Some of the upgrades cost don't make sense

[Ixath]

The two easy ones to note are the "Balls destroyed by electric tower have x chance to spawn gems.." upgrade and the 2nd tier of earn 10 gems/min.

The electric tower one takes something like a million kills to earn those 10k gems back, and the 2nd tier 10 gems/min is pretty bad, too.

Both only get worse with the more upgrades you spend.

[NoPants]

True, but with the last upgrade, you earn bonus damage based on your lifetime gems earned. So in the end, you'll have much higher damage per shot by upgrading the electric powerup. As for the gems per minute, that's offline too, so it really doesn't take long to make the gems offline to buy higher levels. At least it didn't take me that long.

[Grey-fox-13]

Originally posted by NoPants:

As for the gems per minute, that's offline too, so it really doesn't take long to make the gems offline to buy higher levels. At least it didn't take me that long.

Can you elaborate what you mean here? I have the upgrade at 50 per minute and the next upgrade costs 300k to increase by 10. Just doing the math 300k / 60*24*10 we get that for this upgrade to pay itself off it will take almost 21 days. And with the prices increasing with each upgrade eventually it will take months until the upgrade is worth it. Is that intended?

[NoPants]

It does take time to pay for itself, but combined with the damage % per gems earned beneath it means your damage is constantly increasing. You can see it for yourself if you occasionally open and close your tower gold upgrades, you can see the damage will increase by a bit. That's the reason why it's so expensive.

[Grumbl3dook]

True... I get that the "gems into damage" skill includes spent and unspent gems so every gem you get increases damage - that's a flat benefit.

The scaling is ridiculous though - and that benefit is only going to be the "best value for your gems" once literally every other upgrade has been purchased, no?

At 21 days (ty Greyfox) to pay off ONE of the early levels, it feels like I could increase my passive gem income faster by almost any damage upgrade allowing me to kill balls quicker to generate more gem balls. If your "passive gem generation" upgrade isn't the best bet for passive gem generation, I'd revisit the price. This could be a really cool early game investment for players who want to focus on gem upgrades - as it stands it's not an effective purchase at any stage in the game IMO.

[🆃🅴🅰🆁🅻🅾🆆]

How much easier does the game have to get?

Yes, the first few gem generation upgrades cost a lot because you're kinda limited on options to generate them. But that's also where you start getting the ball rolling. You generate these both off/on-line making them even better.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2505761407

By the way, gem generation was the first thing I maxed out since the benefit by itself was so great.

Let's just for fun say I could buy the next upgrade. That'd be 2.76m gems and currently I generate 600/min. That's 600 * 60 * 24 = 864000/day. 2760000 / 864000 = that's around 3.2 days. Or, I could do the illogical thing and say It'd take ~200 days to pay itself off but that'd be just silly. But this is not even right either. We're not only generating gems via the upgrade. Nope. We're getting 75gems per gem ball or, we split them with a saw for 150. Not stopping there either. We can use Electric towers to genreate even more. With some good placements I could most likely have that upgrade tomorrow (if it was possible.)

I don't think I need to point out what 864000/day means for the +damage per 100k does right?

By making things easier and faster you only shorten the game further and... Sadly, with so little content to go around...

[Grumbl3dook]

Hmmmm, I'm still not sure (but the fact that there's disagreement in the fist place makes it more fun / less obvious :D ).

Arite checking Greyfox's maths above, after the upgrade he's earning 86400/day. Looks like that works out at 3.5 days (not 21) - so not as bad as proposed. Since your final tier upgrade is about 3.2 days lets say that's average for the number of days required to pay off your next upgrade via passive generation only (i.e. the point at which you actually make a profit).

So it takes ~3-3.5 x 50 = 150-175 days to start earning profit on passive gem income upgrades. That's not a good look.

864k/day sounds impressive, but what is it as a percentage of your total lifetime gems (which is what the damage bonus is calculated off)? exponential growth renders static gains like this irrelevant pretty quickly.

You're exactly right about gem splitting though - point being if you buy upgrades that allow you to split and destroy only an additional 4 gem balls per day (75x2x4) you'll get the 600 gems per day extra you'd earn at maximum level passive upgrade. It takes much less than a day to make that kinda progress for most of the stages of the game, IMO - and for any upgrade level less than the maximum you need even fewer extra gem balls per dayto beat its cost effectiveness.

[🆃🅴🅰🆁🅻🅾🆆]

Without looking at any numbers, I'd wager the gem generators stand for ~10% overall. But I should point out again that ins't the point. We get these no matter if we're on/off-line. So that's 864k/day when the game is turned off (Admittedly, I have not used this feature once yet as the game has been on since the very start.)

It's hard to say how much damage is added but at least a few trillions every day. Which may not be much now but it was a week ago (Shrink Ray sitting at 520,53T for example. This is obviously with the light powerups active.) But there is deminising returns for sure. But with that said; I would not be here had I not gone the route I did!

Originally posted by @Grumbl3dook:

So it takes ~3-3.5 x 50 = 150-175 days to start earning profit on passive gem income upgrades. That's not a good look.

You'll have to exuse me but im a bit lost here (Maybe just too early...) but what is the 50?

Generally speaking I don't really agree that the generator needs to pay for itself but rather all of them pay towards the next upgrade.

Originally posted by @Grumbl3dook:

You're exactly right about gem splitting though - point being if you buy upgrades that allow you to split and destroy only an additional 4 gem balls per day (75x2x4) you'll get the 600 gems per day extra you'd earn at maximum level passive upgrade. It takes much less than a day to make that kinda progress for most of the stages of the game, IMO - and for any upgrade level less than the maximum you need even fewer extra gem balls per dayto beat its cost effectiveness.

I really should have started quoting earlier... Well, some points have already been pointed at before. Not to nitpick but I assume that was a typo? It's 600 gems per minute, not day :)

But having said that... I play on the second stage and do not have enough DPS to one shot everything. Far from it in fact. In fact... I require the magnets to really progress much at all. (Shrink balls around by 10%/s) so getting a lot of gem balls is no longer really a thing. I may pop maybe 5-10/minute? Split. So, that's what... ~1m-2m per day? That puts my generators at around ~80/40% which was honestly more than I thought. Compared to active play I mean. This could be very different from someone else though!

Alas I am out of time. I'll drop a screenshot on this post to be sure my math checks out. If I missed something just hola at me and I'll sort it out.

EDIT:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2508976791
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2508977123

[Crenshaw]

how you can get 2,6B gold per ball? i dont find anything what rise the gold to this number

[🆃🅴🅰🆁🅻🅾🆆]

Originally posted by Crenshaw:

how you can get 2,6B gold per ball? i dont find anything what rise the gold to this number

Hmm? Go defeate the boss to unlock the next 10 maps. Get to level 10 and farm away... Want more gold? Level up general +gold per ball up to an additional 100%

Cannot remember if there are other perks as I havn't really touched the game since the dev announced he'd not really add anything new to the game.

[Crenshaw]

thx, didnt know that there are more lvls and how i can load them

[🆃🅴🅰🆁🅻🅾🆆]

Originally posted by Crenshaw:

thx, didnt know that there are more lvls and how i can load them

I already covered that actually, but you need to beat the boss. To clarify it a bit more, you need to earn 1 million upgrade points and an icon will show up so you can start the fight.

[Crenshaw]

i kill the boss 2 or 3 weeks ago and the game said there are more levels (i am not sure), but this was all, nothing about how i get they

[NoPants]

Originally posted by Crenshaw:

i kill the boss 2 or 3 weeks ago and the game said there are more levels (i am not sure), but this was all, nothing about how i get they

In the level change menu on the bottom left, there should be an option for new levels on the bottom, below level 10