Idle Planet Miner update: Space Station?

Idle Planet Miner posted an update this morning (12/21), where the main new addition is a Space Station near the center of the map.  The Space Station has a tree of new goals and powers based on energy cells, which you win in Tournaments.  Now, I have never seen a Tournament screen in the game, but it sounds like this is the bottom icon which issues a challenge to sell your galaxy and see how fast you get back up to a million.  That Challenge screen says nothing about energy cells, though.  So that wasn't very well rolled out.

Still, I've been thinking of selling my galaxy again anyway, since there's not much left to build or research.  I've already hit the very last smelter recipe and last crafter recipe.

Let's see ... my galaxy value is $49.78Q, which is worth 1235 credits (x2 if I use 100 of the dark matter than I just got through playing Dice Dreams on Tapjoy).  Double the credits for 2470.  Click the Sell button.  Step one is new rooms.  Dorms give Crafting price 1-% for 642cr.  Terrarium would give Colonization Prices -10% (don't care) and Sales would give Alloy/Item values x1.15.  Either would cost 934cr.  Buy Sales.  Next new room would cost 1351cr, it shows Classroom for x1.15 to all manager bonuses (meh).

898cr left for upgrades.  Aeronautical lv 3 (8cr) and 3 (12cr) and lv 4 (18cr) for ship speed x2.5.  Same for packaging for x2.5 cargo.  Smelt speed lv 9 (62cr) for smelt speed x2.  Same for workshop for Craft Speed x2.  Oops, hit Craft speed again (82cr) for Lv 11 (x2.1 speed).  Dorms lv 2 & 3 (21cr,29cr) for craft prices -19%.

Well, let's save the rest for future upgrades and get the new galaxy going.

By 6PM today (12/23) I was able to get the galaxy up to $85M.  I only have about 10 minutes in the morning and a few breaks during the day to mess with it.  But this first "Challenge" is almost over so I will soon know if this is how we're supposed to get those new energy cells.

12/25 update: that Challenge ended with my galaxy at $87M and I think I got 2 resource stars and 15 dark matter, but nothing about energy cells.  The same icon later said Tournament instead of Challenge and listed 4 tiers of rewards for the top 100 players in each tier.  I had almost no time to tinker with the game, and when my galaxy was at a measly $9M the top guy in the copper tier was at $15q, over a million times the value of my galaxy.  So, yeah, it feels like ranking high in one of these tournaments might be a full-time job.

I was busy all day but ended up rank 78 in the copper league, which gave exactly nothing.  Why bother having a reward listed if it's all zeroes?

I'm not feeling hopeful about ever getting an energy cell or being able to use that new Station they just added.


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Idle Planet Miner: Selling Your Galaxy

Image
Back in Idle Planet Miner, production was starting to bog down, with crafts taking an hour apiece, and sometimes needing hundreds of items to unlock new research.  So, I figured it would be a good time to test out their "Sell Your Planet" feature, which has so many people online asking questions. These idle games can't level up through an infinite many items, so they all have this same kind of game reset mechanism.  In Idle Planet Miner, the Sell Galaxy button shows you the value of your galaxy and how many credits you will get for it.  These credits are a kind of meta currency, letting you buy new rooms for your ships, with each new room offering a different game boost.  Clicking the Sell button will show you exactly what you will lose: all planets, cash, ores, alloys, items, research.  Which sounds terrible.  But you get to keep your dark matter, your managers, your beacon buffs (though you will have to research the Beacon again to get it back on screen),...
Read more

Ancient Games Book

Image
I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...
Read more

Hounds and Jackals

Image
Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move. Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there. The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since di...
Read more