Recent reviews by Mireille

I weeped. I cried. I ate a gallon of ice cream.

If you want to improve at maths, play this game. It's more about calculation to figure out the best DPS and fastest way to gain "hero souls" than it is about clicking.

The way it works, you get a whole bunch of heroes. The first one improves your click damage, and all other heroes do DPS, which is an acronym that stands for Damage Per Second. Literally, they do damage automatically and you don't need to do anything for it. You increase their level to make them do more damage using gold dropped by monsters you kill. At certain levels, a new skill unlocks which gives effects ranging from increasing that hero's damage by 100%, or increasing overall DPS by all your heroes by 25%, increasing your click damage by a certain percentage of your heroes' total DPS (which is actually the brunt of your click damage), etc. Some of them teach a skill. There are nine skills in the game. For example, Clickstorm is a skill that automatically does 10 clicks per second for 30 seconds, with a 10 minutes cooldown. Proper use of skills is important to kill monsters faster. Especially because...

There are bosses. You have 30 seconds to kill them. If you don't kill them in time, you can't progress to the next stage. Every stage consists of ten monsters, and there is a boss every five stages, on multiples of five. By stage 100 and above, bosses have a chance to be "Primal", which is a special version of the boss that drops "hero souls". Every boss from stages in multiples of ten starting from stage 100 (100, 110, 120, etc) give a "gild" to a random hero from your list. At stage 100, you also unlock ancients.

Hero souls is a special "currency" that does two things. First, it increases your base DPS (what you have when you start the game) by 10% for each hero soul you have. It doesn't show in your DPS that is shown in your total current DPS shown in the hero tab, but it definitely affects it. Having hero souls is important to improve your damage and general progression, or else your DPS is too slow. However, they also serve as currency to unlock ancients.

Ancients are special "characters" that do various passive bonuses. There are a bit over 20 of them, and four are selected randomly for you to pick one from. It can be rerolled if you don't want them, but that costs hero souls. Anyway, ancients effects include increasing all your DPS by a certain amount but only when you are idle (i.e. not clicking or using skills for 60 seconds), increasing the amount of time you get to fight a boss, increasing click damage, getting a LOT more gold from random treasure chests, etc. Ancients are absolutely key to progressing in the game, so you need to find a good balance between keeping enough hero souls on yourself to keep a good DPS bonus, while still improving your ancients that will benefit you more than the hero souls' DPS you lose for improving said ancients. It can get very technical on a mathematical level.

Gilds are a type of bonus awarded to your heroes. They're assigned to a random hero when you get them from defeating a boss that is a multiple of 10 starting from stage 100, but it is later possible to move them to other heroes for a cost (in hero souls). A gild improves that hero's damage by 50%, and gilds are cumulative. For instance, having five gilds on a hero increases its damage by 250%. You definitely want those on heroes that gain a lot of "attack bonus" skills on themselves (such as Masked Samurai) rather than on heroes that have other effects that don't involve having a lot of DPS (such as Alexa which mostly improves click and critical damage, Midas which mostly improves gold drops, etc).

Finally, "Ascension" is the other important mechanic to explain. Once you get the skill "ASCENSION" from the hero named Amenhotep, you can learn the skill to do an ascension, which brings you down to the first stage and you lose all your money and your heroes lose all their skills. In exchange for "starting over", you gain a certain amount of hero souls based on a few things.

Hero souls gained from killing a Primal boss are only truly awarded after ascending. Also, each 2000 cumulative hero levels you had before ascension give an additional hero soul upon ascension. When you ascend, you keep your gilds and ancients. With the hero souls you gain, you are able to progress faster than the previous time, and you can get overall further and faster. A lot of the joy in the game is the way you get a little bit further than the last time you ascended, each time you get there.

There's a bit more to the game, but this is most of the important stuff that you need to know. Another thing of note which, to my knowledge, is not explained by the game, is that after level 200, a hero gains four times the amount of DPS as normal, every 25 levels, and most importantly, ten times that amount at level 1000 (and 2000 and 3000). It's important to note because once you get to a certain point and the next hero (Dread Knight) is just faaaaaar too expensive, you want to go back to your first hero and level him up to 1000 which becomes the new best thing, rather than keep increasing the last available hero (Frostleaf) who gains rather minimal DPS. You'll need to ascend many many times before you can even dream of getting Dread Knight, so get those early heroes to level 1000 which is the new meta at that point.

Since a lot of the progression is done through DPS, which is automatic, it's an easy game to play which you can leave running in the background while you do other things and that you can check on once in a while. One thing of note is that when the game is closed, your heroes still are gaining gold from monsters they kill. It's like the game keeps playing itself even when it's closed, although they won't progress to the next level/set of enemies or go past bosses and such. Only gold from monsters of the current highest stage you're at is considered. Since this is such a relaxing game to play, which you don't need to pay a whole lot of attention to most of the time, I recommend it to whoever isn't afraid of doing some maths to maximize their experience with the game. Or following a guide, I suppose. :p

Finally, it is a very known fact that you can use "autoclicker" programs with this game. I personally don't because it's not something I feel is natural to the game's intent and purposes, but it's something you can do, which a lot of people do. When playing without, most of the damage come from DPS and you don't need to click and/or can click only for important stuff such as bosses when you need the extra damage (and/or when using all your skills together for burst damage). Of course having such a program running nonstop will be a large part of your damage compared to someone playing without, especially with relevant ancients that complement that, so keep that in mind.