Walkthroughs

Idle Balls tips and tricks - how to play to maximize your idle income

Very ballsy

Idle Balls tips and tricks - how to play to maximize your idle income
|
iOS
| Idle Balls

Idle Balls is a bouncy, orb-breaking idler from Snake VS Block developer Voodoo.

Like most idle games, a lot of the action occurs autonomously without requiring much input from the player. You have control over purchases, upgrades, and your own taps, which is where some element of strategy, planning, and our tips below come into play.

So, what's the point?

If you've never played an idle app before, Idle Balls may seem a bit light on actual gameplay. The goal is simply to remove the colorful orbs from the game board. To do this, you can tap an orb or you can purchase balls that will endlessly bounce between orbs automatically, slowly whittling them away without you needing to intervene.

Each orb has a number on it that is reduced as it is hit or tapped. These numbers are essentially the orbs' health bar: if an orb contains a "5," that means it requires five taps or five bounces from a ball to be removed. As the orb is hit, the number on it will go down, indicating the remaining number of hits required before it will vanish.

Every time you hit an orb in some fashion and reduce this number, you'll gain the same amount of points in your bank. These points can be used to purchase more balls or upgrade existing ones—or your tap power—so they can break orbs more quickly.

That's the gist of it. If you're wondering what the goal is, it's really up to you. You could aim for the highest level possible—you gain a level every time you clear the board of orbs—or you could try to purchase every ball in the game. There are currently no leaderboards, so besides sharing your scores with friends, Idle Balls is really just a laid-back distraction that offers a sense of progression even if you merely leave the app open while having a snack.

So, tips?

While you can progress through the levels simply by letting your balls do their thing, there are some things you can do to speed up the process and maximize your idle ROI.

Anytime you're actively tapping on orbs yourself, be sure to use multiple fingers. The game will register numerous taps simultaneously, and we've found hitting three orbs at once is fairly easy even on smaller screens.

Save up your points/money for new balls instead of spending it on upgrades. You can only own one of each type of ball and once a type is purchased you can then apply points to increasing its level, which upgrades its strength. Strength indicates how much a ball damages an orb's "health" when it hits it: a ball with 500 strength will remove an orb with "500" on it in one hit and an orb with "1,000" in two hits.

However, the strength upgrades are usually very minor and never as beneficial as adding an entirely new ball to the mix. For instance, the Tennis ball has 30 strength at level 1 and 32 strength at level 2. Basketball increases from 90 at level 1 to 96 at level 2.

For a higher tier example, let's look at Egg: it does 65.6k damage at level 1 and upgrading to level 2—which costs 92.3m points—bumps its strength only to 70.2k. Meanwhile, the next ball up, Cookie, has 196k strength and costs 503m. It's always better to save your points for that next ball and to buy the most expensive ball you can afford.

Use taps to clear out the last orb or two on a board: your balls are most useful when there are lots of orbs for them to bounce around. When the field is narrowed down to just a few orbs, it takes longer for the balls to hit a target. You can save time by just removing those stragglers yourself and letting the balls take over on the next level.

Banking and boosting

As you reduce and remove orbs, their point totals are added to your bank. You don't actually have access to these points until you "collect" them by pressing the blue button in the upper-right corner. This bank will continually increase until you collect it and there's no limit on how much it can hold.

The reason you have to physically collect your points is so Idle Balls can show you an ad. This is how it monetizes: anytime you collect points from your bank or upon returning to the game after exiting, you'll receive an ad. Because of this, it's best to let your bank fill up as long as possible before hitting the "collect" button so you can minimize the number of ads you have to watch.

The points you earn while the app is closed are based on the strength of the balls you have in play. For instance, we left the game for about seven seconds and returned to 10k waiting for us. We then bought the Basketball and left for another seven seconds: this time, we earned 22k. If you're going to be away for a while, try to purchase a new ball to bump up your idle income.

Those idle points don't actually come from breaking the on-screen orbs. If you leave the game and return, you'll still have all the same orbs waiting. In order to increase your level, you need to have the game actively running and the balls breaking orbs.

Use the "Revenue x2" booster as often as possible. It's especially helpful if you're going to be away from the game for awhile, but we recommend activating it any chance you get. Not only does it double all income you earn for four hours—after watching just one ad—but you can extend its duration by watching additional ads. So, if you're heading to bed but want to wake up to a lot of extra points, turn on Revenue x2 and then extend it once so it is doubling your income for eight hours straight.

The other two boosters are really not worth using: they each work for only a very short period of time, and their benefits are much less noticeable than the increased revenue. Tap x10 multiples your current tap power by ten, so if you have a tap strength of 100 it would give you a strength of 1,000 when tapping and while it's active. Balls x2 doubles each active ball's strength, so a Ball with a strength of 100 would temporarily change to 200. This is more useful when you have very powerful balls in the mix, but even then, it's better to spend your ad views on the Revenue booster. Note that booster ads are not skippable, while all bank collection ads are.

Jillian Werner
Jillian Werner
When not hunting down food in buffet- or waffle-form, Jillian loves to play puzzle, adventure, and cat games. Yes, she insists "cat" is a legitimate genre.