier but they seem to not like NGU saves) here.[drive.google.com] If you're willing to give it a look, I'd appreciate any advice.

[Hypertext Eye]

Originally posted by Cap'n Crazy:

judging by the achievement percentages (admittedly not a great metric, I know), it looks like I should have managed to scrape up a trillion EM a while ago and I'm nowhere close to that.

Don't worry about the cap achievements. I was "behind" on those too but I still progressed at a reasonable pace. The only way you could have been screwing up is if you'd been wasting tons EXP on adventure stats or Rich Jerks boosts.

I'm not going to load up your save file, but let's make sure your EXP generation is set up properly. You should have Fruit of Knowledge at 24, and using poop on it. And you should have a few perks: FoK sucks, FoK still sucks, and First Harvest. Also you should have NGU Ygg and NGU EXP running at full speed at all times (with some time spent at the end of each rebirth on Evil NGUs). I'm sure you have all this set up though.

One thing that concerns me is that you said progress is rather slow. I found that the grind up to the first Evil titan was surprisingly quick (around a week maybe?), and it was only after that things started slowing down.

ETA: I checked my achievements. It was 10 days from entering evil until the titan, and then I got the 1 trillion energy cap achievement 2 days after that.

[ak-ryuu]

Originally posted by ハイパーテクスト・アイ:

ETA: I checked my achievements. It was 10 days from entering evil until the titan, and then I got the 1 trillion energy cap achievement 2 days after that.

Made me curious, so I checked mine too:
Welcome to Evil - Unlocked 21 Jan, 2020 @ 8:05pm
1 Trillion Energy - Unlocked 5 Feb, 2020 @ 1:17pm
First Titan - Unlocked 12 Feb, 2020 @ 10:48pm

[Cap'n Crazy]

I must admit, after I hit evil I'd been kind of ignoring my normal NGUs, in retrospect I can see why that wasn't a good move. Gonna try refocusing on that for a bit and hopefully I'll be approaching T7 soon, and I guess I'll just not worry about EM since I guess those statistics aren't actually useful. Thanks for the info!

[Hypertext Eye]

Originally posted by Cap'n Crazy:

I must admit, after I hit evil I'd been kind of ignoring my normal NGUs

Don't do that. You'll want to do a little bit of Evil NGU every rebirth but don't focus on it. It's best to do it near the end of the rebirth because you'll have built up some temporary levels in The Beard Cage. There's a quirk that gives you Normal NGU levels when you gain Evil NGU levels, so you'll want to get that at some point (though there are other quirks you'll want before that), and then at the very least wait until you can run Evil Ygg and EXP at full speed all rebirth before you switch to Evil NGU full time. Someone else may have better advice about when to switch.

[Astral]

Originally posted by ハイパーテクスト・アイ:

Originally posted by Cap'n Crazy:

I must admit, after I hit evil I'd been kind of ignoring my normal NGUs

Don't do that. You'll want to do a little bit of Evil NGU every rebirth but don't focus on it. It's best to do it near the end of the rebirth because you'll have built up some temporary levels in The Beard Cage. There's a quirk that gives you Normal NGU levels when you gain Evil NGU levels, so you'll want to get that at some point (though there are other quirks you'll want before that), and then at the very least wait until you can run Evil Ygg and EXP at full speed all rebirth before you switch to Evil NGU full time. Someone else may have better advice about when to switch.

I literally never swapped back to normal NGUs after moving over to evil. Just like I've never swapped back to evil NGUs after moving to sadistic. Though I'm already getting to the point of being able to BB some NGUs in sadistic by now anyways, so eh. The transition between evil and sadistic felt much more tame to me than the one between normal and evil.

[Poop King]

A trillion energy???

I'm still only at 5 million, and currently getting my Magic to 2 million.

[Hypertext Eye]

Originally posted by Astral:

Originally posted by ハイパーテクスト・アイ:

Don't do that. You'll want to do a little bit of Evil NGU every rebirth but don't focus on it. It's best to do it near the end of the rebirth because you'll have built up some temporary levels in The Beard Cage. There's a quirk that gives you Normal NGU levels when you gain Evil NGU levels, so you'll want to get that at some point (though there are other quirks you'll want before that), and then at the very least wait until you can run Evil Ygg and EXP at full speed all rebirth before you switch to Evil NGU full time. Someone else may have better advice about when to switch.

I literally never swapped back to normal NGUs after moving over to evil. Just like I've never swapped back to evil NGUs after moving to sadistic. Though I'm already getting to the point of being able to BB some NGUs in sadistic by now anyways, so eh. The transition between evil and sadistic felt much more tame to me than the one between normal and evil.

I don't know about Sadistic yet (not quite there, a couple of weeks away) but I do know that if you switched to Evil NGU's immediately then you slowed down your early Evil progress by an extreme amount by not continuing to level Normal NGU. At the very least your PP would have suffered greatly.

[Hypertext Eye]

Originally posted by Poopskin:

A trillion energy???

I'm still only at 5 million, and currently getting my Magic to 2 million.

You are still very, very early in the game.

[Astral]

Originally posted by ハイパーテクスト・アイ:

Originally posted by Astral:

At the very least your PP would have suffered greatly.

Depends on your definition of "greatly suffered", I suppose. Looking at my normal NGU vs. evil, I have 2.081e8 more normal PP NGU than evil. Even if I ramped that up to a 3e8 difference, which I'm not sure I could have in the time it took me to start really pumping evil NGUs anyways, the difference in value would be 2070.05% vs. 2,298.53%. So basically 10% more PP. I was still getting some levels in evil PP earlier than normal though, given 24 hour running of them, so the difference may not even be that be quite that pronounced.

It's not like I'm going to argue that what you're saying isn't effective though, I'm just not really convinced on it being a massive difference in speed.

[Hypertext Eye]

Originally posted by Astral:

Depends on your definition of "greatly suffered", I suppose. Looking at my normal NGU vs. evil, I have 2.081e8 more normal PP NGU than evil.

You're looking at the levels you have now and trying to work backward from there. It doesn't work that way, for various reasons. You can't look at your numbers now, see there's not much difference, and think it means it wouldn't have been much difference back then either.

Diminishing returns is a thing in this game. It means early levels have a much greater impact than later levels. You delayed getting a lot of those early levels by fully committing to Evil NGU early. You would have gotten to the point where you could "really pump" evil NGU faster if you had those levels at that time.

I was still getting some levels in evil PP earlier than normal though, given 24 hour running of them, so the difference may not even be that be quite that pronounced.

I'm not saying completely neglect Evil NGU's. I'm saying do a little at a time. Getting to soft cap is important and has a significant impact. Past that, it barely matters, because of how SLOW Evil NGU is and how little it actually does for you (again thanks to diminishing returns). When Evil NGU is still slow, you get more out of running Normal at full speed than you do running Evil past the soft cap. You can do the math if you don't believe me, all the relevant formulas are readily available to you.

[Astral]

Originally posted by ハイパーテクスト・アイ:

You're looking at the levels you have now and trying to work backward from there. It doesn't work that way, for various reasons. You can't look at your numbers now, see there's not much difference, and think it means it wouldn't have been much difference back then either.

But it does work that way? I'm not sure why you're saying it doesn't. Assuming a running of 20 hours a day, given you said you left the end of the run for evil NGUs, it'd take a little under 28 days to work up another 1e8, ergo 50/s for each category. Now, at the absolute start of evil I couldn't really run too many NGUs, but that went away in less than a week.

Diminishing returns is a thing in this game. It means early levels have a much greater impact than later levels. You delayed getting a lot of those early levels by fully committing to Evil NGU early. You would have gotten to the point where you could "really pump" evil NGU faster if you had those levels at that time.

I'm not saying completely neglect Evil NGU's. I'm saying do a little at a time. Getting to soft cap is important and has a significant impact. Past that, it barely matters, because of how SLOW Evil NGU is and how little it actually does for you (again thanks to diminishing returns). When Evil NGU is still slow, you get more out of running Normal at full speed than you do running Evil past the soft cap. You can do the math if you don't believe me, all the relevant formulas are readily available to you.

Well, yeah, and it goes both ways. So using adv. a as an example as well, saying I had gone up 1e8 in value, going by the previous idea, would've resulted in roughly a 15% boost over what I had. To get the same from evil adv. a you'd have to go to about 4500, 3500 over the 1000 cap. That's where the wiggle room lies to me, at least if you're saying to dead stop at the softcaps for evil NGUs until much later. I'm not saying the method you're describing is slower, again, I'm just not convinced it's a significant difference in speed - though that too is another variable, what each of us considers 'significant'. Definitely worth it if you're willing to spend the extra hassle on it though, that sounds like a for sure. Just too much hassle for me.

[Hypertext Eye]

Originally posted by Astral:

But it does work that way? I'm not sure why you're saying it doesn't.

Because the difference you have now is not the same as the difference it would have been then. I tried to explain that and I tried to explain why it's like that. The bonuses you would have gotten from Normal NGU at that time would have pushed you along faster than the bonuses you actually got from evil NGU at that time because you completely stopped doing Normal NGU too early.
Eventually your Evil NGU got fast enough to run at full speed, and you have the quirk that gives Normal levels along with Evil levels. You ran Evil at full speed for a very long time when you were still in Evil mode. During that time, your Normal NGU caught up. You're at approximately the same place you would have been, it just took you longer to get there.

if you're saying to dead stop at the softcaps for evil NGUs until much later.

I absolutely did not EVER say to stop at the soft caps. I didn't even imply it a little bit.

Just too much hassle for me.

What hassle? Run Normal NGU for most of your rebirth, switch to Evil for the last hour or so. Simple. There's no hassle.

ETA: It's the combination of continuing to do Normal along with doing a little bit of Evil that makes the difference. The bonuses are multiplicative. If you just do Normal or just do Evil you're slowing yourself down.

[Cap'n Crazy]

I'm through T7! Thanks for all the advice.