Out of Eggs

It finally happened: I ran dry on pet eggs.

Empty nest.

This was predictable, and I knew it was coming, but still kind of interesting.

Does it change anything?  Well, not really.  However, there is one thing that I should have mentioned as soon as the pet-egg-hatch-time boost appeared.  We now expect, over the long run, to have lots of spare hatching time.  (This will be true for everyone unless they either spend money to buy pet eggs -- and I am not sure you can keep pace even then -- or unless IGG creates new ways to get them.)

Given that there is now excess hatching capacity, this means that obtaining eggs is now important, whereas (pre-Yulephant), it wasn't.  Back then, getting extra eggs would help you only if the extra egg was blue or purple.  They'd give you slightly better chances at rare pets.  So, even then, the benefit of extra eggs was marginal.  As such, it was never worthwhile to do anything to obtain that extra egg.  It just didn't matter, so there was no reason to change what you did.

But now, any extra egg can be hatched.  The benefit from the marginal egg is a full egg's worth of pet dupes.  That's a lot more than it used to be.  As such, it may be worthwhile now to change how you play to get those extra eggs.  Everyone should be getting the 2 daily eggs, and the 2 bonus eggs for doing quests.  But now there is the question of should you spend gems to get the 3 bonus eggs you get via gem spending.

For a gemmer, it seems pretty obvious that you should now do a handful of gem rolls every day, just enough to bring your daily spending of gems up to 900.

I don't think FtP players can do that; we don't get enough gems for it.  (Here's my earlier article on gem spending strategy.)

Generally, I think that FtP players should not worry about pets much.  The marginal value you are getting from a pet egg is quite small.  I don't have any characterization for it in terms of gems. But just intuitively, getting a few more pet dupes is not going to make much difference.  (By comparison, gems cash out as either chances at new heroes or crests; both can have dramatic impact on your game.)

By comparison, the gem bonus you get from doing "Spend Gems and Win" at the 2500 level is, in effect, at least 36%; and usually it is higher than 36% since it is very rare that you have spent zero gem over two days.  (My record spending before topping off during two days of SG&W was 1310 gems.)  So, you should definitely save for that.  

Now we do find a small difference that pets make.  When a SG&W is on, you should spend gems on both days, not just the second.  On the first day spend gems to get to 900 to get the extra eggs.  Second day spend so as to hit 2500 as normal, again (probably) getting extra eggs.

What about extra gems beyond those needed for SG&W?  IGG doesn't run SG&W that often.  With my gem income, SG&W does not consume all my gems.  What's next in terms of value?  Well, the other kind of event for gem spending is "Uncover the Treasure".  Usually this runs two days, sometimes one day.  My feeling is that you should continue to do these also, to help consume extra gems.  Soulstones are not worth that much, but they are still better than pet eggs.

Again, there is a small difference if the event is running over two day.  Spend at the end of day 1 to hit 900 and get those extra eggs.

I'll have to see if the two spending events can use up all my gems.  If they don't, then that's when I will want to consider doing daily spending to round up my gems-spent to the next 300.  Obviously, the most efficient way to do this is one hero roll on a day when you are at 150/450/750.