Tips and Tricks

A collection of various tips and tricks during gameplay.

By opening only a 1 tile wide tunnel to a chamber, a limitless amount of creeper can be held back with a single Cryon, allowing rockets to deal massive damage without much danger.

This strategy gets complicated if other dangers are involved, such as bots. If no bots are involved, shields can serve as a temporary replacement for the Cryon.

Against stationary enemies, it is possible to nullify them through one of these 1 wide hallways, however shields in the hallway will block the nullifier beam.

These hallways also do not need to be straight; so long as the entire path is in range of the rocket, the rocket can navigate through the hallway to attack the creeper. Long zigzag hallways with shields can keep the creeper back for minutes or even hours while still allowing rockets to fire through them.

Your Apex ship starts with 200 energy in storage and a low energy generation rate of 0.30. You want to build as much as you can right at the start to make use of that 200 energy, but if you overbuild that will massively slow down your game plan.

The highest possible economic start without access to starting kirkium is to build 7 reactors, then build reactors one at a time. With access to kirkium, you can start with an extra 1 or 2 reactors depending on how dense the kirkium deposit you are lathing is. Note that reactors take about 2 minutes to pay for themselves; if you intend to win in less than 2 minutes, it is not worth it to build any reactors. In these builds, 2 reactors can be replaced with a digger to get quick access to things like upgrade gems or a large kirkium deposit.

Less economic openings may be needed if the enemy is aggressive enough to need defenses in the first 1-2 minutes of the map. When building up your first set of units, do not let their total costs exceed 200 unless you have access to enough kirkium to make up the difference. Also be aware to take into account supplying units with ammo and the potential for map elements like IXE cores can take some energy from your starting build.

On some maps it is possible to simply rush all of the objectives before the creeper has a chance to stop you. Take the first demo mission as an example; instead of starting at the top of the map and fighting the creeper you can start in the water and just dig a path around the sand chamber to the remaining ixe core, no combat ships necessary.

Let the map play without any intervention and see where the creeper lands by about 1 minute in. If you see a path to all objectives that is not blocked by creeper, and you think you can terraform that path open in that time, restart the map and try it. Don't build reactors if you plan to win before 2 minutes; spend your starting energy on diggers to perform all the necessary terraforming as quickly as possible.

By default, all collect objectives have physics and are affected by gravity, while IXE cores have physics and are affected by creeper flow. This can be abused, because shields do not have collision physics, but do affect creeper flow. So if you dig a pit underneath an objective with a shield on top, the objective often just falls through the shield where it can be isolated from the creeper. Note that bots can stop you by bypassing and destroying your shields.

The most consistent setup for pulling this off is to dig a hole underneath the objective you want to drop but leave the top 1-3 layers of land untouched. Right beneath the untouched land, make a couple layers of shields and once those are done, terraform out the top layers of land. The objective should (hopefully) fall into your newly dug pit where the creeper can't stop your packets from reaching it.

Objectives are often placed in the same chamber as strong emitters or breeder pools so you have to fight to them on that map. However, those chambers often take a few seconds or even a minute to fill up with creeper. It takes less than 4 seconds to spawn your Apex Ship in a cavern and send out enough packets to activate objectives. This can clear out what is often the hardest objective on a map in less than 5 seconds. Note that you need to activate all IXE cores simultaneously, so if there are other IXE cores in a different chamber, you only have 30 seconds to find a way to activate them.