It says 1 prestige is properly balanced so far, but well seems far off from that tbh. For one, the game is actually slower with well when it should be the opposite. It is ever so slightly faster early-game in that you can rack points up much faster, but due to the nature of specific upgrades that falls off quickly. Once you get back to specific upgrades, the game turns from rock always win idle into scissors always loses idle. With well added, scissors now loses way more often, I feel like there should be some kind of counter to this. Especially since scissors controls how fast the game plays.
If you are unlucky enough to purchase rock never loses before maxing scissor upgrades, you'll be stuck waiting a long time, much longer than necessary, to max scissor upgrades because you're locked to random & scissors is 1/4 options and if it does happen to get chosen, it's most likely to lose.
I really love the concept here, but I think this kind of logic is something you'll need to heavily consider going forward. Also not a big deal because a 2nd prestige doesn't exist yet, but well doesn't have a well -> rocks upgrade so rock does in fact lose instead of always winning.
Some suggestions to improve well: an upgrade to improve streak multi for all types, not just well. Since it's a special type, maybe a 4th upgrade as well that minorly improves specific resource gain (as in like, you gain more scissors/rocks/paper/wells) or whenever you get wells, you also get scissors/papers/rocks (a smaller amount).
Some minor issues I ran into, W T L is actually W L T, you can still convert scissors (or paper) to rock before buying all of the upgrades. It seems to only require buying all of the speed upgrade to appear (that and rock never loses) but you can still lock yourself out of more paper/scissors per in example. Not huge, but annoying nonetheless. Well upgrades displays with no upgrades available after buying rock never loses, presumably because it's going to get the well -> rock upgrade as well but doesn't exist yet.
Please don't let my feedback discourage you from updating the game, I really love the concept and want to see more, but I just feel this stuff should really be brought to your attention for the future. Especially how new types can affect the game in a negative way and needs some way to counter that.
EDIT: Forgot to mention something else, imo a mulligan should never go down one if it's there's no streak to mulligan. It's depressing watching all of my mulligans go down the drain because I lost multiple times in a row and never got a streak.
Viewing post in Rock Always Wins Idle comments
Thanks for the detailed review! Lots of good notes and areas of improvement.
Ah, very poor choice of phrasing on my part. I intended to suggest that the first level (i.e. only paper/scissor/rock) is well balanced (0'th prestige?) -- not the Well prestige. There is a deep well of issues with the Wells prestige. Sorry for being misleading there. I'm aiming to cover both prestige 1&2 with full upgrades and completion in the next release. Stay tuned!
I'm working on a fix for the blocking selection issue. In most of my balancing tests, I had completed the game option upgrades well before reaching rock never loses which often won't be the case. I also didn't want custom selection once you unlock Rock Never Loses for obvious reasons, but there are some other side problems created from that. I'm going to see how I can work around this. Good call out!
The mulligan issue is a major issue that I can't seem to root cause. Let me know if you notice any patterns for this.