In what order should I upgrade my stuff in Temple Run?
When you get coins in-game in Temple Run, you can spend them on upgrades like Invisibility (which makes you invulnerable to obstacles), a boost that shoots you ahead like the Bullet Bill in Mario Kart Wii, a Coin Magnet that means you don't have to steer to collect coins, and others. Each progressive level of these upgrades costs more coins than the last.
What's the most sensible order to upgrade them in? Boosts and invisibility help me get further, but coin burst and the mega coin thing help me get more coins with which I can buy more boosts and invisibility sooner.
Is there an optimal order for how I should spend my upgrades? What are the different strategies I could apply?
If you're aiming for a high score, you need to keep objectives in mind as well. Spending coins on upgrades and consumables (sans characters) nets you 5 objectives and another five multipliers on your high score:
- Used a resurrection
- All level 1 upgrades
- Used a head start
- Resurrected twice in one run
- All level 5 upgrades
All of these are easy and cheap except for the level 5 upgrade one, which you can tackle in the long term. Objectives and score do not affect coin gathering though.
If you know you're in the game for the long haul and you'll have all the objectives eventually, you probably want to focus on the Coin Values upgrade. You'll start getting double and triple coins much earlier in your runs which really add up in the long term. Boost is essentially a score-inflating upgrade as is invisibility - they don't improve your coin count alone, they'll just help you get farther. Coin magnet is useful if you're bad at tilting but otherwise can be left until later. Mega coin is a direct impact on your coin count but you still have to wait for it to show randomly in-game.
Strictly from an efficiency standpoint, I'd grab level one in mega coin, then max coin value before going back and forth between mega coin and coin magnet until they're maxed. Then focus on the other two and objectives to get the high scores.
If you are focusing on coin, you should ONLY get the coin magnet and coin value upgrades (with coin magnet having first priority). Why? The coin magnet (at max level) gives you 3x value for each coin, and when you don't have the other powerups enabled, the coin magnet appears in its place!
The other powerups range from worthless to score helpers. Mega coin pales in comparison to how many you'll get from a single coin magnet (at 3x multiplier). Boost just speeds up a game (but doesn't really aid in getting more coins per distance run). Invisibility assists in you not dying, and may be worth it eventually, but coin magnet still nets you a ton more coins than surviving a bit longer.
So: max coin magnet, then coin value, and nothing else until you've unlocked everything.