Idling Gears

TLDR **This game has an excellent base concept for an idle game; however, the execution and balance is a little bit strange.

The weirdness stems from a couple of factors:
1) All power for your gears comes from one "Golden Gear"
2) The speed that all your gears move at is based on the speed of the Golden Gear
3) The speed that the Golden Gear moves at is based on the total torque load for your whole system
4) You make money by spinning gears as fast as possible

Each of these factors is totally reasonable on their own, however when combined they create some weird situations. Because you want your gears spinning as fast as possible, when trying to make money it is actually advisable to have low to no load on your gears and just spin large gears faster and faster by repeatedly chaining certain ratios. The result is that you end up feeling punished for attaching your machine to anything that requires a load unless you use a really large ratio to get enough mechanical advantage to not add too much to your total load. But by doing that you are also severely limiting how much value you are adding by attaching that new load.
Essentially, having speed and torque reliant on one another, while it does make sense, creates a weird, un-intuitive, and somewhat un-fun gameplay loop. I would absolutely love this game if torque was instead treated as a resource we are trying to use as efficiently as possible, and speed was just an upgrade-able component.

I was close to give up on this one. Even with an auto-clicker, it felt slow and boring.

But, after messing around a bit, I eventually understood a few principles. (those might be obvious to those used to mess around with gears IRL, which isn't my case at all)

First, there's *torque* and *speed*.

For the mechanisms already present on the map, only torque matters. You simply gotta connect small gears up to them and slap the biggest gear available between your small gear chain and the mechanism to achieve the biggest amount of torque. (keep left click pressed while hovering a gear to see it's torque)

For gears which depends on speed (amount of turns / minute) to make money, like the cash gear, things actually get interesting. You must compound a bigger gear on top of a smaller one to make turn faster. So, in practice, a cash gear will turn faster if you compound it on top of a smaller one instead of connecting it to a smaller one. Once you understood that, you can actually start to make decent money.

You can basically compound a BFG on top of a small gear, connect a small gear to that BFG (different layer), compound *another* BFG to that last small gear then connect a cash gear to it. Money goes *brrrrrr*. (I tried repeating the process to reach ludicrous speeds but there seems to be a cap ... not a bad thing, tbh)

I'm sitting at 116k bucks/s and have accumulated 222m while writing this review.


TLDR : The game is kinda slow before it starts getting interesting, but you gotta mess around a little bit to find out what makes good money and what doesn't.


Edit : I just understood that your load meter is the most important factor in that game.

Basically, you want the lowest load possible at all time to maximise your money/second. The game actually explains how to achieve this (by slower, big gears with a lot of torque through compounding) but not from the start, which is, IMO, the main problem of the game. The tutorials should be displayed sooner. From the get go, ideally.

It becomes 100% idle, yes, but you do need to be creative to get somewhere.

Devs clearly didn't actually understand torque, angular velocity, gear ratios, or practically any other mechanical principle related to gears. Several of these terms feature in the game but are just shoehorned in to pander to the aesthetic. This is just your average idle-game shovelware, like you'd find on a mobile app store, with a gear-based paint job trying to mask the gamedev sins. Stick with a decent incremental game like adventure capitalist or cookie clicker; at least their gameplay-loops are enjoyable.