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Stalin is reputed to have said "the death of one person is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic." But what is the death of everyone except one person? A really big statistic? Maybe like a whole statistical analysis that comes in a dozen binders? We may never know.
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Aug 6, 2018 08:12
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it depends on what you mean by that. if you mean “could he possibly count and feel for all of those lost souls” then no absolutely not; there’s a lot of interesting numbers surrounding the psychology of tragedy and the brain completely conks out and stops caring after about a dozen individuals involved in a tragedy - there’s just too much data to process in terms of peoples’ lives. The brain instinctively understands that on some level and simply stops trying. If you mean “could he feel for the broken civilizations themselves” then absolutely not; he didn’t know these civilizations and had no context on their traditions, values, or histories. It, effectively, ends up being like a library you’ve never been inside burning down. You can be told it was a great library, and maybe you can even hear a witness tell you all the things that library did for them...but ultimately you have your local branch. If you mean “could he comprehend the magnitude of the squandered promise” then yes, absolutely, because ultimately that great and bountiful dream these places aspired to is what he himself was trying to build in CW2. It’d be pretty easy to internalize that fall from utopia happening over and over and over again, grinding himself through that experience an arbitrary number of times to visualize the heartbreak over and over again. I could go on longer but I feel like I’ve made my point here - there’s ways you absolutely could fathom the depth of the tragedy here. It just depends on how you want to tilt the gently caress prism with relation to your own values and priorities. E: also there’s actually been a lot of writing regarding the killing of everybody but “one” as it were, it’s far from an untread area. pick up i have no mouth and i must scream for an easy to run over intro to it. it isn’t quite what you’re talking about since there’s a few people and they’re being actively tormented by a demented AI, but in the interactions between the surviving humans you get a primer of how the rationality game takes a big turn when humans understand that their numbers are too low to ever recover the race and hard core nihilism becomes the only real choice they can make. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Aug 6, 2018 |
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Aug 6, 2018 08:24
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Interesting psychological comments, everybody. Good mental food!
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Aug 7, 2018 07:43
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Tiplex Video Time to take out the inhibitor for this system. I think we've been here long enough.  That ... does not look like a naturally occuring formation.    The 'Ticon Empire' must be a name worth remembering, if Lia is bothering to mention it at all.    Ever the inspirer of hope, isn't it/she?   Obvious answer is obvious to this question.  Peachfart posted:For CW3, I'm going to say gently caress digitalis. Brief, eloquent, succinct. And as we'll see, very much true. For all the brilliance of the Ticon, Skars may well have been much better off if they never arose.           That was a lot of words. This must be an important mission.  I land the Command Node on the right side as instructed. This here I didn't notice while playing out the mission. We're on maximum zoom and it's still pretty hard to see ... but on each side of the digitalis webbing(that's what the white stuff is, the 'plan' for where it's going to grow), there is a blue something and 'Build: 16%'. The Digitalis is actually building stuff here! That truly sucks.  This is the first time I tried the suggested click-and-drag method for placing collectors. I did it badly on some occasions, but I did it doggone it!! Here you can see that some of them won't build due to obstacles. It appears best to use on open areas.  Now we've got the second Command Node available as we noticed earlier. Only one locked option in the Orbital tab left. I fear we'll eventually have to manage a third of these things. But all in good time.  Destroy the inhibitor. Nothing else matters. Also, notice that silver disc thing? Looks rather out of place over here on the left with the second node. Also, we have a second energy and ore bar at the top now. Later in the mission I would get confused over which was which. I didn't realize the '2' emblazoned on the bottom of this node(hard to see here due to the image resizing), which sort of reminds you if you forget which one was placed first. Also, see how the webbing is all bluish now ... except for at the bottom of this shot where it's still white and harder to see? Blue digitalis has creeper; white is damaged/withered. I like the word withered, so I'll be using that. We can already see how it couldn't care less about obstacles, just climbing over, around, and through as needed. Ay caramba.  It takes about two minutes from mission start for the digitalis to fully regenerate. So I deploy cannons where it reaches the top levels, because if it finishes up there bad things will happen. Digitalis turns red briefly when damaged.  Just about the time I finish getting cannons and collectors up on the top level of both sides, along with ore mines on the deposits, I'm notified of what was being built. Spore Towers. I need Beams before attempting any kind of attack it seems. The basin down there is flooding with creeper as well; that's a fairly decent-strength emitter.  That strikes me as a particularly bad idea in general.  I messed around a bit with a couple not-the-best ideas, then decided I wanted to put mortars on the platforms like so, with cannons on the surface. The left and right sides of the map aren't totally symmetrical, but they're close to it, so I can more or less use the same approach on each side.  When I get to that disc, I'm told it's basically the CW3 version of the CW2 Holocube. The way Lia phrases this begs a rather massive question; why would the Creeper leave stuff like this around for us to find?   Oh goody, a cliffhanger ...  This is the best -- no, that's not the right word. More like the 'least bad' way I find of taking down the digitalis formations. The Sprayer can't actually attack the stuff directly, but it does hold the ground against the creeper itself and, as Lia mentioned, slow regeneration of the digitalis. The cannons and mortars can then be less ineffective against it. But it's still not a quick process. It's about here that I began an extended period of doing stupid things. Those of you who like to swear at and throw things at your screen as I make mistakes, this is probably your best time to do it so far in this game. Not moving the beams forward to protect the relays? Check. Moving forward too far to get your cannons destroyed by the digitalis? Double-check, triple-check, and then some. Running out of energy and procrastinating far longer than I should have in just building a bunch more reactors? Yep, got that covered as well.  Here I lose some stuff but just barely protect a nullifier long enough to take out this emitter on the left side. That means less creeper feeding into the digitalis.  I try several times to securely get something on that power zone, and fail. I do eventually take out the emitter on the right side, leading to this. Which is a beautiful sight. Apparently the emitter that the warp inhibitor is on doesn't feed the digitalis because reasons. Appears to be connected, but it isn't. So now the webbing is withering, shriveling, and dying as Skars cheers with glee. There are actually three emitters in that lowest trench, but neither of the others matter. I'm pushing onward to take out this one and get out of here.  I put a Mortar on the power zone here to pound the depths, and it's a much, much easier thing to push the creeper back now that the digitalis is dead. I'm already getting a nullifier in place to knock out that spore tower.  Then I manage to do this for the first time; it's a Super Nullifier! This is about the limit of the range, but that emitter puts out 250 every 3 seconds. It's awful nice to not have to clear out a bunch more space just to get closer to it. The inhibitor dies, and we're done here. Navox is history. At this point, after 10 missions, we'd be half done with either of the first two games' Story Mode. Here we've finished three of nine currently-visible systems. The easiest/smallest three, presumably. There might be a little more meat on this bone, comparatively speaking.
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Aug 7, 2018 08:54
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When facing digitalis, you really want to switch your cannons to prioritize digitalis. (The option that turns them blue) It helps A LOT. Strafers are also good for cutting off parts of the network.
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Aug 7, 2018 09:33
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Thotimx posted:on each side of the digitalis webbing(that's what the white stuff is, the 'plan' for where it's going to grow), there is a blue something and 'Build: 16%'. The Digitalis is actually building stuff here! That truly sucks. That's not a Digitalis thing, that's just a Spore Tower thing. All Spore Towers take longer before their first activation, to give you some time before you have to rush to get beams online. Mousing over a Spore Tower will either show you how long before it starts its normal cycle (while it's "building"; that's what the "Build: X%" text is), or how long until the next launch (once it's up and running). Also, it is pretty helpful to cut off Digitalis networks from emitters when you can, since as far as I'm aware starvation kills them faster than any weapon except maybe a well-placed Strafer (or a Power Cannon). Warp inhibitors continue to not quite count as emitters - first there was the fact that they don't leave power zones, now you've noticed that they don't spread Digitalis. Sillyman fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Aug 7, 2018 |
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Aug 7, 2018 12:12
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Fangz posted:When facing digitalis, you really want to switch your cannons to prioritize digitalis. (The option that turns them blue) How, exactly? Won't they just get overrun by the creeper itself if they aren't shooting at it?
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Aug 19, 2018 19:21
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Thotimx posted:How, exactly? Won't they just get overrun by the creeper itself if they aren't shooting at it? You might want to have a cannon as well shooting creeper, but even with just digitalis focused cannons it seems like the cannons have a pretty easy time shooting all the digitalis in range, *then* the creeper. I just find the prioritised cannons far more effective, maybe because creeper replenishes itself faster than digitalis.
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Aug 19, 2018 19:39
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It's prioritization, not exclusive focus. They'll make sure there's none of whatever you prioritize in their range, then shoot anything else. In practice this means that once they've killed the digitalis that they can reach, your cannons will destroy creeper as normal, sparing one shot in like 5 to keep the digitalis from spreading further. Imo, it's pretty similar to capping emitters in the first game. Efb
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Aug 19, 2018 19:42
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I'll definitely need to experiment with it the next time I run into a bunch of the digitalis then. Lemal Video  Three systems down, two more to go until we have a choice of where to travel to. Up next is Egos, the last one that I've seen(and only part of it).      To kill everyone and everything for the sheer lulz of it? No??     Skars unfortunately gave Lia an out here, and she once again ignores the real question.  Irrelevant shadows among the countless trillions who have fallen ...     If they weren't we'd be stuck here forever, so yeah I guess.    Or maybe there's just there to make our struggle difficult, and there's no reward to be had at all.  Another five planets in this system. The Inhibitor is on Chanson, while Lemal is the only one we can access at the moment.  A pretty sizable map here, with more destruction and 'holes', but also a lot of previous construction to deal with.      Time for some more heavy space-magic nonsense.      So basically Aether is the new version of TechNytes. We get to research again now.    Naturally.   That bluish structure starts producing creeper immediately, and a fairly good amount of it. Also, these blocks of creeper move along the bottom and left sides of the compound, protecting it from any approach. That'll be just spiffy. It looks like there is a treasure trove of shield keys in there; three of them - but it'll take some doing to get to them.  Our good friend the Digitalis protects the Forge also.  Process of elimination leaves setting up the command node to the southwest. A single ore deposit along with a pair of siphons, each of which has 800 more ore to contribute, are available. The creeper from the Forge to the east, and the Totems to the north, soon begins to encroach across these twisting pathways that cross the nothingness. Token defenses of a cannon or two are all that is needed to hold that back.  Takes a couple tries, but a sprayer and a few cannons are able to get across towards the forge. Lia's briefing gave us a clear series of goals, and this is first on the agenda. I lost a few things taking out that first emitter, until I realized that Nullifiers can fire uphill to higher terrain. Makes it a lot easier.  Getting a Sprayer onto that power zone ended up having an effect I didn't anticipate; it very quickly spread anti-creeper throughout the digitalis on the raised platform where the Forge is. That should prove useful. Going around the bottom there can be a real pain since there's not much room and the digitalis is still getting fed by the emitter on the other side. This, however, made it pretty simple to take a more direct route ...  Now it would just be a matter of time, and not that much, to take out that second emitter and end the digitalis threat for good.  Not having a better idea of what to do with them, I put reactors on the power zones. For the record, I had 9.8 produced before this, and each of them added four more, nearly doubling it to 17.8. So SuperReactors like super every elses are quite nice, worth several of them anywhere else. With the first major objective achieved, I needed to head northwest for the Totems that would supply Aether(whatever the heck that is) to the Forge so it could operate. After clearing out all the creeper in the southeast I moved the weapons across the map. Here the creeper had more time to build up, so I used a substantial amount of the remaining ore to have the sprayer contribute. It would take a bit of time to create enough room for a beachhead on the north side.  Even with a SuperCannon in place, it still took a bit to clear out the remaining resistance. Two Totems to supply us ... and between them, if you look closely, there's a spot to place a siphon to gather even more.  Once we hook all that up, here's how things look back at the Forge. The Aether itself is those small, barely-visible whitish things with a dark center, wafting their way through the air over here. You can see that at least for now, our upgrade options are limited and half of them we can't even do anything with. Fire rate, energy and ore storage, energy and ore efficiency we do have though. I went with fire rate first but would eventually max out these possibilities. That left just one object left; the Ticon structure in the middle of the compound which dominates the map.  By this point, it's flooded the entirety of the main chamber and flowed over some. So we've got a lot of creeper to deal with. The blocks are still doing their thing; in fact I think they are bigger than before. I think this works like most of the CW2 manipulation did, by drawing creeper from the machine to feed the blocks.  This was my first idea. I didn't work, but hey it was worth a shot. I built a wall to stop the blocks ... but as you can see it just flows right over it. Doesn't stop, slow down, etc. I'd used up the extra ore but still had the one deposit operating, so I built a couple of bomber bases to pound the main chamber. That wasn't going to be nearly enough on it's own, but it would help limit how much built up in there.  I tried digging a bit to stop the blocks, because I noticed that the compound 'floor' is at a height of 7. The walls of it are at 10, but by digging down to 1 I'd give it a bigger obstacle to traverse. Again, the blocks don't care. Here I'm also just removing the wall sections by lowering them down to 7. I've got to build a massive front of weapons to take out the blocks as they approach, so I can build relays behind them. If any creeper at all reaches relays or collectors, they incinerate them instantly. This is the only way I can think of to get into the main chamber itself.  Mortars are too slow to take on the blocks ... by the time their payload arrives the block has already moved. So this was a job for pulse cannons. LOTS of pulse cannons. I lost a few things in the process but eventually it works. Here I've literally removed the wall with with a terra so that I can just waltz into the main chamber now.  All of these little 'posts' make maneuvering and advancing a pain ... so I just bring a Terra with me to eliminate them as we go. As we get closer, the mortars start to serve more of a useful purpose.  When the Ticon machine goes down, courtesy of a nullifier of course, something predictable and yet surprising happens. The blocks stop moving, and release their payload right where they are. This ... creates some minor issues as they overflow the walls of the compound in a couple spots and I have to redirect some cannons to deal with the mess. But we're now totally in cleanup mode. In a few minutes time, I'm able to collect the trio of shield keys, and the threat from another world is eliminated.  Now only Chanson, site of the Warp Inhibitor, is off-limits to us. The three systems in the middle orbit are now available in whatever order I may wish to visit them.
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Aug 21, 2018 00:35
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I didn't see a clever way to do that level either.  Brute force it is!
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Aug 21, 2018 02:28
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Klaus88 posted:I didn't see a clever way to do that level either. Same! I thought you might be able to make a wall or a hole and it would stop, but alas. I ended up rebuilding a lot of relays. I don't think I ever tried a mass of cannon like that, that's a good idea.
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Aug 21, 2018 03:06
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Yeah, that level's a bit poo poo. With enough cannons and upgrades, you can kill the patrolling bits of creeper - but it's long and tedious and irritating.
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Aug 21, 2018 06:16
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Ah yes, the totems. What they never tell you is that they speed up the rate at which they spit out aether (and their spinning animation) every 30 seconds of so they're connected (and the Forge is also connected, or maybe by flipping a setting on the totem's settings panel). So it's usually a good idea to connect to them as fast as possible.
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Aug 21, 2018 06:52
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carbondioxide posted:What they never tell you is that they speed up the rate at which they spit out aether (and their spinning animation) every 30 seconds of so they're connected (and the Forge is also connected, or maybe by flipping a setting on the totem's settings panel). So it's usually a good idea to connect to them as fast as possible. I think your avatar is wrong: you're not the stupidest anything on the forums :P. I recorded a new level shortly after reading this, and was able to note this(I'd already realized there was an indicator of 1.??x but didn't really know what it was doing). Good tip!
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Aug 21, 2018 10:19
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So there's something regarding forges that I learned the hard way, and hopefully you won't repeat learning it the hard way. Your technology is stored in the forge, not somehow globally. If your forge gets destroyed one way or another, your technology gets sent back to zero even if you build another forge. Even if you're not fighting on multiple fronts, you should put down all of your command nodes if you have ample space. They generate some energy and that boost can be very useful, especially initially. Though a bit of a problem is that the count for energy generation is summed up and that sum is displayed for each command node in the network, but energy being sent out is shown individually. This makes more sense for AC considering that it's actually stored at command nodes in a way that is tracked individually, but it's kind of weird for energy considering that it's not individually tracked and it makes it harder to see if you're capping energy. (What I mean is: Say you're generating 10 energy in your network and have two command nodes. They will each say +10 energy, but the pull listed for the nodes may say something like -2 and -6 because one is sending out more packets than the other.) I don't know if this distinction was made before, but it's not just that the nullifiers can fire uphill. They don't care about terrain or obstacles as long as they're in range. You can use them straight through a wall if you want, and you might be required to at some point, I don't know. Count me among the people who were disappointed in their initial playthrough to find out that there apparently wasn't a clever solution to this map.
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Aug 21, 2018 19:41
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You can be a bit more time-efficient and skip some of the blocks, and saving up your ore to swamp the area in anti-creeper can help.
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Aug 21, 2018 19:53
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Ruine Video  This is actually big enough that a couple of 'islands' are below the screen here. We can see though that it's another 'islands in the void' map, with some weird thing going on in the lower-right, an artifact, an energy resource to tap, Totems, Spore Towers everywhere ... there's a lot going on here.    Lia did just fine for billions of years, and now needs to recalibrate more often than Garrus Vakarian.       That's pretty cool -- but it also means that I'm still in the tutorial here. The tutorial is as long, or nearly so, as the entire main story in the previous games. Ok then.   Your complete lack of even the most cursory, uber-hogwash explanation of why you couldn't do this earlier is duly noted for the record.   That's a few incoming spores ... 10 if I count right. I had time to get collectors up and a few reactors, and then I put up a quarter of beams to try and protect from all directions.  I add a couple more beams, and more reactors after this. They are kept busy.  Just to the southwest, I extend relays to get the Guppy artifact as soon as we get on top of the energy situation. Which basically just meant more reactors. We're up to like 15 or 16 spores coming at once now. Feels a bit like ChopRaider from the first game, only not as hard. I get one built, but before I use it we connect to that message storage device to the southeast.             Either we are being trolled by whoever put these here, or there's something we don't fully understand and it's not as impossible as Lia says. I'm leaning strongly to the second explanation.  The anomaly further southeast is going quite haywire. There's AC there, from an unknown source, and it's fighting with itself. It appears that however this happened, the region of space has some seriously messed-up stuff going on. I put up a SuperBeam after taking out one of the spore towers to aid in shooting down all the incoming projectiles.  Then it's time to try out this Guppy thing. This island is some ways to the east. Wouldn't hurt to get a Totem up and running. The guppies have launching pads just like strafers or bombers, and then I can just land them and they'll connect to whatever I need done until they are out of energy. I try putting the guppy on the Power Zone after taking out this tower, but it doesn't seem to do anything. I then build the Forge on that spot, which doesn't do any good either from what I can tell. I need constant energy over there, but I surprisingly discover that I don't need to micromanage the Guppy -- it just refills from it's launching pad and goes back without my intervention. I definitely want to leave this one doing that, so it can keep the Totem and Forge running.  I use this island, where the message artifact was found, to set up a couple more ... uh ... Guppy Pads? That's just sounds silly. But it's what they are. Time to clean out the various island towers.  Here, well to the south, is an actual emitter. With the shield key naturally. And I can't get any sort of conventional connection there. The best idea I find, though Strafers would also have worked, is to put up this SuperMortar nearby. It'll pummel the thing for a while. An Aether resource location is found on another island, and I deploy a siphon there. As I clear out more towers, I try putting relays on the power zones on those islands. I discover that if it increases their range at all, it's not by much. Somebody mentioned that relays benefited in some manner from the things -- I'm wondering if it's packet speed then? Because I can't see any impact at all. Whatever.  A combined-arms attack with the mortar firing from afar, and a few cannons backed up by a guppy proves enough to handle this landing.  Maybe there's another way, but since Guppies can't connect to stuff like the shield key, the only way I find to get it is to land the second Command Node here. And we're finished! I think the Guppy is a cool idea. Hopefully not one that I'll use once and forget about for the rest of the game.
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Aug 26, 2018 10:04
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Malicus posted:there's something regarding forges that I learned the hard way, and hopefully you won't repeat learning it the hard way. Your technology is stored in the forge, not somehow globally. If your forge gets destroyed one way or another, your technology gets sent back to zero even if you build another forge. Good to know on the forge thing … so I would guess the lesson there is don't lose your forge. Protect it well. On the second, I've found so far that A) I generally want the space for other things like reactors or whatever, and B) I'm not playing so optimally that the little bit of energy they give is going to help. I'll try to keep it in mind as we go forward though.
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Aug 26, 2018 10:06
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Thotimx posted:As I clear out more towers, I try putting relays on the power zones on those islands. I discover that if it increases their range at all, it's not by much. Somebody mentioned that relays benefited in some manner from the things -- I'm wondering if it's packet speed then? Because I can't see any impact at all. Relays on power zones can--or at least should--connect to other relays across at least twice the distance. Their connection range to other structures isn't extended at all, though, so it's kind of weak unless you have two power zones across a big empty space.
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Aug 26, 2018 11:49
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I really underused guppies when I first played the game, but nowadays I love them. They are really good at getting stuff done early, since they are basically an infinite range relay.
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Aug 26, 2018 12:26
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The reason the totem at 15:05 in the video didn't do anything was because a forge wasn't built and the checkbox on the totem to have it charge up anyway wasn't clicked (though I tend to find the latter a bit of a waste of energy, but there might be situations where it's useful). It doesn't require any sort of network connection to the forge. As you've seen, aether just flows through the air from a totem to the forge.
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Aug 27, 2018 18:31
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Really Pants posted:Relays on power zones can--or at least should--connect to other relays across at least twice the distance. Their connection range to other structures isn't extended at all, though, so it's kind of weak unless you have two power zones across a big empty space. Nearly every building has some sort of effect, but not all the effects are hugely useful. Going forward, I'll confirm any specific effects you ask about, or any effects that you specifically try and can't identify what it actually does, but I'm not going to just list them all out. Really Pants is correct in that power zone Relays have a double connection range to other relays only. Collectors have triple connection range to everything, triple range on collected terrain, and generate 50% more energy for all terrain covered. Using the best possible circumstances, a PZ collector can generate ~2.7 energy/second, which is still less than a power zone reactor's 4 energy/second. So if you want to dedicate a power zone to energy production, always build a reactor, never bother with a collector. Here's the issue with the Guppy that makes it hard to notice the effects - on a power zone, it gets double the amount of storage for energy but also requests it from the system twice as fast, so it spends the same amount of time recharging, but can hang out longer at its destination before it has to return to base. It also moves faster than a normal guppy. It's hard to tell unless you've built and sent out multiple guppies to the same destination and watch them. Any weapon with a fixed range has its range doubled on a power zone. The ever popular Cannon gets its fire rate quadrupled on a Power Zone, but each individual shot has its cost reduced to 1/3rd the normal energy cost - it drains energy faster, but is way more efficient than a regular cannon for the work that it does. Moreso than in the previous CW games, Cannons do not quickly clear out extensive "depth" of creeper - especially when you have a "wave" of creeper that is taller than the height of the cannon. Cannons can't shoot up, so if you have a 5-6 "block" tall wave of creeper, your cannon can really only really shoot at the bottom part of it. You could make elevated platforms for your cannons, but it's pretty inefficient to do that except as a boost when you're trying to climb cliffs or something. Dealing with dense creeper is what mortars are for; power zone cannons can do it at a decent rate but mortars are just better for it. Also, mortars ignore elevation, so put cannons on any elevated positions and use mortars to fire from below.
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Aug 27, 2018 19:41
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Landing Command Nodes on power zones should power up everything imho
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Aug 27, 2018 20:13
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Really Pants posted:Landing Command Nodes on power zones should power up everything imho It does have an effect! The effect sucks. I'm not even going to mention what it is, because it's that hard to notice.
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Aug 28, 2018 01:08
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Really Pants posted:Relays on power zones can--or at least should--connect to other relays across at least twice the distance. Their connection range to other structures isn't extended at all, though, so it's kind of weak unless you have two power zones across a big empty space. Gotcha. I think that's the piece I was missing … I was trying to connect a relay on a power zone to one that wasn't, which didn't help. Does seem like an edge-case thing, but I could have used it to extend the network to that island with the emitter. This might have been the best time actually to do so. Olesh posted:Nearly every building has some sort of effect, but not all the effects are hugely useful. Thanks for the info dump, and the discretion. I've been surprised at how long the 'extended tutorial' has been lasting here. There's still a couple of locked spots in the control panel, so I'm not even quite finished with it yet.
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Aug 28, 2018 02:55
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You should only need one relay on a power zone for the extra distance.
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Aug 28, 2018 02:59
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Really Pants posted:You should only need one relay on a power zone for the extra distance. Yup, I think a relay on a power zone gives double the distance to other relays not on a power zone. Have two relays on power zones? They can connect if they have 4x the distance of regular non-power zone relays. As usual, the connection between relays and other units is always tiny. I usually use them to build a couple shortcuts. One next to a command node, then a row of them to wherever I need a lot of packets at the time. It's faster than having the packets traverse the collector network. And just dump a new one in range of the previous relay when you advance your front.
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Aug 28, 2018 06:58
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I like building a relay backbone for my power grid; my preferencue is for packets heading to the front lines to go directly from a command node to a relay, then follow relay connections until they're a single collector away from where they're needed.
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Aug 29, 2018 04:03
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Relays are great; just not often the best use of power zones, is all.
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Aug 29, 2018 04:05
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Choix Video First up a bit of an anecdote: this is the first Creeper World mission I ever saw. The only reason I know about the series at all is a while back I happened a catch a video from noted youtuber quill18, who was playing this. He only did the one mission(at least at the time), and I only watched part of it but I was interested in it. Then I looked up what the heck Creeper World was, which eventually led to this thread. So it's all quill's fault. Or something. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled creeper-stomping.  A tall map which extends just a bit lower than this. We've got a defensible structure at least, with an emitter and shield key in the northwest. It's the onlly emitter ... but creeper is bubbling out in three locations. We'll soon learn why ...    Lia no longer wastes time changing the subject. Just pretends not to have heard what Skars said, until he does.    Honestly, it's past time.       This happens within seconds. For ignored and completely unexplained reasons, these random slip exits or whatever can't go inside the walls. Anywhere outside of it though can become extremely hazardous in an instant.  There's some new information; shields can block spore impacts. There are no towers on this map though. This large central area I fill with collectors asap, and we've also got some energy sources to siphon.  Then I work on getting shields and mortars up. Shields will protect the entrances, mortars ensure the walls don't get overflowed. Already there is creeper everywhere outside. This area to the southwest has a trio of totems as well, and a notch in the hallway accessing it clearly meant for a relay. There's another similar one to protect(without totems) in the northeast. That makes three openings that need shields.  Here's the situation as the four siphons are depleted. Their fruits were put to good use, as we have fully powered shields doing their thing and some reactors up with more on the way. Even so, I need more energy. The shield at the top here has a clear zone beyond the barricade.  I turn off most of the mortars for a while so I can paint the inside of the compound mostly purple with reactors. That leads to this. One of those maps that you don't want to twiddle your thumbs on, or bad things will happen. I deploy a few cannons to help clean up the mess, more reactors to get out of the energy hole, which eventually we do with a couple more mortars to shore up the wall defenses. Then it's time for the Forge to go in.  After a couple upgrades, including one energy efficiency, and even more reactors I'm up to 25 produced there which seems to be sufficient for the time being. A range increase helps the mortar keep the creeper at bay, which is already being done adequately. Now we have a veritable mountain to deal with as we go on the attack here. 60 creeper a second, and it can pop up anywhere.  This is one circumstance when my first instinct, overwhelming firepower, doesn't really work. When the creeper just bursts from beneath you and destroys your life-giving relay, there's not a great deal you can do.  Eventually I get sick of losing weapons and relays and rebuilding them constantly, coming up with an effective if slow and expensive plan. This is Shield Leapfrog. As I build new ones forward, they create enough room to protect the relays going a bit forward, and so on. The limited range of the shields makes this painstaking work, but I don't have a better idea.  There are times when I swear the creeper knows where I'm trying to move next, and repeatedly erupts just there. It does eventually work, and a string of several shields here has us close enough to nullify the emitter. I really hope this isn't an oft-repeated gimmick. The point is probably to force the use of shields. Info assimilated.
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Sep 1, 2018 12:15
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I wonder if this is a level that would benefit from the use of guppies. At least with guppies you don't need to worry about having a chain of relays. In any case, you can drop shields into (very) shallow creeper - they will clear out an area around themselves before they run out of health, and if you are quick about it you can place them outside of relay range and resupply them before they run out.. So shields with cannon/mortar support can go a bit further apart than you did there. I find this level is much faster if you just ignore building up an economy and just rush the emitter - the siphons will keep you supplied for a while, and if you move quick enough you can clear the level before the creeper breach the walls substantially. Fangz fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Sep 1, 2018 |
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Sep 1, 2018 12:31
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Could you tell us what new Forge upgrades have become available? Every mission we're told that there's new stuff but I haven't seen in the posts what it is.
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Sep 1, 2018 13:22
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The thing with shields is that they have particularly low health for units expected to be in close proximity to creeper. They don't die IMMEDIATELY, but still much quicker than cannons and the like. Still, I like to include one or two in my assault squad. Since they don't care about altitude or obstacles, they are good for clearing creeper off high ground that you can't easily attack, and they are especially good for protecting a nullifier that must be placed in awkward terrain.
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Sep 1, 2018 18:49
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This level is a little strange. You're intended to use shields to protect yourself against the randomly appearing creeper, but it seems like there's a window of time where creeper can still appear underneath the shield for an instant and break relays. This can lead to the impression that shields don't actually protect you, although they do. One thing Thotimx missed out on is CW3 has a new upgrade that didn't exist in the previous games - "Build Speed", which is very nice in helping make the advance move more quickly. Your relays start working faster, it's quicker to replace anything that goes down, and you spend less time waiting for replacement/reinforcements to be constructed. It also helps when you've underestimated your power needs and need to expand your power generation quickly, before you lose too much ground as your guns run dry. The strategy Thotimx outlines is more or less the "intended" strategy for the level, and I was never able to find any weird tricks. The level is too straightforward to bypass the gimmick, so the only thing you can do is grab a siphon immediately, then use that opportunity to build all of your collectors, slam down the Forge immediately (there's a perfect spot in the upper right part of the fortress), and fill the central area with reactors. Once the creeper starts to make progress chewing through the gates, you can have basically the entire central area filled with reactors - don't overwhelm your siphons heavily, just continually build a little past your energy generation and keep throwing down more reactors before you build any shields or mortars. Three shields and a half dozen mortars spread out nicely are more than enough to keep you safe indefinitely, so you can continue to fill out the central area if you haven't finished that, leaving the upper area clear to build weapons. Then you can just lay down stretches of cannons and mortars (you can drag-build them) and a couple shields and start flying them into position outside the gates, building relays to provide energy while you leapfrog new shield bubbles at the edges of the old ones, spending your aether on energy generation, build speed, and weapon upgrades as desired. This is a fast, safe, and foolproof method of doing the level quickly
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Sep 1, 2018 18:54
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Well, this is how I did this level in under seven minutes.
Fangz fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Sep 1, 2018 |
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Sep 1, 2018 19:10
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carbon dioxide posted:ould you tell us what new Forge upgrades have become available? Every mission we're told that there's new stuff but I haven't seen in the posts what it is. I'll try. I know at first there were only 5 levels of Energy/Ore Efficiency and there are now 10; similarly, there were 2 of fire range/fire rate and we now have five of each of those. Build Speed as Olesh mentioned has been added along the way; he's also right that I don't put much stock in that one. I've usually built my key structures before the Forge, because I make sure I have enough energy for defenses before I build it. So build speed, so far at least, has been like packet speed only upgraded when I have so much Aether I don't know what to do with it. There are more storage techs also. I don't know how many because in one of the missions that will go up soon, I got up to like level 17 energy storage which was way more than I thought I would ever need, and still I could upgrade it more. There weren't more than 10 of those at the start, but the others say '2/10' or whatever and the storage doesn't give an upper limit. I'd be surprised if it's infinite, but I really don't know. Spose I should conduct on !SCIENCE! on it with a high-Aether map. Then there's 5 levels of Move Speed, which was totally locked initially. That's like Build Speed in that I really don't value it much. And Packet Speed's still around -- like storage that doesn't tell me how much is available.
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Sep 2, 2018 05:26
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I think you're getting build speed backwards. Yeah, you might be able to use it to get your key buildings up more quickly, I guess, but if you combine it with energy storage, what it really allows you to do is crank out a ton of poo poo very quickly. Sure, if you're playing ~optimally~ your energy generation will always be roughly equal to your usage, but if you upgrade both, it helps mitigate suboptimal play. Say you expand your front a long way past beam coverage and realize that a ton of spores are about to launch from multiple directions. Having both (along with some packet speed) allows you to slam down a bunch of beams at once without starving your cannons, and they might build quickly enough to make a difference. It's also nice to be able to queue up multiple groups of 4 cannons, a mortar or two, a shield, and two or three guppies for deepstriking and establishing beachheads or sniping emitters without having to build them one by one or risk being overrun because your guns ran dry. Move speed is another QoL one for this (and does affect aircraft, improving their uptime). Sure, they're not gonna be the first things you get, but as other techs get more expensive or hit their caps, these become more attractive. Lprsti99 fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Sep 2, 2018 |
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Sep 2, 2018 07:48
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First world I remember restarting. I used a lot more shields and fewer mortars to keep the base secure, but I couldn't tell you if it was really more efficient or not, I just figured shields were the order of the day and went nuts. Once I started pushing to the emitter, I built shields next to the command center and moved them out to where I wanted a relay before building it which, when backed up with some firepower, seemed to work well enough without weird creeper spawn issues.
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Sep 4, 2018 02:52
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 16:53 |
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:First world I remember restarting. I used a lot more shields and fewer mortars to keep the base secure, but I couldn't tell you if it was really more efficient or not, I just figured shields were the order of the day and went nuts. Once I started pushing to the emitter, I built shields next to the command center and moved them out to where I wanted a relay before building it which, when backed up with some firepower, seemed to work well enough without weird creeper spawn issues. This is the level that began my as-yet unbroken streak of obsessively overusing shields without particular regard for the actual wisdom of doing so. Aside from digitalis(  ) creeper pretty much can't break through a shield; it'll flow into the edges but I don't think I've literally ever seen it actually overrun a shield generator by simple mass. So I have this habit of covering my entire front with shields and then putting in some other weaponry to deal with digitalis and thin out the stuff getting forced back. It's a ridiculous energy sink, but by god it works.
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Sep 4, 2018 03:16
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