Cookie Clicker

[jack]

I've been playing this on and off all week. I learned that when you reset, you can rebuild a LOT quicker. Partially due to heavenly chips, which unlock upgrades giving you a massive multiplier depending how many cookies you've baked in all games -- after three resets, each rebuilding back up to prisms an order of magnitude faster, I'm currently on about 30x faster. And that the five kitten upgrades give you a bonus for the number of achievements you have, and now I have quite a lot.

I have all the achievements it seemed at all reasonable to get -- 100 of all buildings, and 200 of about half, and all the little side-achievements like naming your bakery ("The Curious and Interesting Bakery of Dr J") and shortening the browser window to dip the cookie in the milk. And "clicknarok" for making 1 quadrillion cookies solely by clicking, and the maximum achievements for cookies per second and for total cookies baked.

And have a sense of what it's most useful for me to buy: buy the heavenly chip upgrades whenever you can, else generally the most expensive building, then kittens. Then the upgrades that double the most expensive building. And when they start to get cheap, buy the "increase cookie production 5%" cookies, those were very powerful first game, but much less powerful when you already have a 30x multiplier.

I'm not sure how often it's best to reset, I've been playing a couple of days in each game, until my multiplier has an least doubled (which required a more than 2x increase in total cookies baked).

But I'm starting to find points of diminishing returns. Once I've got a number of prisms, the next notable achievements are "50 prisms" and "100 prisms" and "kitten overseers" which need 50-100 quadrillion cookies and need a lot of waiting. And after that, there seems nothing notable to buy until I get to kitten managers at 900 quintillion. Which presumably will still only be a doubling of cps. Hmm.

Comments

[wildeabandon]

I've ended up playing this as well, although rather less methodically than Ramesh. I've got a very simple spreadsheet which tells me which building gets me the best cps/cookie, but for everything else I just work it out roughly in my head. He's got a ridiculously complicated one, which takes into account all the different interactions they have. I have been piggybacking off other people's theory crafting on the wiki though.

I'm only on my second reset, so nowhere near hitting diminishing returns yet. I'm quite keen to get to 5000 heavenly chips and unlock the season switcher.

[jack]

:) I feel like each building varies, but is something like an order of magnitude increase in cost and in cookie production, which means it massively outclasses the previous building once you take into account the surcharge for buying 10x of the previous building. So my impression is that I should get the prisms right, and then not worry much about all the other buildings. But I'm not sure if that's right, I'd appreciate comments from one of you with a spreadsheet :)

I try to eyeball "how long will this take to pay back" and it's usually obviously very good or very bad deal. But I'm not sure, I get tripped up by the upgrades that give +N cookie production for a certain building type because those used to be a bit inneffective compared to just buying more buildings, but are more effective than they look because I have a massive multiplier.

On my first run through I was thinking solely of buildings, and reasoned that each building had a "time to pay it back" corresponding to the rate of return, and this reduced as you bought more of it, so in theory you should keep buying buildings until they all had the same rate of return, and then repeatedly buy one of each. But I don't think that level of optimisation is necessarily worth it any more. And it's also complicated by when to buy doubling upgrades. I've ended up mostly buying the most expensive building until a doubling upgrade is obviously worth it or I unlock the next one, and then buying up everything else to 50 or a 100 when it's become cheap.

But I'm not sure of the best strategy in terms of when to unlock kittens vs cookies vs buildings and especially when to reset.

I feel like I'm still a long way to 5000 chips, but I think it adds a lot more to the game, that you can get big bonuses from some of them. Or I guess I could just wait till Christmas ;)

[obandsoller]

I think that you'll get to 5000 heavenly chips faster than you think, the game is very exponential after all. Though it is slightly a shame that I told you about this at just the right time for you to have missed the Easter season.

One of the things that I really like about cookie clicker is that its quite good at producing both differences in scale and differences in kind. Some of the other idle games (or incremental games) I tried out just involved clicking, buying stuff and numbers going up faster and faster. Cookie clicker does that, but I feel it's also quite good at opening up things that feel new and different, like when the wrinklers appear, or when the game basically becomes about spotting golden cookies.
What I really like about the season switcher (other than the fact that it increases my cps by loads!) is that for a period of time it makes the game feel quite different.

I think that you're right that each new building massively outclasses the last. But I think that because the cost of each one gets multiplied by 1.15 each time, it only takes 5 purchases before the rate of return gets halved, so they quickly end up being much less cost-effective than earlier buildings. Basically I agree with what you say here:
"On my first run through I was thinking solely of buildings, and reasoned that each building had a "time to pay it back" corresponding to the rate of return, and this reduced as you bought more of it, so in theory you should keep buying buildings until they all had the same rate of return, and then repeatedly buy one of each."

But I don't understand why you think that it isn't worth it any more. I think that if you've got lots of heavenly chips then in the early game you've got such a high cps it's not worth doing the calculations because it's just more effective to spam buy stuff. Later in the game buildings cost a lot more compared to your cps so I think that it really is worth buying the thing with the best rate of return.

Regarding the upgrades:
* The base cps ones are obviously not worth buying immediately (they unlock when), but there has to to be a point where buying another building isn't as effective as buying the upgrade.
I don't think that your cps multiplier effects the point at which it's more effective to buy the upgrade because that multiplier applies after the upgrade to base cps has taken effect.
(Having said that it's obvious I used to always buy them immediately, because buying stuff is fun, and I wasn't really thinking about the game in the same way.)
* There must be a point where it's better to buy enough buildings of type X to unlock the doubling upgrades for it, than to buy building with the best current rate of return. But I don't know when it is, I want to update my spreadsheet so it will work it out, but I haven't had the "to-it"s for a while - and other improvements [adding holidays] seem to be becoming a higher priority for me.
(Part of the reason I have a more complicated spreadsheet than wildeabandon's is that his mental arithmetic is much better than mine - another reason is that I'm theoretically using it to get more comfortable with spreadsheets)

Like I said before, one of the things I like about cookie clicker is that it if you ignore all the upgrades, it has quite a neat solution to what you should buy next (the one you described above) of getting everythign to the same rate of return then repeatedly buying one of each^1. But each upgrade changes what the equilibrium point is, and it's not trivial to work out when it's worth buying upgrades.

I'll email you my spreadsheet, I think that playing around with the numbers might give you a better feel of what's going on that my waffle above.

"But I'm not sure of the best strategy in terms of when to unlock kittens vs cookies vs buildings and especially when to reset."

I have no idea how I would frame this mathematically. The fact that cookie clicker keeps raising interesting questions that don't seem to have an obvious answer another reason it keeps my interest over some other idle games.

But I guess my answer is that I get achievements ASAP because it's fun, and it's an upgrade that lasts over playthroughs (mostly the former).

When you get lots of heavenly chips the start of the game starts to feel quite intense (which I guess is part of why it's a cool mechanic), but I find that I can't be bothered to reset a lot of the time I'd much rather just peck away at golden cookies as they appear, and occassionally buy a building now and then. So my "strategy" for resetting is just doing it when I feel like I've plateaued somewhat, and feel like giving the game a lot of focussed attention.


[1] I played some games where the tuning was such that it basically only ever felt worthwhile to buy the most expensive building, and somehow that felt less interesting.

[obandsoller]

"On my first run through I was thinking solely of buildings, and reasoned that each building had a "time to pay it back" corresponding to the rate of return, and this reduced as you bought more of it, so in theory you should keep buying buildings until they all had the same rate of return, and then repeatedly buy one of each."

A subtlety that I forgot to mention is that a big part of the cps gain of buying the cheaper (non-cursor) buildings is the fact they improve the cps of cursors. That sounds like a niggling point, but right now each farm gives me 1.183 million cps, but the cps of getting a new one would actually be 677.690 million cps. So it really is a big difference.

[jack]

Thank you for sharing spreadsheet!

I think that you'll get to 5000 heavenly chips faster than you think

Maybe. I'm currently at 5 trillion cps, but the next notable purchases look to be 200 prisms, or 5000 heavenly chips, both of which look to take a week or more of idling to get to (or fake-idling). Maybe I'm impatient, but there just doesn't seem to be much to do in the meantime, am I missing something?

One of the things that I really like about cookie clicker is that its quite good at producing both differences in scale and differences in kind

Yeah, that's been true so far -- even when I'm thought I've got the hang of it, the next upgrade has often been excitingly large!

I don't understand why you think that it isn't worth it any more

I'm currently getting >90% of my income from 100 prisms, even when I bought some of the other buildings up to 200. Given that, it seems to make little difference whether the other buildings are bought optimally or not, that whether that 10% was 8% or 15% it wouldn't make that much difference compared to the amount of effort optimising it. But am I missing something big, should I have a much different ratio?

I get achievements ASAP because it's fun

Yeah, I definitely enjoyed just getting more achievements, first by guessing, and then by looking them up and filling out the ones I'd missed. But now it seems like most of the ones I don't have involve a lot of effort to get, 200 buildings of various types, or LOTS of cookies by one building type, or season-themed updates...

[wildeabandon]

both of which look to take a week or more of idling to get to

Bear in mind that a week of idling is equivalent to about 12 goes of activating the Elder Pledge and clicking on every golden cookie, because of the way Frenzy and Lucky stack (assuming you've activated Lucky Day, Serendipity, and Get Lucky), and that's assuming you don't get any cookie chains or frenzy+click frenzy - obviously you're not going to want to do that six hours at once, but one or two Pledges is enough to ratchet up your idle cps fairly significantly.

[wildeabandon]

Actually, that's not right, because wrinkles. So it would be 36 hours of active play vs a week of idling.

[jack]

Ah! I hadn't realised that was worth going for. I think I have all three upgrades, but the most expensive one only this play-through. And I normally left it after one mind, to get wrinklers (since I don't play actively that much) plus some golden cookies. But this time I took it all the way through to get the grandmapocalypse achievements (I missed them first time). I hadn't realised the cookies might stack now they appear at once.

[wildeabandon]

Given that, it seems to make little difference whether the other buildings are bought optimally or not, that whether that 10% was 8% or 15% it wouldn't make that much difference compared to the amount of effort optimising it.

Oh, I meant to reply to this as well - once you're at the stage where the wait between being able to afford prisms is measured in hours rather than minutes, you're also at the stage where you've got >100 prisms, so each one is only actually adding about 1% to your CPS - at that point, if you can increase your cps from other buildings from 8% to 16% of your total, and do so in a tenth of the time, that's significantly superior.

[obandsoller]

Maybe. I'm currently at 5 trillion cps, but the next notable purchases look to be 200 prisms, or 5000 heavenly chips, both of which look to take a week or more of idling to get to (or fake-idling). Maybe I'm impatient, but there just doesn't seem to be much to do in the meantime, am I missing something?

I think you are to some extent impatient, but the whole game is about impatience and deciding whether to buy something less good now, or something better later. Part of the fun is splurging and not caring about whether you're buying the right things or not, and part is having something cool to wait for.

Also I was lucky in starting a little while before Easter, which was a good source of new stuff to do.

But something you are maybe missing is that if you click on golden/wrath cookies everytime they appear then because of the way they can combine it can create a huge boost to your cps. e.g. you get the one that increases your cps (Frenzy) followed by the one that gives you a large amount of cookies based on what your cps is (Lucky). There's a lot of theorycraft that's been done on the wiki about how's best to do it (i.e whether to buy pledges or not), but I haven't looked into it that much. I think that can be quite fun to do while you're doing something else at the computer that doesn't require a lot of attention, like watching you tube videos or something.

I think that I'll play more cookie clicker later, but at the moment I've given up because:
1) I don't feel like I'm progressing unless I'm able to answer some of the questions I'm coming up with, like when is it better to buy a given thing. And I don't feel I have the mental energy to work on the spreadsheet now, so I feel like I've ground to a halt on that front.
2) I've starting feeling like I'm *losing* cps if I'm not constantly paying attention and clicking on golden/wrath cookies, and that's not a good place to be, especially when you need to do things that require your whole attention.

[damerell]

I ended up modifying one of the simpler Javascript build scripts - pause game, add one of each building in turn, see which one had best price/performance with a fiddle factor for it not being available for ages yet, try and build that for real - mainly to fix bit rot from it being from an older version, but also to build more than one thingy per tick, which is very useful post-reset once you have a decent collection of heavenly cookies. This leaves the user build-spamming upgrades, but not buildings.

I've also used the "Cookie Monster" addon, which is pretty impressive but not always up to date.

With these sorts of tools resets become more viable because you can quickly get back up to speed with minimal human effort (mind you, some purists regard this as not de rigeur), and then you should reset whenever the time-to-next-prism is more than the time-back-up-to-speed, roughly speaking.

Then I realised idle games were a seductive trap for the brain, and stopped playing it. :-)

[toothycat]

Are you aware of the kittens game?

[obandsoller]

I wasn't. Thanks for pointing it out :-).

I've only played a few minutes, but it initially looks a bit like Candy box, or A dark room, where the pleasure is much more about new different things opening up than making numbers big and making them go up faster and faster. I enjoyed A dark room quite a bit, so am glad to find another game which seems a bit like it.

Notch's Drowning in problems is sort of similar too, and probably the best game of it's kind that I've played. I wouldn't exactly describe it as "fun" but it's compelling and good.

[jack]

Drowning in problems

Wow, that's... something :)

[damerell]

"Mine Defense" has a lot of changes of what one is doing - nothing as radical as "A Dark Room" going from the village to the map, but the initial "buy things to get currency to buy things" is just scratching the surface.

What was that about avoiding idle games, David? Ooops.

[obandsoller]

Thanks for the recommendation - I think that I can't find/mental space for another one of these right now. But I'm thinking of trying to make my own when I have more time over the summer, so I think that I should play lots of different ones so I can get different ideas. I'll play it when I tire of one of the games I'm playing at the moment.