New Game plus perks

[Simbu]

Looks like if you do New game plus you get 90 DNA points, and curious what people think the best upgrades are.

I think decreased EXP requires are a no brainer for 2 of your perks, but the third I am personally torn between several... Base Decay, Food cooldown, Max health gain, and passive jobs.

I have a feeling food cooldown will be the best of those, with base decay and health gain a close second place, and passive jobs I am not sure how it will go, but think it will ultimately end up worse, but wondering what others think.

Decay growth seems underpowered for the first one you can chose, since as it states you need a run >60 minutes for it to actually be better then just base decay. Combat shield probably loses to food cool down, especially with increased exp gains, and food value kinda works against the idea of unlocking automations in as few runs as possible.

[Simbu]

Stats from new NG +++ run. this is 2x both exp, and passive jobs, 1x combat shield and max hp.

This run definitely felt a lot of dynamics shifting with the extra exp additions. Cut a total of 10.5 hours off my time, and definitely lost HP because of it (about 10%), but could mostly make it past.

Combat shield helped an ok amount with hourglasses, but not as much as I hoped with bull. Still overall pretty good progress.

Added in base decay, food cd and food value for the next run.

Chapter  Generation  HP (Base)  Total Time    Longest Life
2        14          200         4:58:03      0:24:15
3        38          593         16:15:32     0:33:18
3 monks  53          1.38k       1d00h47m     0:38:06
4        66          5.02k       1d08h21m     0:38:16
5        89          48.1k       1d22h00m     0:38:16
6        115         350 k       2d15h22m     0:45:22
7        135         554 k       3d04h29m     0:45:22
8        171         746 k       3d22h07m     0:45:22
9        188         868 k       4d07h36m     0:45:22
9        212         1.00M       4d18h58m     0:45:22

[Slayer1557]

NG+2 complete. 260 generations, an improvement of 26. I used Gen XP, Inst. XP, Food CD, Food Strength, Combat Shield, and Max HP. For NG+3 I'm adding one level of Base Decay and one more in Max HP.

[Furrygopher]

I've restarted again myself, I had hoped that 2 levels of combat shield would make some of the late game optional combat encounters plausible with my All River all the time playstyle: it didn't, so I ended with 1.15 million HP again only able to achieve around 50% of the Chapter 6 optional, saving only something like 13 generations on my last run.

This time I've redistributed perks to 4* Base Decay, 2* combat shield, 1*both XP perks and Max health having dropped passive jobs.

A quick note on Base decay, these times are on Generation 1 when Decay hits 0.5:

2 levels adds 24 seconds to a run
3 levels adds 38 seconds to a run
4 levels adds 52 seconds to a run

I suspect there is some rounding at work here so some high levels might round in such a way to give zero effect, conversely implausibly achievable crazy high numbers might round to zero and give infinite time.

[Simbu]

I don't know exactly how it works, but removing 5% is not the same as as multiplying by 5%

Example, we know that the rate increase by 25% per minute, but that doesn't mean if you take 25% off of the value, its 1 minute longer, you actually only needs 20% less to add an entire minute...

.5*.8=.4
.4*1.25=.5

I think we did the math a little wrong when calculating base decay adding 12 seconds. When doing a more rigorous examination, I get closer to 14 seconds...

I assume its using the same formula as the other values, so you could see it as
.5*.95^x=base decay

You can remove the .5 as a constant... can just solve for...
.95^x * 1.25^(Y/60) = 1 (this is to covert to seconds...)

If I plug into wolfram alpha, I get Y=13.792*X

That also means level 4 should be giving you about 55 seconds, and not 52... but that could definitely be due to rounding issues.

So might just be better to say base decay gives somewhere between 12 and 14 seconds per run, but fully willing to be proven wrong.

[Furrygopher]

Oh i'm sure you are right, I've not done more than a cursory use of spreadsheets for things like base decay and decay growth.

I've just been going off my gut that an exponential toward zero and an exponential to infinity interacting is going to approach some limit and took your 12 seconds as near enough to it as makes no difference.

The exponentials and their limits is why I've started questioning the long term viability of passive jobs, it's approaching a limit of 1, whereas other skills approach zero or infinity, 7 levels of max health nearly doubles health gain, but will the 7th level of passive jobs be notably better than the 6th? framing it like that though the same can be said of base decay, it's a linear reward in a system where you could be getting exponential rewards instead.

[Simbu]

I kinda doubt most of us will get past 5 levels of most perks, 7 would probably require a lot of work, and don't see at all anyone getting to 10 anytime soon... and on those scales I don't think the exponential matters that much.

It is true that when you look at the long term, passive jobs won't be as good... if we simplify it and just say 7 levels is 7% better... then yeah, you get .07, then .14 then .21, but relative increase is already going down. health max will always double every 7. That isn't counting that at level 50 you would be gaining half (approximately) the boost you had at level 0.

Beyond that, by level 5 or 6 passive jobs I think it will very nearly auto complete jobs for you as your doing exploration and such, so it would be useless to go any further then that anyway.

For those first 5 levels though, its really strong, so no reason not to get it I feel. for the first 5 chapters that would be pretty close to working 25% faster, which is really good.

Long term... I am fully in the exp reduction camp, but everything will be useful to some extent.

[Fel]

Well, as more chapters get added we should be getting more points for perks as well when going for new game plus.
So maybe in the future we will be able to get to higher levels more easily as well, and the balance between those perks could change based on the added chapters as well.

[Simbu]

yeah, I was mostly referring to current content.

An interesting thought experiment though would be what each perk gives at level 20.

Gen exp should be about 10 generation levels, thats 62% increase to skill multiplier...

Instinct should be about 50 instinct levels, thats a 64% increase

Base decay should be around 274 extra seconds at the start of each run, thats 4.5 minutes of 'free' progress.

decay rate... Thats a hard calculation and I don't know the exact percents... but probably weaker then base decay...

food cooldown... its basically 3x faster food eating... so theoretically could support 5 minutes longer lifes... at the cost of needing 3x the food (only at the end of the life though, or at least when max hp isn't maxed)

combat shield means about 1/3rd the damage too... probably overkill at that point.

food value.... each food is worth 2.7x more. That would mean a single seal is worth 675k, or a 475k health profit... At that point max hp might be super important, or you couldn't get value out of your food.

Max health is 8x health... It starts to become difficult to refill all that health at some point.

passive jobs... about 18% of standard work done on each job all the time. Hard to measure, but don't expect to be able to food stall anywhere, I think at this point you are pretty close not ever really doing food yourself, mostly construction and exploration.

Overall I think even at level 20 its fairly balanced... I would definitely want the exp levels/passive jobs, but also understand if you only take those, combat/damage tasks will murder you.

[Furrygopher]

Addressing decay rate in your thought experiment

if decay rate is reduced by 1/250 per level we should be looking at (1-(1/250))^^20

Meaning decay will increase at 1.23 ish per min instead of 1.25

Big assumption here, Taking a average run to be 40 mins
1.23^^40 is a multiplier of 4000 ish
1.25^^40 is a multiplier of 7500 ish

So health decay is nearly halved at 40 mins, feels like it's adding in the region of 3 Mins to a run on just some back of the napkin maths, but it seems to match your intuition that it's still inferior to base decay.

[Slayer1557]

Keep in mind, it may be worthwhile to get some levels of decay rate as everything else is higher level, just because it's cheaper. Meaning, if everything else is like level 5+ maybe getting 2 levels of decay growth is economical. But finding the breakpoints for that is up to you.

Also, you're really teasing me with all this talk about passive jobs. I like being able to micromanage food. Maybe next time through I'll get a few levels of passive jobs anyway. I'll have to think about it.

[Simbu]

Level 1 has some drawbacks, but level 2 is basically all benefits. Level 1 makes it impossible to hold food in the late game. I am thinking of getting level 3 next run, just depends how well my current 3 new perks perform.

[Deepwater]

I'd pay 90 DNA for 5 inventory slots I swear

[Simbu]

5 inventory slots would be nice, but probably too strong for just 90 points if being honest.

I would value 5 inventory slots at about 4 levels of food value, which is pretty close to 180 dna points I think, so maybe about 150 points for 5 inventory slots.

[Fel]

Those inventory slots would make the river path weaker since it would no longer be required to get all of the coins, that's probably one of the reasons why it isn't in the perks you can get.

[Slayer1557]

What if it was 30/40/55 etc points for 1 inventory slot each. That seems more reasonable, maybe even underpowered.