All I know is I need more cookies.
http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
"Game", indeed. This abomination has been a fad on the Plounge for a few weeks. You might be interested in this:
http://kotaku.com/5846080/the-life+changing-20-rightward+facing-cow
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Real programmers can write Perl in any language.
Well, it is a game. There is a goal, and you have to make decisions to achieve that goal. I've done a lot of mental math while playing it (and a bit of non-mental math) to determine what is the best course of action in terms of purchases (although occasionally with limited knowledge because I didn't know how much of a bump the next building type would bring).
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Well, if the goal is merely to accumulate cookies, you don't technically have to make any decisions to get there once you've bought a cursor. Challenge only arises when you start worrying about speed.
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Real programmers can write Perl in any language.
Well, presumably the goal is to unlock all of the achievements. But speed is something you have to worry about, as with a single clicker you would need thousands of years to get everything.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
So now I'm trying to do a legit analysis of when it is better to buy certain things, but I'm having a hard time conceptualizing it.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
I wrote a solver for the old version that framed it as a search problem, where at each branch point, you can choose to buy one of the items (waiting as long as necessary until you have enough cookies to afford it) or just wait until you reach your goal. I don't know much about search problems, though, so the algorithm is just breadth-first search with a little lookahead.
http://www.reddit.com/r/MLPLounge/comments/1k4i7y/i_wrote_a_solver_for_the_cookie_game/
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Real programmers can write Perl in any language.
Different from the solution I'm starting with, but I think it's because you built in the assumption that the player is going to be actually clicking the cookie. I started with the assumption that, once they bought the first clicker, they are not going to click manually anymore. That probably changes things. Because even though Grandmas are 5 times as effective as Clickers and cost less than 5 additional clickers, buying the 5 clickers as soon as they are available is faster. (For the first five, at least.)
But I haven't come up with a proper function to model it. I know I can program a solver like you did, but I'm hoping to find something more elegant.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
I think it's NP-hard, so although you can try to be clever with dynamic programming or something, any solution will necessarily boil down to trial and error.
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Real programmers can write Perl in any language.
Different approaches, I guess. I just played it until I was tired of it, buying as much as I could and doing rough estimations of what was best to buy in my head, then I recorded a macro to click the cookie 200 times per second and left it running all night.
A more straightforward way to cheat is to say Cookies = 1e13 or so in your browser's JavaScript console.
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Real programmers can write Perl in any language.
So I'm not sure how much progress I'm making with my calculations because mixing and matching buildings is really hard to calculate. But I've generated lists of times for purchasing the next building if you only have one clicker and that building type. What's interesting is that, so far, the time required to purchase the next building decreases with each one you buy until you buy 7. Then it begins to increase. This leads me to believe that, at the least, buying 7 of one thing then moving on to the next is not the worst strategy.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)