Only the hardest: High Complexity - Surface Emitter - Titan - No Experimentals

[Hunter22222]

Dang those levels are hard!

[florrat]

one shoe may large/high
Surface titan (with fields), decaying terrain to 19-health drones, and limited space.  2.25G rightward gravity  buys you some time, but soon a formidable bubble of creeper starts to build... (note: not completed by me.)

That map is indeed insane. I can't complete it either. I survived 4 minutes in this screenshot, but things are not looking good (actually there's a hole in my wall in this screenshot, but I have a savefile on 3:32, so I can still fix that)

[Fisherck]

Have you tried the Nor'easter technique for that (when you keep your city aboveground and build below, but stay connected using microrifts)? I have not used it on titan emitter maps, but it should work...

[florrat]

Hmm. Interesting technique. But I'm sceptical if that will work. Then you'll need to fight off 19hp drones on three locations...

[Ebon Heart]

Don't forget to have some blasters to kill the drones too.

[Kithros]

Have you tried the Nor'easter technique for that (when you keep your city aboveground and build below, but stay connected using microrifts)? I have not used it on titan emitter maps, but it should work...

I've tried that on that map, but I can't quite advance anywhere - I could defend myself indefinitely, but when I hadn't gotten anywhere after 90 minutes there wasn't much point bothering. I might have been able to place reactors and such better so it might be possible to turtle it out, but I think you would need to be extremely aggressive and somehow get a microrift down at the bottom early on before the creeper gets too dense anywhere/the terrain decays through (at least, to get a remotely decent time).

EDIT: Finally managed to beat it - I'm not sure it's necessarily the hardest map I've played (though it certainly is hard) - but it is definitely the longest I have ever played so far, took me 123:31.

[florrat]

Have you tried the Nor'easter technique for that (when you keep your city aboveground and build below, but stay connected using microrifts)? I have not used it on titan emitter maps, but it should work...

I've tried that on that map, but I can't quite advance anywhere - I could defend myself indefinitely, but when I hadn't gotten anywhere after 90 minutes there wasn't much point bothering. I might have been able to place reactors and such better so it might be possible to turtle it out, but I think you would need to be extremely aggressive and somehow get a microrift down at the bottom early on before the creeper gets too dense anywhere/the terrain decays through (at least, to get a remotely decent time).

EDIT: Finally managed to beat it - I'm not sure it's necessarily the hardest map I've played (though it certainly is hard) - but it is definitely the longest I have ever played so far, took me 123:31.

Congratiulations! Impressive.
I've tried the Nor'easter technique on that map, and it works quite well. See screenshot. I'm able to defend the top left, and the right side, but the thing which is killing me is the decayable terrain to the middle of my left base, with creeper density of 3M next to it :/ I'll try again later with a small base on the left, such that I don't have to worry about that. But that'll cost me 21 building spots :-(

[Kithros]

This is more or less what I did - though I did not initially defend at these points, I only just recently started to move (very slowly) at this point.

Spoiler

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My reactor placement on the bottom is a bit sloppy - I was initially going to try to kill off the bottom emitter and work my way to the bottom of the map for more reactor space, but that didn't work out well so I just ended up turtling it out with the launchers in the middle slowly reducing the density of the creeper. At this point I have all my reactor upgrades, 1 range upgrade (I couldn't get a 2nd range upgrade or the right side would get overflowed because the launcher would target too far - I originally had defended farther in on the right side), all fire rate upgrades, -20% build cost and energy storage. The other upgrades aren't particularly important, so I destroyed my tech domes for more reactor space. All my blasters are set to drone only, and once I could afford to I built a microrift on the bottom to make sure all the drones would attack there so I wouldn't need to worry so much about the top being hit by drones - for the early part of the game I used shields to deal with the drones instead of blasters - 3 shields will deal with 2 drones (as long as the shields aren't damaged by creeper - in some instances I deactivated my shields to make sure the creeper didn't damage it when I knew it wouldn't go under the shield, the shields will still do full damage to drones while deactivated).


If I played through it again I could probably reduce my time a lot by having a better idea of what I was doing, but I really don't feel like playing through that again.

[Bacteriophage]

Great job!  I would never have thought to create a "second base" and link to it with micro-rifts.  I'm at least glad that there wasn't some trivial trick I was missing on that map.

[Kithros]

water water by large/high

Biggest non-experimental emitter I've ever seen in a code map at 192.4M intensity - I don't think the map should be too too hard, but it will certainly take a while to clear out the creeper around the titan.

[burguertime]

again up bread L/H

50M titan, no phantoms, G-down B-up, very little build space. Drones galore once the decayable walls come down. If you are fast enough, might be not so hard, but still...

[Kithros]

again up bread L/H

50M titan, no phantoms, G-down B-up, very little build space. Drones galore once the decayable walls come down. If you are fast enough, might be not so hard, but still...

Fun map, as you said though the key is to move quickly - I actually pre-emptively attacked the close emitter, what I tried to aim for was nullifying the first emitter before the bottom drones broke free (it wouldn't be too bad to hold off the bottom drones with shields, but this way I could redirect some of my blasters after the first nullify to deal with them easily). Use shields to block off the first wave of drones, after that it will be a steady stream of drones that 2-3 blasters can hold off easily. Once the top is clear of creeper you have a huge amount of space and plenty of gems, so it should be pretty straightforward from there.

[burguertime]

834523 L/H

Grav-Right (2,4g), Build Left. A 50M titan in the main chamber and little room to build. The fields fill almost all the top of the map, and change fast.

Stream of drones from second 1 and phantoms soon


little run red L/H 70M titan in a central chamber

Up-Grav (3.5g) - this one with the surface emitter is very funny. Old Faithful. Down build direction (upside-down) - you have to dig to build a single reactor.

Again, if some ninja can blow the surface emitter really fast, this map is not that hard.

4 health drones streaming from a very nearby portal, no gems in the first five rows of earth. 4 Phantons soon.

[Kithros]

834523 L/H

Grav-Right (2,4g), Build Left. A 50M titan in the main chamber and little room to build. The fields fill almost all the top of the map, and change fast.

Stream of drones from second 1 and phantoms soon


little run red L/H 70M titan in a central chamber

Up-Grav (3.5g) - this one with the surface emitter is very funny. Old Faithful. Down build direction (upside-down) - you have to dig to build a single reactor.

Again, if some ninja can blow the surface emitter really fast, this map is not that hard.

4 health drones streaming from a very nearby portal, no gems in the first five rows of earth. 4 Phantons soon.

The first one looks a little boring to me, there's nothing too too threatening in it and you have more than enough space to deal with the titan (if you want to see some maps where you're really short on space, look at 'grass car three' (small/high) or 'one shoe may' (any/high) (not to say this map is trivial, but to me it's boring since I've already dealt with maps much worse than it)

The second one might look intimidating at first, until you realize that the emitter doesn't actually do anything other than puddle on the top and can be completely ignored. I took advantage of the time the field pushed the creeper over to the left and quickly looted 2 green gems + a red gem and the technytes before flying over to the left - it shouldn't be necessary, but if you want to play through it quickly that would be the way to go. Once you get a single blaster up you'll be safe from the drones, and the creeper would take an extremely long time to become threatening.

Spoiler

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[MadMag]

coat when cake small/high (might be funny, haven't tested it yet)