Custom Map #912: Flooded Depths

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This topic is for discussion of map #912: Flooded Depths


Author: Kithros

Desc:
You start off surrounded by creeper on all sides - expand quickly or be overwhelmed by the creeper. Another attempt at using multiple difficulties with negative score gems - hopefully this one turned out a bit easier for people willing to pick up the gems.

[Nate Dog]

I really enjoyed this game, it took my a few tries to get the hang of the beginning, but after that I managed to beat it twice, cutting my time about in half. Good luck to all of you who decide not to use the dark beam/mirrors!

[Kithros]

Is it still really that hard? I was able to play through it with the gems using 2x speed and without pausing.. pick up the gems, build reactors and 5 blasters to deal with the drones. Throw away the left base if you need to since the extra space from gems is plenty to get to +12 energy for the dark beam.. and yeah, build a dark beam and kill everything with it.. Doing it with fewer gems is certainly hard but I thought for sure this time it would be fairly easy if you picked up the gems...


EDIT: If people are having trouble even if they get the dark beam set up, you can defend yourself indefinitely like this (I got to this point playing on 2x speed without pausing):

Spoiler

[close]

First I took the gems, built some blasters to defend from the drones, dig out some of the terrain to make extra room for them so they can all fire before the drones crash into stuff. I didn't need to build any more repulsors/launchers or anything. From there I built a bunch of reactors at the top-left, and the dark beam and put mirrors in position, activated the dark beam and suicided all my blasters and such because they were just in the way. Build another microrift if you don't feel like positioning mirrors around the old microrift like I did.

From here if you take the bottom terrain with the gem you can even support a 2nd dark beam if you need to, and just use dark beams to kill stuff off. This obviously isn't a walkthrough for a good score, but it shouldn't be too hard to at least beat the map like this.. As for improving on it you'll likely need to improvise sometimes.

[Nate Dog]

The reason it was hard for me to set up was because I was trying to get the dark beam running ASAP. I used 2 blasters to hold off the first group of drones (4 health?) and then by the time the second group was headed in the beam was up. The only reason it took so long to win was because I wasn't very careful about watching for drones aiming at my mirrors and had my little network taken out a few times.

[fitz]

drones aiming at my mirrors and had my little network taken out a few times.

a few times! I must have rebuilt mirrors a hundred times. There must be a smart way around that.

Love the map btw

[Nate Dog]

drones aiming at my mirrors and had my little network taken out a few times.

a few times! I must have rebuilt mirrors a hundred times. There must be a smart way around that.

Love the map btw

The only way I found to avoid the whole network falling was to watch all my mirrors to see if drones were taking unusual paths. Then you just pause, redirect the network to point at the drone, press "N" until the drone pops, then reconnect the network. It's very tedious, but it's much nicer than having 10+ mirrors get eaten by creeper.

[Kithros]

drones aiming at my mirrors and had my little network taken out a few times.

a few times! I must have rebuilt mirrors a hundred times. There must be a smart way around that.

Love the map btw

Yeah, I guess that might be a problem - one solution to that (as you would see in my screenshot) is to keep the mirrors behind the terrain that won't ever break through, that way the drones will always have to go through at least 1 cell of the dark beam even if they target a mirror (which they will die from). I suppose I probably shouldn't have had the terrain marked for digging right at the LS, I wasn't sure if I should have done that or not, but ah well. It's always hard for me to guess what will happen when other people play through my maps.



EDIT: Oh, and if anyone needs help advancing after that point, you might find it helpful to bury the mirrors inside of the other terrain blocks to make sure the drones don't crash into them. If you have enough energy to support it you might even want to build a dark beam in either the top or bottom big blocks, though if you do that be careful of the gateways digging through the terrain there if you ever run out of anti-creeper.

[fitz]

Good ideas, thank you. I'm sure I could have built mirrors in the other rocks as I progressed.

I'm not sure if I have the stamina to attempt this again  ;D

[SmileyCoder]

Any advice on setting up without taking any gems, and without using experimentals.

[Ebon Heart]

Any advice on setting up without taking any gems, and without using experimentals.

yes. Get some common sense and don't try to be Kithros. lol.

[Kithros]

Any advice on setting up without taking any gems, and without using experimentals.

Well, the way I did it (I'm still not certain this is actually the best way mind you), is I pretty much threw away the left base - I dug through to the gateway right at the beginning after building a few more reactors, and nullified it before the creeper protected the gateway. After nullifying it I moved anything I could through the microrift, and just let that part die. From there you want to start building further down (you'll want to dig 1 space over to the right once you dig through the bottom or the creeper will finish decaying through the terrain faster). You need 5 blasters to fairly reliably defend each side of your base - first build them at the front of course.

Once you've finished building reactors on the bottom, you should build a microrift at the bottom base, and have 10 blasters (5 for your LS base at the bottom, and 5 on the bottom base), all set to drone only, and have 1-2 launchers firing at the creeper along with repulsors, similar to the front side - I had my repulsors on medium so I could keep them further back, to give the blasters more room to kill the drones. After that you'll probably want to start building an offensive to reach the top base - it's hard to give a detailed idea of what to do from here, but essentially you'll want to break through the terrain at the top of your LS base, and get 2 repulsors pointing in each direction to hold off the creeper.

After setting up that base.. my solution was a bit strange to getting to the next areas. I pretty much stored up to 220 energy along with some other upgrades, and had launchers firing from within the top base to soften the creeper up a bit. I dug through the left and bottom sides of my top base down to 1 left on the terrain, and went up to 220 energy, and dug through all the terrain at once. A lot of micromanagement here, but I pushed over to the left with the huge amount of anti-creeper there, and made my way over to the huge terrain at the top and killed the low intensity emitter below it, and got a microrift in there and turtled up in there like all the other bases (I also retreated back into the LS base since it's hopeless defending the top after you've opened it up on so many sides). After taking the big block of terrain there you'll have enough energy to brute force your way to the top emitter, and work your way down as long as you use your energy efficiently.




EDIT: Oh, just to be clear, it is very intentional that it is ridiculously hard without the gems - though I may have still made some mistakes on setting the difficulty with the gems...

[SmileyCoder]

Oh, just to be clear, it is very intentional that it is ridiculously hard without the gems - though I may have still made some mistakes on setting the difficulty with the gems...

I wasn't complaining :) Its my own choice to take or not to take the gems. I love the map, and the concept.

[Kava09]

Great map. Kithros, respect.