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

[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.