Mission: Which is the 'best' country?

[xoft]

Niger, though, has me.  There's an early breakthrough of a zero-g emitter & tough drones from two gateways.  It's impossible to dig in.

You need to build a dark beam before the only opening to the surface decays. I've tried and it is possible. First build only as much as energy permits, until you get to the first crystal, then start the dark beam and as many reactors as possible. Don't build phantom coils until necessary, usually 0:25 before the phantoms will do. Switch off the coils as soon as they finish destroying phantoms, this'll save your energy.
The rest of the map is simple slogging; I'll post the score tomorrow when I finish it.

Niger is definitely worth playing if you need to brush up on fast start-up and rapid energy management. I found myself micro-stepping through much of the beginning.

[SmileyCoder]

Posted a score for niger. Fun map. I even managed to kill of the first emitter before discovering that the map had experimentals :P

[xoft]

Niger finished and posted. I'd say this deserves nomination.

I noticed some of the countries I did were still unmarked in the main list:
Kuwait - challenging start with surface emitter and drones
Libya - fun to start, titan emitter breaks to the surface quite early

[SmileyCoder]

Croatia is deffinately not easy. Tried it a few times, but still no luck. I think it IS doable though.

[Loren Pechtel]

Niger, though, has me.  There's an early breakthrough of a zero-g emitter & tough drones from two gateways.  It's impossible to dig in.

You need to build a dark beam before the only opening to the surface decays. I've tried and it is possible. First build only as much as energy permits, until you get to the first crystal, then start the dark beam and as many reactors as possible. Don't build phantom coils until necessary, usually 0:25 before the phantoms will do. Switch off the coils as soon as they finish destroying phantoms, this'll save your energy.
The rest of the map is simple slogging; I'll post the score tomorrow when I finish it.

Niger is definitely worth playing if you need to brush up on fast start-up and rapid energy management. I found myself micro-stepping through much of the beginning.

How????

I just tried that approach, I put it down quite early and it wasn't quite ready at the breakthrough and it wouldn't have mattered anyway--I only had an energy production of 5.




Nicaragua down, Zzzzz.

[Cavemaniac]

The scammer country fell.  It took a while but nothing notable.

Umm...

Which country have you invaded?!

Nigeria!

Hur hur!

Would someone please send me $10,000 for legal fees so I can send you the $1.2M oil fortune that your great uncle left you in his will?

[Cavemaniac]

Niger finished and posted. I'd say this deserves nomination.

I noticed some of the countries I did were still unmarked in the main list:
Kuwait - challenging start with surface emitter and drones
Libya - fun to start, titan emitter breaks to the surface quite early

Sorry xoft.

All updated now.

[xoft]

Loren Pechtel,
You need to spend everything on reactors. At 2:00 I had energy production of ~10.7, several reactors building and just digged out the second batch of technites, so I could improve my reactor efficiency further. I've already got the dark beam running and since it was almost full of energy when the cave broke through, it can survive for some time on less than 12 energy. Just enough to finish the reactors needed.

[Loren Pechtel]

Niger finished and posted. I'd say this deserves nomination.

I noticed some of the countries I did were still unmarked in the main list:
Kuwait - challenging start with surface emitter and drones
Libya - fun to start, titan emitter breaks to the surface quite early

Sorry xoft.

All updated now.

I edited what I thought was the last post in the thread--oops.

Nicaragua down, Zzzzz.

[Kithros]

Worst case scenario if you don't have enough energy - there's actually an interesting tactic that can be used for those kinds of experimental maps, where you build 2 long columns of shields around the terrain that will decay through - then you can turn the dark beam on for short bursts to hold the creeper off instead of needing to have the dark beam constantly running, since the shields will keep the creeper inside of the dark beams path. If you need to you can turn the dark beam on for a somewhat longer time to destroy and replace all the shields.

[Loren Pechtel]

Loren Pechtel,
You need to spend everything on reactors. At 2:00 I had energy production of ~10.7, several reactors building and just digged out the second batch of technites, so I could improve my reactor efficiency further. I've already got the dark beam running and since it was almost full of energy when the cave broke through, it can survive for some time on less than 12 energy. Just enough to finish the reactors needed.

I can't imagine how you are accomplishing that in 2 minutes!

[xoft]

Ghana and Gambia done. Neither was interesting.

Some may have noticed, for the others I'm giving a little trick: pressing the N key while the game is paused will step the game one frame. Using this, you can achieve a pretty tight timing that might be needed in some missions - as soon as you grab the crystal, or as soon as that terrain is digged... That's micro-stepping ;)

Loren Pechtel, what did you spend those technytes on? I spent my first batch on decreasing unit cost, this helped me reduce the build-time needed for the dark beam, as well as for all those reactors. The rest was used for packet speed and energy storage. The second batch was used to improve reactor efficiency and I don't remember what else.

EDIT: I tried re-playing the level, and I got to ~16 energy and running dark beam at 1:40 :)

[Cavemaniac]

Mexico - interesting looking map, but pretty standard play.

Updated...

[SmileyCoder]

Finally managed to beat Croatia. I would say its worthy of a nomination.

EDIT: Posted a score for Morocco. VERY boring.

EDIT: Panama, Interesting start, rest is a sluggish.

[Cavemaniac]

Updated.

We're nearly done with the list guys!

Are there any non English speakers participating?

If so, we could use some alternate country names/spellings to extend this challenge.

I've included Aotearoa which is the Maori name for New Zealand as inspiration.

Edit: Aotearoa done - no challenge...