Cookie clicker is an OG in the "incremental" space. But while universal paperclips goes places, CC also goes to different, weirder places.

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.

> 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

Story is pretty much all I care about, so I agree re: those mechanics.

They can be good if they unlock significant new game mechanics.

I'm taking microbiology classes (or will be again in the fall). I dig the premise. Thanks for sharing.

Oh, the "primordial soup" part is just the intro. After a few resets it passes quickly and is eventually skipped entirely.

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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... :(

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.

Ah Cookie Clicker's got fancier graphics (although they're kinda heavy, I'd turn them off) and it goes... eldritch at some point. It's definitely the longer of the two to play, I recall finishing Paperclips in about three slow workdays.

There's one, I don't think Cookie Clicker has an ending. It's got countless multipliers, but eventually you're completely out of upgrades and achievements and it just sort of peters out in diminishing returns.

One remark though: if you've been playing for a while, save & back-up your save games. It stores progress in a cookie (I think) and they have a tendency to expire / get lost after a while. I just opened it up (it seems I last played a year ago) and it started a new game, but I had it backed up. Save before you stop playing.

The HTTP and HTTPS pages give you different save slots, so you may have been switched between the two.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but it doesn't take long for the investment engine to begin generating more money than the paperclip builder, to the point where you can shut off production and just make free money. Is that the point it's trying to make?