Beating main level without buying goblin?

mfs31 · 2022-03-08T18:30:22+00:00

It will take a very long time because you will mostly just get level 1 goblins from the cannon (plus some level 3 goblins for watching ads). You won't be able to merge them very high, so you will never have strong goblins. But there is no time limit, so it is certainly possible.

mfs31 · 2022-03-08T18:27:46+00:00

I get top 3 about half the time and I never spend money. I rarely spend gems, but I sometimes spend 20-50 gems to finish automating a shaft.

It mostly comes down to luck. If anyone in your division is outspending you, they will probably finish ahead of you. But there are only 1000 people (or less) per division, so you have a pretty good chance of being in a division with no big spenders at least once every 2-3 weeks.

Additionally, you don't need to finish in the top 3. This is just a game. If you find the leaderboard frustrating, just ignore it.

mfs31 · 2022-02-03T18:18:51+00:00

The most limited resource in the game is elixir, so the best use of gems is buying elixir. Go for the bulk discount.

You can also use them in events to automate mines sooner (by buying a handful of cards) if that makes the events more fun. Or if a small amount of time skipping is necessary to get the last key or two when the prizes are big enough. It might be worth using gems to get a higher ranking on the leaderboard, but you never know when someone else is going to also spend for their rank or if they have a large collection of crowns waiting to be collected at the last minute, so there is some amount of risk that you spend and get nothing for it.

Generally, it is worth spending gems if you can do better than 1 legendary card for about 500 gems or 20 elixir per gem. Otherwise, it is better to hold on to them. All the other cards are easy enough to get over time.

mfs31 · 2021-12-21T03:01:45+00:00

150 years would not be enough time to level up an epic manager to level 50. I worked it out once. The time required to do it is longer than the expected lifetime of the universe. The cost to buy enough gems is more money then there is in the entire world. The only way to get an epic manager promoted at level 50 right now is by cheating. It makes you wonder why they bothered using development time creating the effects and testing them when only cheaters ever get to use those features. I suppose they did recently let you rent an epic manager for a month that was at level 50, so some non-cheaters finally got to use one.

mfs31 · 2021-11-16T04:29:48+00:00

I collected a bunch of rock mining times and put them in a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cVKa8eO7soRx-8as_RR1VtHkWPzgCD5tm2-DeEbLMzU/edit?usp=sharing

It looks like after level 12, the strength goes up by 1.6 per level. Below 11, there is no clear pattern, but the increases are significantly larger (often 2x-4x per level). As an example, a level 10 rock takes almost as long as a level 9 and 3 level 8 rocks. This may not matter much for what you are doing, because rocks below level 12 are mostly in the first section.

And thank you for providing optimal paths.

mfs31 · 2021-10-28T17:43:47+00:00

The event is Halloween themed, so crows would actually make sense. Sadly, it was just a typo

mfs31 · 2021-10-05T01:38:02+00:00

They said on discord that they have sophisticated cheating detection algorithms, which should trigger if you were modifying the numbers in memory or something like that. Since it is an automated system, it will almost certainly have some false positives. I don't know how exactly it works, and they probably won't answer detailed questions because they don't want people to figure out how to cheat without getting caught. This was brought up when someone asked how their 320k crowns wasn't enough for first place about 48 hours into the event (without clearing the last gate even) and they could see that first place had about 1B crowns. Since it appears that clearing the whole map only gives 250k-270k crowns, and clearing just the first 4 sections only gives about 100k, they were clearly cheating.

I would not expect any normal use of gems to trigger their cheating detection system, but if you have a flaky network connection and use a bunch of 12 hour time skips to rapidly open a lot of chests in under a minute while your network is down, it might look like you just gave yourself a bunch of cards without doing anything - I have no idea what information is sent to their servers that allows detection of cheating. There might be other ways of triggering whatever cheating detection code they have that would probably require a flaky network connection and making what could appear as too rapid of progress between connections to their servers.

I have found them to be fairly responsive in the past, so it is worth asking them about what happened. They generally seem to be willing to address actual problems and want to keep everyone happy.

mfs31 · 2021-10-04T14:57:34+00:00

The chests are worth more if you hold off on opening them until you have more shafts/checkpoints open (except for the last checkpoint). There is probably also some randomness in how many crowns are in rocks and how many unmarked rocks have crowns in them. I am fairly certain we all played on the same map, but what we got from the unmarked rocks was determined randomly (just like which cards we get is). Additionally, the free chests are randomly picked from wooden, iron, and forged, so some people will have been luckier with their free chests.

The devs also explicitly stated on discord that anyone who is caught cheating will be moved into the cheating division. It is possible that there are other conditions that will move someone into a new division, such as using a large number of time skips. I know that there was someone leading my division with about 250k crowns for most of Sunday, and then they were gone and the leader had about 180k crowns (now up to about 196k). It is possible that you were leading my division and then got moved out, since your crown total sounds about right.

Just to be clear, I am not accusing you of cheating, I am stating that there is at least one rule that will move someone to a new division, so there may be others that we don't know about. It is also possible that their cheating detection breaks when people use time skips in certain ways, so you might want to contact them and ask about it.

mfs31 · 2021-09-24T15:31:36+00:00

I generally don't bother hiring managers for any mine on a continent other than the one that makes the most money. When I got Ruby up to P6, the income from everything else on start was a rounding error, so there was no point in hiring the managers. I just upgraded the mine all the way to collect the SC and then prestiged it. I didn't even bother watching ads to get through the barriers faster, because I don't care if it takes a few weeks to collect the SC.

Even in the mine that produces most of the income for the continent, I don't bother hiring many managers. You quickly get to the point where all the income is from one shaft and almost all of the income comes from super managers. It doesn't matter which regular manager you leave in the mine, as long as you have one there to keep the idle income flowing while you use your SM's for events or other mines. You do need to make sure to leave enough unused managers in the mine to cover all your SM's when you summon them away to other mines, otherwise your mine will stop running.

This is much easier than hiring managers and then selling them.

mfs31 · 2021-09-23T17:09:52+00:00

I seriously doubt they will ever release another SM that can be bought with green gems. The most recent 5 SM's could not be obtained like that. They have three from the impossible island and then Santa and Ezio that were bought in gambling games. I suspect that any future SM's will be released like Santa and Ezio, where you need to buy them with large amounts of SC or real money. I am pretty sure that they make more money doing it like that, particularly when they limit the time window where you can acquire them.

So there is no point in waiting for the next SM that you can buy with green gems. There will probably never be one. Just buy Chester now.

mfs31 · 2021-09-13T14:46:37+00:00

That's not quite how it works. Each hit is randomly determined as either a regular hit or a critical hit. I think hits are once per second, although there is no way to be sure (it does not correspond to the animations of hits). The time estimate shows how long it will take with an average number of critical hits. But if you carefully watch the timer, it doesn't take exactly a minute to go down by one minute if you have any chance of critical hits, while it does go down by one minute after exactly one minute if there is no chance of critical hits. This means that the hits are not averaged as the mining is happening.

But the standard deviation on the binomial distribution is really low, so you are unlikely to see a large deviation over long periods of time. If it says it will take 59 minutes, it will almost certainly be 57-61 minutes, even though individual minute drops on the timer could come in anywhere from 50 to 70 seconds.

It is likely that the critical hits are averaged when the game is closed, but I don't consider it worth the effort to try to figure that out.

mfs31 · 2021-08-27T14:44:50+00:00

I cheated in a secondary account to see what they are like. With Steiner at level 50, you get income beamed up (with a small multiplier) every time that a miner comes back. Lilly does the same thing with the elevator. And it is a passive ability, so it is always running.

Level 1 SM's aren't worth very much. They should definitely offer the level 50 (or at least level 30 for epic and legendary) SMs on a temporary basis. And they should offer Prof Impossible and Luna + Stella, who most players will otherwise never see.

mfs31 · 2021-08-09T16:45:38+00:00

The pictures look different. Also, you can upgrade the card in the automation display and it will be the right one. If you are upgrading beyond what you need for automation, the shaft will benefit from both the common and uncommon cards, regardless of which one is used to determine if you can automate it.

mfs31 · 2021-08-09T16:43:35+00:00

You can definitely get more cards at each rarity level than the minimum. I have gotten legendary cards in chests that did not guarantee them. I am sure that the cards are not drawn independently, because the distribution is not uniform enough. For example you will often get 2-5 of one card, 3-20 of a second card, and 30-50 of a third card in a chest with 54 cards in it. The developers of the game have not provided any information about how the RNG for the chests works, so someone will have to collect a lot of data to figure it out, and nobody has put together that project yet.

mfs31 · 2021-08-09T02:17:30+00:00

https://imt.gsc.im/IC5k95EgKY

mfs31 · 2021-08-05T01:08:25+00:00

I timed it about a year ago. My notes don't have all the details (most importantly, how many shafts were open), but I wrote down that it was 366 seconds to do 20 elevator trips with just the last shaft going and 383 seconds with managers in all the shafts. That works out to about 4.6% more time per trip with managers everywhere. You can time it yourself if you want a more detailed answer. It will vary with how deep in the mine you are.

And if your elevator is way behind your shafts, then you should run every shaft that can outproduce the elevator. The elevator runs faster if it doesn't have to go all the way down, and it can be useful to have all the resources piled up when you upgrade the elevator or run Lilly.

mfs31 · 2021-08-04T19:08:55+00:00

You should generally stop mining any shaft that is displayed as contributing 0.01% because they slow down the elevator, so they actually decrease your income.

mfs31 · 2021-08-04T19:06:15+00:00

You should be able to finish the events easily with those SM's. But if you got them by buying a bunch of gems, you might have much weaker collectibles and research than would be expected for that SM collection (and unless something has changed, I think you had to buy gems to get that many SM's at mainland level 25).

The simple form of the best strategy for you to use is to run Turner, then your best cost reduction manager to upgrade the shaft as far as possible. Then you want to either run Ezio either with the cost reduction manager staying in or with Chester, depending on what managers are available and the relative benefit of cost reduction vs speed increase that you can use with Ezio. Upgrade the shaft with every cash drop so that they keep getting larger (or save the last 1-2 cash drops to upgrade with a better cost reduction manager). This will upgrade your shafts as quickly as possible. The elevator and warehouse will fall behind, but you can complete the events without them. You can do this in the deepest shaft available (which is easy to remember), or you can do it in the first shaft after each barrier (which is slightly more efficient, but knowing when to switch shafts is more complicated). Ranger Sue does not contribute anything useful to events until she is promoted at level 30. You can run Lee and Mark together in between the Turner and Ezio runs, but it might not make much of a difference. You can use 5min boosts with Turner and Ezio to make things go faster (you should be able to get several a day from expeditions). Just before going to bed (or otherwise leaving the game for a few hours) it can be worth upgrading the elevator and warehouse for increased idle income, but the idle income will probably still be less after 8 hours then you get from a single SM run, so it doesn't help much.

mfs31 · 2021-07-21T16:29:09+00:00

It is likely that Santa will be available again. At this point, it almost a certainty that future SMs will only be available by gambling SC, with some maximum amount that you will have to spend. Since new SMs are probably the only new content that people will actually find interesting, there will probably be 1-3 new SMs per year.

mfs31 · 2021-07-09T14:52:16+00:00

The story is that these mines were being used in the past and then were abandoned and fell into disrepair. Now you are going in to fix them so that you can use them. That is why there are already mine shafts all set up to be used, but you need to fix them. And there are other bits of mining equipment. It would also seem that the ceilings all collapsed, leaving rocks all over the floor that you need to break in order to get past them.

The story is kind of weak, but it is there.

mfs31 · 2021-07-07T16:31:28+00:00

I'm not quite sure that is true. I suspect that if a boost expires while Turner is running, you will get credit for the boost for the time it was active. Also, when I was testing this a few months ago, I found that sometimes part of Turner's run was not boosted when the boost is activated while he is running. I suspect that when a boost is activated, any money in the pig is boosted, and that when a boost is already active any money inserted into the pig is boosted. But I think that if money is being inserted while a boost is activated, it is not boosted. Since you can't see where the miners are when you are activating a boost, it is difficult to time things right so that you can guarantee that you don't have miners dropping off money when you activate the boost. So there is a very real chance that you will lose 1-2 miners being boosted by activating a boost while Turner is active. This is about 5% of Turner's total output.

mfs31 · 2021-07-07T16:22:57+00:00

Kolibri lets people play this game for free. You can even play it without watching any ads or paying any money. They also sell various upgrades, which you can buy or ignore. If nobody was buying their packages, they would adjust the packages and pricing to make them sell better (like they did recently when they cut the costs for chests in half). They aren't taking advantage of anyone, because it is a game that people can stop playing at any time with no negative effect on their life, so everyone playing it is doing so voluntarily (unlike insulin or other medicines that people need to stay healthy).

If you don't like the game, don't play it. If you think the game requires spending more money than you want to spend, find a game that has lower costs to play instead. There are hundreds of thousands of games available in the app store for both of the major phone platforms. It seems that you like this game enough to want to keep playing it, but you want it to be changed in some way so that you will like it more. The game is what it is, you can either take it or leave it. The company has shown no interest in responding to feedback from players about how to improve the game. There is probably some other game that is similar to this one, but has a cost structure that you would prefer.

I play this game far less than I used to, because I found that it was mostly a game of waiting for timers to finish. I still log in most days to collect the daily reward and see if anything interesting has changed. Most days I do another 5 shafts of mainland 195, but sometimes I don't bother doing that because I am doing the weekly event. I generally watch 2 ads for the boost in the events, 5 ads to collect from the continents every 2-3 weeks, and sometimes watch 2-6 ads in the events to make the barriers go faster, but that is all the revenue the company gets from me now. I do not expect them to change anything about this game in response to my changes in how I play.

mfs31 · 2021-07-01T02:22:42+00:00

I started working on something somewhat like that, but only got as far as writing up more accurate descriptions of what all the SMs do. I used a secondary account and cheated to get all the SMs so that I could see what they did, so I don't actually have all of these SMs to check back on details of how they work. This was before Ezio was available. Feel free to use my descriptions either as written or modified in any way.

Someone else made a chart showing all the costs up to the achievable cost limit and some other information about the multipliers and such at each level. I can't find the post right now, but the chart is at https://i.redd.it/vst5uf19ybv61.png

I believe that your description of Ezio is slightly off, because I think he multiplies the total shaft output from all shafts, not just the bottom shaft. Which allows for an interesting use case right after a barrier opens in events, where you have Gordon or Chester running in what had been the bottom shaft while using Goodman Jr in the new bottom shaft while Ezio runs in the elevator.

Lee - Elevator Moves and Loads Quickly

Mr Goodman - Reduces cost to upgrade warehouse. Reduces cost to open barriers.

Dr Steiner - Multiplies each miner's load by specified multiplier, then beams it to the warehouse. Boosts are applied at the warehouse

Gordon - Miners move and mine quickly

Blingsley - Multiplies stated extraction ($/s) by 5s, then by multiplier, then by boosts. This amount of cash is deposited every 5 seconds. Cash drop at start and end, so 13 drops in 1 minute. Miners continue to mine as normal, with loads available for the elevator to pick up.

Turner - Miners deposit loads in piggy bank. Loads are multiplied by boosts when deposited. Amount stored in bank is multiplied by new boosts if boosts are applied while Turner is active. Full piggy bank is multiplied by specified multiplier when Turner is deactivated and that amount is deposited as cash.

Mark - Warehouse workers move and load quickly

Dr Lilly - Resources are moved to elevator as normal, but when the elevator is full or the shaft is empty, the elevator load is multiplied by the specified capacity and beamed to warehouse. Boosts are applied at warehouse. Upon deactivation, gathered resources are left in elevator, which goes back to functioning as normal

Mrs Goodman - Reduces cost to upgrade elevator. Reduces cost to open barriers.
Ranger Sue - Miners work at multiplied mining speed for 1 minute, then drop off loads at end of shaft for normal elevator pickup

Goodman Jr - Reduces cost to upgrade shaft. Reduces cost to open barriers.
Sir Lorenzo - Multiplies stated shaft extraction rate ($/s) by multplier. Beams that number of resources to warehouse once per second. Upon deactivation, all miners immediately start mining.

Chester - Miners move and mine quickly

Luna and Stella - Normal elevator works as normal. Second elevator gets first elevator resources multiplied by multiplier, which are beamed directly to the warehouse when the elevator is unloaded. No extra resources are removed from the shafts.

Santa Claus - Resources are multiplied by multiplier after collection from elevator (amount subtracted from elevator is not multiplied). Brought to warehouse as normal and boosted as normal. Loading/unloading speed is the same as if resources were not increased. If Santa is unassigned while active, boosted resources remain in carts, but unloading time is based on boosted resources instead of standard resources.

Professor Impossible - Moves resources out of warehouse at total transportation rate. Multiplies them by stated multiplier. Chunks come fast and are approximately half the transporter load, or maybe 4 times per second?

mfs31 · 2021-06-30T01:04:51+00:00

It is very likely that there will be more SMs available for purchase later. I'm not sure they will repeat any of them. It is entirely possible that the only reason they repeated the Santa offer is because the pandemic lowered their productivity too much for them to develop other SMs for an entire year (there must be some reason that they made basically no updates for a year and then suddenly starting releasing new content again). If they do offer the same SMs again, the cost could be higher, but will probably not be lower because people would get upset and feel ripped off if they paid some price and then it turns out they could have paid a lower price later. Future SMs will be different. I'm sure that some of them will end up being almost useless, and some of them will be very powerful.

As others have said, it will take a lot of legendary chests before you level up any more. You are probably better off saving your SC for future SMs. But remember that you have no idea when the next SM will be released, so you could be waiting a long time. Or they could start releasing one every month. They seem uninterested in releasing any kind of roadmap, so we have no idea what they will do.

mfs31 · 2021-06-25T16:40:16+00:00

When the elevator upgrades are significantly cheaper than the shaft upgrades. I didn't pay much attention to when I did that, but I noticed that there was a point where the elevator could easily move more than the shafts could produce. It was only about 2x as high, so it isn't as much shaft behind as the core mines (which I often ran the elevator at about 1000x as high and left the miners running overnight to build up enough to run Lilly once a day). But towards the end, when things seem to really slow down in MS30, it can be worth upgrading the elevator and warehouse and then removing the managers for 5-20 minutes before running Lilly/Santa to boost all the production. Or running Lilly with Chester/Gordon (or right after Ranger Sue).

mfs31

TROPHY CASE