Clicker Heroes - Not Mammon

There are a variety of ancients that give you gold in different ways. Fortuna gives you a small chance of getting bonus gold for each enemy. Dogcog reduces the cost of heroes which is effectively getting more gold since once you get to endgame levels are the only thing to spend gold on. Dora gives more treasure chests, and Mimzee gives more gold from treasure chests.

Amazingly, all of these are far worse than Mammon.

Now that's not actually true. Dora and Mimzee together are better than Mammon because their effect multiplies. Thus it shouldn't be a surprise that their individual effects are worse than 5% gold per level. I'll get to them in the near future, but today Fortuna and Dogcog have some explaining to do.

Fortuna gives a 0.25% chance of getting ten times as much gold from each monster killed per level. It costs the same as Mammon and has a maximum level of 40. That means with 40 levels invested Fortuna gives a 10% chance of getting ten times as much gold. Since that monster would have given you one times its normal gold without Fortuna, that means the bonus is nine times the gold of a regular monster. That's 90% extra gold. For 40 levels. If that doesn't sound right, imagine you were able to continue to buy levels of Fortuna. At level 400 the chance would be 100%, so Fortuna would just give 10 times gold for all monsters. That's a 900% bonus. A level 400 Mammon would give a 2000% bonus. This is a specific instance of the general rule that crit is always bad. Fortuna is critical strike chance for gold earned.

Dogcog gives 2% off the cost of heroes each level for 25 levels. That's effectively 100% more gold for 25 levels.

Since each of these is worse than Mammon on a per-level basis, it should be obvious that Mammon is always better. Since Dogcog arrives at a better maximum effect in fewer levels, it should be obvious that Dogcog is better than Fortuna when you average everything out. But like I said in my discussion of Mammon, when you are multiplying, the question is not so much whether to get it as it is when to get it. Also, from my post about fixing your intuition about multipliers, we should guess that number of levels you put into Mammon and the number of levels you put into these lesser ancients should be fairly close - closer than the vast superiority of Mammon would suggest.

My next ancient costs 250 souls to purchase. At that price, I should buy into Fortuna for 19 levels at 1415 souls. With that number of souls, the correct number of Mammon levels to buy would be 31, almost 32. That's a 12 or 13 level difference between the two ancients. However, the final level of Fortuna - level 40 - should be bought at 4107 souls. With that many souls, you should be buying the 49th level of Mammon. After that point, if you were allowed to continue to buy levels of Fortuna, the difference between your Fortuna and Mammon levels would remain at about 9.

Dogcog works a little differently. Because it reduces the price of heroes by a fixed percentage that adds up, each level is actually more powerful than the previous one. The first level reduces costs from 100% to 98% which means you effectively have just over 2% more gold. The last level reduced costs from 52% to 50% which means you effectively have 4% more gold.

Because Dogcog gets more powerful with each level, it make sense to max him out much sooner. The first level of Mammon, with a summoning cost of 1, is worth purchasing at 15 souls. The first level of Dogcog is at 51 souls. By contrast, the 25th level of Dogcog is worth purchasing at 1081 souls, while the 25th level of Mammon isn't worth purchasing until 1360 souls.

That probably sounds insane. Why would you wait longer to get a total of 125% more gold than you would to get 100% gold for the same cost?

There are two facts that go into answering this question. First, remember that we are thinking on the margin. The 25th level of Mammon increases your total gold production from 2.2 to 2.25 which is only a 2.3% increase, while the 25th level of Dogcog is a 4% increase. Those numbers assume you already bought the ancient to 39. Second, remember that these numbers only tell you when your production increases by buying that ancient, they don't comment on how much it increases or whether that is the best way to spent your souls. Clearly it is better to spend your 325 souls to get 125% more gold than it is to spent them to get only 100% more gold.

This serves as a reminder of how to use the Mammon Spreadsheet. The spreadsheet doesn't tell you to buy Mammon, it tells you when to increase your levels of Mammon assuming that you've already decided that Mammon is the ancient for you.

And this is the real problem for Dogcog and Fortuna. Since each ancient costs more to summon than the last, these two are holding you back from buying other ancients while providing a capped benefit that is actually quite low. Right now I could summon Dogcog and buy it up to maximum level for 575 souls. Doubling my gold for 575 souls is a good idea.

But instead of doing that I could buy Argaiv and buy it to the level. Then, in the future I could continue to buy them even higher without dropping another 500 souls for my next summon.

Honestly I can see myself getting Dogcog about three ancients from now, but I have other priorities in the mean time. Probably getting Dora and Mimzee together is a far better way to increase my gold production.