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Yes, they are very amusing. Obviously they are also the only meaningful form of damage in the end-game, as well. Maxing out GEET is a necessary route, it seems. Not sure if the other rocket based choices are worth it, though.
Baby drones - these little suckers do massive damage once you get the power upgrade from the sword in the stone.
To power baby drones up even more, getting the talents that increase combo chance for your slammers (motivation, along with the one that increases combo chance per jump, then add the drone inspiration for 3 extra jumps gets you to 98% chance to combo)
To keep motivation up, you’ll need a load of runners with the Timeshift talent along with a TON of bombers — those bombers should have several investments in timeshift.
Honestly, if you are going for massive insane numbers, you can ignore zygnorps as your time shifting runners will easily outscale them once you start scaling the number of bombers you have (invest those extra points in timeshift instead of the 3 extra zygnorps).
Stall as long as possible on C9/10 and get as many drones as you can (make sure to have the drone talent that gives you 2 babies for every 1 drone) so you can have as many babies going into C10.
Take advantage of all your time shifting and get zybellium arrows.
Get grenade launching gnorps (modern warfare) and the talents related to that.
Crucially, get the talent that allows you to select all 3 sword in the stone perks.
Get weak spots (modern warfare will spam out extra weak spots (talent) and the perk that pops weakspots with rockets will keep you ahead of the curve). Pair this with weakspots increasing your overdrive bar followed by the overdrive bar triggering Excalibur and add in the green flower power for your multiplier and the zybellium arrows and you’ve got a godly build.
Ice and acid together will do four times as much damage as rockets alone, late game. I turned off red and blue flowers to focus on just acid alone,
Think I had 40 mountaineers, 40 runners, 35 bombers
Currently all that matters is getting acid and rockets up and that's enough to beat the game entirely while completely ignoring all other forms of damage.
Maxing it out is actually a waste. At high compression/collection runners can very easily keep the rockets full at only 10%, use the gnorps elsewhere.
You want to focus on more damage, and if possible damage that is focused in the same range. The faster you get those concentrations the better off you will be. Right now I have been using frostfire / bombers into rockets / acid / excalibur / zyg arrows late game. I only had 10% GEET as well, and just a couple of rocket upgrades didn't really need more. Think I had 500M + damage at the end.
Interesting that we both just finished the game and came away with completely different strategies and thoughts on the mechanics.
My build was based entirely around bombers, rockets, and the psychics. Bombers and GEET to generate rockets which (multiplied by poison, ice, and Excalibur) were the main damage component of the build, reached about 1.5G damage at the end. Bombers synchronize really well with the psychics since you get the same benefit from Timeshift by investing 2 extra points into psychics as you would from investing those points into Timeshift itself, but you also get the extra psychics on top of that. These guys will take care of all your collection needs, though if I were going for a pure speed strat (and not trying to unlock extra perk points, as I was on this run), I'm not sure I would bother with them.
Use the perk that lets your gunners fire arrows and put fire arrows on them to keep the rock on fire permanently for massive boost to the Bombers speed, which will generate even more Timeshifts and rockets. Also take the perk that causes them to fire grenades on reload, it won't be a ton but it will help generate some weak points that you can trigger with your rockets for faster Excalibur triggers. Finally ran 10 mountaineers purely for the Inspiration bonus on your collectors (doubles their carrying capacity - again, not useful if you aren't going for perk point unlocks).
Didn't even touch slammers or drones.
EDIT:
Just completed speedrun with basically the same strategy at 29:20. Went all in on Timeshift and didn't bother with psychics, but I'm not sure it was actually helpful. I was definitely blocked by lack of shards more than anything else throughout the run, mostly in late game housing and rocket upgrade costs. You essentially lose 1 perk point on Timeshift by going for the psychics but I think it's probably worth it, since the late game damage scaling is all about pumping out more bombers and rocket upgrades, which gets expensive.
Slammers are just mega inefficient at generating shards compared to bombers, and its not even close, plus they don't have the built in synergies with runners and arrow generation that you get from Timeshift on bombers, which hurts your early game damage and collection rates a lot.
Drones don't seem designed at all for speedrun purposes, they are almost completely useless for it IMO, but after having played around with them now I could potentially see some uses for them when trying to push higher prestiges on standard mode.
Psychics also seem to be a net negative on speedrun strats, they do let you speed through the early game a bit faster, but late game their collection rate becomes a problem when trying to finish the last compression.
Anyway, I refined my original strategy quite a bit and got the speedrun time down to 19:26.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3131252051
For anyone interested, the basic strategy is this:
1. First few seconds spend collecting shards, then buy a couple houses, the House of Shards, and your Runner building and drop in about 15 Runners right away. The Runner Backstop perk will boost your collection rate insanely high for the first minute.
2. Use those early fund to immediately grab the Archery Range and Fire Arrows. These are boosted significantly by Popcorn and Superhot so they will generate a lot of shards and put them right next to your Runner building. Then get your Bomber building and drop all your free gnorps in there (should be at least 15-20).
3. Grab the Rock Analysis Lab and research the thing to let you grab Zybellium and the special thing that generates 3 extra Zybvelliums. Invest your first 3 points into Timeshift. Keep buying housing and adding to your Bombers. Get to 20 Runners and bump your carry capacity to 10-15. This should be all you need to invest into your Runners for a while, Timeshift and Runner Backstop will keep them collecting at a really nice rate for a while.
4. Don't go too crazy on houses though, cuz what we're really doing in these first few minutes is trying to rush towards Riflegnorps. So save up 10k quick as you can, and grab the Gun vs. Rock building and buy your first two Riflegnorps, and put them on Fire bullets, so that they spit out a lot of shards right next to our Runner building, but more importantly keep the rock on fire so our Bombers have boosted speed at all times.
5. At this point you're probably starting to rush through compressions. Make sure to grab the Cocoa Cafe so that you can unlock and take the Break Time tech at your Runner building. While you're at it, grab 5 Mountaineers (do not bother upgrading them), set your Runner inspiration to the Mountaineer one, upgrade your carry capacity to 15-20, and get the first speed unlock for your Runners. Continue upgrading housing and adding more Bombers, stop around the point where you unlock the Additional Housing research, but make sure to save 9 Gnorps. Get your third Riflegnorp, then switch your Archery Range over to Ice Arrows. Finally, unlock the triple damage from your Bombers for 150k.
6. Everything above I would basically call "step 1" in the strategy. The goal is to setup fast early income and blow through the first few compressions to get your Timeshifts started and get the Zybellium you'll need for the next part of the strategy.
7. By now you'll have a really solid income and can start saving for the big ticket items. Get the GEET tech at your Runner building and make the rocket factory. Then get Pocket Rockets at your Bomber building, up your mountaineers to about 20-30, and switch your Bombers to the Mountaineer inspiration to let them spawn rockets as well.
8. Our end game strategy is all about Excalibur and weak point generation, and now is when we start beelining for that. First on that list is Additional Housing for around 250k and 1 Zybellium. Grab this as soon as you can, your're going to need the extra population. Now we save up for The Shine, this bad boy costs 1m but is key to pushing our damage further and we want to unlock it ASAP. As soon as its built, spend the 9 pop to find the chosen one, and keep an eye out for when the Accords unlock and grab all three of them.
9. Now that we have Excalibur unlocked, we need to switch over to exploiting weak points. Unlock the grenade tech at your gun building and switch your Riflegnorps over to Modern Warfare, and grab a couple more of them. Build The Garden, turn off red flowers, get the double speed flower growth upgrade, and research the tech that gives Directors extra weak spot generation, then the poison upgrade tech.
10. Switch your Archery Range to Zybe Arrows. Unlock Vulnerability at your rocket range. If you haven't done so already, grab all the speed upgrades for your Runners and get their capacity up to about 30. Build more houses for more Bombers.
11. MORE RIFLEGNORPS. At this point the strategy is basically complete. Your damage will mostly come from weak point generation from the grenades your Riflegnorps shoot, and it's more or less a waiting game now. Spend your remaining Zybellium on more Timeshift upgrades. I ended with 20 Runners, 30 Mountaineers, 90 Bombers, and 10 Riflegnorps.
I think I'm probably done refining this strategy, but if anyone wants to take it further there are some potential upgrades to make in terms of the specific order of events and unlocks and whatnot.
Also a few thoughts I had but never got around to testing:
- Poison isn't adding all that much damage in this build, so assuming that turning off green flowers would create more directors faster (resulting in faster weak point generation and a higher multiplier), it might be an overall dps increase to do that. But I don't even know if turning off one type of flower actually increases the rate that the remaining flowers are grown. If it doesn't work that way, then turning off green flowers is pointless.
- The last few Zybellium I put into more Timeshift upgrades but I'm not sure they're adding much of a boost at this point. It's possible that putting one or all of them into Gatlegnorps would be more effective, as they would generate a ton of arrows for your archery range to fire more Zybe arrows, which is already the second highest damage contributor as is (though pretty far behind Excalibur).
- Slammers with Fire Breath to keep your rock on fire after you switch your Riflegnorps over to grenades. Lot of unknowns here - how valuable even is it to keep the rock on fire at this point, since this is the point you're switching primarily to Excalibur damage? How many Slammers do you need to consistently keep it on fire? And how does that weigh against losing that many Bombers? How does the cost of 1 Zybellium for the Fire Breath unlock weigh against using it for Timeshift or a Gatlegnorp?
- King of the Hill. Given that our primary damage is Excalibur which scales off your multiplier, this is theoretically a huge damage boost. But I haven't really been able to figure out a way to trigger him reliably in this strategy, plus there's no room in your 20 points for his perk that gives the +8 multiplier, but if you could solve those two problems this could potentially save minutes on the run.
Anyway, thanks to the devs for a fun game!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3131438018
Reversal is... Fine. Not great, but fine. Only really works if you're actually getting reclamation, but can help a bit if/when you do. I usually grab it just because why not.
Overdrive is by far the most important one, because almost as soon as you get it, Gnorpcalibur will become a massive portion of your damage, if not the main portion outright.
Power is the second-best one, and allows things like Bullets/Grenades/Rockets to scale via multiplier, though only a small amount of it. Even that small amount is often enough to make a huge difference, though.