Once you have Golden Combo (GT+) unlocked, optimizing your Golden Tower Duration (GTd) becomes crucial.
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PS! This is an early-stage draft and more information, examples, and graphics will be added.
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The simplest guideline is to aim for a Golden Tower Duration that is longer than your Multiverse Nexus (MVN) cooldown. This ensures that your GT+ activations can effectively count your hoarded enemies for massive coin gains. This is because GT+ only counts enemies that spawn AFTER it has activated.
So you can imagine that if your GT+ activates while you have a hoarded stack on screen, then that hoarded stack will not count towards your GT+ multiplier. Which is what will happen every Golden Tower cycle if your duration is not longer than your MVN sync. But, if your duration is at least one second longer than your MVN sync, it will include a lot more enemies. And not only that, but it will also mean that you now have permanent Golden Tower.
Assuming a GTd one second longer than your MVN sync, the activation of the GT+ shifts by one second each cycle. At the start of the run, it will be off by one second, then it will be off by 2 seconds, and so on until it has done 58 cycles and starts again. This means that every 58th time, you would have GT+ activate the same time as the econ ultimate weapons, which is fine and a lot better than it activating simultaneously EVERY cycle.
While your initial goal is to at least get your Golden Tower Duration 1 second longer than your Multiverse Nexus cooldown, you will eventually want to increase your GTd further. Read the section Increasing your GT Duration beyond +1s below for that.
As you increase your GT+’s duration further, it’s important to understand in greater details about Least Common Multiple of your MVN and your GTd to ensure as many unique starting points for GT+ as possible. Because, as discussed earlier, you want to avoid GT+ activating the same time as your MVN sync as often as possible.
In order to learn more about this, check out **Yugiohcd10’**s work on GT+ duration and LCM, which he covers in his guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS6bGewyNcPbMUCMw8aCtaTwnPaRUojk2PKpdUWzjavAgdazJB0j10TQ8ITQ5tfplteqwxMUJdDLeAs/pub
While it is a less common scenario, if you are running a sync strategy without Multiverse Nexus, you still want to read and get familiar with the considerations around Multiverse Nexus and your Golden Tower Duration.
However, without MVN, you could manually offset the GT duration start time yourself at the beginning of your run, which may help give you some additional coins by getting more enemies killing during your GT+ bonus.
If you are running a “perma” strategy, such as with permanent Black Hole, Galaxy Compressor (or simply are not concerned with MVN sync), you are not really concerned with specific GT duration differences or Least Common Multiple (LCM) with your Multiverse Nexus, etc. Instead, for you, simply the longer the Golden Tower Duration, the more time you have to kill enemies for the GT+ bonus. That’s really all there would be to it.
That being said, there are of course still some considerations you have to make of what is best at your given situation: “more GT Duration” or more “GT+ levels”.