Is resetting even worth it?
Yes, it's pretty much essential to get past the middle game.
The more kittens you have, the more your happiness drops. The more your happiness drops, the less your kittens do. Ampihtheatres reduce that penalty, but just making up numbers to give an example, let's say you have 40 kittens and 60% happiness. Your 40 kittens are doing the work of (40 * .6) = 24 kittens. If you then add one more kitten, that's +1 kitten and -2% happiness. So that means your 41 kittens are doing the work of (41 * .58) = 23.78 kittens.
That means that in this example, you actually get
less production from
more kittens. That's not always the case. Realistically you'll probably have much less of a penalty at 40 kittens than I've shown here. I've chosen numbers specifically to demonstrate the effect. But there are generally diminishing returns for more kittens up to that point that they start penalizing you.
Karma overcomes that, both by reducing the raw penalty, as well as by moving upwards the point at which having more kittens is bad.
For example, if you had enough karma to give a 40% happiness boost, so that you had 100% happiness at 40 kittens, your 40 kittens would be doing the work of 40 kittens. And when you add one, your 41 kittens would be doing the work of (41 * .98) = 40.18 kittens. You've turned a -.21 penalty into a +.18 bonus. Every kitten up to that point is doing more work than they were before, and even at this point you're still gaining from adding more kittens.
Realistically, you're probably only going to have a 10-18% or so bonus from karma after a first reset. But even if you reset at a very low number, say...50 kittens, that's worth roughly a 12% bonus on your next run.
So, first penalty happens at 5 kittens, assuming no ampitheatres, right now your 20 kittens are doing the work of...(2% * (20 - 5)) = 70% happiness. 70% happiness * 20 kittens = 14 kittens worth of work. (Real result will be higher because you probably do have ampitheatres.
With a 12% happiness bonus, it would be 82% * 20 kittens = 16.4 kittens worth of work.
So roughly a 17% production bonus compared to where you are now.
it's gonna have to be a hell of a buff.
Well, how much is "big" depends on a lot of factors. A 10% adjustment to a 10% penalty is different from a 10% adjustment to a 10% bonus.
.9 * .9 = .81
1.1 * 1.1 = 1.21
.19 change vs .21 change.
Additionally, a lot of these things have diminishing returns. 100 karma is not twice as valuable as 50 karma. So the precise numerical value of reset bonuses is difficult to give.
But loosely speaking, if you can reset with ~60 kittens, that will be worth roughly a 13% production bonus to the work your kittens do. And if you can get to 81, that's worth roughly a 16% production bonus to your kittens from karma, as well as 10 points of paragon, which will give you:
* 10% kitten production bonus ( I think this is muliplicitive with the karma bonus, but I haven't confirmed that)
* +1% storage capacity to all your buildings
* +2.5% building production bonus (smelters, calciners, etc.)
The first reset recommendation given
here should be worth 90-100 kittens in under a week. Between karma and paragon, that's worth roughly 40-50% kitten production bonus in addition to storage and building production bonuses.
Don't underestimate the storage capacity bonuses. Each additional building costs more than the previous, and even very modest storage bonuses can save you from having to build one more storage building, which is more expensive than any of the previous storage buildings, in order to have room to buy one more of some other type of building, which is also more expensive than any of its previous buildings. This is especially apparent with research buildings when your science is always capped with nothing to spend it on and you need to start needing to build more warehouses to be able to have the storage capacity to build more research buildings to increase your science capacity.
I've spent a long time getting myself up to the 20 kittens I have, and I'm not going to hit 34 quickly either.
It's probable that you're doing something silly. My first run was twice as long as it needed to be for much less gain than I could have had. Just because you
can upgrade something doesn't mean it will benefit you right away. If you're buying things and investing in research based on what arbitrarily sounds good, or assuming that because it showed you this thing next, that should be the next thing you do...you're probably wasting a lot of resources.
The steamworks is a good example of this. You gain access to it fairly early, and it's useful
later, but if you get one as soon as you can and turn it on, it does nothing for you except burn up your coal. It can actually
slow you down if you build an early steamworks. At 20 kittens, I'm guessing that's probably not your situation, but it's possible you've stumbled on other pitfalls.
If you post a screenshot of your bonfire/science/workshop screens, I can probably offer more specific advice.
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Topic: Kittens! An incremental game of steam and science. (Read 60397 times)