Knuckle Cracker

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) (http://knucklecracker.com/wiki/doku.php?id=cw2:weekly_5_map_tournament)
Code Map Scoreboard (http://knucklecracker.com/creeperworld2/viewscores.php)
Tournament Score Tool (http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?topic=7477.0)

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

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.

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...

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

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

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

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?

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. :)

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.

Quote from: Kithros on May 06, 2013, 09:07:53 PM
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.

You can do something like this:

Spoiler

(http://i.imgur.com/y4Tou99.png)

[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.

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!

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.

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

yep... these be hard.

Results Per Player


   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Rank	Name	Black Belt	Blue Goo Experiments	Too yellow	Red Giant	Tyrian Purple	Total Score	Total Time
1	ea3401	11222	11855	12834	10229	12040	58180	45:56
2	asmussen	10457	11139	12096	9498	11059	54249	80:52
3	dt42			12297	9611	11285	33193
4	Eketek	10474	11810				22284
5	Wheatmidge	10741	10722				21463
6	Atomicfrog					11408	11408
7	MizInIA					9094	9094

Scores recorded at 2013-05-09 22:49:03 forum time.

Quote from: ea3401 on May 06, 2013, 02:54:26 PM
"Red Giant" on small/high was great fun!  :)

So far, I've been able to destroy the gateway and drones, but am struggling on making any headway after that. Still trying, though. :)

@Eketek: "Blue Goo Experiments" in 3:36 min? How did you do it?  ???

Quote from: ea3401 on May 10, 2013, 07:15:29 PM
@Eketek: "Blue Goo Experiments" in 3:36 min? How did you do it?  ???

Oh, with some more optimizations it's 3:18.

I built a kill zone to use with laser pulsing.  I micromanaged packets (to avoid feeding the laser too much while I wanted to build reactors at full speed).  I manipulated the beam in three areas simultaneously while clearing the area below.

Any more advice on Red Giant?  I love the idea of using anticreep as the main drone killer, and I get a couple of blasters built.  Been trying to take out the emitter on the right side of the map and just can't do it because phantoms keep knocking out the nullifier. 

Quote from: deety42 on May 10, 2013, 10:31:13 PM
Any more advice on Red Giant?  I love the idea of using anticreep as the main drone killer, and I get a couple of blasters built.  Been trying to take out the emitter on the right side of the map and just can't do it because phantoms keep knocking out the nullifier. 

Ummmm... Are you sure you're talking about the right map? Red Giant didn't have any phantoms.

Oops.  No, black belt!

Quote from: deety42 on May 11, 2013, 06:01:11 PM
Oops.  No, black belt!

Well, the way I approached it, I started out much like you described (Thanks again to Kithros for the tactical advice. :) ). I built a maker to start with, and then two blasters after the maker was built and producing, doing the drone tag routine the whole time. I then used the maker and two blasters to secure the middle section of the map, digging down first to secure the ore deposit so that the maker wouldn't stop producing when the ore from the remnants ran out, and using the rest of the space for reactors, with phantom coils as protection. While I was building up my economy, I added blasters to my force on top, until I had about a dozen or so total. I split that force and took half of it to the right to take out the emitter there. I don't recall having any issues with phantoms killing the nullifiers, but I probably had phantom coils in position to take any spores out before they got to the nullifier. Are you not using enough coils, or lacking them in the right positions to protect your nullifier, maybe?

Aha!  I've been going after the right side first and leaving the middle alone, so there's no place to build anything.  I thought about the middle, but that was so long ago I forget why I decided not to try it.  One more try!  Thanks!

The final scoreboard:

Results Per Player


   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Rank	Name	Black Belt	Blue Goo Experiments	Too yellow	Red Giant	Tyrian Purple	Total Score	Total Time
1	ea3401	11277	11855	12834	10838	12040	58844	39:48
2	Eketek	10474	12027	12717	10406	11438	57062	55:24
3	asmussen	10457	11139	12096	9498	11059	54249	80:52
4	dt42	9665		12297	9611	11285	42858
5	Wheatmidge	10741	11760				22501
6	Atomicfrog					11408	11408
7	MizInIA					9094	9094

Scores recorded at 2013-05-13 00:14:18 forum time.

Next tournament here: http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?topic=13211.0 (http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?topic=13211.0)