Green Zodiacs useless?

[Thanatos]

I'm through Hard Trial 4 with all divine level zodiacs and am experimenting with what gets either higher total score for attacks, a higher Zodiac level, or faster progression through Unity to get to your softcap zodiac level so you can grab it and start again.

Through general fiddling, red zodiacs will help with score, if they have Common exp power. Having one Mult Gain from Aries helps reduce the time it takes for the initial dilation surge (it takes two lap ticks instead of more). A Lap Speed upgrade from a red helps in general for speeding through the beginning of unity.

The DP focused upgrades from Light Blue and Dark Blue help greatly. The more of them you have the higher your score and zodiac level, for the most part. Trading off how many dark blues you want for luck and game speed vs light blues for even more DP is a slider you can move to your preference.

However, at no point does substituting a green zodiac into my build will it increase any of these factors (total score, Unity Zodiac level, speed to get through unity).

Are they supposed to be completely useless? What gives? I would assume it was intended that having at least one of each class of buff would be optimal but that doesn't seem to be remotely the case.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Maybe they're like four out of the six lab upgrades. Someone, someday, may placebo a use for them, but even without having reached the "attack" part of the game, green zodiacs have only been good to me for one thing: Shop currency.

[Thanatos]

Yeah but with the lab upgrades, the two that had actual impact were gen exponent, and common exponent. You could get a demonstrably higher score with a 1:2 or 1:3 ratio between lab 5 and 6.

The green zodiacs have gen exponent! Yet somehow it doesn't help compared to more common exponent....

[roboticaust]

They are designed around IP gain through stuff like stars and generator synergy. The problem with that is A) they take time to build up and B) are softcapped through the majority of Unity. So they are on par with 4 out of the 6 lab upgrades. They exist, people experiment with them, then eventually they are generally avoided. Unlike the lab upgrades, they do have secondary uses like sacrifice and sell fodder, plus an achievement for full green. But beyond that, kinda mediocre.

[Thanatos]

I think the fatal flaw is that the green upgrades are all based around score/IP.
Gen exponent boosts generators, which purely boost multiipiers, which is score
Infinity gain boosts the infinity upgrades which boost IP and score.
Mult/bought gen is again multipliers which is score
Star Base boosts stars, which boost generators....same as gen exponent it's just score.

Then we have increased DP, which boosts....
DP - DP upgrade 1+2
IP - DP upgrade 3+5
EP - DP upgrade 3+5+7+9
Star Base - DP upgrade 5
Gen exp - DP upgrade 5+6
Common exp - DP upgrade 3+4+5
mult gain - DP upgrade 5
lap speed - DP upgrade 5
ascension power - DP upgrade 5+8
infinity gain - DP upgrade 5
generator power - DP upgrade 5
stardust gain - DP upgrade 5
star base - DP upgrade 3+5
lab points - DP upgrade 5+9
AP - DP upgrade 5
DTP - through the cap.
Score - through literally everything above

DP upgrades EVERYTHING that factors into Zodiac level. Why would you pick anything else. The green buffs need to be vastly increased if they want to compete. Subbing a green in SHOULD increase your score at the cost of everything else, but the combination of everything else gets you a higher score!

[roboticaust]

Truthfully, you're way over thinking it and they don't need to be balanced at all really. I'm sure they shine early on into the unity grind then fall off and that's fine. But realistically, the late half of Unity is where you start to optimize zodiacs and the final bits of progress come insanely quickly once you do. Green not falling into that optimization is honestly not even a huge deal. One less thing to grind for when swapping loadouts.

If I were to make an honest criticism towards the zodiac implementation as it is currently, it wouldn't be "balance". It would be to have the ability to lock and have loadouts for quick swapping. Would make the attack climb much less of a ball ache.

[Thanatos]

Originally posted by roboticaust:

Truthfully, you're way over thinking it and they don't need to be balanced at all really. I'm sure they shine early on into the unity grind then fall off and that's fine. But realistically, the late half of Unity is where you start to optimize zodiacs and the final bits of progress come insanely quickly once you do. Green not falling into that optimization is honestly not even a huge deal. One less thing to grind for when swapping loadouts.

If I were to make an honest criticism towards the zodiac implementation as it is currently, it wouldn't be "balance". It would be to have the ability to lock and have loadouts for quick swapping. Would make the attack climb much less of a ball ache.

They do not. Green never "fell off" - it was not better at any point during Unity.

I don't see how having 1/4 of the feature be useless isn't a balance issue. Same problem with lab.

[roboticaust]

You clearly haven't played enough idlers if you think every aspect is balanced in a good one. This is never the case. The imbalances force players to consider their choices and find optimizations. If everything is balanced, then progress would be brainless and not engaging whatsoever

[roboticaust]

As for "not better at any point during unity", I used them in most of my easy and normal trials and I've been done with the new content completely for awhile now. As I said, they help push IP and those trials being completed via reach infinity/eternity meant they helped push past some rougher spots in the trials. Sure you can always ignore the trials until they become trivial and avoid green zodiacs entirely as a result. But to each their own. I liked completing them early for rewards, even if some of the rewards weren't useful until later on when the factors could really start scaling.

[Thanatos]

Originally posted by roboticaust:

You clearly haven't played enough idlers if you think every aspect is balanced in a good one. This is never the case. The imbalances force players to consider their choices and find optimizations. If everything is balanced, then progress would be brainless and not engaging whatsoever

Sorry what? It's bad on purpose so people will use guides?

I have played a lot of incrementals, and I KNOW that is certainly bad design. Everything should have a purpose.

"I used them in most of my easy and normal trials and I've been done with the new content completely for awhile now"

But you could have gotten it done easier with a red. Trust me, I know, because I did so.

[lordoftheabeliangroups]

I think they're intended to speed up the period between the first Infinity and the first Eternity. The problem is that (a) that isn't a particularly slow part of the game anyway, especially once you have the bonus from Medium Trial 2; and (b) Free Lab Levels does a better job at that than anything green. If Free Lab Levels did not exist, players would at least need to prioritize green while running through Medium Trials.

It also doesn't help that almost everything in that stage of the game feeds into GP, which is softcapped to such a degree that you need a truly massive increase in it to see any difference.

[roboticaust]

You are misreading and drawing your own summaries here. I never said I used full green for my trials. I just slipped in one here and there to do them earlier. Made use of what was available in my inventory and made it work to keep progressing.

As for perfectly balanced idlers, you're absolutely delusional. If every option is equally good, then you end up with trash like that idle spiral game. A boring game where all you do is wait and the only choice you can make to speed up progress is opening your wallet for some made up currency to buy your progress with.

Good idlers have depth to them and things to actively do between the idle phase. Mechanics that require you to find what works and what doesn't. If every option worked, what would be the point of this update. We could just slap whatever into whatever slot and profit. Boring.

[Thanatos]

You leaped in weirdly hostile about this. It's utterly baffling why you're defending this. You are also inexplicably assuming that the developer intended them to be weaker in every way, as a trap for players, instead of this being an unintentional mistake - which can still be corrected!

[lordoftheabeliangroups]

Originally posted by roboticaust:

You are misreading and drawing your own summaries here. I never said I used full green for my trials. I just slipped in one here and there to do them earlier. Made use of what was available in my inventory and made it work to keep progressing.

As for perfectly balanced idlers, you're absolutely delusional. If every option is equally good, then you end up with trash like that idle spiral game. A boring game where all you do is wait and the only choice you can make to speed up progress is opening your wallet for some made up currency to buy your progress with.

Good idlers have depth to them and things to actively do between the idle phase. Mechanics that require you to find what works and what doesn't. If every option worked, what would be the point of this update. We could just slap whatever into whatever slot and profit. Boring.

Except it's almost as boring when there's one option that's never the good option.

If a game repeatedly asks you to choose between option A and option B, but the correct choice is always to choose A, that's not much better than a game where the choice of A or B doesn't matter. But if each option is better about half the time, then the choice becomes interesting.

Similar logic applies when there are more than two choices.

[roboticaust]

It wasn't meant to be hostile tbh. And it's not so much defending it as feeling like it's not a big deal. Even in the other more used elements, there's one "bad" one in the bunch. Sure they can have some uses for a specific trial or achievement, but I found I only used specifically 2 out of each set once I started focusing in on build specific zodiac sets rather than just taking whatever the game threw at me during the painful manual pre-full macro unity phase.

Green in particular was bad by that point. Earlier on it was more trying to piece together what worked out of a slew of random junk collected through manual unities and every now and again a green made it's way in to get the job done. Plus I might've missed a fringe outlier potential to them such as leaderboard stuff since I don't actively engage with that at all to really care about min-maxing it.

Again, do I think everything needs to be perfectly balanced... not at all. Because the reality is half the zodiacs are in the bad pile and it takes a bit of experimenting along the way to figure out which are in that list of duds. Sure it does feel weird that green makes up half of unused ones but it also makes sense especially with the way lab worked before unity. Greens push IP gains, but as we all learned months ago pushing other things pushes IP as a result and makes it a bait choice.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Originally posted by Thanatos:

Yeah but with the lab upgrades, the two that had actual impact were gen exponent, and common exponent.

Except by the time you get to Dilation on your very first run through the game gen exponent already matters as much as the popularity of reality TV shows and you're better off going full common exponent.

So yeah, green zodiacs are mostly useless except for That One Time They Worked. This game is basically a puzzle game. If you don't find out what the One Thing is that you need for each part of the game, you'll be going at twenty miles per hour on a highway.