Sagefault's Endgame Guide provides a good description of Relic Engines. This guide gives a bit more math detail behind the Type 2 Relic Engine, and also outlines the Type 3 Relic Engine.
To resummarize:
- Type 0 Relic Engine: Trade with the Leviathans to get a few relics from some trades.
- Type 1 Relic Engine: Build and enhance Relic Stations.
- Type 2 Relic Engine: Build a time crystal shatter engine, and convert time crystals into relics.
- Type 3 Relic Engine: Reset with 70+ chronospheres.
The Type 2 Relic Engine provides a good flow of Relics which can be used to buy cryptotheology, and many of the cryptotheology upgrades improve the efficiency of the Type 2 Relic Engine.
The Relic Engine cycle is:
- Shatter time crystals to obtain Unobtanium via Resource Retrieval.
- Trade Unobtanium with Elders to gain more time crystals than shattered.
- Convert profit time crystals to relics.
These steps can be improved via:
- Blazars improve the effect of resource retrieval.
- Feeding necrocorns to the Elders increases the number of time crystals received.
- Black Nexus and Black Pyramids increase relics per time crystal.
- Black Core allows more Black Pyramids to be purchased. The number of pyramids is O(sqrt(cores)).
The Corruption Rate is the rate at which necrocorns are produced. The formula for the Corruption Rate is roughly:
- c * Markers * (1 + sqrt(Radiance*BLS)) * (1 + Necropolis), for some constant c.
- BLS is basically equal to the number of Cores.
- The corruption rate is reduced by a factor of 4 once a necrocorn is produced but not yet fed to the Elders.
- But this penalty decreases as Necropolis are built.
The efficiency of the Relic Engine increases as necrocorns are fed to the Elders. Since the Corruption rate increases the rate at which necrocorns are produced, the efficiency of the Relic Engine improves as the square of the corruption Rate.
In terms of upgradeable units, the Relic Engine efficiency increases as:
- O(Necropolis^3)
- O(Markers^2)
- O(Core^1.5)
- O(Radiance)
- O(Nexus)
- O(Blazars)
Markers bottleneck on Unobtanium storage, so exponential increases in unobtanium storage also improve Relic Engine efficiency.
- Event Horizon
- Void Rift
- Sunforge
- Cryostation
- Moonbase
- AI Core
- Paragon
XenosHg outlines the Type 3 Relic Engine in Reddit today. And Sagefault implies this Relic Engine. Resetting with more than 67 chronospheres increases the amount of relic, void, and antimatter.
- First, do a long run to build up a seed supply of relics, void, and antimatter.
- Then do increasingly shorter runs while spending minimal amounts of void, relics, and antimatter.
- Reset with 67 or more chronospheres (70 are suggested) to increase the supply of relics, void, and antimatter.
- An important milestone is being able to reset before reaching the Dark Future, which should allow for much shorter runs.