Coglet

An idle game asks the same question over and over: what to buy next. Then it hides the answer behind numbers nobody can compare in their head. A machine at 4.1e17 coins that adds 9.2e14 a second, against an upgrade at 8.8e16 that doubles something older. Most people give up and buy whatever is newest, which is usually the wrong answer.

Coglet works that comparison out. Every purchase on offer, a machine, a hundred of them at once, an upgrade, a manager, a wider away window, is scored the same way: production added per day against coins spent, which comes out as a payback time. That one figure is what lets a machine, an upgrade and a manager be ranked against each other at all. The front page names the shortest payback standing, what it costs and how long it takes to earn itself back, or how long until the balance covers it. The rebuild screen answers the other question the genre never answers: whether prestige is worth taking now, and how long it takes to get back to where the factory already is.

WHAT IT DOES

• Twelve machines on their own cost curves, each kind doubling its output every 25 built
• An advisor that ranks every purchase by payback time and names the best one
• Twelve upgrade levels per machine, a manager per machine, and a night shift that widens the away window from eight hours to sixteen and then to twenty-four
• Buy max priced from the closed form of the geometric series, so a few hundred units cost one multiplication rather than a loop the watchdog would cut short
• Offline earnings settled from the wall clock in one multiplication, capped at the away window, with machines that have no manager idling at a quarter speed
• A clock set backwards pays exactly nothing, so absence cannot be farmed
• A rebuild that trades the whole run for a permanent multiplier, with a screen that says plainly whether it is worth it now and when it pays back
• Every coin carried as a mantissa and an exponent, and printed with a short suffix, K, M, B, T and on through letter pairs, never as scientific notation
• Four pages: the floor, what each machine is producing, what to buy next, the rebuild
• Five languages, on-watch settings, nothing sent anywhere

WHAT IT NEEDS

Nothing but the watch. No phone, no signal, no account.