Steve's guide for tapfishers

TapFish with More Fish and Less Tapping



Having recently reached level 60, Tap Fish 2's practical limit (higher levels require an absurd amount of repetitive effort, and give you relatively nothing in return), I thought I should share my experience with other tapfishers. I'm going to assume that people more or less have the following goal: create lots of pretty tanks with a reasonable but minimal investment of time and money. That goal contains several key elements that we'll cover in detail below. You can only have as many tanks as your level, so to create lots of tanks you have to go up lots of levels, which takes experience points. To decorate the tanks, and to buy and breed fish (which gives you experience points), you're going to need coins and fishbucks. So you play TF2 in three, slightly overlapping phases: 1) accumulate coins, 2) accumulate experience, and 3) make pretty tanks. Here is my advice for doing that reasonably efficiently.


Budget


If you're going to play TF2, and probably get addicted, then accept the fact that it will cost you some real money. Play around for free for while and try it out, but then make the decision: play and pay, or don't play at all. Without paying real money for fishbucks (FB), some activities will take a ridiculous amount of time, and many others will be unobtainable. Here is a nominal budget based on playing conservatively, with values for playing more seriously in parentheses:

- 8 (18) additional breeding tanks @40 FB = 320 (720) FB
- 2 (3) additional mystery breeding tanks @40 FB = 80 (120) FB
- 5 (10) premium fish @40 FB = 200 (400) FB
- Key backgrounds and decorations = 100 (200) FB

That totals 700 FB for playing conservatively, and 1440 FB for playing seriously (IMHO, anything more is playing foolishly or compulsively). The normal price of fishbucks is 650 FB for $20, or 1750 FB for $50, so we're talking a lot of money for a little time-waster app, and I discourage you from reading further--just forget you ever heard of this game. You can be sure that TF2, like all such apps, exploits numerous psychological tricks for getting you hooked, keeping the game on your mind, and luring you back. You probably won't be able to fully resist or avoid these temptations, just mitigate them. You have been warned. If you are undissuaded, read on.



1. Coin Phase

First, based on your expected style of play, buy your fishbucks in bulk. Key principle: as in real life, buy things on sale. TF2 has occasional sales on fishbucks, tanks, fish, and decorations. Be patient and wait. Be super stingy with your fishbucks.

Second, to start generating coins, you will want to breed the more valuable offspring. The most valuable is the Eagle Damsel, which sells for over 140K coins, and whose parents are the Eagle Ray and Damsel. You could just buy and breed this pair, or look for fish whose children are a bit prettier but still reasonably lucrative. You can find out their values in TF2's Trophies section, but the Damsel, Angler, and Ranchu tend to be the best investments.

The Super-Exotic limited-breedable pair Spottted Cardinal and Banggai Cardinal cost 800K coins apiece, and produce offspring that can be sold for 170K coins. Get this pair as soon as you can to start putting your Mystery breeding tanks to use.

Third, you will earn even more coins by buying and selling fish. The best "meat" fish is the White Grunt, when you can afford it, but you will work up to that from other fish, like the starter Green Snapper and the Super-Exotics Chromis and Golden Dwarf. The key feature of these fish, besides the high profit margin, is that they grow in exactly 24 hours. This will enable you to play TF2 just once a day at about the same time. You do not want the game intruding on your thoughts throughout the day, and you not want to be setting your alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to perform some stupid fish task. Many games in the TF2 genre lead to this kind of addictive behavior, and it can be hugely destructive. If you see a game exploiting human psychology destructively like that, denounce the company publicly.

Finally you will work up to some really high-value fish, and after a few rounds never need to worry about coins again.

To get the best price for your fish, their happiness should be over 90%. Since you get a +2% boost for loving a tank of fish, you really only need happiness of 88%. To raise their happiness, decorate the tanks. Eventually you will have some quality backgrounds, but initially you will rely on castles, plants, rocks, and the like. Don't make a mess of it: spend more coin on a small number of higher-value decorations instead of 10 cheap starfish. Soon you'll have all the coins you could ever spend, so 10K coins for a castle or volcano is nothing.

Miser's Rule #1: Never pay real money for coins.
Miser's Rule #2: Don't pay full price--wait for sales.
Miser's Rule #3: Never spend fishbucks on breeding speed-ups. If you need to speed up the breeding process, you don't have enough tanks.


2. Experience Phase

You get experience for doing two types of things: 1) buying, breeding, feeding, and selling fish and 2) visiting, loving, and cleaning tanks. As mentioned above, this can develop into compulsive behavior, so you want to get into a daily rhythm--don't try to race up levels by doing these things every few hours. Again, high-profit fish that grow in exactly 24 hours are the Chromis, Golden Dwarf, and White Grunt.

With experience you go up levels, and each new level means you can have one more tank, enabling you to breed more fish. This would be a virtuous circle, except...the number of experience points to attain the next level keeps going up. As a result, the game gets progressively more time-consuming and tedious, with level 60 being the practical maximum.

Time-Miser's Rule #1: If you are collecting experience points, DO NOT sell your fish individually, one by one--use the mass sell feature to sell the entire tank at once. Yes, it will cost you 15%, but you can afford it--by now you should have all the coins you need anyway. Sell fish individually when your tank contains keepers (e.g. an algae-eater) and/or the fish are high value (e.g. the Pink Skunk Clown Fish).

Time-Miser's Rule #2: Always buy food bricks. They may cost coins, but they save you time and tapping.


3. Aesthetics Phase

Eventually, when you have tired of mindlessly climbing the levels, your focus shifts from quantity to quality, and you start converting meat tanks to display tanks. I've visited countless random neighbors, and almost universally their tanks suck (which is why I'm writing this). I'm no professional artist or interior designer, but there are some basic visual design principles that everyone should know:

First, the two basic design elements that we care about most are color and shape. Second, the principles that we care about most are unity, variety, balance, and harmony. Put those elements and principles together, and you get a simple rule for making an aesthetically pleasing tank: combine a variety of fish that have something in common. It could be different colors of fish with a similar shape, or different shapes of fish with the same colors. Too much sameness (e.g. just one type of fish, or just one primary color) is boring; too much diversity (e.g. more than two primary colors) is chaotic.

So how do you plan what fish will go into a tank, and thus what fish to buy and breed? In the Trophies section, TF2 shows you what a bred fish looks like only after you've already bred it. That is where this Tapfish 101 blog provides a valuable service: you can look through the pictures, pick out some good-looking bred fish, and then buy their parents. Some parents produce better-looking offspring than others; my favorites include the Betta, Emperor, Giant Barb, Glow, Ice, and Jewel.

Note that I am talking mostly about fish, because most of the decorations are pretty lame, and TF2 provides frustratingly few tools for arranging them (e.g. no way to re-size, no easy way to re-order, and even moving decorations is a pain). Too many decorations cost fishbucks, so people only use and re-use the basic decorations that cost coins. The key decoration is the background, and as you play you should acquire a few good ones (e.g. light, dark, and gray). Unfortunately, you need decorations in order to increase fish happiness, but that only matters in the Coin Phase, and you can reduce the clutter by buying fewer, more-expensive items (like castles or volcanos).

Once you stop caring about experience points you will put an algae-eater in each tank. Unfortunately, coins will buy you only one color: green. Fortunately, algae-eaters occasionally go on sale.


Conclusion

If played efficiently, Tap Fish 2 can be moderately expensive, moderately time-consuming, moderately addicting, and moderately rewarding. It has already improved over time (e.g. the recent implementation of HD graphics), and probably will continue to do so, hopefully made a bit less expensive.



Happy Tapping!

Simplulo