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Bacchante posted:I'd say changing the anti-creeper to match CW2 wouldn't be a bad choice. It'd make it clearer visually for you and us. It's what I did in my own run. It's not always visually clearer. Leaving it at default is probably fine, but if you do change it, be prepared to change it around on a level-by-level basis.
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Jul 24, 2018 07:51
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Bacchante posted:I'd say changing the anti-creeper to match CW2 wouldn't be a bad choice. It'd make it clearer visually for you and us. It's what I did in my own run.
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Jul 24, 2018 10:51
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Bacchante posted:I'd say changing the anti-creeper to match CW2 wouldn't be a bad choice. It'd make it clearer visually for you and us. It's what I did in my own run. I feel that the default is more visually obvious than setting it to pure white, even not considering what other people have said about it blending in to some terrain.
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Jul 24, 2018 18:26
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The developer chose default creeper/AC colors first then designed the terrain colors to contrast. To be specific white/light gray occurs somewhat often...
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Jul 24, 2018 19:11
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Jojo Video  Abitus is now completed; Navox is next. The third of five systems along the initial forced route. Only seven more systems to go, unless there are 'hidden' ones somewhere(not counting that out).  They should probably decide whether each 'star' is called a system or a sector. Think I'll go with system though.   It's not much of a choice, since I don't really know what is what and where is where until after we land.    As mentioned, the choice is between the three smaller, inner planets, with Flick and Tiplex waiting until later. It is at least a choice; getting to pick what Story mission comes next is a new thing to the CW series, so we can salute it a bit even if it's not a very meaningful one. I go with Jojo, which seems to be the odd one out of the three, at least visually.     So Spores are back from the first game as well - but this time they are no longer powered by the mysterious force known as Offscreen.    Layers upon layers. Perhaps there is some mysterious entity beyond even Platius aiding us for some reason?   That large central island does seem to be the most defensible location.  The Beams have a decent range, so I put one on each side after painting this area in collectors.  Then I relay my way to the other islands behind us, all of which have ore deposits to make them worth the effort.  Shortly after finishing up that expansion, we get our first warning of incoming Spores.  Takes a bit of time to take out the spores, but this beam placement on the right has enough firepower to knock out two of them before they land. Unlike the SAMs from the first game, it's a gradual wearing down of the spore projectile. They are pretty loud too.  I use a sprayer to create a 'wedge' push forward, which works ... at first.  I lose a few cannons that aren't placed optimally, and then a spore strikes a key Relay here. I was able to target it a bit just before it hit, but mostly it just found a weak spot in the defenses ... the Beams on the central island are a bit too far back to guard this area. I also was tight on energy here.  After taking out the central emitter, this beam gets moved to the power zone, and the spores will no longer be a threat. It can cover nearly the entire width of the map from here, and spores are swatted from the sky in about three seconds at most.  After taking out the western emitter, I try a big landing on this island to the east to push towards the final one. It ... didn't work well. I lost a cannon and had to retreat. Still working out exactly how to best attack in this version. After this, I thought it was over. I was wrong. We need to take out the towers too. The other significant thing I messed up on this mission was not building reactors to boost the energy soon enough. That would have allowed more weapons and just being able to overwhelm the thing with more firepower. There was more resistance(I think the emitters here were all 20 per 0.5 seconds). The Navox System appears to be a bit of an upgrade in difficulty, so I can't just assume any longer that a few cannons with a single mortar and sprayer will be enough to steamroll it. Quite a few things got blown up unnecessarily on this mission, which is why it took as long as it did.  The Spore Towers also leave behind power zones. I'm assuming anything we have to use a nullifier on does. That'll bear remembering for the future.
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Jul 24, 2018 20:30
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Thotimx posted:The Spore Towers also leave behind power zones. I'm assuming anything we have to use a nullifier on does. That'll bear remembering for the future. If I recall correctly from earlier missions, the Warp Inhibitors don't, despite being mostly just emitters. Then again, they also destroy all other enemy buildings when destroyed, so it probably doesn't matter.
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Jul 24, 2018 20:53
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Glad you figured out just how easily Spores can be dealt with using a power zone beam, putting a couple of those down midway across the larger maps can let you eco very easily behind them.
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Jul 24, 2018 23:47
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The old fashioned leapfrog style still works, although creeper feels a tad more viscous in CW3 - cannons have trouble clearing out creeper with any real depth to it. In general, you should also have "extra" cannons that aren't currently holding back the tide do all your advancing, otherwise the creeper can end up swamping you from the sides. Cannons do not turn particularly quickly, so it's better to have cannons each fighting on a specific "front" where possible, rather than a few cannons trying to shoot all around. Edit: Oh yeah - each of the spore towers is in range of a Power Node boosted Nullifier on this map. Was quite disappointed that I didn't see that trick pulled off here. Additionally, you should consider immediately dumping a cannon on any available Power nodes in areas where you're advancing - even if you don't have the ability to support it right away, a Power Node boosted cannon does a very good job of clearing the area around itself, and you can always rotate it out for a fresh cannon if it doesn't make enough space on a single ammo load. Olesh fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Jul 25, 2018 |
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Jul 25, 2018 07:27
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Olesh posted:Additionally, you should consider immediately dumping a cannon on any available Power nodes in areas where you're advancing - even if you don't have the ability to support it right away, a Power Node boosted cannon does a very good job of clearing the area around itself, and you can always rotate it out for a fresh cannon if it doesn't make enough space on a single ammo load. Seconding this. Always get a cannon in a new power node ASAP, clear out a bunch of creeper, and then decide what you're going to use the node for permanently once all the creeper is out of range of the cannon.
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Jul 25, 2018 11:16
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Ormos Video  We'll just zip over to the opposite side of the Navox star to the other planet on the innermost orbit, Ormos.         Umm, if it's a 'constant', doesn't that mean it can't be altered? Oh yeah, this is Creeper World, laws of physics are just guidelines and all that.       The creeper immediately bursts from the edges of the map here, even before we do anything. It appears that what we've got here is your basic moat and a damaged castle inside it. That's where we are intended to make our stand.  We learn a bit more about Siphons as we grab that tech artifact. Each of the pentagon-shaped crystals has 75 energy. I eventually discovered that these behave much like the artifacts did in CW2; the siphons will only activate if you exceed your available energy reserve.  On the right side of the 'castle' is the Terp Artifact, followed by instructions to use them immediately.  Here's a Terp in action on the southwest corner, filling in a gap in the wall.  To make it work, we just select a Brush Size and Terrain Height setting from the control panel here on the bottom, and then click where we want to change the elevation to these settings.  I get most of the wall gaps filled in time, but not here on the west. I need a few weapons to clear out the encroaching Creeper.  Once everything is filled in, a couple mortars will suffice to keep the creeper at bay.  It gets a little interesting crossing the moat, but nothing more firepower can't fix. It's time to push on towards the shield key and get out of here. This proves to be a routine operation.
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Jul 27, 2018 23:08
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Terps are the one of the most useful units, and any player map that disables their use is probably going to be a bitch to clear.
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Jul 27, 2018 23:55
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Terps are my reactor. I kinda feel dirty using them and will generally avoid it. But I get that that's just me being "quirky".
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Jul 27, 2018 23:58
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Terps are slow as hell so not great if you want to hit the leaderboards but they are a great addition to the game. There are all sorts of interesting and creative ways to use them.
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Jul 28, 2018 00:00
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Fangz posted:Terps are slow as hell
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Jul 28, 2018 00:04
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Why are they called "Terps" though?
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Jul 28, 2018 00:10
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Really Pants posted:Why are they called "Terps" though? TERraforming Platform
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Jul 28, 2018 00:11
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that abbreviation is terrible, you may as well call Reactors "Rears"
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Jul 28, 2018 00:15
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I haven't watched the video yet, so I don't know if this was noticed during it, but for the longest time I didn't notice that you could right-click to remove a terraforming designation. It even spells it out in plain text right there. Maybe my eyes just passed over the red font. But I spent the longest time matching up the designations to the current terrain height to remove designations when my mouse cursor slipped. Don't be me. Edit: Having watched the video now, yeah, you tried to get rid of a terraforming designation by overwriting it rather than right-click removing it. Please don't be me. Malicus fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jul 28, 2018 |
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Jul 28, 2018 01:16
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Terps are why I will never reach a leaderboard in this game, I got stuck on the methodology of clearing a chunk on creeper, maxing out the terrain in a small pillar, sticking a relay and a weapon or two on two, and repeat After the first iteration, because it is quite slow to do this, it then becomes mandatory to continue due to the sheer density of creeper on all sides
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Jul 28, 2018 02:07
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A common tactic I use is to temporarily push the creeper back to dig a trench, it works about as well as a wall but unlike building a wall your blasters can fire on a trench without building a firing platform. Alos it's important to remember that terps very power demanding, I've had more than one map that I almost screwed myself by over terraforming into the red.
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Jul 28, 2018 09:18
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TERPS. Usually my first thing to do is to solidify my base, build a three-wide 10-high wall with a 1-high moat around it, toss up some blasters and then I win. Fill my available space with reactors and push forward slowly. It's weirdly enthralling even if it would be horribly boring to watch, but it's really not always viable; which is good because otherwise the game would be way too dull.
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Jul 28, 2018 09:53
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Terps. Now that's an unit I tend to forget about. I suppose I prefer excessive firepower.
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Jul 28, 2018 09:58
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Deathwind posted:A common tactic I use is to temporarily push the creeper back to dig a trench, it works about as well as a wall but unlike building a wall your blasters can fire on a trench without building a firing platform. Trenches and mortars are your happy place.
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Jul 28, 2018 10:00
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The best use of terps is flattening out terrain and filling in holes so you can have a neat orderly grid in your base. This is more or less the main purpose of the large brushes. As a reminder, cannons cannot fire if their shots would pass through a higher elevation. As tempting as it may be to terraform walls up to 10, you can save yourself time and energy by only making them as high as necessary. Nearly every map from now on can be cheesed by building a sufficiently wide height 10 walkway to the destination of your choice using terps. While reliable, this is very slow. Edit: Also, when building collectors, get used to using the click and drag functionality to build lines of collectors. It seriously makes filling in empty space way faster and less tedious. Olesh fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Jul 28, 2018 |
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Jul 28, 2018 10:32
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General Revil posted:Seconding this. Always get a cannon in a new power node ASAP, clear out a bunch of creeper, and then decide what you're going to use the node for permanently once all the creeper is out of range of the cannon. Good idea, I tried to implement this in an upcoming level. Deathwind posted:A common tactic I use is to temporarily push the creeper back to dig a trench, it works about as well as a wall but unlike building a wall your blasters can fire on a trench without building a firing platform. Hadn't even thought about intentionally reversing the elevation. Olesh posted:when building collectors, get used to using the click and drag functionality to build lines of collectors. It seriously makes filling in empty space way faster and less tedious. Keep the suggestions coming, but I should mention that we're reaching a point where I'm really not able to be close to keeping everything in mind while playing . I expect a lot of stuff to get missed at this rate due to limitations on my brain's ability to multitask. Sort of the old 'Yes I do know it all, I just can't remember it all at once' deal.
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Jul 30, 2018 19:18
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Seedet Video  The third planet in the third system we've visited so far.     These 'Seloi' make for an interesting and I suspect ultimately essential part of the tale ... but once again Lia does not directly answer the question. I'm becoming very suspicious of her/they/it.   Let me guess, it was to die horribly so that the next generation could rise and do the same.       The plot thickens. Clearly the Seloi's 'Arc', whatever it is, was important enough to concern even the Loki. I'm wondering just now if we'll ever find out what happened to Thrade's insurrection ...      This has a similar theme used in CW1 with need to control the craters, but in actuality the warning is overblown. The volcano emitters are 12 per second ... but the main one produces enough to equal a full dozen of them, 25 creeper per 0.17s. This also seems a good time to mention that the Doom Timre doesn't appear that it will be a thing anymore, at least for this iteration of Creeper World. I let the whole map flood(it took almost an hour to get it all, the last part being that walled-in area where the schematic is), but there is no auto-loss trigger. Which makes sense since nothing forces you to deploy the command node ... unless of course you actually want to play and win the mission.  I began in the best defensible position in the southeast ruins. Partial walls and an elevated spot. This mission puts somewhat more immediate pressure on you than the previous ones. It's more tricky to fill in the gaps in the walls and get the new Strafers going as instructed before being overrun.  My first idea was to get walls up right away. I didn't have time; here I've got the Strafer and the instructions for it, but have lost a collector and an under-construction Terp. Takes about a minute and a half for the creeper to start making its way in between the walls. But hey, air power is now a thing again!  I worked on filling in the gaps with a terp, with a couple of pulse cannons filling defensive roles, while also getting the first couple of Strafer pads up. Quite similar to the Drones from CW1 all things considered. I generally like the line-targeting anyway, but the oblong craters seem to fit that better.  I added a mortar to be darn sure the levels of Creeper didn't get too excessive, added more Strafers so I'd get the four that Lia recommended, and started moving around the perimeter filling in more gaps in our position.  It was not the smoothest operation ever, but there were minimal casualties(one pulse cannon I think, which I'm still calling blasters on occasion - old habits die hard). I've got raised plateaus or walls everywhere here, no low ground for anything to get through, and a similar situation below. The aircraft have the volcanoes under control as well.  There's a single Ore Deposit in the northwest, and once that's been acquired I deploy a sprayer and a couple weapons on a good plateau up that way. I think I'm ready to start attacking.  A mass of pulse cannons with a couple of mortars in support seems to be my strategy of choice most of the time.  I opt for a PowerSprayer right in the middle of the map. With the strafers handling the volcanoes, we should be able to clean this out quickly.  The only thing left to do is relay my way over to the volcanoes and the shield keys. There's two of them; one for Tiplex, and one for Flick, the remaining planets in this system. Now I presume I'll need to use all the recently-acquired toys to take those down. We have nothing yet in the Titans tab(2 locked), Orbital still only has Command Node(2 more locked as well), but the Weapons and Structures areas are starting to fill in nicely.
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Jul 31, 2018 07:10
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I don't know why I got this impression, but for some reason I expected that you couldn't use other tech from this set of three worlds within the set of three. I guess it actually set a flag that said you had the technology instead of just giving you the minimum you could have at that point. It's a simple thing, but I did not expect it, even though I should probably know better.
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Jul 31, 2018 18:39
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There is no Doom Timer per se, but there are definitely intended starting areas that get overrun somewhat quickly if you don't set up well enough fast enough. I'm expecting at least one restart from the first serious challenge of that type even if it's still not actually hard.
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Aug 1, 2018 20:19
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:There is no Doom Timer per se, but there are definitely intended starting areas that get overrun somewhat quickly if you don't set up well enough fast enough. I'm expecting at least one restart from the first serious challenge of that type even if it's still not actually hard. This is basically still part of the extended tutorial. Later areas are more challenging and have Doom Timers.
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Aug 1, 2018 23:38
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Oh goody. I'm sure restarts will become a consistent 'feature' again once we that kind of fun arrives.
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Aug 3, 2018 07:24
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If you are reading this; congratulations on making it to the 100th Creeper World episode! And thanks for sticking with the adventure this far. Depending on how big CW3 and the eventual CW4 end up being, there could be another 100 to go I suppose ... we will see. Flick Video  It occured to me that it might make more sense to put the planet map overview before Skars & Lia blather on discussing it, so you can have some vague idea what they are talking about ...   How typically vague of you, Lia.       Lovely.    So we've got an 'island' map here - which constrasts rather hilariously with the somewhat normalish orbital view of the planet - that is apparently being held together with nothing but invisible/transparent space-magic-glue. And we're here to get the death & destruction ... err, bomber schematic. The 'master' emitter produces 20 every 0.5 seconds, a decent amount but nothing overwhelming. A lot less than the big one did in our last venture. The ability to dispense it in several locations at once via the handwavium of 'subspace rips' is the gimmick to deal with here.  This particular island in the lower-right has a moderate amount of space, ore, and is also close to the schematic. It also doesn't have an indestructible Subspace Slip-Emitter on it. Nowhere else on the map has all of that going in favor of landing there.  This announcement that we've got the bomber schematic is eloquent in it's brevity. I'm also relaying my way along the islands on the right and upper-right of the map here in order to get to the other ore deposits. After building some reactors to compensate for the limited land area available to me, it's time to build some bomber bases.  They look similar to the Strafer ones, but the aircraft are quite different. I do really like the distinctive unit graphics of CW3 so far. I haven't yet hit a situation where isn't quite clear to me what all is going on. Here it's time for some island-hopping ... I could have chosen a different one but overall this seems as good as any. I want to clear this off to get myself close enough to the central island which is the primary target. Below in the control panel there is the very useful 'Auto Launch' toggle, an improvement over CW1 which allows me to just set a target and have the bombers repeatedly attack it whenever they get the ammunition to do so.  Here I bring over a group of cannons, after the bombers take down the buildup a bit. In the very bottom-right by the terrain meter, we can see the creeper depth is '2.21'. Anything much higher than that is generally too much for cannons to deal with in a single go, so I try to get it down to about 2.5 or lower. And in fact, this attempt fails as well ... I run out of ammunition before creating enough clear space to get a relay up.  After pulling them back for a resupply, and some more bombing, I'm able to successfully get a beachhead soon afterwards. The bombers are re-targeted on the central island. I've got eight of them, but that isn't enough to exhaust ore supplies so I upgrade to 12. The creeper depth by the master emitter is in the 15-18 range ... several times worse than what we just dealt with. It's gonig to take a while to work that down to a reasonable level, so the more pounding the better.  Eventually I end up with this setup; one Mortar can just reach the edge to help thin things out a little faster, while the pulse cannons keep any creeper 'rifting' over here from doing any damage. Now we wait. I fully admit the audio is screwed up on this part; with a dozen bombers firing non-stop you really can't hear much of what I'm saying *slap self*.  The master emitter going down cuts off the flow ... but it doesn't end the struggle. There's a shield key on an island in the upper-left. More bombing commences there, and a similar operation proceeds to acquire that. It's just cleanup though; once the central island is conquered, it's only a matter of time.
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Aug 4, 2018 07:29
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By the way, one quirk that I think changed between CW2 and 3 is that there's a difference between Ore packets and AC packets. Ore mines send ore packets to the command node, which then stores them as AC. AC packets are sent out to sprayers and bombers. If you set a Sprayer to 'collect excess AC', it can either store it as AC internally or convert it back into ore packets which go to the command node.
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Aug 4, 2018 09:16
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Thotimx posted:If you are reading this; congratulations on making it to the 100th Creeper World episode! And thanks for sticking with the adventure this far. I'm mostly lurking, but I'm enjoying the thread!
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Aug 4, 2018 09:50
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I feel that AC tends to be better for holding ground than it is for clearing creeper. You should usually leave that job for conventional weapons, maybe with one sprayer or a few bombers to help hold the ground they clear. I would complain about you forgetting about strafers, but there IS a Steam achievement for not using bombers or strafers on that map (and it's pretty easy to do).
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Aug 5, 2018 18:12
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Skars is pretty nonchalant about learning of how many people have lived and died since he last woke, isn't he? Regarding multiple command centers: do you get any benefits of having more than one? I've always felt it adds to the complexity without much payoff.
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Aug 6, 2018 01:59
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Jet Jaguar posted:Regarding... This hasn't been revealed as a thing yet I don't believe.
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Aug 6, 2018 02:02
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Well, it has now, at any rate. You get a small amount of additional energy, and it's another place to store energy/ore which might be the most important thing about it. Without saying too much about the actual point where it is revealed, there could well be missions like Ursa in the first game where you have resources in multiple places that you can't immediately connect with your network. Having a command node in each place would allow you to get those right away and use more of the map. Malicus posted:I feel that AC tends to be better for holding ground than it is for clearing creeper. I agree. Jet Jaguar posted:Skars is pretty nonchalant about learning of how many people have lived and died since he last woke, isn't he? Indeed, though I think it just might be a certain level of emotional fatigue at this point. Oh look, another planet with billions who died after a terrible struggle because Creeper Adaption X happened. After the first few, how do you summon up the passion to be truly horrified by it anymore? Sort of like the 'Urist doesn't really seem to care about anything anymore' thing from Dwarf Fortress.
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Aug 6, 2018 02:35
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Thotimx posted:Well, it has now, at any rate. You get a small amount of additional energy, and it's another place to store energy/ore which might be the most important thing about it. Without saying too much about the actual point where it is revealed, there could well be missions like Ursa in the first game where you have resources in multiple places that you can't immediately connect with your network. Having a command node in each place would allow you to get those right away and use more of the map. Yeah, the only thing I would add (now that we're talking about it) is that making sure that each "front" where you're trying to push out has at least one CC in range can reduce the delay between ordering something built and it being functional and in position, as compared to having one CC centrally located with relay highways. You still absolutely want the relay highways, though. If the bulk of your energy is being spent on one front, that CC can supply all of the energy packets (if all of them are connected to the same network), but AC storage is discrete between CCs. If the nearest one is out and you don't have relays, then the other CCs send packets over your collector network instead, which can mean losing an area that was just barely stabilized. Besides, you want that sweet sweet packet speed. Lprsti99 fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Aug 6, 2018 |
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Aug 6, 2018 04:54
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eh, i can feel why skars is just focusing on the task at hand. lia basically keeps telling him to go gently caress himself every time he dares to ask about larger picture stuff so the only thing he's really left with is what's in front of him. you can dwell on all of these billions of people that got screwed over or you can keep trying to get a grasp on the now so you can hopefully build something that won't get screwed over. as half-hearted as the writing is in all the games you can still basically see skars being the same dude you saw in CW1 and 2 in that he is one of the only folks capable of holding it together and formulating plans to get everyone a bit further down the road. in this situation though he just doesn't have the context he needs to really operate at the high level he's used to, and on some level he knows that. so he's focusing on what he CAN do while he tries to get that context sorted out for himself.
Coolguye fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Aug 6, 2018 |
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Aug 6, 2018 07:49
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i mean can he even comprehend such a magnitude of loss? could any of us?
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Aug 6, 2018 08:01
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