Knuckle Cracker

I finally moved from the center to 3 o'clock on the box and hammered my way around clockwise. If I could handle two fights at once, I would have opened a second front (from the 3 o'clock position) and also gone counter-clockwise (anti-clockwise for those who speak real English).

The 3:00 AC emitter is half the size of the creeper emitter next to it, so it's the obvious starting point. The other obvious starting point is about 7:00, as that lip of land is close enough to hit with mortars (which I normally don't even build on a Pastor map, since they can strand or kill runners).

My first theory was that the -2000 AC emitter would overwhelm the +1000 emitter if I suppressed all the runners, so I figured out how to do that (not trivial), but it didn't work out, even with maximizing mortar support. Creeper levels stay around 120 on the 3:00 beachhead even with suicide waves of sprayers and guns landing.

After that, I figured that maybe I could go to the 7:00 beachhead, since you can get enough mortars in range to get the creeper there down to about 0 full time. Negative on that one too- a relay won't reach. (To rub salt in the wound, it looks like it is pretty close to one block away from reaching...)

I think my next attempt will be to blow up every mortar that is disrupting digitalis on the beachheads, replace them all with snipers, and see if a mortar on the PZ is at all helpful in reducing creeper levels.

After that fails, I will ban all snipers (those bugs pump out a LOT of creeper when they die), and see how that goes.

Will figure it out, though my chances of beating pastor's time are rather low (5:10:00 and counting right now, :)  ).

The sniper-maximizing try was interesting; I removed the 'duck blind' that was restricting my PZ sniper to shooting the right side of the map and raised the PZ's height from 9 to 10. It doesn't keep up with the runners, so 'suppress all runners on map' is not a viable option. You can duck-blind it and suppress all the ones on the right side (with support from some left-size snipers), though I can't figure out how to get creeper levels over there low enough to build a relay. With 3 rotating waves of kamikaze sprayers landing, it stays above 80 creeper. :\

I also tried clearing all the runners from the right side, then building walls of shields to push AC off the center island (where AC levels are around -550). That worked about as well as you might imagine. :)

I may also try that singularity thingy that the forge has- not sure how it works, but I guess now's the time to play with it. :p

The key for me was to take out the spore tower on the island almost straight away, put a relay on the PZ and then relay across to 3 o' clock and then use a combination of blasters and mortats (about 4 of each) to work out both clockwise and anti-clockwise

Was nice to play a PH map where it was not an issue to pop the runners and without needing beerthas, really nice balance to the map. I guess the AC emitters were essential to this

supported by several terps to smooth the way

(http://i60.tinypic.com/2dtybr8.jpg)

  The start is very tricky and you have to move very fast

I started by covering the island with collectors with my command nodes spread out

Next build 3 beams at one end and a nulifier at the other whilst building 3 blasters for the 3 faster moving arms of digitalis (1 at each end and one top middle)

Once this is all built I made sure I had 2 blasters on every single strand of digitalis, one set to shoot creeper one set to focus on digitalis

Finally mine al the ore and have 3 sprayers set to permanently on to keep the central island flooded in AC

Power control is vital, keep in the green as mich as possible!