Custom Map #8458: 8448 hell mod. By: Nofear

[Johnny Haywire]

Yeah, once you gain enough power the advantage you gain from a single upgrade is equal to or greater than the benefit from using it as a drain.

BTW, I've noticed that Nofear has some crazy low times on other CSM maps, so I suspect he is a Jedi or Sith Lord who commands the enemy emitters to do his bidding.

[toolforger]

I can't seem to drive the creeper beyond 2000 using three singularities.
I wait for 300 power, fire the forge with 50%, 25%, 25%, which I believe gives me three signularities at the same spot, yet I see the emitter at 2000, with 1900-ish in the neighbouring squares.
Should I go for a single 100% shot, should I stack more singularities, or am I doing it completely wrong anyway?
FWIW I'm trying to overflow the leftmost multiplier.

D*mn this is hard.

[toolforger]

Ah ok, multipliers don't die from singularity-induced creep/AC flips.
The dark blue destroyable emitters do. Which is well worth doing, at least those that spawn ridiculous amounts like 12,000.

Now what's the right angle of attack on the left 1,000,000 store.
Can't neutralize it because I can't supply the bomb factory with energy, can just singularity-flood it but that's really hard to get right without spilling into unwanted areas, and I'm not sure I can sustain that long enough to actually push 2,000,000 AC into it just to run over the 1,000 emitter to its left...

[toolforger]

For some reason, a new attempt worked. Not sure what exactly I did differently.

Things I had to do, by memory:

To get the Aether siphon:

Spoiler

Just place the siphon on the resource pack.
Siphons do not require a flat surface.

[close]

The siphon isn't strictly necessary, but you'll have to wait for the totem to recharge the Forge for the singularity weapon, and this map absolutely requires that weapon.

For dealing with overflow:

Spoiler

Switch F01/F02 whenever overflow starts to threaten the Aether siphon.
It's okay if the siphon gets accidentally destroyed, it's quickly rebuilt.

[close]

For dealing with the dark blue emitters (already noted by several others):

Spoiler

Fire multiple singularities. Three usually do the trick, sometimes you need a fourth shot.
What happens is that more than 2000 creep will be pulled into the emitter, it will become anticreep, triggering the emitter's self-destruct.
The anticreep will be eated almost instantly by neighbouring creep, but even a split-second of anti-creep on these emitters will trigger their "Oh no, the creeper is too powerfull" selfdestruct anyway. (Flip emitters and multipliers do not have this scenario, so the singularity tactics will fail.)

[close]

Getting rid of these emitters will remove a lot of pressure from your area.

I had to be patient with the absorbers. They can store 1 million, 5 million, and 10 million creep/anticreep. ("1E7" is just a computer software way of saying "10 million".)
It just takes time to feed enough AC to kill the creeper in it, and then fill it up to maximum.

Spoiler

It might be a good idea to wall off an absorber so you don't have to feed millions of AC into them; the downside is that you can't move your AC through the absorbers, obviously.

[close]

I didn't do that, so I don't know if will actually speed up the map.

To get enough AC output for frontal assaults against ~300-strength emitters:

Spoiler

You need to upgrade to 18.

[close]

It's really slow, particularly if you are like me and do it to all the AC emitters just so you don't have to think about where exactly you need to and where you can skip it.

To avoid opening pathways that will overwhelm you:

Spoiler

Avoid filling absorbers unless you're ready to push past the creep that they absorb.

[close]

These things are really your best friend, and they remove the pressure from the absurdly strong emitters (15,000 creep every 100 millisecond: that won't work).

To take more pressure off assaulting emitters:

Spoiler

Upgrade any emitters as you flip it.
Without that, you won't make much progress, and may even get rolled back.

[close]

There's a power tower to the left of the upgrader that will get overwhelmed eventually.
To avoid this:

Spoiler

Regularly fire the singularity weapon at a conveniently placed absorber.

[close]

There are multiple viable targets, just try them out and see what happens - if a hit spills creep in the wrong direction, just let the situation normalize (you'll usually get your emitters back) and fire at a different location.

I actually sacrificed multiple emitters, some of them for a really long time - I had taken them too early and keeping them on my side would just take up resources I'd need to advance elsewhere.

Identifying the absurdly strong emitters:

Spoiler

Some of them are placed over (under?) gates.
Check all gates that spew out too much creep. If mousing over them does not reveal text that describes the emitter, try the connected locations.
One gate network actually has emitters on TWO locations.

[close]

Dealing with the absurdly strong emitters:

Spoiler

They all come as pairs: A relatively mild (1,500/sec or similar) flip emitter and a 15,000/500 ms "oh no the AC is too strong" dark blue emitter (but you don't see the color).
To be able to even assault these you'll need a stopper. It will stop the weak emitter, but you can send a second stopper that will stop the other emitter (one thing you have to find out, since Regallion bombs don't want to go where another bomb is in other maps - though that might be more because there's just one emitter in one place on other maps).

[close]

Dealing with the absurdly strong emitter on level 10 (in the top-left corner):

Spoiler

You cannot terp the the terrain under the emitter down, the singularity won't draw AC to level-10 terrain, and you can't create level-10 terrain, so this looks impossible at first.
The key is that while you cannot have level-10 terrain for any duration, terping to level 10 does actually work and lift whatever AC was on the terrain on level 9, which will then spill over the level-10 area and flood the two emitters for a moment, which is long enough to destroy one and flip the other.
You'll probably have to do this twice, because the destroyed emitter tends to flip the flippable emitter.
So don't move your stopper bombs away immediately (I did and have to send a stopper again, though given the extremely long playtime it was a mere annoyance and didn't matter much).

[close]

Once your AC emitters are past strength 300, you can start to (cautiously) rely on them to hold against somewhat far-away stronger emitters. You'll want to do that so you can push elsewhere.
Terping level-9 barriers will help tremendously, simply because much less creep will spill over the barrier than if you just keep everything at level 1.
(This is a general tactics for hard-ish AC maps.)

End result was ~7 hours.
I'm sure I could speed this up a bit, but nah... it's too slow.

And as others noticed, getting that multiplier down is just slow.
Don't worry if you don't see the green bar shorten, it will take multiple seconds for each pixel, and multiple minutes to die; just mouse over it and make sure it's covered in AC, and if yet, everything is fine.
Unfortunately there's no way to speed that d*rn thing up; for me, it was the last enemy standing, so I cranked up game speed and went AFK (which I found pretty anticlimactic).

[wenda12]

after 2 days i found a way
but i cant killthe last ???
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3173343600

[wenda12]

ok you must send the 2 stoper same time and after up to 10

[Johnny Haywire]

More than four years later and this is STILL a great map!

Want to test your CSM (CORKY-map) skills? Want to test your patience? Want to save baby penguins from being tortured by juvenile delinquents from a futuristic alternate universe? Then this is the map for YOU!

Having played every CSM map there is (as far as I know) I can say with confidence that this is the most challenging of them all. Not the most difficult map in the game, just as far as CSM maps go.

That is, until Martin sees this post and decides to make an even more difficult CSM map.

In the meantime, really cool map - you should try it!