KGAF Phase 4: Time
I have a vision of a man-made object
I have the money, I have the means
I have the strangest dreams
-Man-Made Object, Lemon Demon
(context) (previous)
We’re in the endgame now.
Put all of your kittens into Scholar. Well, not literally all of them, leave a couple in each other job to prevent your economy from collapsing, but put 98% of them into Scholar - it's all about starcharts now.
Pick up Hubble Space Telescope to further boost starchart production.
After ~9 Lunar Outposts, launch Piscine Mission. Piscine has Research Vessels, which will expand starchart production. Unfortunately, it will take about ten minutes to reach it. In the meantime, keep buying Lunar Outposts.
After ~14 outposts, launch Dune Mission. Dune doesn't actually have any helpful buildings, but it unlocks the Cosmological Libertarianism policy, which boosts unobtainium production by 15%.
Use your first 1000 unobtainium and Chemist to craft Eludium for Microwarp Reactors, and that's another +75% unobtainium.
Then funnel your unobtainium into about 13 Space Elevators. The exact number of elevators you want depends on how much total unobtainium you need to trade - for a 35k total unobtainium run, the optimal number is about 13.
Orbital Arrays are far more expensive in unobtainium and are not worth it.
Once your Piscine Mission arrives, build ~20 Research Stations to boost your starchart production. It's only about a 50% boost, but it's still worth it.
Now - until you can build up enough unobtainium to trade for 63 Time Crystals (~35k for me), you are going to be splitting your starcharts between building ships -> titanium -> factories to boost outposts, and using starcharts to directly build more outposts. My rule of thumb here is to prioritize outposts and occasionally spend a minute of starchart production on ships.
The Leviathans you need to trade with to get Time Crystals can only arrive at the start of a year, so you are going to want to do the RNG manipulation (in the same manner as titanium trading) to get them before you have all of the unobtainium. If you waited until you had the unobtainium, you'd have to wait for the next year to arrive, which could take several minutes.
And this is why you needed to have the Black Sky challenge complete. The Leviathans arrival chance is based on your number of Black Pyramids, but Black Pyramids cost unobtainium. Thankfully, Black Sky's reward is essentially a "passive Black Pyramid", which includes the Leviathan arrival chance. While the chance is low (only 3.5%), you can use RNG manipulation to guarantee Leviathan arrival with no unobtainium spent on Pyramids.
Once you have starcharts to spare, send a mission to Helios. After arrival, turn off the Winter Has Come challenge. This will give you 150 apotheosis and a bunch of void. By this time, you will probably be able to spare the resources for Thorium Drive and decrease the travel time.
Here is the total number of Time Crystals needed to build a Cryochamber:
Chronophysics - 5
Tachyon Theory - 25 (also costs relics)
Void Space - 30 (also costs 100 void - this is why Winter Has Come is part of the run)
Chronosphere - 1 (cryochamber requires chronosphere)
Cryochamber - 2
So you need 63 Time Crystals. One trade with the Leviathans is 5k unobtainium, so the total unobtainium you need will be a multiple of 5k, plus 2.5k for the one Chronosphere.
e.g. With 18.2M BP and Monarchy, you can just barely (with RNG manipulation) get 63 Time Crystals with 35k unobtainium.
While you're doing that trading, make sure you also get relics - they're needed for Tachyon Theory.
After building a cryochamber, disable the Atheism Challenge first (300 apotheosis), then 'No Chronospheres' (20 apotheosis) and 'No Apocrypha'.
Then you're done. Nice work! You've gained a total of 470 apotheosis in just under 3 hours.
==========
Because this phase is simpler than the others (even if it takes longer) I'll take the opportunity to talk about how each phase of the run changes as more Burned Paragon and Karma are accumulated. I'll also bring up newer/more speculative strategies.
Phase 1:
Since you don't have a leader during this phase, the only thing that changes from run to run is your karma count. This boosts the production of your kittens, which means faster Academies. Sadly, since Karma gain is diminishing, this isn't a huge effect - Phase 1 won't see much timesave. Because iron only comes from smelters, your iron levels also won't increase much.
This is also the only phase where anything gets "worse" - in the first few minutes, more karma increases the number of farmers you need to sustain your first full-time worker.
Phase 2:
The extra Burned Paragon here gets more iron -> observatories -> starcharts, more ships -> titanium, and more alloy/steel -> more steamworks. This phase benefits a lot from BP, perhaps the most out of all of them.
Crafting 3 batches of ships instead of 2 not only gets you more magnetos as you'd expect, but it also makes it reasonable to cough up the 250 titanium for SETI early. This might seem like a pure quality of life upgrade, but because it removes the 'reaction speed' factor of getting starcharts, it could even be optimal. And also, the quality of life is REALLY appreciated.
In the same vein, for only 75 titanium, you can explode culture production before Phase 3 with an early broadcast tower. This could be good in two ways: alleviating the culture bottleneck during the tech tree climb in phase 3, and allowing for the Zebra embassy to be purchased. This would make trading during this phase far more convenient, especially when using multiple tabs to manipulate RNG.
After the useful wood/mineral buildings have been made very expensive, I've messed around with assigning extra hunters and scholars to build up extra science and catpower for Phase 3. This ALSO gets you master rank hunters and scholars sooner in Phase 4, which is very useful.
The only minor issue with this strategy is that, once you run out of parchment, it's tempting to 'send all' hunters and spend your entire stockpile of catpower to replenish your parchment supply. Don't give into this temptation. Promote a kitten with the Manager trait to boost hunting, and send hunters one at a time from the city tab until you have enough furs.
Speaking of getting Masters sooner, Phase 2
Neural Networks/Telecommunication would dramatically speed up skill acquisition, but they each take thousands of titanium, and so won't be plausible for a long, long time - if ever.
Phase 3:
Once you get Neural Networks/Telecommunication, the raw number of kittens you have (total and in each job) boosts skill gain. This means that more kittens (from more karma -> woods/minerals -> log houses/huts, or BP -> titanium -> mansions) are even more useful than usual.
More BP means more ships -> titanium -> factories. Similarly, more blueprints for steamworks and magnetos (though this bottleneck is more of an issue in Phase 4.
More karma -> more gold from geologists, more catpower from hunters, and more science from scholars. All of this is super useful, but karma accrues slowly.
Phase 4:
More merchant power -> fewer unobtainium trades needed to get 63 Time Crystals.
More karma -> more starcharts from scholars.
Leviathans give starcharts in addition to Time Crystals when traded with, so I've been considering a two-trade instance strategy, e.g. trade half your unobtainium early, use the starcharts to build more lunar outposts to speed up your acquisition of the rest of the unobtainium.
One complication with this idea is that after you trade with the Leviathans, their timer is set to leave in one year. This doesn't make the strategy unworkable, but it does mean you need to know exactly how long it will take you to get the unobtainium for the second trade batch.
Not to mention, they don't give a huge amount of starcharts - enough for a couple outposts, maybe. Not a huge boost, which is why I haven't been super eager to try this out.
I discovered a new emerging issue on my most recent run, where I tried to get 63 TC in only 30k unobtainium.
I mentioned offhand earlier that once you complete Anarchy, your leaders can have ranks above one which boost their trait by 50% additively. In every run before this one, the merchant had time to reach at least rank 4. This time, however, they were only rank 3 - leaving me far short of the trading power necessary to get 63 TC from just 30k unobtainium.
If I had seen this coming, building more academies during Phases 2 and 3 might have been enough to get them to rank 4 in time - I was about 20% short. Even if this is true now, it won't be in the long term. By the time I'm doing 25k or even 20k unobtainium runs, rank 4 will be totally implausible.
2 notes
·
View notes