3P Maps

[TLMike]

Fair enough. I think the sound might get rather annoying, anyway, with 40+ Stafers being beamed at once....

[ThirdParty]

Fair enough. I think the sound might get rather annoying, anyway, with 40+ Stafers being beamed at once....

You went for overwhelming them with massed fliers, eh?  My own strategy on these maps never gives the enemy beam towers the chance to fire a single shot.

[TLMike]

Referring mostly to Reticle, which is the one I beat, as Beqaa overwhelmed me instantly: I most certainly had to overwhelm the central tower with something because it sits on the lowest terrain level. Any attempts to construct a nullifier nearby resulted in an effect I call "ONETWOTHREEDEATH". So, I overflew it with Strafers, and parked about 30 blasters nearby to distract the thing while I Nullified.



...Spoilers.

[eduran]

My own strategy on these maps never gives the enemy beam towers the chance to fire a single shot.

Would love to hear how that works on Reticle. There seems to be no way to deal with the center tower other than to present it with a bunch of targets to shoot at while constructing a nullifier.

[Relli]

I love the idea (and look) of your Corrupted Beam Tower. Gave me the idea to make a Corrupted Sprayer Tower to go with it. After playing around with Tower Fields, I think I can make it work, too. The one thing I don't have is a picture for it, and I absolutely cannot draw. Where did you get the picture you used for the Beam? If you made it yourself, would you consider doing a Sprayer version? And finally, if anyone wants, I can post the code I make for it here, so anyone can use it, and possibly improve upon it.

[ThirdParty]

My own strategy on these maps never gives the enemy beam towers the chance to fire a single shot.

Would love to hear how that works on Reticle. There seems to be no way to deal with the center tower other than to present it with a bunch of targets to shoot at while constructing a nullifier.

There was an important clue for Reticle in the intro text: the corrupted beam tower has a line-of-sight restriction when attacking land units; it can't shoot at you if you stay behind a ridge.

Here's the intended solution to Reticle:

Spoiler

1. Assault the western and eastern islands normally.  (The western island is easier, in my opinion; if you do it first, you'll have more space for things like Berthas and Reactors to support the assault on the eastern island.  Don't try to do them both at once; it'd take too much energy.)  Use a Relay on the western island's power zone to colonize the tiny resource spot in the northwest.  You will probably want a Bertha on the eastern island's power zone, but that's optional.

2. Colonize the northeastern resource spot via Guppies from the eastern island.  Then assault the northern island via Guppies from the northeastern resource spot.  (As far as I know this is the first time in CW3 history that it's actually made sense to have one set of Guppies supplying another set of Guppies; it's necessary because you'll get shot down if you try to fly straight from the eastern island to the northern island.)

3. Link the northern island into your network by using a power-zoned Relay to connect it to the northwestern resource spot.

4. Put a Terp on the remaining power zone on the northern island, and use it to build a ridge on the central island (this is where that power-zoned Bertha would come in handy; it's the easiest of several possible ways to clear creeper from the central island for the instant that it takes your power-zoned Terp to do its magic).  Then replace the power-zoned Terp with a power-zoned Sprayer, to secure the space on the safe side of the ridge.

5. Use the power-zoned relay that you already built on the northern island to colonize the space on the safe side of the ridge on the central island.  Then nullify.

[close]

Beqaa overwhelmed me instantly

Sorry to hear that.  I assume that you recognized the landing pad in the southwest corner, that you noticed all three energy packs, and that you know how to set cannons to target digitalis rather than creeper.  If so then it's just a matter of prioritizing the threats.

My strategy for establishing an initial base on Beqaa:

Spoiler

1. Land your CN in the southwest corner, and build siphons on the two energy packs.

2. Slow down the enemy creeper: build a cannon on the left side and a mortar on the high ground.

3. Drain the flooded energy pack and build a siphon on it.

4. Slow down the enemy digitalis: you'll want a digitalis-targeting cannon on the north end of the high ground and a second one on the east end of the high ground; the cannon you used to clear the flooded energy pack should also be set to target digitalis, and moved to the east of anything you've built on low ground.

5. Build some reactors and a beam tower to guard them from the spore that will be incoming about now.

6. As needed and when feasible, build a forge (for upgrading energy efficiency using the aether pack on the high ground), lots more reactors, a couple more beam towers, a couple more mortars, and a sniper or two, after which the situation should have stabilized.  You'll probably be running a deficit as you do all this building, so it's a good idea to pay attention to ammo for crucial defensive structures and use "disable" and "stop resupply" commands to micromanage it if necessary.  (It's not survivable to have creeper overflow the left side, digitalis overrun you anywhere, or a spore hit a reactor.  You can survive having creeper start lapping at the high ground, having a spore hit a defensive structure, or having a runner stun something, but obviously these events are also to be avoided as much as possible.)

[close]

I love the idea (and look) of your Corrupted Beam Tower. Gave me the idea to make a Corrupted Sprayer Tower to go with it. After playing around with Tower Fields, I think I can make it work, too. The one thing I don't have is a picture for it, and I absolutely cannot draw. Where did you get the picture you used for the Beam? If you made it yourself, would you consider doing a Sprayer version?

Yes, I made the Corrupted Beam Tower image myself.  (The beam itself is by Virgil from one of the built-in maps.)  It's really just a simple splice of the center of a beam tower (appropriately recolored) onto an alternative emitter image.  (Making a Corrupted Sprayer would be even easier.  For the stationary base, just use one of the alternative emitter images from here; for the moving barrel, take the sprayer barrel from here and replace the cyans with blues.)

By the way, I feel like I saw a tower like you're describing, somewhere.  You might want to poke around the alpha sector a bit and see whether it already exists.

[eduran]

Here's the intended solution to Reticle: Spoilers

Spoiler

I forgot that I could put a Terp on one of the powerzones :o I actually flew a few over to the center with the rest of my units to try to build a ridge but they managed to die before they were able to do that.

[close]

One thing I noticed that might be a bug: the beams don't interact properly with Guppys. As long as you are flying over void (or any terrain lower than the beam tower) the Guppys don't get shot at.

[ThirdParty]

One thing I noticed that might be a bug: the beams don't interact properly with Guppys. As long as you are flying over void (or any terrain lower than the beam tower) the Guppys don't get shot at.

Ugh.  Yes, that's a bug.  And not my bug either.

I've submitted a bug report to Virgil.  There doesn't seem to be any possible workaround, so the only thing to do is wait for him to fix it. :-[

[Relli]

I'm probably wrong, but would it help to use the ISLANDED Unit Attribute? I would suspect that it ignores elevation and only checks to see whether a unit is moving (flying). Then you could target based on that, and add an else that also targets anything on a higher elevation.

[eduran]

After having played both new maps I've got to say: well done! The beam towers radically change the way you have to approach the enemy. Very enjoyable.

[ThirdParty]

I'm probably wrong, but would it help to use the ISLANDED Unit Attribute? I would suspect that it ignores elevation and only checks to see whether a unit is moving (flying). Then you could target based on that, and add an else that also targets anything on a higher elevation.

Yes, that's exactly what my script does.

It's failing on guppies because a bug in CW3 is causing flying guppies to incorrectly return ISLANDED=TRUE.  I've reported the bug using the form on the wiki, so hopefully Virgil will get around to fixing it eventually.

After having played both new maps I've got to say: well done! The beam towers radically change the way you have to approach the enemy. Very enjoyable.

Thanks for the encouragement!

[asmussen]

I've managed to break Beqaa. I got to this state, and the whole map locked up. The mission timer continues to progress, but all action on the map is completely frozen in this state.

[ThirdParty]

I've managed to break Beqaa. I got to this state, and the whole map locked up. The mission timer continues to progress, but all action on the map is completely frozen in this state.

That's odd.  None of my scripting should be in danger of producing an infinite loop...

The beam tower script is a bit process-intensive, so maybe it's just because you have so many towers near the beam towers.  Alternatively, I'm puzzled how your bomber could have gotten where it did without being shot down, and I haven't really experimented with what happens when a unit is outside the map, so maybe something is behaving unexpectedly due to the that.

What was the last thing you did before the freeze?

[asmussen]

Well, I hadn't figured out the line of sight thing yet, so I was still trying to figure out how I was going to nullify the beam towers. I hadn't built any air units yet, because I assumed they'd be ineffective, but since I wasn't sure what to do next, I built that one strafer just to see what would happen. After it was built, I targeted one of the beam towers with it. It managed to fly to the position where you see it in the screenshot without getting shot down, and then everything just stopped. I just reloaded the saved game I made with it frozen, and actually not everything is frozen. The spinning animation on the corner of the command node is still going, and the spore towers continue to count down, and then make the launch sound, but never actually launch any spores. Everything else is just frozen completely in place. Not even the packets currently in route on the network move anywhere. I'm attaching the save game I made here in case you're interested in actually seeing it in that state.

[ThirdParty]

Okay, I have a theory.  Apparently strafers and bombers have the same bug as guppies; they return CONST_ISLANDED=TRUE even while in flight.  (I've updated my bug report.)  So my tower mistakes the strafer for a ground unit.  Because it thinks it's a ground unit, it attempts to check line-of-sight.  This results in invalid coordinates being fed into an IsTerrainLOS call, which skips them and grabs the previous item on the stack instead--which is unfortunately a Do Loop's counter.

You can resume your game by selecting the strafer and destroying it.  This problem will go away after Virgil fixes the bug in CONST_ISLANDED.