The RPS Summer Games: AdVenture Capitalist
Greed is gold
The second RPS Summer Games event is... AdVenture Capitalist [official site]. If Clock Simulator was a sprint, this is the marathon event. Each contestant has 30 minutes to make as much money as possible by clicking on lemons, doughnuts, hockey teams and whatever else this casual clicker can offer.
Rules:
Results:
Adam
Adam says: Alec has previous in this event, being one of the foremost Adventure Capitalists in the world, or at least our portion of it.
Even though this is a marathon rather than a hurdling event, I managed to trip after ten minutes or so of the half hour, falling flat on my face just as I was preparing to buy a manager for my pizza place (not the same pizza place as in FNAF, I hope). My computer crashed, the screen frozen, and I wasn't even able to get a grab, all efforts to do so meeting with failure and a shot of the desktop behind the game.
A disqualification then, I guess. But maybe I shouldn't be the only person disqualified – take a look at the lemonade on Alec's stand and you might find it's not quite as pure as advertised. Somebody's been juicing in more ways than one.
Alec
Alec says: I’m a recovering addict. Pip’s demand that I return to the poison teat of AdVenture Capitalist is essentially trying to convince a former alcoholic that just a half can’t do any harm. So while, on the one hand, my frightening amount of time with AdVenture Capitalist in times past perhaps gave me an unfair advantage, the fact I was screaming and weeping as I played surely slowed me down. Part of the reason for said screaming and weeping was due to having to erase my old save game in order to have a fresh start. “You were offline for 9375:33:23. You earned 2.505 septquadragintillion while you were gone.” No more.
‘Twas insult to injury when I realised that, with just four minutes of investment sprint left, Pip had not clarified whether the goal was total earnings across 30 minutes or cash in hand at the end of it. I’d presumed the former and so never kept a dime in hand, but of course the rest of the team – amateurs! – had done the latter. So I limped to the finish line with extremely healthy investments but a relatively meagre $342 million in my pocket. Screw you all. Still, the good news is that the experience was so disheartening that I will never again return to my lethal muse.
Alice
Alice says: Oh mate, I pity my fellow sporters. I've secretly had Adventure Capitalist on the go for yonks. You wouldn't believe the passive bonuses I've racked up! I can earn more with one single click than others might accrue in days. That's not an illegal performance boost: it's training.
Brendy
Brendy says: Having just spent a day idly clicking at Spaceplan, my mouse hand was trained for this. According to the rules of Games Master Pip, “you have half an hour to make as much money in the game as possible.” I guessed this meant the liquid money – not assets – that was in your “account” the instant the clock hit 30 minutes. So I knew that the crucial thing would not be to keep clicking as much as possible, as fast as possible. The crucial thing would be to know when to stop investing. Because if you keep clicking on things up until the final minute, your bank account won’t be able to recuperate in time for the final snapshot at the 30 minute mark. I plucked a number that seemed legit out of the ticking clocks on screen and decided I would stop buying hockey teams and shrimp boats when I saw 7 minutes left on my timer. If I’d had just ten seconds more time I would have increased this score by like another 50 million, allowing me to buy -
Oh my god what’s wrong with me. SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION.
Graham
Graham says: Clicker Heroes is the only clicker game I've ever really got into, and I've never played AdCap at all. I spend my first few moments buying a lemon and wondering why I don't seem to be earning any money from it. Then I realise I'm not buying lemons, and I am earning from it when I click. "Oh, I remember how these games work."
20 minutes later and I think I'm doing a pretty good job. We're competing for who can have the most cash-in-hand at the end of the time, which means making a decision at some point about when you stop investing and sit back to simply recoup profit. I made that decision just a minute ago.
Again, I don't know what other people's scores are though. This and Devil Daggers are where Alice is most confident however and oh god while I was typing this I forgot to click on my shrimp boat and... hockey team? I do not remember buying the hockey team but the icon suggests that's what it is.
Anyway. If I lose: clicker games are dumb casual games for people hooked on the endorphin of superficial progress. If I win: casual games are great, and clicker games are both relaxing like a casual game but with a whole hardcore wing of god damnit I forgot to press the shrimp boat button again. Hang on...
Right! Final score: $379,852,118.68.
John
John says: Having not played the game before it took me a little moment to grapple with the operations, to fully understand what I was meant to be doing. In fact it took me more than a moment, and I only wish I could have the half hour over again knowing now what I now know. What I was meant to be doing was cheating.
As soon as I realised this, that this was the true spirit of this event, my profits went from reasonable to truly grotesque. Assuming that everyone else on RPS would be too honest/cheap to spend any of their own money, I threw in a tenner and started buying some of the ludicrous upgrades real-world money can offer in this free clicker. And, as I say, I could have cheated so much better. If I'd realised that it's only 10 gold to add a full day's profits at any point, I'd have spent all 130 gold just doing that at the last minute, and maybe made a quintillion. As it is I didn't really cheat very well at all and even managed to drop below the 20 trillion I reached by investing in 25 movie studios that weren't going to make any profit before my time ran out. In short, I think I have all the qualities and qualifications to be a true CEO of a trillion dollar company. I'd better have won this event.
Pip
Pip says: So having decided to "cheat" I was all-in on this one. I instantly chucked $4.99 away on 55 gold bars (the in-game currency you get with real cash) and bought an upgrade that gives Earth (your start planet) a 12x multiplier on all profits.
God, I was earning so much money in the first few minutes it was obscene. Shrimp boats, movie studios... I had them all. But then I started to fret about what point to stop investing and start just sucking up the cash, leaving my liquid assets at the top of the screen for all to see.
But... I was on billions not trillions. I'd definitely heard talk of trillions in the chatroom. I panicked. I looked through all the upgrades and options to see if there was anything that would catapult me forward in terms of my earnings, but none of my earners could be upgraded to a significant milestone so there were no speed boosts to be had or anything.
There is no moral victory in capitalism. I headed to the shop and sank another $4.99, this time spending it on a mixture of the upgrades that instantly grant you profits as if you'd played for a certain number of days. I think I added 16 days to my account and was rolling in it. NEARLY $100 trillion!
It was nearly so sweet. I could taste a gold medal! Then I went to screenshot my victory. A practice screenshot while I waited for my timer to go off. But... it was the wrong button. Something popped up on my screen. I clicked away to get back to AdVenture Capitalist and... accidentally bought a fucking bank for trillions and trillions of dollars. Cheating is really really hard. Also I hate myself.
CURRENT STANDINGS:
