I have recently doubled the height of my base, but it's still rather shorter and more compact than most others I've seen pics of. It seems to be working though, I've only lost a total of about 5 turrets (all laser) and 10 mesh blocks with the following set up, and yes that is wave 81 in the picture.
It's Green Hills, currently #6 on the leaderboard for that map. They're all Heavy Plasma, total load out is as follows... 24 Howitzers 16 Heavy Plasma 40 Lasers 10 Orbital Lasers 10 MIRVs 16 Mortars 4 Vortex Guns 8 Freeze Guns 9 Mine Drills 16 Mine Shafts
Wow. Well this is mine(well part of it). I'm still goig strong on wave 59. I have thousands of Mesh blocks that I've made. Mostly for getting around and such. This is on the tropical islands.
Also anyone got any ideas for tidal cliffs? Those maps are impossible...random damn holes in the ground, especially with the plasma rifle.
How many rare minerals do you guys usually get when you afk quick start mode? And what's the easiest way to get them? I've been playing for awhile but it seems to take quite a bit of time to get the minerals...
This is where our play styles seem to differ. I don't chase coins, I stand and deal death. The only problem I'm starting to run into now are shadow elites that can take a heavy plasma shot (with 18 damage mods so far) and keep coming. They're manageable when there are only 2 or 3, but anything more than that and you've got to hope you can keep them stunned/slowed (modded plasma pistol) while the hplas reloads! This may just be random chance of the number of groups of shadows that can spawn at any one time but I would sure like to see it scaled back to like no more than 2 or 3 groups on a map at any time. Don't use QuickStart for AFK mining, use survival. Your turrets can easily solo the first 5 or so waves, just keep a save once you get to lvl 15 or so with a base set up that can solo the wave. No shadows spawn on waves 15,16,17, or 18 (not 100% sure about wave 18) so you can just tap the map to start the next wave up to 17 or 18 the reload your wave 15 save. I get 3 to 5 rare mineral per 2 minute wave so I'll let you do the math.
Well everything is clear out flat. There is near nothing that holds them back from getting to my base. Just water. I do have a massive Mesh wall that covers almost the entire east side of the map. It's the only thing that keeps them from coming.
As far as I can tell on my map the water slows the mobs down, with a trade off in that they go underwater periodically and are untargetable (though can still take damage). I built my barrack on an area I knew would be surrounded by water once the terrain was cleared for this reason. If you have a wide open lake they come at you from then let the long range stuff pick at them while you scan for closer threats.
Good post! Stealing content is NOT a legitimate business model, though it's unfortunately very common these days You should edit your post to remove his spam link I guess he's been reported and taken care of, at least some of his posts
Something that would shift the balance towards favouring short range turrets and help the game to move away from the 'huge central tower of long-range death' paradigm and onto something more diverse and interesting is if enemies were affected more by terrain, and would path through natural choke points to avoid mountains and lakes, instead of just making a bee-line to their target despite the sheer cliffs and water in the way. Shadows, assault troops and some other units could ignore terrain and come at you from any direction as they do now, while most units would have a high cost in their path-finding heuristic for water blocks and cliffs, so they'd still climb or swim when they really had to, but would tend to prefer paths over relatively flat land, and would perhaps suffer penalties when swimming or climbing. Maybe there could be some special area-denial blocks like caltrops that can't be attacked by most enemies, same as with landmines, and help to herd enemies into kill zones by increasing the movement cost heuristic (not necessarily the actual movement cost) for the affected blocks so that enemies prefer to path around the area, and suffer a debuff (like slow, which would make sense for caltrops) or light damage from passing through the area (which could also apply to the player). It would make for a more interesting game if long range towers were nerfed and had more of a support role while short and medium range towers were made the primary DPS dealers, forcing players to use terrain to their advantage and carefully choose where to place their turrets rather than just sticking as many long-range turrets as possible on a big central tower. More wish-list items: A detailed summary of destroyed blocks, and the option to rebuild them from the summary screen, so that I don't have to look around for empty spaces where I know a turret should be and manually replace them, and so it's easier to tell if the 20 blocks that were destroyed last round included anything important/valuable, or were just walls. A steeper difficulty progression, at least on hardcore mode, but probably on normal mode too. The difficulty goes up quite steeply in the early levels, and when I first started playing, each level represented a significant escalation from the preceding one, but the increase in difficulty from one level to the next becomes increasingly minor past level 20, and going from level 70 to level 80 feels about the same as going from level 7 to level 8 used to, but takes 10 times as long. Could bedrock be made less craggy? Even with the terrain block hitpoint boost in the last update, it takes hardly any time for my MIRVs to level the entire map (AOE mods on my MIRVs make them especially good at that), and then the camera movement is quite unpleasant when moving across the landscape due to the constant bobbing up and down as I travel over a checkerboard of tiny 1 or 2 block pits and rises, and it throws off my aim and makes it difficult to see where coins are. It's also a bit of a shame when a beautiful map gets turned into a grey wasteland and stays that way for the next 60 turns, but terrain destruction has it's advantages and is an interesting mechanic, so making it less ugly when it happens might be better than doing away with it altogether. The craggy bedrock problem is particularly bad on Tidal Cliffs, and it becomes really difficult and quite frustrating to move across those maps once the soil layers are gone. Make the enemy wave indicator/start battle button in the top left corner of the screen also function as a button to send the next enemy wave during battles. Sometimes I wipe out the first wave in seconds on early levels and then have to wait 1-2 minutes for the next one to appear. The chirping crickets on Tropical Islands get on my nerves. The rest of the environmental audio is great; it's just the damn crickets that bother me. A button on the 'place barracks' screen to generate a new map of the same type as the old one, to make it easier to cycle trough maps and find something I like, rather than having to place my barracks -> quit -> don't save -> new game > select map > x -> start if I don't like a map.
Are Goblock bombers absent from the game? They appear in the guide, but they've never spawned on my maps, even at level 80-something.
I totally agree. The only way to play this game is to build a large tower. Also you have to destroy the landscape around youre barracks for the defenses.
How about strategic minerals? You'd have your basic minerals for building things and rare minerals for crafting, but also strategic minerals that are needed to build and maintain advanced turrets, or that grant bonuses. If you want to use lasers on the current map, you might need to find and mine a deposit of emeralds, with each laser costing something like $15, 60m and 1 emerald, and having a chance each turn of burning out the emerald and either consuming a fresh emerald from the stockpile or being deactivated until one becomes available, like they do when there isn't enough power. Since strategic minerals would be consumed over time, players would need to maintain control over the deposits to keep things working, and players could only build a limited number of each type of advanced tower (if each laser has a 10% chance per turn of burning out an emerald and you have one deposit that produces 1 emerald per turn, you could only support 10 lasers before you needed that 1 emerald per turn just to keep them all working), which would push them to use a more diverse mix of turrets, rather than finding the 2 best turrets and spamming them (the 2 best turrets for me are currently the howitzer at #1, MIRV at #2, and I have little incentive to build anything else. The orbital laser gets an honorable mention, but is limited to a maximum of 10 anyway, so can't be spammed, or at least I haven't figured out how to spam it). Players would also have to adjust their strategy on each map depending on the strategic minerals on it, so on some maps they might not be able to build any lasers due to lack of emeralds, or there might not be any xenon for heavy plasma turrets, or a map might have a tungsten deposit that makes bullet-firing turrets fire armour piercing rounds, so they use lots of .50 cal in place of other things that they'd normally use for armoured enemies (also, how about getting a level 3 minigun or autocannon turret to round off the machine gun and .50 cal turrets? Maybe there could be basic, intermediate and advanced versions of each type of turret). Strategic deposits would need to have unlimited or very large reserves so that they didn't run out like normal mineral deposits do at round 20-25 and doom a base to slipping back into the stone age, and they'd be a strong incentive for placing the barracks close to them rather than in the centre of the map, unlike the very temporary normal deposits. Alternatively, maybe they could be uncovered only by purchasing the technology to prospect for them, so that it wouldn't be immediately obvious what strategies would be required on any given map, and players would need to adapt to the circumstances as the went along, a bit like Civilisation when you discover an iron deposit and build lots of swordsmen but then find out later on that you don't have any oil and have to figure out how to deal with it. Randomly generated stuff that only gets discovered as you play is great for replayability value/addictiveness, since there's always the hope that you're just about to find the infinity+1 gun or an unobtanium deposit or whatever.
These are some more good points and very well stated. It isn't immediately obvious to me how changing the way-finding of the goblocks would make short range towers more useful, since lasers and howitzers might be even more deadly if the enemy preferred flat land. But I agree with your overall point that making short range towers more important would make base building more variable and interesting. I wouldn't say it is cookie-cutter bad right now, but base creativity could get a helpful nudge if the devs wanted to make some changes. That being said, the devs have a tough job, because when you have 18 damage mods on your lasers, you are clearly playing a different game than I am Making the game more interesting for folks on wave 80 may require some sort of hardcore mode.
The pathfinding change wouldn't flip the balance in favour of short-range turrets all by itself, but it would start to shift things in that direction. One of the difficulties facing short-range turrets is that you need to defend the entire perimeter of the barracks equally since the enemy will attack all sides equally, averaged over time, but at any given point in time will be focussed on one particular side. This favours turrets that can sit high up on a tower and provide nearly 360 degree coverage, with every turret firing on the enemy at every point in time, regardless of where the enemy comes from. The pathfinding change cuts down on the number of directions the enemy can come from, so instead of having only 1/4 or less of your short-range turrets able to fire on the enemy at any given time, while the other turrets idly stand guard against future attacks from other directions, you can position your barracks so that the bulk of your short-range turrets sit at the mouth of a valley that has mountains on 3 sides, or on a peninsula between your barracks and the mainland, where the geography will funnel the enemy towards them and all the short-range turrets can combine their firepower against the same targets to bring them down before they can do damage, and where the enemy will pile up into a dense mass as the troops at the front get hit by stuns and slows and more troops pile in from the rear, allowing AOE weapons to be put to good use against them.
Just beat wave 106 and broke into the top 5 by expanding into this set up. The light blocks do wonders for managing shadows and jet pack Goblocks that get too close, kinda wished I'd started using them earlier. Just started a new run on Tidal Cliffs though, it going to be interesting to try and manage all the low holes in the map. I'm planning on using more indirect fire in this next base design to try and take advantage of the fact that you can use AOE fire from mortars and MIRVs to knock the Goblocks off the cliffs as they climb up and then hopefully repeat the process when they climb again.
@Recent bases, Where're the Orbital lasers? They only cost $500 and 500m for 10 and are extremely effective due to being able to target mobs that have spawned a second ago at the edges of maps in addition to having massive AoE splash of around 9-15 blocks which weakens all advancing mobs quite a bit. They also seem to hit shadows if they're lurking with targetable mobs. Also, what mods'd you guys put on your Howitzers and MIRV's? Lasers are single target and quite annoying these days..
