What survives when you start over

After a good while playing, Império do Pastel offers you a button that erases your money, your units and your upgrades. Pressing it is the right move, and this post is about why.

What prestige erases, and what it hands back

The till goes. Every unit of every product goes. Every purchased upgrade goes. What you get instead is a new number: prestige points, and each point is worth +2% production forever, across every run that follows.

One thing does not go, and that is our call: the managers stay. You start again with no money but with the structure standing — which is what I covered in the post on how the empire grows on its own. Charging you twice for time you already paid for would stretch the game, not deepen it.

The maths is a square root, and that is the whole design

Points come from the square root of what that run earned. That has a consequence worth saying out loud: earning four times as much in a single run yields only twice the points.

That is deliberate. Without the root, the optimal strategy would be to stretch your first run forever, and the game would turn into an exercise in patience. With it, a moment arrives when the next run — faster, with the bonus paying from the first second — is worth more than staying in this one. The game pushes you forward instead of holding you in place.

There is a floor as well: you can only prestige from one hundred points up. Prestiging too early would leave you with a tiny bonus and a whole run ahead of you, and that is a trap a game should not let you walk into.

When this happens — measured, not guessed

This part is not a hunch of ours. There is a simulator that plays the entire run, from the first pastel to prestige, in a few seconds, and it runs on every change we make to the game.

Today’s number: the first viable prestige lands at around thirteen hours of play, inside a required window of ten to sixteen hours. If a change pushes that number outside the window, the rule here is to change the game, never the target — a target you tune until it goes green measures nothing.

The track prestige never touches

Beyond the points there is a second kind of progress that is not erased: reputation.

It rises on events, never on idle time, and each event is worth a different amount: buying a unit is worth a little, crossing a milestone more, unlocking an achievement more still, hiring a manager more still — and prestiging is worth the most of all, by a wide margin. The game pays best for the very gesture that feels like a loss.

Each reputation level hands back two things: money scaled to what the run has earned so far, so you are not restarting from absolute zero, and one more slice of permanent production. There are forty levels, each 28% dearer than the last — the early ones arrive fast, the last ones belong to people who have played for months.

Why a game asks you to play it again

An idle game without prestige has an ending: sooner or later the next product costs more time than it returns, and there is nothing left to do. Prestige turns that ending into a beginning. The second run covers in an afternoon what the first took a full day to cover, and the third is faster than the second.

The simplest test of this is the best one: the first time you prestige, your stomach drops. The second time, you go looking for the button.

If you want to see the curve this runs along, I wrote about the twelve products, one by one.