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Universal Paperclips has the best story out of all the idle games I know, but it's not the best game. For one thing, it has very limited reset/prestige mechanis

by brazzy 3y ago

Universal Paperclips has the best story out of all the idle games I know, but it's not the best game. For one thing, it has very limited reset/prestige mechanisms, and the expansion mechanism in the final phase is very opaque and can mislead players into frustrating dead ends.

Shish2k 3y ago
> For one thing, it has very limited reset/prestige mechanisms Are those considered good things now? In all the games where I’ve seen them implemented, they haven’t increased fun at all, just prolonged the grind. I actually like universal paperclips more for being relatively grind-free — there is just enough boring time-consuming manual-labour to get its point across, and then it moves on
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Story is pretty much all I care about, so I agree re: those mechanics.
- brazzy 3y ago
  They can be good if they unlock significant new game mechanics. The most extreme example (I know of) in that regard is https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/ https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/ which has, at last counting, 12 different ways to reset, many of which are not accessible until you have done dozens if not hundreds of others. Exploring the entire game takes years of play. Obviously, there's still lots of grindey repetition, and it's only something for people who find slow progress towards optimizing grind rewarding.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I'm taking microbiology classes (or will be again in the fall). I dig the premise. Thanks for sharing.
    - brazzy 3y ago
      Oh, the "primordial soup" part is just the intro. After a few resets it passes quickly and is eventually skipped entirely.
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        Yeah I got past it pretty much as soon as I posted, which is kind of a pity. I like the idea of playing as a plant buying amino acids from the mycorhizae with hexose. The whole coal mining fungus with banking problems thing feels a bit too rooted in the human world. Poking through the code though, I can see that that's probably not a problem that I'll have for long.
the_af 3y ago
I was never able to go past the universe exploration step, nothing I did made significant progress past that and I couldn't find a way to speed things up. Is there a way to win or reach an end? (Which I assumed was consuming all of the universe?)
- jholman 3y ago
  There is an end, yes, and it happens a little bit after consuming all of the universe. You'll know that you've reached it when you are offered the option to delete all of your progress and restart. As with many of the better-designed incremental games, there are moments in UP where you might get the impression that the way to continue is to just do more of what you've been doing, but actually the way to continue is to do something slightly different. I think you're referring to the starkest of those.
- brazzy 3y ago
  Yeah, that's exactly what I was referring to. It's been a while since I played it, but the key is to allocate as many of your resources as possible to reproduction rather than exploration, because that leads to exponential growth. It's possible to complete the game in around 2 hours of active play, IIRC.
  - the_af 3y ago
    Well, now I'm stuck in the "combat against drifters" phase and everything is going too slowly, so I think I'll abandon the game once more... :(
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  The trick is to get the right balance for your von Neumann probes such that they survive long enough to propagate (hazard remediation mostly) while also not bottlenecking on a resource. Iirc you can harvest so much so fast that it's easy to be set for the foreseeable future. I would occasionally just stop mass/wire production to get my fleet going strong and it would take a long time before I needed to restart it. Meanwhile trust stacks up and probes get better.

by brazzy 3y ago

Shish2k 3y ago

> For one thing, it has very limited reset/prestige mechanisms Are those considered good things now? In all the games where I’ve seen them implemented, they haven’t increased fun at all, just prolonged the grind. I actually like universal paperclips more for being relatively grind-free — there is just enough boring time-consuming manual-labour to get its point across, and then it moves on

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Story is pretty much all I care about, so I agree re: those mechanics.
brazzy 3y ago
They can be good if they unlock significant new game mechanics. The most extreme example (I know of) in that regard is https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/ https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/ which has, at last counting, 12 different ways to reset, many of which are not accessible until you have done dozens if not hundreds of others. Exploring the entire game takes years of play. Obviously, there's still lots of grindey repetition, and it's only something for people who find slow progress towards optimizing grind rewarding.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I'm taking microbiology classes (or will be again in the fall). I dig the premise. Thanks for sharing.
  - brazzy 3y ago
    Oh, the "primordial soup" part is just the intro. After a few resets it passes quickly and is eventually skipped entirely.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Yeah I got past it pretty much as soon as I posted, which is kind of a pity. I like the idea of playing as a plant buying amino acids from the mycorhizae with hexose. The whole coal mining fungus with banking problems thing feels a bit too rooted in the human world. Poking through the code though, I can see that that's probably not a problem that I'll have for long.

the_af 3y ago

I was never able to go past the universe exploration step, nothing I did made significant progress past that and I couldn't find a way to speed things up. Is there a way to win or reach an end? (Which I assumed was consuming all of the universe?)

jholman 3y ago
There is an end, yes, and it happens a little bit after consuming all of the universe. You'll know that you've reached it when you are offered the option to delete all of your progress and restart. As with many of the better-designed incremental games, there are moments in UP where you might get the impression that the way to continue is to just do more of what you've been doing, but actually the way to continue is to do something slightly different. I think you're referring to the starkest of those.
brazzy 3y ago
Yeah, that's exactly what I was referring to. It's been a while since I played it, but the key is to allocate as many of your resources as possible to reproduction rather than exploration, because that leads to exponential growth. It's possible to complete the game in around 2 hours of active play, IIRC.
- the_af 3y ago
  Well, now I'm stuck in the "combat against drifters" phase and everything is going too slowly, so I think I'll abandon the game once more... :(
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
The trick is to get the right balance for your von Neumann probes such that they survive long enough to propagate (hazard remediation mostly) while also not bottlenecking on a resource. Iirc you can harvest so much so fast that it's easy to be set for the foreseeable future. I would occasionally just stop mass/wire production to get my fleet going strong and it would take a long time before I needed to restart it. Meanwhile trust stacks up and probes get better.