Weekly 5-Map Tournament - Color - closing May 12, 2013

[Eketek]

You probably do not recognize me, but for some reason, I get to declare a tournament.  The theme this week is Color. 

A few useful links:
All Tournaments (wiki)
Code Map Scoreboard
Tournament Score Tool

Theme:
Color



   
   
   
   
   
   

Map Name:	Size:	Complexity:
Black Belt	Small	Medium
Blue Goo Experiments	Small	High
Too yellow	Medium	Medium
Red Giant	Medium	High
Tyrian Purple	Large	High

[ea3401]

These maps are quite hard.

Results Per Player


   
   
   
   
   

Rank	Name	Black Belt	Blue Goo Experiments	Too yellow	Red Giant	Tyrian Purple	Total Score	Total Time
1	ea3401	11222	11552	12834	10229	12040	57877	48:06
2	asmussen	10457	10853	12096	9498	11059	53963	83:16
3	Atomicfrog					11408	11408
4	Eketek	10474					10474

Scores recorded at 2013-05-07 15:54:05 forum time.

[Eketek]

I can assure you: they're all quite possible.  I made sure I was at least able to establish a foothold in each one of them.

I wanted to use Red Giant on small/high, but it proved to be too much...

[ea3401]

"Red Giant" on small/high was great fun!  :)

[deety42]

Oh dear. ea is saying they are hard.  I'm actually a bit scared.

[asmussen]

Well, it's going to be a challenging week. No doubt about it.

[deety42]

Well, I'm not managing a foothold on Blackbelt.  I get the red gem, the green gem, build a couple of blasters while evading drones, but eventually don't have enough energy supply to do anything else.  Tried digging into the middle but couldn't sustain it.  Hints?

[asmussen]

I'm pretty sure that the 2 small maps are the hardest out of the bunch this week. I've left them for last, and I'm still trying to figure out how to get properly established in either of them. :)

[Kithros]

For black belt, use drone evasion early on and get a creeper maker on 1x production ASAP. Once you get a creeper maker out you can clear up the drones chasing the LS with the anti-creeper, and the creeper maker alone is good enough to hold off the creeper since the emitters are laughably weak on any complexity other than high. After getting the creeper maker + ore, pick up the rest of the gems/technytes and build 2 blasters and you can build up and win easily from there (You should first start building the creeper maker right away and get the red gem - only start picking up the remnants after you've picked up the red gem).


EDIT: Blue goo experiments looks pretty straightforward to me - pick up the gems that are easily available, and then just build a dark beam. have 2 mirrors so you can shoot the dark beam into the chokepoint - you only need to have  the dark beam firing for a few frames every few seconds so energy isn't a big concern. Building shields to make the chokepoint longer can reduce the time spent firing the dark beam if necessary - though you'll occasionally need to replace the shields.

Alternatively you could dig the LS in and conversion bomb the close emitter + nullify it to get a lot of anti-creeper to defend yourself long enough to build up.

[asmussen]

EDIT: Blue goo experiments looks pretty straightforward to me - pick up the gems that are easily available, and then just build a dark beam. have 2 mirrors so you can shoot the dark beam into the chokepoint - you only need to have  the dark beam firing for a few frames every few seconds so energy isn't a big concern. Building shields to make the chokepoint longer can reduce the time spent firing the dark beam if necessary - though you'll occasionally need to replace the shields.

Alternatively you could dig the LS in and conversion bomb the close emitter + nullify it to get a lot of anti-creeper to defend yourself long enough to build up.

When you say that you only have to fire the dark beam for a few frames every few seconds, were you taking into account the creeper field? When it's oriented upwards, it pushes creeper up through the chokepoint faster than I've been able to keep up with given the size of my energy economy at that point, and using shields to hold off the creeper doesn't work very well for me, as the drones take them out too quickly. Not giving up yet, though. Still trying to tweak my strategy.

[Kithros]

You can do something like this:

Spoiler

[close]

Whenever the fields point down you can replace the shields again, and you don't need to keep the beam constantly firing since you just need to make sure they don't overflow the shields. It might be worth it to have a bigger wall of shields - I'm not sure how big of a shield wall would be optimal here.

[asmussen]

Aha! Interesting maneuver. I hadn't considered using the shields on the sides of the bottleneck to extend it that way. My shield use up to this point was along the lines of putting the shields IN the bottleneck in an attempt to hold back the creeper long enough to build up charge on the dark beam, but the drones wreck that plan quickly. Thanks, Kithros!

[asmussen]

Results Per Player


   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Rank	Name	Black Belt	Blue Goo Experiments	Too yellow	Red Giant	Tyrian Purple	Total Score	Total Time
1	ea3401	11222	11552	12834	10229	12040	57877	48:06
2	asmussen	10457	10853	12096	9498	11059	53963	83:16
3	Eketek	10474	11275				21749
4	Wheatmidge	10741	10722				21463
5	Atomicfrog					11408	11408
6	dt42					11285	11285

Scores recorded at 2013-05-08 11:29:38 forum time.

[deety42]

Here goes. I only have the small maps left.  I hope those hints help!

[MizInIA]

yep... these be hard.