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Is it more effective is manually send my kitty hunters away, or let the Mint building do it for me?

Of course when I am away the building is more effective because it is automated, but assuming I am at my desk and letting no catpower go wasted by overproduction. I've got the Bolas and Hunting Armor upgrades (hunters are twice and four times as effective) and also enough catpower per tick to make fully use of the mint (>0.750/tick).

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    I'm assuming your question is about catpower efficiency, which I believe the Mint wins on but I could be mistaken. The reason not to always rely on Mints, in my experience, is the gold cost - both to build and to run the Mints. It's not an answer to your actual question, regarding catpower, but in general the Mint is worth it if you have spare gold, and is not worth it if gold is a limiting factor for your religion or trading advancement.
    – gatherer818
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 4:47
  • It is indeed about the catpower efficiency. Although the gold income is reduced by 25%, I don't see any direct very negative consequences, as my calcincer is almost ready so I don't have to trade that much to obtain titanium.
    – Mathias711
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 4:51
  • I do find the Mint to be more catpower effective, but that's unfortunately all anecdotal. Good luck proving it one way or the other ^_^
    – gatherer818
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 5:36

4 Answers 4

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It depends on a playstyle.

Mints are designed as a supplementary structures for players that want a legitimate way to autohunt. Manual hunting is almost 10x as effective in terms of catpower/gold conversion.

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    Can you back-up that last statement with actual numbers, preferably from the code, or else from the description of the mint building and an average of some hunts? Doesn't has to be exact, just a rough estimate.
    – Mathias711
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 5:13
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    Sigh. The exact formula is tricky as it is related to the total catpower. Let's say you will receive 60-300 furs per 100cp. That will be 0.6-3 fpcp. The production of the mint will be 0.00875 per 0.75cp giving you ~0.01 fpcp. This value will be adjusted by catpower limit, but I'll leave further calculations to players.
    – bloodrizer
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 8:31
  • Thanks. Something like that was indeed what I was looking for. I just was too lazy to do it myself.
    – Mathias711
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 9:04
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    Just to be clear, you do realize that the person you asked to back up their statement with "actual numbers" is the creator of the game, right? bloodrizer knows this game better than you, the end.
    – codetaku
    Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 16:01
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    @codetaku It is possible for a programmer to be mistaken about the implications of their own code.
    – Brilliand
    Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 19:28
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With all applicable workshop upgrades [Edit: Everything up to Hunting Armour, as that's all that existed when I wrote this answer] (which you should be able to get before getting a Mint), hunting once produces an average of 131 furs, 40.5 ivory and 0.04 unicorns. (There's also a chance of gold in Iron Will mode, but I'll ignore that for now.) Mint productivity, on the other hand, is dependent on your maximum catpower. From the wiki:

  • Catpower per Tick: -0.75
  • Gold per Tick: -0.005
  • Furs per Tick: +0.00875% of Maximum Catpower
  • Ivory per Tick: +0.00210% of Maximum Catpower

100 catpower (the same amount of catpower it takes to hunt once) is thus converted to (1.1667% of maximum Catpower) furs and (0.28% of Maximum Catpower) ivory, at the cost of 0.667 gold.

Mints becomes a more effective use of catpower than hunting at the following values:

For furs: 11229 maximum catpower

For ivory: 14465 maximum catpower

Note that mints also consume a small amount of gold, and have no chance of producing unicorns. Unicorns probably don't matter so much, since you're likely to have acquired two unicorns and gotten proper unicorn production started by the time you build a mint, but the gold consumption might be a good reason to turn off your mints at times even with very high catpower.

Generally speaking, your most efficient strategy for most of the game will be to turn your mints off when you're actively paying attention to the game, and turn them on when you're about to walk away, or even do something else for a few minutes. Catpower caps out extremely quickly, and mints are the only way to get any meaningful amount of value from the catpower generated while the game is idling.

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    I think this answer might be better than the accepted one, but I'm still disappointed neither answer actually shows the formula :P The comments for the other answer show an example, and this one shows tipping points for efficiency (more useful imho), but the actual forumula would be awesome. +1 from me anyway ^_^
    – gatherer818
    Commented Oct 28, 2014 at 19:09
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    @gatherer818 I've added the formulas to the answer.
    – Brilliand
    Commented Oct 28, 2014 at 20:02
  • You are awesome and I wish I could upvote again ^_^
    – gatherer818
    Commented Oct 28, 2014 at 20:08
  • I would say that as soon as you get a proper level of magnetos and reactors your gold income will be so high that you should always run mints (assuming you have over 10k max catpower). The gold cost of mints is ridiculously low and usually before space comes out you have way more than enough gold around.The only obvious exception being in IW mode where you ought to make sure you don't spend too much gold. So while it's useless to buy them early (outside of the gold cap bonus) when you're into space mints are usually the way to go.
    – meneldal
    Commented Sep 17, 2015 at 23:52
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Someone did the calculations on Reddit. To summarize, it is based on how much catpower you have vs how much your hunters are bringing in. For mints to more be powerful than manually hunting:

Fur

  • No Upgrades: 3,386
  • Bolas : 6,129
  • Hunting Armour: 11,700
  • Steel Armour: 13,136
  • Alloy Armour: 14,486
  • Nanosuits: 15,922

Ivory

  • No Upgrades: 3,850
  • Bolas : 7,229
  • Hunting Armour: 15,000
  • Steel Armour: 17,122
  • Alloy Armour: 19,315
  • Nanosuits: 21,579

For anything less than this, you can have maximum hunting effectiveness by using autoclickers.

If you don't like autoclickers, you can get the optimum balance by only partially using Mints. For example, my catpower is about 8k. I have 9 hunters and use 5 mints to get catpower capped every 45 minutes. This is a slow enough rate that I don't have to worry about clicking it every 5 minutes.

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  • When I wrote my answer, Hunting Armour was the highest armour available. I see your numbers at that level are slightly different from mine - I wonder whether that's rounding error, or a change in the game.
    – Brilliand
    Commented Dec 29, 2015 at 22:22
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Well, I think Mint is actually automated income? So divide that by 1/your automated production bonus to get the max catpower needed, i think.

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