When DPS is being measured in octillions and the final upgrade of a character, costing as much to earn as a new level for the most effective member of the crew, only increases their DPS to a few quintillion, that’s more a rounding error than any effective level of support. Getting a bonus of 2000% DPS on a character sounds like a great payoff for their final ability, earned at level 600, but that money is always, every single time, better spent on leveling up your highest-powered character. Therefore, a decently-balanced idle game will make it so that, if you’re spending X gold to max out a character, the effort will at least be semi-noticeable. Remember, money is time is money (can’t stress that enough), so the real currency of the game is how much time it takes to earn enough cash to upgrade someone. Sakura Clicker’s other major problem is also tied to follower abilities, and also math-based. In a game that’s tuned for a constant increase in difficulty there’s no problem with additive rather than multiplicative progress, but Sakura Clicker has the same near-exponential increase that’s the genre standard, and the character upgrades don’t take this into account. If it was x25% per upgrade, that same pickup would be 931 gold. The +25% gain from 325 to 350 is also only a 7.7% increase overall, and the overall percentage only gets smaller each time it’s added on.
When you’ve had ten bonuses of +25% apiece, what that means is 100 gold becomes 350. It’s nice enough for the first couple upgrades, but the additive nature quickly means the bonus gets less and less worthwhile. The next time you level up a character who has that skill, that 100 gold will now be 150 gold, which is of course 100% + 25% + 25%. That first 25% bonus means what would have been 100 gold is now 125 instead, and here’s where things start getting tricky. When you’ve got no followers you’re at 100%, so 100 gold = 100 gold. Take one of the more common skills, which is a 25% bonus to earned gold. Unfortunately these skills are additive rather than the standard multiplicative, and the game isn’t really tuned in the later levels to work with this. In an average idle game, leveled-up characters get new skills that increase your effectiveness, and that’s true to a point in Sakura Clicker as well. The problem with Sakura Clicker’s progression is that it’s based on an additive formula. The real currency becomes the length of time it takes to earn enough cash to buy the upgrades necessary to defeat the boss. What this means is that, quite literally, time equals money. endlessly taking out random enemies and adding the gold to your growing stockpile. When that happens the game backs up to the highest level before the boss and pauses there.
As the game progresses they get more and more powerful, so if you aren’t regularly checking in and powering up the latest member of your army or hiring someone new, you’ll eventually slow down and finally stop as a timed boss gets too much for your underpowered army to handle.
Each bought character adds to the overall idle damage per second (DPS from here on), meaning if you walk away the monster-girls are still being defeated and progress is being made. Every follower you hire reveals the next one available, expensive beyond the current level’s wildest dreams but immensely powerful and worth saving up for as you advance. Leveling her up by spending the gold dropped by defeated enemies makes each click a bit stronger, and pretty soon you’ll be able to hire your first follower. At first there’s just your hero, doing a set amount of damage per click.
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