Is anyone else on this level or played this level? I am several days in and it seems to be nearly unplayable to me. I have conquered most of the levels up to this and several twice so its not, not knowing how the game works.

Couple problems so far:

Resources have no value, Raw Copper, tin, iron, zinc, nickel, lead all sell for W0. Next resources like silicon sell for W0.01 which is still nothing in the game.

All of the above resources made into bars sell for basically nothing as well. from W0.17 to W600 this is while making hundreds of thousands to millions of currency per sec from early on.

I used 4 fog busters so I see most of the map. I can see recipes that will take me days to get to so I can use them yet I can buy the item from the market at such a low rate that the recipe is meaningless to me. This is also how I have completed all of the techs (accept those needing copper or tin bars as you basically start with them).

The crafters so far are useless at 16.21% complete the most value item I can make sells for W8.67M takes 8 min 28 secs to complete and I am making W5.45M/Sec interestingly the recipe I need to make the bars for that item I dont have and is not worth using the armies to get as it such a meaningless amount of currency.

I have 110% permanent upgrade for army production and am making 27K/Sec armies, some territories are in the tens of millions on the low end, hundreds of millions mostly and then quickly going to billions near me. I have been working on one, six territory bonus since last night (with a 6.5 hour idle time accumulation) and I have taken 4 of the 6 territories. with 686million and 1.6Billion left to go at current production rates that will be 23 hours of army building minus a little for drafts and having 25% strike force. I have put nearly all income into upgrading army camps and bought very few mercs as they are very expensive. Everything I have bought from the market to complete the first 18 techs has added up to less than 5 min of current production.

Resources caches which have always been a good benefit up to now give back 10% ish of armies needed to take it, and near meaningless amount of cash, with a tiny amount of resources/items which are worthless.

A recently unlocked tech required items I did not have the recipes to make but to buy them all from the markets cost less than 45 seconds of currency production. Thus leading me to not even go for recipes but only markets.

I could go on, but in conclusion this level seems nearly unplayable to me at the moment. I expressed this to Fizzer a couple days ago and he said to keep playing and hopefully it would balance out.

Has anyone else experienced this on this level?

Which revision are your playing on?

idk, where do I find out?

The main reason why it got so much slower was the downgrade of the caches. They are just like neutrals now which cost even more than normal neutrals.
I can't really give you an advice since i'm stuck as well

I see what you mean with the massive nerf on caches ... so they're really just for money and items now. Don't really get the army benefit they used to.

But if I understand how the 'rebalancing' system works, presumably something else was automatically raised to compensate. It should see the reduction in caches as a trigger to increase other benefits/resources or decrease obstacles (territory army counts required) in order to keep the finish time constant.

yes that should be the case but so far in this level it is not! The items in the caches are also worthless.

The main issue is that the crafters and refineries are worthless. I have been making the most valuable item I can with the crafters nearly nonstop for two days. and its worth 12 seconds of my income production.

This is the only level I have been in where that is the case. I assume it will get at least a little better, but to get there will take so long its not worth it. I spent over a day completing one small bonus.

I am working on another bonus right now, which will take me 2-3 days to complete, the reward for it is another army camp which will likely produce just over 3k/s armies. but takes about 4 billion to get the bonus and thus the army camp.

Sounds like a hard & frustrating slog, but I don't know that that isn't the desired goal.

I don't know what the target duration for each level is, but having big waits in between captures was how the game was originally described. Meant to make a couple moves/tweaks, go away for a while, come back and make a few more tweaks, and keep on slogging on.

How long do you think it'll take to finish the level at that rate? I haven't played that level yet so can't say myself.

There could be something that moved things along faster in the future. but right now I am thinking two months of agony.

In every level there have been moments where you can inspire mercs or do something that leads you to a large boost. This level that just has not been the case. I have been playing it for several days maybe a week and its always horrible. The most valuable thing I can make right now is worth less than 2 seconds of my income production. I inspired a merc camp yesterday just to get a little moving and it was just gone so quick.

I can say right now having really enjoyed playing Idle up to this point that I hate this level and if the game was always like this would hate it altogether.

Once I finish CCC, I'll try that level next and see if I can get the same experience.

I am at 18.32% complete. based on when I started this thread I have completed 2.11% in 34 hours while using the daily power up and wheel spin. and an inspire mercs. divided out thats about 70 days. again think it will be a bit faster but 2 months seems right.

I think it's a lovely map for big team games and FFA

I finished that level a week ago, before the last update. It took insane amounts of money & armies.

Y=10^24
R=10^27

The finish time has clearly multiplied, but maybe that was the goal. The rebalance meant that the cache armies were drastically reduced by Fizzer. Which means now that not only is the end of the game slowing down but without the big cache armies there is slow progress in the beginning as well. So after all, balance works if we look at it.

The problem is not with the slowness, but with the lack of action. In the past, there were really treasures in the treasure chests that, especially when used in combination, could greatly speed up progress. It used to be a hunt for treasure, but now you wish you hadn’t found another useless chest. But not only have the crates simply become unusable, but they are downright a barrier, as they still need huge armies to get them.

If that stays the case, I would definitely suggest Fizzer to replace the current image of a rich treasure chest. At the very least, keep the crates locked and don’t suggest that there are many treasures in them. Maybe it would be nice to have as many armies in some crates as they used to be. This would make one more willing to pay a lot of armies to unlock them if they might even get something for it sometimes.

Oh and I even forgot to mention that Fizzer even took the super bonuses from us, and instead of the big bucks we mostly get useless chests.

Reading this, I am so happy that I gave up on Idle early enough :P

We need to remember it's still beta and Fizzer is looking for the best ratios. And it's clear it's somewhere between previous and current. 2/3 of the armies from caches was too much and totally useless "treasures" is not good either. The fact that army camps didn't play much role wasn't good. Now at least that improved. Now, there's more strategy in my opinion. Keep up the good work!

Just started this level and after 2 days, I see the issues being discussed here. TLDR, the % contribution of army camps has been "increased" by decreasing the contribution of caches, mercs & drafts.

Army camps might (not sure) be more effective. Hard to say. If they are, it's a minor improvement. But certainly armies from caches are down. And the # of mercs in camps is down, but more problematic is that the cost of mercs is waaaaaay up. So less cache + less mercs = less armies = less drafts = furthermore less overall armies. Which means we're getting less armies from drafts, mercs & caches, so the missing armies must come from army camps which so far as I can see haven't increased enough to compensate for the loss in the others - which means, just wait longer for more armies = takes longer to clear the level.

More on mercs. So far mercs typically start out at cost of <1.0, but the cheapest merc camp on this level sells for 1.24K. This is typically the 7th or 8th merc camp on other levels. So mercs previously gave a decent boost in the early game because a small number of them sold for cheap. Now these mercs are still small in number but so expensive that they aren't worth buying, and by the time you can afford them, the # of mercs offered is too small to make a difference b/c you're already on to larger territories. Eg: 1st merc camp offers ₳583K @ ￦1.24K each for total cost ￦722M. By the time I was able to afford that, the smallest capturable territory was in the millions, but that money took a few hours to accumulate. So a few hours of money for <50% of 1 territory. The next largest/expensive merc camp I have would me ₳9.18M for ￦111B (though at present time I can only afford ₳501K for ￦6.1B) - a steep step up in cost for an insignificant # of armies. The largest merc camp I have offers ₳168M for ￦27T - and I'm now already finishing the double digit M territories, venturing into the ₳100M+ territories and even have a ₳2.6B on the map, so ₳168M doesn't help at all. Even with all 4 Techs making these 15% cheaper, it's still going to super expensive and not enough units to cost effective. (Okay, just got some new merc camps, each progressively more expensive and the latest is ₳602M available for ￦1.23M, so 740T to get all 602M armies).

Looking at selling crafted items ... as RecMart said, the lowest item sells for ￦0.02. So you can make all the items you want, you're not making any money of them, which also means all the techs related to increasing their value are useless for anything other than the achievement as +15% of insignificant value = still insignificant value.

However ... the markets also appear to have items selling for cheap. So money doesn't seem balanced. Items sell for nothing and cost little to buy. Mercs are ridiculously priced. Army upgrades seem normal but still don't return enough value to the price. I'll still play on for a while to see if something changes ... but seems like I'm having the same experience as RecMart. And not sure what AP advancements would materially change this experience. Hopefully don't have to abort this level, b/c I'm used a bunch of Time Warps, Free Caches & Supercharge Army Camps just to get this far ... would hate for all that to be wasted. Not going to waste Inspire Mercs b/c the # of armies in each camp is too small still to be useful (would only get a 1-3 territories at most and then I'd immediately be stuck at a super slow crawl again). Market Raid would also be wasted since everything in the market is already cheap.

So it seems that the only potential to clear this is clear all the low count territories, target all the army camps, target all the markets, buy all the items for Techs and get all the army, draft, merc, cache upgrades and hope it makes a difference (but I don't think it'll be enough).

Has anyone else finished this level since the 5.04.2 update?

Update:

Now 9d10h into the level ... and it reaaaaalllly slowed to a crawl around 8d when I was at about 27% completion and clearing a small handful of territories every 4-8 hrs hours (typically one in the 1-2B category plus some other smaller ones nearby in order to be able to properly JS it and just even get to it at all). My drafts got up to 16M each. Tediously, I'd try to peg it every 6 mins to maximize draft earnings -- but this totally makes the game non-Idle yet also not really active either. I probably used about 5 TWs, 5 FCs, 5 SACs up to this point.

So I broke down and starting using powerups furiously (in addition to what I had used already) - about 6 IMs, 3 MRs, 5 TWs, 5 FCs, 8 SACs, 6 SMs, a few FBs to guide the way ... and finally was able to get some merc camps with enough units worth using IMs on (the ones so far had not even been enough to capture more than a few non-essential territories), a recipe worth making (sold for actual money that could be used for army upgrades and buy mercs with), some meaningful markets (gave me items useful to complete 80% of techs with + also sell to buy army upgrades and mercs).

This brought me to 72% completion. All merc camps are empty once more. Even with all army camps on the map and maxed out all upgrades up to cost of 1Z (reminder: order is -KMBTPEZYR), my income is only 291K/sec (this is with the +20% army bonus for watching the ads on mobile), so ~1B armies per hour. For a while my drafts were up to 16B each which kept me going even after the merc camps were empty, but now they're down to 102M each. And while I haven't counted, I estimate that I have well over 100B left, so even if I click every 6 mins (I won't), this would only give me ~2B total per hour, I'm still looking at minimally another 50 hrs, but likely closer to 100 hrs b/c I couldn't be bothered to do the tedious drafts anymore. So at least another 4 days. Which honestly surprises me given the # of power ups I've used on this level. For anyone who actually buys them with coins, wouldn't seem like they're getting their money's worth out of them. It would cost a lot of money to use all the powerups I did here, which got me <50% completion. So ~4 days for the territories, and not sure about the Techs - the last few require pretty high quantities of super valuable bars that cost ridiculous amounts at the markets that I don't even have items that can get that much money without already having a number of the bars to begin with. So the Techs may even take longer - not sure yet.

Another issue ... it seems that the more items I uncover between army camps, mines, markets, smelters & crafters (even if I'm not smelting or crafting anything) the slower the game gets. It's not consistent, but right now there's about a 0.5-6 sec delay when I click on things. I have a fairly high spec PC so it's not for lack of compute power or resources. Clicking in the smelting/crafting screen seems to trend towards the longer delays.

you got further than I did. That level is obviously unbalanced. You have more permanent upgrades than I do, but still shouldn't have been that slow and with the last 20-30% always taking the longest and being the most boring I am sure that will seem to take forever.

If playing one level and get you to the point of wanting to quit the game something is obviously wrong. I backed down a few levels to one I skipped and everything is going fine. Only disappointment is how meaningless so many of the mines are. I maxed out 20 or so just bc it costs so little and I figured why not. but really not needed at all. The game could be make more simple if you had half or even 1/3 of the mines and then maybe a few more of the low producing resource cashes.

I think the main problem is that the Mercs are ridiculously expensive. Even the early merc camps are completely not affordable. And by the time i'm able to afford them, the amount of armies they give would be virtually useless.

Also, with the new market raid, I only got 1 of every resource lol.