I have a hard time understanding Lightyear per hour.

[Lord Retro]

Im now playing the game for quite a while, and what baffles me and makes me scratch my head is LY/h. im now in BH8, and everytime i do the whole timetravel thing, i have, lets say, 10k LY/ hour, but after like 3 or 4 hours, the numbers drop by 60 to 75% down to lets say 2.5k. And i dont understand why. i dont see any obvious changes that cause this, and it happens everytime. What is going on there??

[Silberfuchs]

That's because the time multiplier isn't linear.
Up until 3 hours it grows to x5, after that it goes down hard and ends up at x20 after 24 hours (and basically nothing after that).

Hence your per hour gain shrinks the moment you go past 3 hours, that's the number for hours played past the 3 hour mark (hence way lower). Your gains from the first 3 hours are bigger on a per hour basis, you don't lose them.

Starting with BH11 this changes, at that point the time multiplier switches over to a linear system, your multiplier will grow by x1 for each hour till it reaches x24 after 24 hours.

The later has many upsides, imho the biggest is that the game gets much more chill.

You can basically start a run each day and push your "armies created" bonus to the max (750 in your case) to maximise the amount of Light Years you get out of such an 24 hour run. Shorter runs practically aren't a thing starting with BH11, because the amount of armies you can build in each BH is limited. Hence only going for those 750 for each 24 hour run is ideal (at the beginning of each BH you still do 1-2 short runs without armies, to get your % multipliers going).

[Siles]

The amount of LY you can obtain is limited.

Your LY gain will decrease if you are unable to defeat more planets, acquire more upgrades, or build up your army.
There is a limit to the number of enemies killed and drops gathered.

[Kotli]

Early game before BH 11 the LY per hour curve is a maximum at 3 hours when its 5x then it starts falling again.
This means that resetting every ~3 hours gives you the most light years per unit time.
The only exception is when you can make a bunch of armies since these give a lot of base light year points and make it so that you should be going for a 24 hour run to the most out of the limited number of armies you can make.

[HardNRG]

Originally posted by Siles:

The amount of LY you can obtain is limited.

Your LY gain will decrease if you are unable to defeat more planets, acquire more upgrades, or build up your army.
There is a limit to the number of enemies killed and drops gathered.

After BH11, when time growht is always linear (upto 24h only ofc), your ly gain growth keeps increasing as long as you can add anything to the kills, items, upgrade, levels, armies, planets and minigames. After you have filled them, growth stops but gains stay at that level, you don't start to get less ly per hour (until you hit the 24h mark).

[Siles]

I meant that LY growth slows down as you reach more limits, especially if it's been around 20 hours since the last time you traveled back.
For example, if you maxed everything out, the difference between 23h and 24h will be little.

[HardNRG]

Originally posted by Siles:

I meant that LY growth slows down as you reach more limits, especially if it's been around 20 hours since the last time you traveled back.
For example, if you maxed everything out, the difference between 23h and 24h will be little.

I just wanted to make sure nobody gets confused when reading this.