You might think you're starting out as an ordinary fruit farmer, harvesting normal tangerines til your heart's content, but then the ordinary tangerine doesn't grow a mustache nor sport a dapper hat, now does it. Inspired by the ever popular Cookie Clicker, Gaz Thomas, creator of the Red Remover series, brings us Tangerine Tycoon. In this silly incremental game, start by clicking the tangerine to produce more tangerines (I'm sure there's a scientific explanation for that somewhere), then use your earned tangerines as currency to buy fruit producing shrubs, trees, farms, and other... not so conventional things that produce tangerines automatically.
As it works in idle games, you can leave your tangerine groves running in the background to multiply as you go about your daily business. But there are some things to discover as you click the arrows on the edges of the screen or use the [arrow] keys to navigate to different areas before you walk away. Somewhat unusual is the alternate system to make or lose money in the game. There's a functioning stock market (you know you want to invest in tangerine figurines) and also a double or nothing gambling screen. You start with a 50-50 chance to win, but can up your odds slightly by buying percentage points in your favor. These optional activities serve to keep you more engaged in your empire if you are so inclined. The graphics are charming if nothing special, and there are plenty of achievements to try for as you discover the secrets of tangerine farming... and the end might only be the beginning.
Here are some of the secret achievements (indicated by a question mark) I've discovered. Feel free to post what you've found!
Have 3 achievements on the screen at once.
Have 6 achievements on the screen at once.
Cycle through all the possible notations.
There's at least 4 different achievements related to how many mutants spawn.
There's at least 4 different achievements related to how many people you let die.
There's also
a secret button.
At least 4 awards for watching the fill screen.
Several awards for watching the ad screen.
2 for clicking web links.
Also:
Checking a certain screen multiple times.
There are actually 5 fill screen achievements, and 3 for watching the ad. You can get both more easily with the idle part of this idle game - just leave it on the particular screen and go do something else for a while.
And the double/nothing screen is very helpful for the fill screen achievements.
I haven't liked any idle game this much since I discovered Cookie Clicker! And I guess Candy Box 2. But this is definitely my favorite flash idle game.
question. does the number of coins you get from the multiverse restart, affect by how many 'gods' you have? or is it just a base 2 per?
@Ashiel
The number of coins you get from a reset is linked to the number of tangerines you've produced; every 10^5 increment you've reached is one coin.
I've found the easiest way to increase that is to invest in the god production multiplier perk.
This is one of the best-paced idle games I've played. You can unlock the final 'building' upgrade within a few hours on your first playthrough, and it doesn't ever seem like you have to leave the game alone for over an hour to unlock something. The achievements seem reasonable too. With Cookie Clicker, there were just too many random achievements that took days to get.
I like the stock market here too. It's very stable, easy to understand, and a good way to save time in getting an expensive upgrade.
This is fun, but why aren't there any coversheets on the TpS reports?
But seriously: I like the stock market addition. If you haven't tried it, it's a great way to earn a lot of tangerines quickly. It's cool that, unlike in the real world, the prices always appear to fluctuate evenly around 50 -- so you never actually need to take a loss unless you're going for an achievement. I've been using a strategy of
using the 50% purchase volume so that I always keep some funds available for building, buying the first time the price rises after falling below 40, and selling the first time it falls after rising above 60.
I'm not so sure about the double-or-nothing game. I've bought my odds up to 56% and have lost 8 straight with 0 wins. Either this is rigged or I should not have gotten out of bed this morning.
Here's some guides, going from left to right; top to bottom.
Perks:
Offline gains is a definite first buy. Insider trading isn't terribly useful. Lucky charm can be useful depending on whether or not you like to gamble. Everything you don't spend in Offline gains and lucky charm should generally go in Upgod so that you can more easily get more coins.
Each achievement only counts your current game, with exception of the multiverse achievements, and the advertisement achievements.
Tangerine Achievements (x13):
Cumulative tangerines of 100 trillion (1x10^14)
Normal building achievements (x16):
100 each of the first four buildings
WARNING! MAJOR SPOILER.
Cats (x4):
Get 100 cats
More normal building achievements (x8):
As before, 100 each of the next two buildings
MuTAnT AcHieVMEntS (x4)
Get 5000 mutant tangerines. Really, really, really, really, really, really, really easy.
Yet more building (x8):
Get 100 each of the last two buildings
Filler Achievements (x2):
Watch the screen fill up 10 times (bottom right screen). Double or nothing is a really easy way to do this
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Giving the developer his dough (x3):
Watch the bottom left screen for an hour.
Visitation acheivements (x2):
Click both links on the ad screen.
Cats (x2):
Put the cat in the machine
Don't put the cat in the machine
Gambling (x5):
Win 1x10^13 tangerines in double or nothing.
Lose 2.48x10^66 tangerines in double or nothing.
Both have to be in one gamble. Not terribly hard once you have the tangerines.
Stock market (x6):
Sell stuff 500 times.
Gain 1,000,000 tangerines from tangerine market
Lose 1,000,000 tangerines from tangerine market
Get 1 billion tangerines using only tangerine clicks, coin upgrades, tangerine market, and double or nothing.
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DEATH!!! (x4):
Kill everyone
Shh! Don't tell anyone. There's a secret button on the tangerine market screen. It looks like a tangerine.
Spam the notation change (middle left screen)
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Why can't I see? (x2):
Have your achievements cover the left button
The Fulliverse. Unknown requirements. Probably means you need infinity tangerines, which I think is 1x10^1000. Good luck.
Breaking the fourth wall (x4):
Visit 25 universes.
And the fifth and sixth walls, too (x2):
Visit 100 universes.
Fast and tangerinous (x7):
Read them. Not gonna list all of them here.
This spoiler intentionally left blank. :P
Stats. Nothing to tell here, other than what's been told in the achievements spoiler.
Click the tangerine to get a tangerine. Here's a list of what you can buy.
Tangerine bush
Tangerine tree
Tangerine farm
Tangerine machine
Tangerine cats. Feed the cat in the machine to get the ability. But you get bonus tangerines next universe if you don't!
Tangerine lab
Tangerine aliens
Tangerine mutants. WARNING! THESE KILL PEOPLE AND WILL REPRODUCE EXPONENTIALLY! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Heroic tangerines. Base cost is 300,000,000 tangerines. Each one kills 1 tangerine mutant per second.
5-D tangerine. Unlocks the multiverse breach.
Tangerine market. Prices will ALWAYS go below 30, and ALWAYS go above 70 for each product each cycle.
Ad screen. Nothing to tell here other than what was given in achievements spoiler.
Double or nothing. You can increase odds in the bottom right corner of screen (plus sign).
Fill screen. See achievements spoiler.
There's a game-breaking cheat in v1.24 (which is on JiG at the time of this writing):
In the Double-or-Nothing screen, winning gives an extra tick. You can store money in the stock market, gamble, quickly switch back to the stock market, and sell if you hear that extra tick. This makes it easy to double your money without risking losing it. (It's easier to switch screens with the arrow keys when doing this.)
One last achievement (the rest have been mentioned):
The hidden achievement after Super Power Trader is another no-buildings trader achievement. You need to get 1e20 tangerines without buildings.
The cheat makes this achievement very easy. Without cheating, the insider-trading perk helps mildly. If you boost your odds of winning gambling, you have positive expected value and can earn money through it (even without cheating). Just don't bet everything or you'll have a catastrophic failure. I'd suggest storing most of your money in the stock market and only betting ~1/16 of your tangerines at a time.
What I'd like to see would be a 100% win rate through gambling. Unfortunately the in-screen upgrade maxes at 15. I don't yet know if it'll be possible to get the other 35 through perks, or if that maxes out as well.
Thanks for the guides! Just a few more achievement notes:
The Fulliverse requirement is 1_e300 tangerines, which is the most the game can handle.
There are five filler achievements in total, from watching the visualization screen fill up 1, 10, 25, 50, and 100 times.
There's an achievement for visiting the blank page 20 times.
As for double or nothing, the odds have to max out below 100%, or you could get to max tangerines instantly. The upper limit is 75% (+15% from direct purchases and +10% from Lucky Charm).
Is there a negative if you
let the mutants kill all the people? Do you keep making tangerines, or does the game end? It felt like it was a race to get my 5D before all the people died, which I did, so I don't know yet the consequence of killing everyone.
neo,
There's no negative. You do get an achievement, though.
Thanks for the extra info on the other achievements! My previous post and the three below it should be enough for people to completely figure out the game. I'm not even gonna try to get the
one after Super Power Trader
until I get the rest, but now all the information is on one page.
There is, in fact, a reward for not converting the feral cat into a tangerine. But I didn't get it until I started a new universe after I'd saved the cat.
Did anyone to the maths ? There has to be a point at which there's no point in upgrading your current technology and you should save up for your next one.
Each upgrade of a technology costs 10% more than the previous one, but moving onto the next technology costs 10% more than the previous technology and (I think) gives ten times as many TpS. But it takes longer to save up for the new technology.
So, I was enjoying the game, been playing it for a couple days, until I loaded it today and found all my progress was gone - I was back to square one. No idea why it happened, or if there's any way for me to get my progress back, but, uh, I guess that kinda killed it for me...
That sounds like your cookies got deleted. Any chance you wiped your browser history (sometimes offers to delete them), or used maintenance software that would delete them as ballast data? Did you lose progress in other games that use cookies too? That's about all I can think of, possibly except a corrupt save that might result in a new game instead.
Very fun for a game that is such a shameless rip off of Cookie Clicker :p
@pesky: At your service! I wrote a quick program based on a formula from a Cookie Clicker discussion, which also applies here. Here are the optimal sequences for the first thousand purchases:
With Cats
Without Cats
Important note:
These sequences assume that you plan to allow an extinction, since you won't buy enough heroic tangerines quickly enough to defeat the mutants! (HTs are heroic but don't offer good TpS at that point in the game.) If this isn't your plan, simply keep buying HTs after the first two and hold off on the gods until the mutants are under control. This will result in changes to the optimal sequences later on, but probably not enough that you'd notice the difference.
@pesky: I just posted the optimal sequences. The post is being held for moderation because there are a bunch of links, but hopefully it'll be along soon.
Whoops! There was a math error in my original calculations. It's fixed at the links that should eventually show up, but you'll just want to ignore my "Important Note" about extinction in that post, since fixing the error also changed the optimal purchase order enough to make it irrelevant.
@abfdrumz: thanks very much for those interesting sequences. I am surprised to find that it's worth buying the small stuff long after you have the big stuff. I had thought it would be more efficient to save up for the big stuff. Anyway, thanks for the work.
You're welcome...interesting, isn't it? The effect is mainly due to the fact that the prices for the "best" buildings increase with each one you buy, and by the time you've bought four or five of them, this outpaces the TpS that they add to the extent that the "worse" buildings provide an equal or better return on investment.
Actually, on the first playthrough, the effect is even more pronounced, because my sequences don't take into account the 1% TpS gain that you get from each new achievement. It's probably actually worth going for 20/50/100 of the lowest-level buildings a bit earlier than the sequences would suggest.
I quickly discovered an interesting loophole in the game mechanics which allow you to exponentially multiply your tangerines quickly. For those interested, here are some increasingly obvious hints:
When playing Double or Nothing, there are two distinct patterns of tick sounds, one for Double and one for Nothing.
Most noticeably, when it's about to land on Double, there are three slow ticks at the end, whereas Nothing ends with two slow ticks.
There's enough time between the last tick and when the double/nothing occurs for you to react.
Can you think of a way to stash your tangerines before they get reset to 0?
The full loophole exploit:
First go to The Tangerine Exchange and make sure your Purchase Volume is set to 100%, so that one click causes you to buy as many of a commodity as you can afford. Click Play on the Double or Nothing screen, then quickly hit Up+Right on your keyboard to switch to The Tangerine Exchange. If you hear it about to land on Nothing, buy a commodity, wait for your balance to reset, then sell it.
@Poochy.EXE: This is the same exploit that bluemoose19 mentioned, though your technique does seem a bit riskier.
If you "hear" the missing tick which means a loss but don't buy quickly enough, you lose everything. If you buy first, hear the extra tick that means a win, and don't sell quickly enough, you've simply missed a doubling opportunity.
BTW, the latest version of the game on tangerinetycoon.com (1.26) eliminates this exploit, so if you want to make use of it, make sure you're playing on JiG. :)
Well, I for one hated this game. I like some incremental games, but this one is very lame. Prefer Kittens, or Adventure Capitalist.
Wonderful! So simple. You touched on a topical issue. I would appreciate if you'd written about how to merge some files online. I know a good online service I used before. I mostly use AltoMerge to merge my PDFs. I think it also allows you to fill the merged documents.
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