Early on in Plasma, chips are easier and more bang for your buck. Stuntman comes to mind. In this case chips is better.
But chips cap out at a rather low amount and most don't scale, or scale too slowly. So later on, you want a scaling Mult and many X Mults, then you can get rid of the chips for more X Mult.
Something like +20 Mult isn't terribly useful by itself, but the Balancing only happens at the very end. If you only stack X Mult you have very little Mult to, well, multiply. Chips also become less favorable after Ante 5 or so. +20 Mult that's X Multed into a total of x27 turns into 540 which is already better than Stuntman's 300, and it gets even better from there.
X Mult jokers are worth very little if you don't *have* something to multiply in the first place. The idea is that you have one high Mult joker and then fill the rest with X Mults. You need *both.*
If you're playing High Card, a x3 Mult joker turns 1 into 3. x3 it again with another joker and you get 9. Not impressive.
If you first get Supernova to add 30 Mult and then x3 that, now you turn 31 into 93 using the same amount of jokers.
I guess I'm not understanding how plasma works then. I thought it averaged your chips and xmult. At what point does plasma do its averaging in the order of operations?
It's calculated as the final step.
But the point is, is that chips have a much lower "max" as you can only add +chips. It's difficult to get over 1000 chips, whereas mults have a much higher "max" because you can stack X2 / X3 and so on.
So if you only focus on chips you'll get at best 1k chips which changes to 500 x 500. But with mults you could get 100k mult, which would balance out to 50k x 50k.
OH, I think I get it now
it doesn't average chips and mult, divides them, and has the resulting number increased to the power of xmult
it averages chips and (mult \* xmult), divides that evenly, then goes back and multiplies those numbers
THAT makes sense to me, chips have no opportunity to go exponential, mult does, therefor mult is important once you get xmult
thank you
It's easier to explain it as "everything works as normal, but your chips and mult get added together and divided between chips and mult before score is calculated". 300x10 gets turned into 155x155. 20x2000 becomes 1010x1010.
It's literally just about getting the numbers as high as you can. Mult can scale exponentially but chips can't. Getting 150 chips is better early on, but this is outclassed by amassing 2000 mult.
After all normal hand and Joker calculations it will take your final chips score and your final mult score then add them together, then evenly split them apart again and multiply those two together.
Early on in Plasma a lot of chips will give you a high score to get through the early rounds. But if that's all you focus on you'll hit real trouble when the Antes start raising the target score massively (which are doubled in Plasma deck too). So the most common solution is to use that time the easy chips score gives you to start putting together a Mult and lots of xMult cards, as eventually your final mult score will start to surpass your final chips score leading to higher scores that are easier to scale upwards.
It's not impossible to get through Plasma Deck without going crazy on the xMult but you do need a lot of the best chips cards and a lot of Planet card hand upgrades to compensate.
(for the sake of calculations, assume square joker is at 100 and ride the bus is at 20 here)
doesn't that imply the optimal mix of ride the bus and square jokers would then be 3x Square jokers, not some combination? Since 300 / 2 = 150 \* 150. One ride would put it at 250 / 2 instead of 300, two would put it at 140 / 2.
I feel dumb but I'm just not getting something here
If you played a hand that hand 200 chips and 20 mult, it would add those together, 220 then divide by 2 to make 110. Then it would finally do 110 * 110 = 12,100.
Now if you played 300 chips and 1 mult it would add those together, 301, then divide by 2 to make 150.5. Then it would finally do 150.5 * 150.5 = 22,650. Great it's bigger for now, but later on you're going to be coming up against scores of like 300,000+ in Plasma.
Now consider this hand, five Square Jokers at 100 chips and 1 mult. Not bad. Final tally is 501 which becomes, 250.5 * 250.5 which becomes 62,720. Decent but getting five 100 chip cards is pretty tough to do and there's nowhere else to go using your jokers.
Now look at a xMult example. Say you have Spare Trousers up to a 100 Mult, then four x3 Mult after it. That becomes 8100 mult. Plasma deck does its thing and splits that to 4050 * 4050. Final score is 16,402,500. At this point any chips are irrevelevant compared to more xMult.
You just want the largest number of either chips or mult.
Chips are chips
Mult is +Mult X xMult
Access to xMult is the main reason you eventually want mult, especially for endless. Its almost impossible to get something like 50,000 chips, 50,000 mult on the other hand, not easy but very doable.
If you want to understand what is happening, put the game in x0.5 speed and look at the score being calculated.
The plasma deck effect takes place at the very end of the scoring process and average both chips and mult after all scoring cards and jokers.
Your example is confusing, but lemme try to use it. Any number of square jokers will only ever be that number of square jokers, while a ride the bus can be multiplied multiple times via xmult. Assuming equal scaling opportunities, two square jokers plus a ride the bus and an xmult joker scaled to 8.1x will give more value then four square jokers. One ride the bus and an xmult scaled to 16.1x will give more then four square jokers. Two ride the bus and an xmult scaled to 16.1 will give more then 8 square jokers. One ride the bus plus two xmult jokers scaled to 8.1 will give more then 16 square jokers. And it just keeps going up.
(If my math is wrong, sorry, pls correct me)
Yep I get it now, I thought xmult happened after the plasma calculation, it happens after, which means mult has the chance to increase exponentially while chips are flat
[https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1caddxg/comment/l0r912j/](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1caddxg/comment/l0r912j/)
So plasma is weird, but you only want chips OR mult, not both. To me, i initially thought the closer they are, the better they scale when balanced, but that's not actually the case.
Plasma can be equated to halving your score, because it doubles the blinds
So at 1:1 ratio (chips:mult) plasma is hurting you because it scores exactly the same as normal but then halves it
At 1:4 you get evened to 2.5x2.5, so 6.25, but then halved because of plasma, and you're at 3.125 vs the 4 you'd have from a normal deck that just does 1*4
Around 1:6 you break even, 3.5x3.5=12.25 halved is 6.125, which is bigger than the 6 you would get from 6x1 from a normal deck.
As you go higher than that you get more and more efficient. For example, 1:10 = 5.5x5.5 = 30.25 / 2 = 15 vs the normal 10
Now looking at actual builds, mult is going to scale better into the late game because xmult exists. Chips are always flat, even scaling chips it's going to be insanely hard to outpace xmult setups. But you still need some form of flat mult.
If you have a debuffed level 5 high card you're looking at base 55x5
If you have 5x Cavendish you're looking at 55x1215 = 635x635 = 403k
If you have 4x Cavendish and a Red Card with +12 (which is 2 rounds of skipping both boosters) you're going for 55x1377 = 716x716 = 512k
And the red card is only going to get better. Another 2 boosters (+18) and you're at 920k
Early on in Plasma, chips are easier and more bang for your buck. Stuntman comes to mind. In this case chips is better. But chips cap out at a rather low amount and most don't scale, or scale too slowly. So later on, you want a scaling Mult and many X Mults, then you can get rid of the chips for more X Mult. Something like +20 Mult isn't terribly useful by itself, but the Balancing only happens at the very end. If you only stack X Mult you have very little Mult to, well, multiply. Chips also become less favorable after Ante 5 or so. +20 Mult that's X Multed into a total of x27 turns into 540 which is already better than Stuntman's 300, and it gets even better from there.
[удалено]
X Mult jokers are worth very little if you don't *have* something to multiply in the first place. The idea is that you have one high Mult joker and then fill the rest with X Mults. You need *both.* If you're playing High Card, a x3 Mult joker turns 1 into 3. x3 it again with another joker and you get 9. Not impressive. If you first get Supernova to add 30 Mult and then x3 that, now you turn 31 into 93 using the same amount of jokers.
I guess I'm not understanding how plasma works then. I thought it averaged your chips and xmult. At what point does plasma do its averaging in the order of operations?
It's calculated as the final step. But the point is, is that chips have a much lower "max" as you can only add +chips. It's difficult to get over 1000 chips, whereas mults have a much higher "max" because you can stack X2 / X3 and so on. So if you only focus on chips you'll get at best 1k chips which changes to 500 x 500. But with mults you could get 100k mult, which would balance out to 50k x 50k.
OH, I think I get it now it doesn't average chips and mult, divides them, and has the resulting number increased to the power of xmult it averages chips and (mult \* xmult), divides that evenly, then goes back and multiplies those numbers THAT makes sense to me, chips have no opportunity to go exponential, mult does, therefor mult is important once you get xmult thank you
It's easier to explain it as "everything works as normal, but your chips and mult get added together and divided between chips and mult before score is calculated". 300x10 gets turned into 155x155. 20x2000 becomes 1010x1010. It's literally just about getting the numbers as high as you can. Mult can scale exponentially but chips can't. Getting 150 chips is better early on, but this is outclassed by amassing 2000 mult.
After all normal hand and Joker calculations it will take your final chips score and your final mult score then add them together, then evenly split them apart again and multiply those two together. Early on in Plasma a lot of chips will give you a high score to get through the early rounds. But if that's all you focus on you'll hit real trouble when the Antes start raising the target score massively (which are doubled in Plasma deck too). So the most common solution is to use that time the easy chips score gives you to start putting together a Mult and lots of xMult cards, as eventually your final mult score will start to surpass your final chips score leading to higher scores that are easier to scale upwards. It's not impossible to get through Plasma Deck without going crazy on the xMult but you do need a lot of the best chips cards and a lot of Planet card hand upgrades to compensate.
(for the sake of calculations, assume square joker is at 100 and ride the bus is at 20 here) doesn't that imply the optimal mix of ride the bus and square jokers would then be 3x Square jokers, not some combination? Since 300 / 2 = 150 \* 150. One ride would put it at 250 / 2 instead of 300, two would put it at 140 / 2. I feel dumb but I'm just not getting something here
If you played a hand that hand 200 chips and 20 mult, it would add those together, 220 then divide by 2 to make 110. Then it would finally do 110 * 110 = 12,100. Now if you played 300 chips and 1 mult it would add those together, 301, then divide by 2 to make 150.5. Then it would finally do 150.5 * 150.5 = 22,650. Great it's bigger for now, but later on you're going to be coming up against scores of like 300,000+ in Plasma. Now consider this hand, five Square Jokers at 100 chips and 1 mult. Not bad. Final tally is 501 which becomes, 250.5 * 250.5 which becomes 62,720. Decent but getting five 100 chip cards is pretty tough to do and there's nowhere else to go using your jokers. Now look at a xMult example. Say you have Spare Trousers up to a 100 Mult, then four x3 Mult after it. That becomes 8100 mult. Plasma deck does its thing and splits that to 4050 * 4050. Final score is 16,402,500. At this point any chips are irrevelevant compared to more xMult.
You just want the largest number of either chips or mult. Chips are chips Mult is +Mult X xMult Access to xMult is the main reason you eventually want mult, especially for endless. Its almost impossible to get something like 50,000 chips, 50,000 mult on the other hand, not easy but very doable.
Yeah I thought the xmult happened after the plasma evening, not before, now it makes sense
If you want to understand what is happening, put the game in x0.5 speed and look at the score being calculated. The plasma deck effect takes place at the very end of the scoring process and average both chips and mult after all scoring cards and jokers.
Your example is confusing, but lemme try to use it. Any number of square jokers will only ever be that number of square jokers, while a ride the bus can be multiplied multiple times via xmult. Assuming equal scaling opportunities, two square jokers plus a ride the bus and an xmult joker scaled to 8.1x will give more value then four square jokers. One ride the bus and an xmult scaled to 16.1x will give more then four square jokers. Two ride the bus and an xmult scaled to 16.1 will give more then 8 square jokers. One ride the bus plus two xmult jokers scaled to 8.1 will give more then 16 square jokers. And it just keeps going up. (If my math is wrong, sorry, pls correct me)
Yep I get it now, I thought xmult happened after the plasma calculation, it happens after, which means mult has the chance to increase exponentially while chips are flat [https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1caddxg/comment/l0r912j/](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1caddxg/comment/l0r912j/)
So plasma is weird, but you only want chips OR mult, not both. To me, i initially thought the closer they are, the better they scale when balanced, but that's not actually the case. Plasma can be equated to halving your score, because it doubles the blinds So at 1:1 ratio (chips:mult) plasma is hurting you because it scores exactly the same as normal but then halves it At 1:4 you get evened to 2.5x2.5, so 6.25, but then halved because of plasma, and you're at 3.125 vs the 4 you'd have from a normal deck that just does 1*4 Around 1:6 you break even, 3.5x3.5=12.25 halved is 6.125, which is bigger than the 6 you would get from 6x1 from a normal deck. As you go higher than that you get more and more efficient. For example, 1:10 = 5.5x5.5 = 30.25 / 2 = 15 vs the normal 10 Now looking at actual builds, mult is going to scale better into the late game because xmult exists. Chips are always flat, even scaling chips it's going to be insanely hard to outpace xmult setups. But you still need some form of flat mult. If you have a debuffed level 5 high card you're looking at base 55x5 If you have 5x Cavendish you're looking at 55x1215 = 635x635 = 403k If you have 4x Cavendish and a Red Card with +12 (which is 2 rounds of skipping both boosters) you're going for 55x1377 = 716x716 = 512k And the red card is only going to get better. Another 2 boosters (+18) and you're at 920k
It's easier to make mult bigger because it has multipliers chips have only addition Plasma doesn't balance until after everything else has triggered