TERP troubles

[xing]

ok ... anyone else get massively sidetracked by this little toy and spend most of the mission where you get it building the 'perfect' castle ?

[J]

I mostly play without terps, they take too much energy and time to me. Only on missions like mistet I complete the wall and on Chanson I used it to attack.

[koker93]

Yes - I over-use terps to create large flat areas for collectors and reactors.  I really love the sense of symmetry you can get when there is a large flat area filled completely up with reactors :)

[teknotiss]

it depends on the map for me, i like massive flat landscapes for my mega energy farms, especially on the huge maps. also a bit ocd about symmetry  ;)
on some maps though time and score seems more important, and on many there's no time or energy for terps.
so sort of...  8)

[miquelfire]

The map you get them, I went a bit over board on my first play, then I wised up, restarted, and got a foothold without red connecting lines. :P

As I don't really play for time, if I see areas I could put stuff down on, or there's a wall that I need to make wider for weapons that can't shoot over them, or I just want to ensure the collectors have full access to lane (I notice a line of sight thing going on, and them one cell holes in the ground can block collectors' area of collection), I will use terps. The map you get your first air craft on, that was one I used them a bit more than normal. Just got to the story map with bombers.

[Batstar]

They are wonderful for building out into a giant pool of creeper so you can get right next to that emitter without literally wading through all that creeper.  All you have to do is take a blaster and maybe a sprayer and chain relay's along behind you. I build repeating T patterns... 3 wide so it fits perfectly. 1 mortar 1 blaster 1 sprayer and the Terp to build my T's.

[CobraKill]

In some maps there needed, although not on any story maps. It's much more fun to mess arounf with them though. Make the perfect symmetrical castle and attack the Creeper.

[Helper]

I've played several of the games both ways and when attacking uphill, I find it takes less energy (and time) to build a path with TERP's and kill the target.

YMMV
:)

[xing]

I just had to play ...

[Grauniad]

I just had to play ...

And so the insanity starts... :)

[TrickyDragon]

nice, but i still believe that you will get more reactors out of the diamond pattern from CW1.....

[knucracker]

I foresee a 'Terp Art' thread.... :)

[Cavemaniac]

They are wonderful for building out into a giant pool of creeper so you can get right next to that emitter without literally wading through all that creeper.  All you have to do is take a blaster and maybe a sprayer and chain relay's along behind you. I build repeating T patterns... 3 wide so it fits perfectly. 1 mortar 1 blaster 1 sprayer and the Terp to build my T's.

This is my favourite Terp tactic too.

Variations I also use are Virgil's original 'Roman Style' where you push a ramp out into the Creeper, and my favourite -'piles' where Relays are up on raised mounds and the Creeper swirls around their foundations.

Note: coupling Shields with Terps is very effective.

[4xC]

When I first joined the beta testers during the alph phase, I was obssessed with terraforming perfect symmetry.

I wanted to make the largest reactor/collector farms I thought I could fit into my backlines, so I flattened out many natural formations and often covered whole fourths of maps with farms. I occasionally built walls big enough to support pulse anons and mortars, but not nearly as often as I expanded so massively.

Overtime, I got better at time management and focusing on getting the job done, but I sometimes still try to make perfect farms. If I could lay collectors at optimal distances regarding production and space consumption, I could almost never settle to mere collector ranches with no reactors inbetween.

It also used to really annoy me whenever an ore deposit or a totem would mess that symmetry up completely by not being symmetric to nearby map edges (not terrain edges) in which case I had large, empty cell groups which would otherwise be practically invisible with collectors/reactors.

It sometimes still bothers me to be imperfectly symmetrical before winning, but now I can live with it more easily.

[Valley]

They are wonderful for building out into a giant pool of creeper so you can get right next to that emitter without literally wading through all that creeper.  All you have to do is take a blaster and maybe a sprayer and chain relay's along behind you. I build repeating T patterns... 3 wide so it fits perfectly. 1 mortar 1 blaster 1 sprayer and the Terp to build my T's.

This is my favourite Terp tactic too.

Variations I also use are Virgil's original 'Roman Style' where you push a ramp out into the Creeper, and my favourite -'piles' where Relays are up on raised mounds and the Creeper swirls around their foundations.

Note: coupling Shields with Terps is very effective.

Agreed!

Terps are just fun.. They add a nice strategic value.. There's been a couple of times I've been at a standstill and throwing everything I could thing of... Then terps saved the day..