So I'm now a week into leviathans and time crystals and so forth. Don't really like the mechanic.
I have anachronomany, flux condensators, a couple black pyramids and a chronosphere, black liquid sorrow capped and ~22 time crystals sitting around. And yet even with 10 sky palaces and 1 unicorn utopia I've yet to collect enough alicorns for even a single time crystal. I just don't see how they're worth bothering with.
Next problem is that the leviathan spawning is terribly irregular. With only a single black pyramid it's only 3.5%. You can build more, as well as markers to increase the spawn rate, but it's generally low-ish, and worst of all, even when they do finally spawn they despawn after a while. So even if you build a couple pyramids and afk for 20 hours, the odds of there being any leviathans when you get back is still very low. So low that it's way easier to savescum for them. Save the game a couple days before winter ends, reload if you don't get leviathans.
Now, I realize I'm complaining about both sides of this. I'm complaining that it's too easy to get time crystals from leviathans for alicorns to make any sense while at the same time I'm complaining that it's too difficult to get leviathans. But ultimately the problem I have with both mechanics is the RNG. Wait a long time and maybe something will happen and maybe it won't. And wait a long time and maybe it will happen but since you're not sitting at the keyboard, it went away. Its' a bad mechanic for an idle game. if leviathans stayed until they were used, I think it wouldn't bother me. AFK until they show up. But requiring the player to sit at the keyboard when the lucky event happens invites savescumming. And if you do, the entire design falls apart.
And the whole thing is of questionable usefulness anyway. The whole points of time crystals is to shave time off the early part of a reset. But in the week I've spent collecting time crystals and compendiums I could have done two full resets without them. The whole system is underwhelming. At +2.4 unobtainium per second and 150 tradeposts, it's about 2 hours to get 3 time crystals. The guide on the wiki recommends 5 chronospheres, which is about 7.4 time crystals. So If you savescum for leviathans, it's about 5 hours to get there, and that would probably shave about a day off your run time.5 hours to save 24 is a good trade.
But that's if you savescum.
If you don't, it would probably generally take days of sitting there hoping to get lucky on levbaithan spawning, slowly building up and hoping you get lucky enough to receive black liquid sorrow when you trade so you can build more pyramids so to increase your chances of getting lucky again...until eventually you have enough time crystals. Plus you'd never want to reset without a full set of black liquid sorrow, which means yet more waiting hoping to get lucky when you trade before you actually reset. When you could instead have spent that time resetting and doing another run without chronospheres.
Presumably there's a balance point where it makes more sense. Maybe with a couple hundred billion faith my unicorn production rate would be sufficiently faster that time crystals could be procured quickly enough for it to be a net time saver. And if it were high enough, maybe you could convert for BLS rather than having to wait to get lucky and trade for it, so no needing to wait for the RNG at the end of run.
Overall though, the whole thing seems badly designed. And even if you do get to the point where it does make sense, the primary benefit of faster resets would be the ability to collect paragon more quickly. But to even be able to do this you kind of have to already be at the point where paragon isn't a big limiting factor. Yes, a recent update added new paragon upgrades, so maybe it will speed up grinding for them, but altogether the late game unicorn/leviathan/timecrystal/etc stuff seems poorly designed. And not even finished. Presumably the unimplemented necrocorn mechanic is intended to solve the leviathan depspawning problem, but even if it does it just means that alicorns are still not useful at all except to turn them into necrocorns, and it's all RNG as to whether your leviathans show up and give you enough black liquid sorrow to reset faster than the time you save from having chronospheres.
Bloodrizer, if you're reading this...this entire mechanic seems weak and poorly designed to me.
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Topic: Kittens! An incremental game of steam and science. (Read 60324 times)