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The wave-of-guppies based assault is one of my favourite things to do in CW3. Note that you didn't technically need the command node there, you can build off of the guppies directly, though you wouldn't be able to plug them into the superreactors. I think a method that would have worked to defend that nullifier was to put an always-on sprayer on that power zone first, build up a big pool of anti-creeper, then move the sprayer off and build a nullifier. EDIT: There was an update on the previous page, oops sniped Fangz fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Sep 20, 2018 |
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Sep 20, 2018 10:44
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I haven't looked at the latest update yet, but I felt like commenting on a few of these.Thotimx posted:There's another one I won't mention yet for getting a stupid-high energy income(not storage), because I'm sure it will probably be necessary somewhere in the bonus material. It won't be. You need a pretty specific setup to make it happen, and that setup will slow the game WAY down to the point that you definitely won't want to actually play with it. Thotimx posted:** Chanson -- win without destroying any Gliders or Glider Factories. That would probably mean not using the Berthas either since they are too close to the glider paths. This would certainly be doable, but arduous. Keep in mind that a Glider attacking then destroying itself fails the achievement, so you need to be a lot more careful than the achievement wording may imply. Thotimx posted:** Ruine -- Destroy a spore tower before it finishes building. An interesting speed challenge that probably wouldn't be too terrible. I kind of instinctually did this one the first time I did the map without knowing about the achievement. So no, it won't be terrible at all. Edit: Okay, commenting on one thing real quick in the update: Thotimx posted:if I'm wrong then it's too late because I've got to clear the inhibitor planet before doing anything else. I'm pretty sure that it only stops you from forward progress. I know it logically should stop you completely, but this game isn't big on convential logic. Also, it wouln't be super good game design to lock the player in like that. Malicus fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Sep 20, 2018 |
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Sep 20, 2018 18:15
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Malicus posted:I'm pretty sure that it only stops you from forward progress. I know it logically should stop you completely, but this game isn't big on convential logic. Also, it wouln't be super good game design to lock the player in like that. Yeah, you can always go back to the map even if there's still a warp inhibitor in the system, you just can't go to any systems that aren't connected to at least one system with a destroyed warp inhibitor.
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Sep 20, 2018 18:53
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Oh also Thotmix, an interface hint: if you double click an unit you select all units of that type on the screen. Great for ordering guppies and strafers around.
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Sep 21, 2018 22:47
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Finally working on getting the next mission up, but while I do that … Malicus posted:I'm pretty sure that it only stops you from forward progress. I know it logically should stop you completely, but this game isn't big on convential logic. Also, it wouln't be super good game design to lock the player in like that. Are you accusing CW of actually having 'super-good game design' here? JK, this makes sense, I just assumed you couldn't leave at all and didn't ever try. Fangz posted:a method that would have worked to defend that nullifier was to put an always-on sprayer on that power zone first, build up a big pool of anti-creeper, then move the sprayer off and build a nullifier. Didn't think of that, definitely a more elegant solution. Similarly, I'll file your double-click suggestion under 'stuff to forget to do every time I record a level'.
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Sep 25, 2018 00:07
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Meso Video  We head back through Frykt and on to Apex, where it seems likely we'll have another one-planet system leading to Tormented Space. But you don't know until you try ...  Yeppirs, that's what we're looking at here.  The further we are from danger, the closer we are to harm?         Once again these aren't the droids you're looking for. The stop sign is put up. We don't know why, and in fact Skars has absolutely no good reason, just a nebulous(pun intended) 'feeling'. How does he know going this way isn't the path to defeating the Loki/Creeper, or that any such path even exists for that matter?? Yes, he knows his purpose, but still there's no reason for this. Whatever. We will do what we're told.  The shrunk-down distortion is regrettable, but necessary. We've got some structures of various sizes here as the distinguishing feature, along with the usual compendium of emitters, inhibitor, shield key, totems -- blah blah we know that drill already. But what are those other things? Pyramids? Ziggurats?? Somebody's third-grade art project???  Takes one to know one, Skars. Ok fine, I'll be nice. For now.  Obviously it met with the usual success rate. Tangling with the Creeper is about as good an idea as starting a land war in Asia or picking a fight with Alexander the Great, as propositions go.        So ... you don't know what they will do, but you know they are defensive in nature? Seems an awfully big risk to keep taking without more information. I mean, all it takes is for one of these to 'malfunction' or be a booby-trap(since the Creeper likes corrupting any and all technology, why would these still function as originally intended) - that supercharges the emitters and makes their output multiply exponentially. So long Skars and Lia! But that won't happen. Probably. We hope. But don't really know. But we're dumb enough to try it anyway. Go team!!   The starting location isn't as obvious on this map, but I still managed to get the 'right' one. It's as far as anything from the initial creeper surge which is wasting no time, and close to two of the three pyramids.  This is a mistake, but a natural one. Get the cannons up to protect against the encroaching tide. All the emitters are the same: 50 creeper every 0.17s. All together 1.8k per second, on a flat map. The Creeper is coming, and it's not being particularly patient about it.  After getting a nice flow of energy to the closest, smallest pyramid, with a few reactors up, this happens. Well that's pretty cool. Clearly the secrets of Anti-Creeper were handed down through the civilizations, because even these guys have it. This thing generates AC, and has a shield. It's not obvious yet, but it puts out a LOT of AC. As in, enough to match a few of those emitters combined. I'd estimate it about 1k/second at full power.  I throw up a mortar, a forge, more reactors, and push to the second, largest, pyramid. I didn't really have the energy for it yet and I'm in the red here, but I wanted to get there before the creeper swamped it. It has a bigger shield ... but only occasionally pulses a much smaller amount of anti-creeper. Took me quite a while through this map before I realized that, at first I thought with more energy it would give a more consistent flow. At this point both pyramid shields are flickering on and off like strobe lights.  It's takes a bit to get up more reactors, collectors under the area covered by the bigger shield, and connect up to another totem. But you know what's coming here. It's time to Bertha-Smash this map.  With four berthas each sighted in on emitters to try to lower the overall amount of creeper, I start out with some Mortars to push south.  I had some energy issues, compounded somewhat by overbuilding, for a bit. It didn't take long though to gradually push south, aided by the AC. A SuperBertha, then a SuperMortar on the second one here, soon started turning a gradual advance into a quicker one in grand CW style.  Next up was the medium-sized pyramid in the southwest, if for no other reason than curiosity about what it does. It has a shield as well, cool -- but what on earth is that yellow ... thing. I mean it looks like a man if it wasn't about a million times bigger than one. Where is it going? At first I thought this was the booby-trap part. Is it headed to unleash an atomic explosion on a Totem and cause some sort of space-time cataclysm? And it's making more. They come out regularly. We can't fire on them either. HELP!!  I'm about to try placing snipers when this happens. They are basically AC 'bombs'. They pick what appears to be a random area on the map that has creeper, and go blow up there with AC. That's actually quite useful! Definitely don't want to shoot them. Between these exploding yellowish AC statue-men or whatever they are(I'm actually curious what they are called, if anything, if anyone knows) and the continued removal of emitters, things quickly wrap up at this point. I move a command node closer and relay a few weapons in to purge the emitter. And the shield key is another one for Farbor. More foreboding.
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Sep 25, 2018 04:13
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A couple of programming notes: ** It's been brought to my attention(many thanks, stryth!) that the audio is not only still out of balance on the videos, but it's actually getting worse. Back earlier in the CW3 story when I first got complaints about it, I did think it was off but not that much and started reducing it. What I'm using now is a third as high on the game effects as it was then, but the increased number of weapons have made overwhelmed that reduction. So I'm about to(literally when I finish posting this) do some testing and rein it back in. That might even me turning them off, but I'll do that if it's required. Thanks for those who have given feedback on it, and/or put up with it. Lesson hopefully learned in paying more attention to that, and I'll make an announcement here in the thread when we reach the point of 'fixed' videos. ** The Meso planet has a special achievement as well, Apexian. The gimmick there is to complete the mission using no weapons other than nullifiers. Sounded interesting to me so it took a crack at it, and after some failed ideas I was able to get it done. I don't think are multiple techniques although I could be wrong, but I would like to know if people would like to see it as a 'bonus' update. If so, I'll do that and put it up next -- otherwhise we'll move on to the next system.
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Sep 25, 2018 04:20
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I'd be interested in it as a bonus update. So Krig is basically Why Bombers Exist: The Planet; those Guppy Bridge plans go a lot more smoothly when you paint a landing site with AC.
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Sep 25, 2018 04:28
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I remember playing this and harvest: massive encounter back when I was in high school. They were the thing to play if your laptop couldn’t handle anything more advanced the RA1. Just beat creeper world three myself but I skipped all the cut scenes so I’m looking forward to seeing what’s going on.
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Sep 25, 2018 04:37
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I don't think the AC-exploding robots are ever named in that level, I'd also be curious what they're called. Probably something as memorable as "terp" or "guppy" so I won't get my hopes up...
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Sep 25, 2018 04:53
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Jet Jaguar posted:I don't think the AC-exploding robots are ever named in that level, I'd also be curious what they're called. Plongers e: with a soft "g" Hwurmp fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 04:54
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The anatomy of a "quick" run, although no doubt this could be quicker yet... Krig is an annoying bastard of a level, no two ways about it. Thotimx's starting strategy was sound - a sprayer, a sniper, and a pair of cannons deployed roughly at each "entrance" of the digitalis keeps you safe indefinitely. Afterwards, it's just ensuring sufficient beam coverage and you've achieved stasis and can't lose. I always double up on beams, not because it's necessarily efficient, but because beams are cheap and I'd rather not ever have any spores get through. Four beam pairs, spaced out along the "beach" is more than enough. Once I had all my defenses in place, I dragged a row of reactors to power future energy demands and started building my assault force, building another strip of reactors once the first one finished. Then come the beachhead assaults - I went for the small island, same as Thotimx, but I built a couple guppies and about ten cannons and did it the fast and lazy way - select drag the cannons, send them flying off into the approximate landing zone, and then retarget some of the inner cannon targets to the outer layer so I have room to target guppies inside the blob of cannons. Time the guppies to land a little after the cannons, and voila! A beachhead of overwhelming force. I didn't have the guppies built and ready in time, so I just sent the cannons over in a blob to soften up the island, waited until they ran out of ammo, and then pulled them out to resupply and repair while the guppies built. While that was going on, I dragged a couple lines of strafers to build in preparation for the bigger amphibious assault, as well as two more guppies. This tanked my power, unfortunately, and I had to wait a minute for my power draw to stabilize and build more reactors to meet the absurdly large demand. I could have been more efficient with the strafers - setting up a rough V or L shape would probably have been better - but I dragged them in a line roughly halfway between the emitters and the edge of the southeast island - their job was to soften up the incoming wave so that the beachhead had less to deal with. Then the second beachhead was sent over, with a couple mortars and snipers added to the mix - same deal here, move the blob over and shift a couple units from the inside to the outside so there's room for guppies to land. I immediately nullified one of the closer spore towers so I could throw a cannon on there for large, efficient area coverage, and then hit the southwest spore tower so I could place a relay and connect back to the main island - once I had full power connections, mopping up the rest of the southeast island was straightforward. However, nailing the center spore towers/Ticon machine is still a pain in the rear end. There's just no good way to manage it. The best I could come up with was moving one of the northern sprayers to the power zone that Thotimx had his blaster on in an attempt to "shield" it with anti-creeper. It still took 3-4 attempts to get the nullifier built and fired. Try as I might, I just can't get the level under 15 minutes.
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Sep 25, 2018 11:47
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Thotimx posted:Are you accusing CW of actually having 'super-good game design' here? JK, this makes sense, I just assumed you couldn't leave at all and didn't ever try. I probably should have said that it would not be "particularly good game design", but details! Thotimx posted:** The Meso planet has a special achievement as well, Apexian. The gimmick there is to complete the mission using no weapons other than nullifiers. Sounded interesting to me so it took a crack at it, and after some failed ideas I was able to get it done. I don't think are multiple techniques although I could be wrong, but I would like to know if people would like to see it as a 'bonus' update. If so, I'll do that and put it up next -- otherwhise we'll move on to the next system. I have no idea if this came up during your attempts, but the Singularity Weapon from the Forge is not actually classified as a weapon, despite having "weapon" in its name. I struggled a lot with that achievement until I made use of that. Also, I didn't activate the southwest pyramid which may have caused problems for me.
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Sep 25, 2018 18:40
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Malicus posted:I'm pretty sure that it only stops you from forward progress. I know it logically should stop you completely, but this game isn't big on convential logic. Also, it wouln't be super good game design to lock the player in like that. Inhibitors require to be at both ends of a nodeline, otherwise there'd be no need to put them on shield worlds.
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Sep 26, 2018 01:29
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Otrav Video  We're on to the Andere system, and right now there are just two stars left to visit on the map.  Surprisingly, there are only two systems here -- including the mysterious Farbor. Still, I was expecting more in numbers of planets.        I'm surprised Lia is even able to speak, what with all the 'gel circuit maintenance' that is surely going to be required now.   That's ... a lot.     ...  That seems obsessively thorough.      Well, that explains why Farbor is so dog-gone special ...     Big sucker of a map. Got some weird circles by that building in the east, a bunch of emitters naturally, and some more somethings-or-others on the various plateaus.  Let's blather on some more about this planet.    That doesn't sound like fun.   Interesting how Skars has switched to telling Lia what to do, when it was initially the other way around ...        Unless what, Lia? Oh that's right - you're just going to leave your thoughts hanging there. AGAIN. Given the situation, it would seem the shield key is the main thing here. If there are billions of worlds like this, silencing one won't matter much.  West side appears to be the only option. All three nodes go down and some collectors - that siphon contains 500 energy, which sounds like a lot. Some of the creeper is starting to flow into the ditch protecting this area, and it's not all that deep.  I get four mortars spaced out to try to keep the ditch from filling up too much, then put down some reactors and cannons.  Wanting to act before the creeper builds up too much, I ry a crossing soon afterwards. It fails horribly. The fairly narrow 'steps' or 'ledges' or whatever up the hillsides make things more difficult on this map. I try a second time with similar results. Then a third with more weapons. Fail again ...  And now I have a bigger problem, as I took away all the weapons defending this area and now the creeper is overflowing the ditch and taking out a bunch of my base. By the time I regain control of the situation, the majority of my reactors down there are kaput. So ... this isn't going super. The only real good news is that there are no Spore Towers on Otrav.  After regaining control of the situation and adding more reactors, not sure of any other way in which to proceed, I decide to build a bridge with a terp. If there isn't a good path, I'll make one. It isn't particularly hard to defend ourselves on this world, but actually making offensive progress is another matter. Berthas aren't as useful when there are no large areas for the creeper to pool, although I do have one up to help out a bit.  It's a bit of a slow process with constant cannon fire to clear out enough creeper for the terraforming to happen, but it works. At 16 and a half minutes here, there's a lot of creeper pretty much everywhere I'm not.  Eventually I make the bridge wider and push to the east. This allows a sufficient concentration of firepower to start making things happen, though getting up the hill is going to be another matter ... I'm at least to the hill now securely though. It is painstaking work and soon I pause for more reactors and a couple more berthas. One of things about the design of this world is I can't just wait for Forge upgrades ... because I don't have access to any Totems initially.  A common theme at this point was for me to get close to getting a nullifier in place ... and then they'd dump more creeper on the hilltop and blow it up.  When I finally did take out the first one, I got a nice surprise ... some AC came out of it to make things a bit easier.  Once I'd secured the area, I soon leveraged this vantage point into taking out two nearby emitters. The hilltop to the north went next, and the usual pattern of accelerating progress eventuated ... particularly since each hill had a Totem, so the Aether supply grew with each conquest.  A point was reached where I'd have two or even three nullifiers going at once, and it became easy to forget where I was advancing, not notice when one was lost due to an untimely creeper dump by those darned circles, etc. That actually became more of an issue because the further I progressed, the more often they'd choose each hill to dump on(simply because there were fewer of them to pick from). I built more SuperBerthas than I needed during this process, and had some of them target the flat east end of the map by that Ticon structure, under the 'anything worth doing is worth overdoing' theory. This robbed those attraction fields of having any creeper to dump, so they just sort of sat on the final active hilltop and didn't do anything.  Here's a pretty good shot of the amount of overkill that was going on at the end, and I could have had more if I wanted it. Farbor Shield Key #3 already in my possession, I ended the activities of this station, and it was time to finally see just what Farbor has in store. This mission did not need to take an hour, but like all the others it eventually fell to my will ... err, my spamming of firepower.
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Sep 29, 2018 23:32
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It took me a few attempts, but I got Otrav under fifteen minutes. The how may not come as a surprise - you have a siphon available from the start of the map, and a couple nullifiable objectives with no creeper immediately protecting them. Grab the siphon immediately, and then relay over and drop nullifiers, stretching collectors along the left shelf. Pre-build a pair of shields before the nullifiers finish, and slot them into place on the Power Zone right away, and you'll be more or less as far along as Thotimx was 45 minutes into the video (albeit with a lot fewer reactors and Berthas). But that first foothold is the hard part, and if you don't claim it right away, there's no good way to get up there. If you don't claim the early foothold right away, this mission can easily take longer than an hour.
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Sep 30, 2018 05:59
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This is, again, a place made easier by shields. Shield bubbles are totally unaffected by elevation, so they're really good at fighting up rugged hillsides like this, where there's no space to drop blasters and it's too spread out to make a dent in with mortars. Next up is Farbor. Good luck, you're gonna need it. namehereguy fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Sep 30, 2018 |
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Sep 30, 2018 18:12
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Olesh posted:ou have a siphon available from the start of the map, and a couple nullifiable objectives with no creeper immediately protecting them. Grab the siphon immediately, and then relay over and drop nullifiers, stretching collectors along the left shelf. Probably wouldn't have thought of that … namehereguy posted:This is, again, a place made easier by shields. You're not the first person to say so. For whatever reason, like in CW1, it just rarely occurs to me to try to use them. I'm not actively against them in any sense, I just mentally go through the options I have and almost never go to them before thinking of something else I want to do instead. As for Farbor, I'm putting together that update now, but you're not wrong. Ultimately it wasn't quite as hard as I expected, but it definitely holds the restart record for CW3 to date.
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Oct 4, 2018 21:19
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Thotimx posted:You're not the first person to say so. For whatever reason, like in CW1, it just rarely occurs to me to try to use them. I'm not actively against them in any sense, I just mentally go through the options I have and almost never go to them before thinking of something else I want to do instead. Farbor is the first CW3 map that really has anything resembling a CW2 doom timer and the real possibility of failure. I touched on this a little bit but one of the big appeals of creeper world in general is its difficulty (or rather, it's complete lack of it). It's relatively trivial to achieve an unloseable state, where victory is eventually certain, but actually winning a map still requires you to overcome roadblocks here and there. As for Farbor itself, I'll wait to talk more about it once the update goes up.
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Oct 4, 2018 23:29
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Farbor Let's do this. Video Warning: that video is a hair over two hours long. With about an hour of material either off-screen or edited out. Also worth noting; At about the 1 hour, 25-minute mark is when I did the sound fix. There's a little blurp about that and some other stuff at that point.  That blue box is hard to read as this zoom. It says 'Destroy the Ore Processors before the Prism Ship launches.' We'll get to that. We're definitely at the point here where the levels were specifically designed and balanced to be challenging, and we've got digitalis, separated landmasses, spore towers building, some weird thing on a mesa in the northeast, and whatever that Prism Ship thing is in the middle. We'd better discuss this situation before proceeding.            Wait, what?  OIC. So that giant sucking sound is everything I know about physics being flushed down the drain. Understood.      So ... if we take too long and don't stop the Prism Ship in time, the Creeper might not destroy us on purpose, but rather on accident as a side effect. That's just grand.        It's a good thing that 'give up' isn't in Skars' vocabulary.  The eight grey pads around the Ore Processors 'activate' right away. At first I didn't even notice, much less have any idea what they were doing. We'll get back to them.  While I looked around at the map and took note of the emitter strengths, which aren't that high(20-30 every 0.5 seconds), the pads finished what they were doing. Which I eventually would discover, is building these transport ships. They go out to various ore deposits, gather loads, and bring them back for processing. Each load allows the construction of the Prism Ship to advance. I would later discover that if you have an ore mine or something else blocking the deposit they are trying to land on, it is simply and instantly destroyed with no harm done to the ore transport. I think that's pretty much a dirty trick.  Two nearly-identical islands, one in the northwest and one in the southeast, are the clear starting locations here. So it's a multi-tasking operation. That naturally complicates things. Each one has a totem, ore, an emitter, and an elevated place to put the command node.  In both locations I did this basic deal; as many collectors as I could get away with, a couple cannons to hold back the creeper, then reactors to expand the energy supply. I noticed the Prism Ship was at about 20% here, and it was about at this point when I relented to the idea that this would be an experimental attempt. I needed to learn how the mission worked, I wasn't going to be winning it on the first try. Which wasn't a real surprise anyway.  I hadn't even thought about getting Beams up yet, so uh this happened when the spore towers activated. Eventually I fought back to get enough of them going, added a sprayer on each island, and made gradual progress -- while the prism ship was rapidly getting finished up.  Eventually I got to one of the emitters, but also discovered that, as you can see here, cannons-mortars-sprayers-nullifers can't do diddly-squat to their ore transports. That's unfortunate. At about 13:40 on the mission timer, an alarm sounds as the Prism Ship is launched. All is lost.       Pretty elementary stuff honestly, as anyone who paid attention during primary-school Rift Space Studies knows.   'Everything we have' isn't much at this point. But all is not lost. Yet. Farbor has achievements for beating the mission both Early(keeping the Prism Ship from launching by destroying the Ore Processors) and Late(not stopping the Prism Ship, but blowing the Enhanced Totem before it fires).  The target area has emitters, digitalis, runner nests, a nice amount of built-up creeper, and and an Air Exclusion Zone covering almost the whole island. Almost, but not quite. Still, it's quite well-protected. About this point I started wondering about Snipers. We've seen them take out gliders, runners, etc. which can defeat our other weapon systems. Can they do anything to the transports? A minute after the first message, the Prism Ship reached the Enhanced Totem and began the firing sequence ...   That's true, but he's been a bit blase and cocky here.  I was playing with house money since I knew I wasn't going to win the mission this time, so I just started messing around with things for part of that 20 minutes. Here's a third of the way through it, you can see a reddish beam, the opened totem, display of the 34% progress so far, and whatnot. That gives a regular countdown on how long it is till Doom.  I built some strafers, not having noticed the air exclusion zone yet. Here's what happens when you try to violate it ... once you enter the zone, they just stop firing. They can fly through it, just can't do anything while they are there. I've also got a couple of berthas up, you can see the explosions from that below.  Since somebody had mentioned this in the thread, I gave it a try; the Return to Orbit option on the command node when full of ore. That gets the Rain Man achievement, and does this. It's literally raining anti-creeper.  Locations appear to be random on where they fall. That's cool, if a bit pointless. At this point, with several minutes before the firing sequence was complete, I just restarted. They didn't seem to be any point to continuing this attempt, and I wanted to try to improve my starting strategy. Take 2 -- 33:40 video, 3:35 mission timer  Got off to a bit better start, and figured I had a decent handle on the initial build order. Which basically at each island is a bunch of collectors, a couple cannons to hold off the creeper, reactors & a beam to boost energy, then eventually ore mine/sprayer/more reactors/a third and fourth cannon/one mortar on each. With emphasis on MOAR REACTORS, otherwhise energy just isn't going to happen.  I also did some SCIENCE and discovered that snipers can in fact damage the ore transports. So perhaps with enough of them, I could at least slow down the construction of the Prism Ship ... they can take a lot of damage though, so one sniper isn't enough to do a whole lot of good.  To completely stop a transport from getting any ore, it took three snipers. That's enough firepower to blow it up before it can pick up a load and leave. As seen here, when that happens they just build a new one, but still it does slow things down. I can't be shooting down all eight of them, because some of them don't come anywhere near the two starting islands, but it does work to an extent. Take 3 - 45:07 video So I restarted with the idea of focusing on slowing them down with the sniper strategy and see how much good that did me. By the time I had enough energy to power the intial snipers, it was six minutes in and the Prism Ship was already at 40%. So that was a bit discouraging.  In the north, this small island was another spot where I could take out the transports, making 3 of 8 under my control. It still had limited effect, and a lot of my energy was going to the effort, even with a SuperSniper in place there.  I decided to give this a try and see how far I could push things. Crossing over to the southern landmass here. The Prism Ship still finished at 16:12, which is later but only by about two and a half minutes. The Sniper Method bought me time, but no matter how much better I did it, that's all it was going to do. And I couldn't say with any confidence that it was even worth the time as opposed to putting resources elsewhere.  This was as far as I wanted to go, snagging another PZ, ore deposit, totem, and using that small island to cross over to the mainland. Of course guppies could have worked as well. That's something else I just haven't gotten in the habit of using. Sue me.  Well, I've made it to the primary island. On the other end of it is the Enhanced Totem. So this is progress. One emitter was quickly neutralized ... but the firing sequence was at 76%. It was clear this was taking too long.  I discovered something interesting though; taking out an Ore Processor also destroys both transport pads connected to it.  It's awkward moving through this whole area, where the prism ship launched from, because you can't land on any of the grey pads.  I took out everything in that area but wasn't quite ready to move forward when the end came. First, a blast of whitish Aether ...  Then a complete fade to black. Everything is destroyed. I particularly like the '167 more messages' on the left. Also, I perversely got an Achievement for this; Failure Has Its Own Rewards. Which is rather ironically named. The achievement itself is the only reward, and as far as I know, it's the only time you can lose a mission and get an achievement for it. I wanted to conduct more SCIENCE, but I waited several days before doing it. Take 4 -- 1:25 video, 32:40 mission timer  Having done a bunch of stuff off-screen, I resumed here with fixed audio and blathered on a bit about that. And sniper experimentation was the entire point of this run. You can see I have a stupid amount of them, and haven't taken out any of the ore processors. Reason being, I wanted to find out if I could slow down the firing sequence at all. I theorized that it might cost the Creeper energy to build the transports, so if I was constantly destroying them on all of their pads -- they literally barely have time to finish building, if that, with this many guns shooting at them -- perhaps that would drain energy from the Totem or something. You'll be happy to know that all I accomplished in this was confirming that this has no effect whatsoever. The sequence still proceeded just as quickly, literally to the second, as if I was doing nothing. Shooting at this stuff has no impact whatsoever after the Prism Ship launches, and I wasn't going to be able to stop that. I thusly concluded that the whole sniper angle was basically a waste of time. Also, if I wasn't going to build snipers then there really wasn't much point in building that second network in the northwest island that I was never going to hook up to anyway. So I would focus on just starting on the one in the southeast, following the same expansion path, and just being fast enough to take out the totem before the Doom Timer was up.  This is how low I eventually had to turn down the effects. Any higher, and stuff like a lot of mortars/nullifiers firing just drown everything out. Take 5 - 1:28:10 video So it was off to the beginning again, and for the first time I was actually expecting to win at Farbor. One thing that only working off the one island/command node did was it allowed me to be a bit more efficient, esp. with a starting build that I was by this time quite familiar with. It didn't go perfectly, but in a little over eight minutes I had kicked the creeper off that island. Too often I forgot that I needed to constantly be building more reactors, but otherwhise it was a smooth progression west across to the bigger 'strip' island, then the hop north to get to the launching pad area. The reactors are particularly important due to the time crunch -- you can upgrade energy efficiency in the Forge, but that means less Aether for weapons upgrades.  With relatively few significant errors, I made this crossing again with, by my estimation, just over 15 minutes remaining to get to and take down the Enhanced Totem. I was confident I had plenty of time.  I didn't press the attack too much right away, waiting to increase the energy reserves. I also wanted to make sure to re-target the two SuperBerthas as we moved forward.  I didn't really need to take out the spore towers here, except I wanted to utilize all the power zones I could to leverage against the creeper. Not progressing as fast as I'd like, but still almost ten minutes left ...  Then I had sniper/runner issues. One, I didn't expect the snipers to insist on targeting the ships sitting on their launch pads instead of shooting the runners. And two, I didn't have enough of them ready. Which meant a bunch of units getting stunned, and general delays. Unfortunately, snipers don't seem to have a 'target priority' function. Not that I considered looking for one at the time, mind you. "You're shooting THAT? Why are you shooting that, of all the things you could shoot?!? Gotta put another nullifier over here just to get rid of that stuff, just so you won't shoot at it!" I was a mite perturbed, a trifle annoyed, at my snipers here you might say. By the time all of that was sorted, I was ready to cross the digitalis and had 3-4 snipers ... but there was only five minutes left. I really did NOT want to do this again.  A digitalis-focused SuperCannon is just begging to be placed here. Snipers are now clearing out any runners before they get close. More SuperBerthas on the way. 78% complete firing sequence. AND DOWN THE STRETCH THEY COME!!!!  Misclicking, time-wasting, mis-positioning all cost critical seconds. Things I normally wouldn't care about became vital. I targeted most of the big guns on the Totem Plateau as I approached. This was going to be over soon, one way or the other. It reached 95% by the time I got the nullifier in position with three cannons guarding it ... 97% as it finished building and started requesting ammo from the network, which had to come across half the map to get there ... 98% as the supply started to arrive, and I wasn't sure we'd make it. It hit 99% just before the nullifier started to fire, and  Well then. At 34:33 on the mission timer. I'm confident I had a solid 15-20 seconds to spare. Not that it was close or anything. I was literally pulling my hair out at the end, having made it considerably more difficult than it needed to be. But we made it! Skars and Lia are still alive! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! The thing took several seconds to fully explode, and then ...  The blather needed to continue. I really am incredible, aren't I?? It's a dangerous job, but I do it for my species. Well no, they're gone. I do it for myself, for the sheer morbid curiosity of things, and for my ... ship's computer? Hmm. Not as inspiring, that.      Remind me to smack that old goat Platius into the next universe the next time I see him ...   May your browsers forgive me ... Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Oct 5, 2018 |
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Oct 5, 2018 06:46
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So, Farbor... Three snipers in range of the destination ore patch constitutes an effective blockade. Every ship you can blockade multiplies the time you have remaining. Let's look at this scenario: You've got about fifteen minutes on the first doom timer. Let's say after the first five minutes, you're able to set up snipers on each starting island to blockade those two ships. Your doom timer stretches a little - instead of 10 minutes left, you now have 13.3. After three and a third minutes, you blockade the next two closest ships - your ten minute timer stretches again, this time to fifteen minutes. You've spent half the doom timer, but claimed all of that time back (and more). Now there's two ships that are hard to reach and two more that are feasible with a little work. It takes you five minutes of advancing to blockade the next two ships, but your ten minute doom timer now doubles to twenty minutes. You've claimed all of the outlying islands and you've got twenty minutes to reach the ship pads and destroy them. Sounds easy, right? Why does this go wrong and why does Thotimx abandon this strategy? Well, the problem is you aren't really gaining time - you're making the timer tick more slowly. In effect, the time you gain from the blockades depends on how much time you have left - if the timer is already running low when you establish an additional blockade, you haven't really bought yourself all that much time compared to setting up blockades quickly and across multiple ore patches. If you're going for the early win (before the Prism Ship is deployed), a blockade strategy is very likely to be the way that you succeed, but you can't spend time messing around - you need to take the outer islands as fast as you can.
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Oct 5, 2018 08:49
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When I did the early win achievement, I didn't bother with anything but the starting islands and the objective, and I used a guppy-supported direct assault. Though like you said, I don't really see that happening without heavy pause abuse. ...I kind of accidentally did it first, because I kept restarting before the first objective actually failed and didn't realize there was anything after it. I was rather confused by the completion objective being named "Better Late Than Never". I think this was also before I discovered the joy of power zone berthas, which would have helped quite a bit.
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Oct 5, 2018 20:58
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this was such a great mission. getting the fast win requires you to play blindingly fast, but it's really satisfying when you pull it off.
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Oct 5, 2018 21:55
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There's two reasons why Farbor actually annoys me. Firstly, since you're not told in advance that you'll be able to destroy the enhanced totem, I and a lot of other people kept assuming the ship launching was a failure condition and would restart when it was at 95% or so and clearly not going to be destroyable. I think I actually destroyed the Enhanced Totem on my first try after finding out that was a thing I could do. Second, I just don't like an actual countdown timer; it's not really practical to do a full blockade of the ore mines, and when I'm faced with any sort of pressure in Creeper World what I usually want to do is effectively stall its progress and then start pushing back; I like having a stable front line and relatively steady advance and using air power or long range bombardment to weaken and delay Creeper concentrations as my primary method of slowing its advance on any key location.
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Oct 7, 2018 06:30
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namehereguy posted:since you're not told in advance that you'll be able to destroy the enhanced totem, I and a lot of other people kept assuming the ship launching was a failure condition and would restart when it was at 95% or so and clearly not going to be destroyable. I think I actually destroyed the Enhanced Totem on my first try after finding out that was a thing I could do I agree with this. It's bit of a sneaky trick. I might well have done this if I wasn't in 'LP mode' and just going for the whole let's see what happens thing. Olesh posted:Let's say after the first five minutes, you're able to set up snipers on each starting island to blockade those two ships. Your doom timer stretches a little - instead of 10 minutes left, you now have 13.3. After three and a third minutes, you blockade the next two closest ships - your ten minute timer stretches again, this time to fifteen minutes. You've spent half the doom timer, but claimed all of that time back (and more). Now there's two ships that are hard to reach and two more that are feasible with a little work. It takes you five minutes of advancing to blockade the next two ships, but your ten minute doom timer now doubles to twenty minutes. You've claimed all of the outlying islands and you've got twenty minutes to reach the ship pads and destroy them. Good explanation -- that makes a lot of sense.
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Oct 7, 2018 06:46
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Meso(Apexian) Video This will be shorter than most since we've already seen this mission. I was going to save this until after completing the Story proper since only one person said 'yeah, I'd like to see that' but then I had technical difficulties which screwed up the next story misson. Specifically, when I beat it the first time ... nothing recorded *sadface*. That's going to seriously impair the quality of that mission which I apologize for, but there's nothing for it. I must have just hit the wrong hotkey or something even stupider like not having OBS running -- haven't had any problems recording CW3 before or since. Anyway, as mentioned before the Apexian achievement is about beating the pyramid level of Meso with no weapons built other than Nullifiers. The only way of doing this that I know of was mentioned in the thread. I actually found it harder the second time I tried, deleted that recording and did it a third attempt. Here's how that went.  The Meso overview, in case you've forgotten it. Once powered up, the top-left pyramid puts out a big shield, and small, sporadic amounts of AC. The small one in the north-central area is the most important, putting out enough creeper to roughly match four of the six emitters. It has a small shield as well, as does the one in the southwest which produces 'golden men'. That's a lot harder to get to though.  I lost a couple of collectors early on and you can see others are already in trouble. I should have built a few less, but the main thing I wanted is to get all the nodes down, some basic energy, and hook up to these two pyramids with relays. That's all pretty much mandatory. If you aren't going to build any weapons, the creeper will overwhelm you if you do anything else.  I lost a couple more collectors here, but the anti-creeper has started flowing and basically informed the Creeper that all this nonsense will now stop. The shields at those pyramids will now flash and flicker, because they don't have nearly enough energy to function consistently. Next job is fixing that. The big pyramid on the left controls enough room to place more collectors.  You probably think Reactors are next, but actually no. I go with a Forge here. Aether is vital to the winning strategy here, and the sooner you start it the faster you get it, due to how the totems gradually ramp up their production of it as long as they are connected to a forge. Then I start building reactors, two at a time. I want as much Aether for later purposes as I can get, but at this point to speed up the buildup I spend some on energy efficiency. We have two Totems operational, the one nearby and the one by the large pyramid. A third is just out of reach for the moment.  As soon as the AC has created enough room to do it, I place this nullifier to take out an emitter. The faster you get them taken out, the more effective the AC can be and that's literally the only thing we have access to right now that can destroy creeper at all. Massive amounts will build up but the lower we can keep that, the better. This also lets me get to the third Totem pictured here shortly thereafter, so how quickly you can get this first nullifier up is a huge factor in the build for this achievement.  Energy is looking better now, so I start spamming entire rows of reactors. I'm going to want a big energy surplus. Aether is only at 52 but I can start gathering more of it now. Then I start deploying some Terps to be used soon. Mostly they are for that riverbed that winds through the map ... creeper and AC tend to pool in that, and the various ridges in the terrain around it make placing things troublesome. I don't want either one of those things ... I want to flatten in out as we advance. Now someone may say ... why not use shields to push back the creeper to get in range of the emitters? I tried tha the first time. I made shields. I made LOTS of shields. As in, I made enough shields to get the Shield Lover achievement. And it works up to a point, but it will only push back creeper up to a certain density and then they sort of hit a stalemate. To reach that point I needed a long, dense wall of them, which not only blocks the creeper, but it also blocks anti-creeper from attacking that creeper. So as a general way to push against an entire front, it really wasn't effective.  I terraform a bunch of stuff, basically wanting to flatten everything in this area because I want to 'attack in this direction. We haven't reached equilibrium yet; the AC is still slowly pushing back the creeper. It's not going to get me close enough to the emitters, but I'm preparing the way here. It's time for the key to this approach, which is the Singularity Weapon. And as has been said, yeah no weapons but the Singularity Weapon is not a weapon for the purpose of this mission. The verboten items are those in the Weapons tab of the control panel. Singularity is a Forge doo-hickey and therefore exempt. So that's some definite sleight-of-hand, but it does make a certain amount of sense; the Singularity doesn't actually destroy any creeper. It just moves it. In experimenting with this, I learned two important things I didn't know: ** Singularity requires 100 Aether, roughly at least, for a 100% charge. ** Every time you fire it, it will use up whatever Aether you have saved up ... and most importantly, the duration of the effect is proportional to how much Aether is available.  While I save up Aether, I position a SuperTerp. Never thought I'd use one of those. Better range and I think it works faster also. The others move to work in another area. We need several hundred Aether at a time for this approach to work, which is why it was so important to get the forge up ASAP. So right now I'm just waiting on it. I grabbed a few energy storage upgrades for some leeway, and a couple energy efficiency ones at the start. The part I forgot, which is also critically important, is packet speed. We'll see why soon.  The first time I fire it, it gives me a 61-second timer. This is after several seconds. I've found it's usually best to target it near the emitter, sometimes offset in one direction by a bit depending on the situation. The idea is that it's going to suck up the creeper near the emitter, giving me time to get close enough to it to deploy and fire a nullifier before the timer expires, the creeper releases, and my whole operation gets flooded and destroyed. Then lather, rinse, repeat. I moved in the terps to flatten stuff out, extended relays, built a nullifier ...  You can't get any closer than this and still fail. It was literally in the process of firing when the nullifier was destroyed. Everything I just did? Almost a complete waste of time. Now go make a sandwich and wait for more Aether to be stockpiled, while that emitter merrily produces 300 more creeper a second. There's a bit of an art to this, and if I'd remembered to upgrade packet speed earlier I would have had enough. During the waiting periods, I used the 4x time compression since there's really nothing else to do. After getting a little over 700 aether saved up, I fire again. 71 seconds. Seems to be real close to a second of duration for each 10 aether, and this time I have an addition 10 seconds. That's about how much time is left on the singularity when the emitter goes down. Ok. At this point the anti-creeper/creeper balance is going to be about equal. I could let it run as long as I want, and neither side is going to gain a significant advantage.  Now I move to the easiest one to get, in the northeast. I move a command node over here for faster supply, and you can see by this prospective nullifier that I don't need to push things back far at all to place it. I fire with 650 Aether, and once again have some time to spare. Three down. At this point, if I'm ok with playing this till my hair turns grey, I could just let the AC do the job of gradually wearing down the creeper. Nah.  The next one I save up to almost 100 seconds duration, and as you can see I didn't need nearly that much. Better safe than sorry but I went a bit overboard there.  Now it gets a bit more difficult. There's a lot more creeper to get through to reach this emitter, and the inhibitor is at least as far away.  I try using the singularity to clear enough room to get a SuperShield and some friends in this area. I ended up nearly, but not quite, getting parity in that area as my shields slowly got chewed up and retreated. They do have a limit, my friends, no matter how much energy you give them. Not really sure what the best thing was to do, I saved up Aether while the AC slowly ate it's way through the creeper. If you look from about 28 to 32 minutes into the video, you can clearly see that the turquoise tide is winning over the dark blue. I then unloaded 1,372 Aether into a singularity over that western emitter. This gave me over two minutes ... it was gone with over 40 seconds left. Whatever, it worked. I could have gone with a similar approach towards the inhibitor, perhaps. But I didn't feel right not getting that last pyramid. It's one of those things where it helps a lot, but I don't know a way to get there reliably early enough for it to make a big difference.  Together with the AC's efforts, I started a Shield Cordon pushing towards the pyramid. Leapfrogging the shields forward with the occasional relay and terp interspersed, I spent far more time(nine minutes that felt more like 29) making my way until I could hook it up ...  By this time the AC had pushed more than close enough to the inhibitor to wrap this mission, esp. considering that I had well over 2000 Aether saved.  A four-minute Singularity combined with golden AC men exploding around it and my own AC bearing down on it? Yeah, I think I can make that work. Hopefully this was worth the admission price of absolutely free. The story will continue in the next update. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Oct 7, 2018 |
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Oct 7, 2018 07:59
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The idea of doing that mission without weapons appeals to me in the sort of 'Hmm, this is a puzzle to be solved' way but even reading about it sounds painfully bothersome. There's elements of this game I keep coming back to but also some that drive me away. Tedium is certainly one of the latter.
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Oct 7, 2018 19:48
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Please don't injure yourself. The answer to the southwest pyramid is "Guppies". Edit: The southwest pyramid is also the answer to "how do I actually deal with the rest of the map without weapons".
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Oct 7, 2018 20:44
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Teledahn posted:The idea of doing that mission without weapons appeals to me in the sort of 'Hmm, this is a puzzle to be solved' way but even reading about it sounds painfully bothersome. There's elements of this game I keep coming back to but also some that drive me away. Tedium is certainly one of the latter. doing this mission without weapons was one of the more interesting and fun missions in the game and i wish there were more like it
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Oct 7, 2018 22:33
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Olesh posted:The answer to the southwest pyramid is "Guppies". That makes sense, I just still haven't gotten it through my head that creeper damages at a constant rate no matter the density. Every time I think about something like this, my reflex is 'no, there's too much creeper there, they'll be crushed before they can do anything' regardless of whether that's actually true or not with the constant-damage-rate mechanic.
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Oct 8, 2018 05:28
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Thotimx posted:That makes sense, I just still haven't gotten it through my head that creeper damages at a constant rate no matter the density. Every time I think about something like this, my reflex is 'no, there's too much creeper there, they'll be crushed before they can do anything' regardless of whether that's actually true or not with the constant-damage-rate mechanic. I'm not certain you could land the guppies on the pyramid once it's flooded, but there's a fairly decent length of time before that happens where the upper levels are clear and you can just land a guppy (or three) up there and power the pyramid. The southwest pyramid comes with its own shield that will help keep it clear so long as you're powering it, and the anticreeper suicide robots let you make progress at a faster rate than the northeast pyramid alone allows.
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Oct 8, 2018 06:02
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If folks want more of these 'only weapon is AC and terraforming', go to colonial space (where you can search and play community maps) and text search for 'CSM-'. (This image link as example) I've been working through a handful since Thotimx did Meso. Pretty fun, very different way of playing.
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Oct 9, 2018 01:17
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maaaaaan now i guess im reinstalling CW3
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Oct 9, 2018 01:40
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Play As Creeper/PAC are also pretty fun, though I always find their starts to be pretty rough; they've got a full map of all sorts of defenses and power zones and generally you start with one emitter, so it's pretty tough to build up Creeper momentum to smash your way out. Still, after that initial hurdle you get to do a Creeper tidal wave, with the ability to redistribute Creeper generation among your emitters, vary rate and pulse size, put in spore towers, lay Digitalis, and use Totems to create a Creeper directional field. Generally you hit strongpoints and get stalled so you reallocate Creeper and deploy the field to slice down and cut a relay to collapse a strong point, or tear into reactor farms so a shield array starts flickering.
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Oct 9, 2018 03:49
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That's sounds … bizarre. Total paradigm shift. Also: next update going up sometime tomorrow most likely. It's going to be long. VERY long. Probably the longest one of this entire LP to date. Your browsers have been warned.
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Oct 9, 2018 11:05
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namehereguy posted:Play As Creeper/PAC are also pretty fun, though I always find their starts to be pretty rough; they've got a full map of all sorts of defenses and power zones and generally you start with one emitter, so it's pretty tough to build up Creeper momentum to smash your way out. Still, after that initial hurdle you get to do a Creeper tidal wave, with the ability to redistribute Creeper generation among your emitters, vary rate and pulse size, put in spore towers, lay Digitalis, and use Totems to create a Creeper directional field. Generally you hit strongpoints and get stalled so you reallocate Creeper and deploy the field to slice down and cut a relay to collapse a strong point, or tear into reactor farms so a shield array starts flickering. I tried several of these, but came away feeling a bit disgruntled. The concept is okay, but most of the maps seemed incredibly tedious and the experience selecting random maps? Well, the description above makes it sound cooler than it is, because most maps I played had overwhelming firepower right from the start and narrow corridors. One map ran for three hours of game time (mostly on 4x speed) - still have no idea what the actual solution was supposed to be.
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Oct 9, 2018 12:30
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Yeah honestly I'm not a fan of PAC maps, and CW3 custom maps in general. I've had the most fun with Particle Fleet custom maps.
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Oct 9, 2018 12:41
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Olesh posted:I tried several of these, but came away feeling a bit disgruntled. The concept is okay, but most of the maps seemed incredibly tedious and the experience selecting random maps? Well, the description above makes it sound cooler than it is, because most maps I played had overwhelming firepower right from the start and narrow corridors. One map ran for three hours of game time (mostly on 4x speed) - still have no idea what the actual solution was supposed to be. Yeah, like I said the starts usually suck. The grind towards the first couple power fields is hell. It also is kinda slow but I don't mind slow, though looks like the only one I took close to three hours on was Planet X954S2, which was just obviously a nigh-invincible hell world from the word go.  It's actually harder than it looks because there's multiple buildings per individual power node; you start with a massive spore storm striking the upper left. You crawl around the outer ring using spores to lay Creeper to lay Digitalis, smashing relays whenever possible, to claim power zones until you build up the strength to push onto the main planet and start cutting it to pieces. The generic strategies are like so: 1. Digitalis. You need like two deep Creeper to lay it; just lay it everywhere you get two Creeper deep. 2. Get totems to power the directional field; more is better. It lets you focus your Creeper into a hammer to overwhelm defenses 3. It's usually best to focus your advance on one or at most two emitters and set the others to support. If you've laid Digitalis everywhere it doesn't take much to keep the defenses from regaining ground 4. Think laterally as much as possible; in all the good PAC maps there's strongpoints that are basically impenetrable but not self-sufficent. Find the weakest point in the defensive line, focus on the nearest emitter, throw your field in a straight line from the emitter to the closest defensive building. 5. Spore towers are useful for knocking down shields or hitting key collectors or relays. However you basically cannot saturate the anti-spore defenses; don't even try. Keep a couple up for when you can get a clear target and sometimes use your concentration field to brute-force through a shield to destroy the air defense covering its outermost edge. Also, you know, these are fan created custom maps and some of them just suck. I personally really enjoyed most of PAC Redemption, but it looks like I took over an hour on most of them.
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Oct 10, 2018 03:46
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Arca Video  Here we've got Arca. And that's it. I thought I remembered there being text here, and I blather on in the video about not being able to access it. But apparently there isn't any -- which is weird but my memory must be playing tricks on me, because I can access 'Archived Transmissions' in other systems. Not here, because apparently there aren't any to access. Not to worry, there'll be plenty of blathering on once we get planetside. So last visible system on the map, and only one planet here. Could be problems.  It's a big square with a bunch of circles inside it! And some strangely broken up terrain in most of the corners. Don't recognize any of those structures.  So apparently I lied and I DO recognize these. Except I really, really don't.       'I just do'? Has Skars become one with the Force or something?   That's hogwash, Skars! But it's very, very good hogwash.   Why does it exist? Who made it? Brain hurting ...   Why? How?  It's actually rather amusing to see Lia flabbergasted.  Those aren't exactly the words I would have chosen. Really started to worry about Skars ...   If they didn't know where it was, why is all this stuff already here on Arca?!?   The Arc Eternal is the ultimate weapon - literally. Getting ahead of myself here, but if so, I hope CW4 is a prequel or something whenever it gets finished, because where do you go from here?     The role reversal is complete. Now it's Skars cutting Lia off, ignoring her questions almost entirely, and just generally doing his own thing.  Red beams connect immediately, and creeper splurts out of the middle and each of the six satellite stations. The first time I did this I tried to stop them. I didn't get a single station down. You have only a few minutes. However, this is just like Farbor; there is a hard 'Early' achievement, and a less-hard 'Late' way to complete the level. I imagine the early one is probably much like Olesh described Farbor; the more stations you take out quickly, the more time you have for the others. But I'll let others describe how that's done. Since this was the re-recording, I knew I wasn't going to be able to stop the stations. So instead, I began to instantly prepare for what happens afterwards. That's also how I did it when I eventually beat this mission the first time.  All three nodes in the southeast, some collectors on the high ground. I tried to get cute and put one of the nodes somewhere else the first time around -- in retrospect I think you need the energy all in one place, or at least it helped me. The start of this mission is frantic. Immediately after this I build a Forge. That'll hurt me initially but I plan on boosting initial energy with Energy Efficiency upgrades to grow out of the massive deficit I'm about to acquire.  Next, I want relays up all the way around the circle. The wall is, I think, 6-high ... sizable but not huge. I want to surround and contain it.  After those are placed, I set down a couple of reactors to start boosting energy, and a relay here in this opening ... where I'm going to put a bunch more. Should have started that before I went around the ring.  The next phase of containment is a ring of Mortars. These are to keep the creeper low enough to contain it within the Ring Wall. I space them out for every two relays.  After that, I do the same for Beams, with the same spacing, roughly in between the mortars. There aren't any spore towers yet ... but there will be. There WILL be. Much of this hasn't even started building yet, because the relays are still constructing. I'm partway through this when, at 2:32 mission time, the stations blow. Which is even faster than I remembered it being, but they don't hang around and discuss the situation in committee.  Nah, you're just the AI Who Cried Creeper at this point.   I care not about a mere Nexus. I've taken down two of them already.   It leaves the middle, where the Arc Eternal apparently is. Thanks Seloi. It doesn't go far though. The fact that it goes anywhere is new; the previous iterations weren't mobile.  WhoWhatWhereWhenWhyHow? Since when are the Loki/Nexus types all friendy and courteous? What happened to YOU SHALL BE UNDONE. YOUR PRIMITIVE TECHNOLOGY IS IRRELEVANT. LIKE ALL OTHERS YOU TOO WILL BE DESTROYED AND UNDONE AND REMOVED AND CLEANSED FROM THIS WORLD. AND OTHER BAD STUFF. ??   Umm ... someone want to tell me what in the name of Platius is going on here?  No need to be concerned, Lia. Skarsgard Abraxis would never listen to a Creeper Nex ...   There we go. Let's not waste time debating, there's Nexus-slaying to do.  My name ... is Skarsgard Abraxis. You would do well to use it.   What the actual ...   Search your feeling Imperator, you know it to be true!       It's not like the Loki to be so delusional. Surely they aren't expecting Skars to believe this manic piffle?  What?!? Sure, this makes perfect sense. We have met the enemy ... and it is us. Literally. The great, malevolent, unkownable and unspeakable evil of the eons. The force behind the Loki and the Creeper who have slaughtered uncountable trillions in myriad of galaxies. Who committed genocide on humanity more times than can be imagined. Who set all of this in motion. Yep, it's me. I'm the guilty party, your honor! There is only one sane reaction to this. Whatever twisted abomination Skars is, if he has a shred of decency in his soul(if he even has one), he will immediately terminate his life force.  Oh good. The manipulative wench finally unmasks herself. This is the only part I really saw coming. For a minute there I thought I was only going to have one massive pile of happy horse manure metaphysicality-twisting, inconceivable insanity-inducing garbage to sift through. Welcome to the living hell that is my existence ... 'daughter'.  The Anomaly? And what, you're the Architect or something?? So who am I, the Oracle or Agent Smith???  Yes, you really should have. Even I strongly suspected, and I'm just your shell/projection/alternate self/what-the-freak-ever.  You let yourself be decieved. But in your heart you always knew what really had to happen here!  What's worse than unspeakable, incomprehensible, evil? Realizing that you are that evil. That in ancient eons of the universe, you looked through the strands as time ... and chose to engineer this, to make it happen.  And with this final plea, we are brought to a choice.  Before I do this, let's just step back a minute. Early in CW3, somebody told me it would all make sense at the end. That I would understand why I'm here, five billion years past the events of CW2, awakened to this situation. And from that perspective, let's give this plot credit where it's due. It does make sense from that angle. Nothing in the billions of years in between matters. The Arc Eternal is literally everything. Victory here is all there is, defeat here would annihilate all other possible successes. Nothing is even relevant in comparison. This it, the moment when the fate of the universe, not just humanity, can be decided forever. It also illuminates some of the things Platius said in the past games. Having said that ... yeah. It's such a raging collection of nonsense that I don't know how to add to what I've already said. It's a moment where the english language, or at least my command of it, utterly fails to capture the sheer depth of expression I'd like to make. I've been sarcastic about the story from the time I started this LP, mostly just to try to be funny and entertaining and not just dry 'move-here, shoot-this'. To mix things up. At times I've gone overboard on that just because I can. I do find Creeper World's honesty about it's extremely flexible, to put it mildly, relationships with physics to be refreshing and enjoyable. Having said that, 'you can't be serious' is what went through my mind when I realized where they were going with this. And not in the good way. Ok, so the choice. Well I'm going to show both, but canon should go first so let's see. Ultimate Evil or rescue the universe from myself? We're definitely going Skars here first. Which, as it turns out, is much the harder path. Loki are holding all the cards. But I'm the impetus behind the Loki, which means I'm holding all the cards, so why should it be harder either way, and I ... *Brain Explodes* Nevermind.     Why?? Seriously, how does that work? The Arc's in the middle of the map. There's a bunch of creeper between us and it. How does our mere continued existence keep them from doing ANYTHING!  Why wouldn't I be able to? If I'm billions of years old, what's a few more?? Why would they be any more able than I to sustain myself? It just said I chose the 'form' of Skarsgard Abraxis, not that I gave up my essential essence or no longer the abilities of ... whatever it is I've been for all this time. And I still have the Anomaly on my side. Honestly I'm just really glad you shut up so I don't have to try to make sense out of what you are spewing from your piehole.   Why am I asking her again all of a sudden?  That's just fantastic news.  11 minutes into the video. Less than 3 into the mission itself. Not that it matters if we're going to be fighting for millions of years.  The Loke Hive, which it calls itself so better than Nexus I guess(THE Nexus?) moves around and does stuff like this. It's not attacking us directly. It builds emitters and spore towers like this one, which is why I put the beams up. And the Arc, under Loki control, continues to spew out a moderate amount of creeper as well. From a gameplay point of view this is an interesting twist; there's a general pattern to what the Hive does but you can't totally predict where it's going to go. Just have to sort of adjust on the fly. By the way, I've got a deficit of 22 energy on each of the three nodes right now. So it's sort of a race here; I'm building up, but so are the Loki.  There's ore mines as well, one in each corner. I hook up to them despite the energy problems. They are going to be vital as well. I set up a sprayer by each mine.  And we care because ... Also I'm not your father.  That sounds an awful lot like ...   Well that's where it's coming, and it doesn't take long.  Up to a deficit of 30 now. We know what this is, but let's have the 'heroes' tell it.   It's time to play the finale of the first game all over again! That's the one where we: ** Fight a Nexus with no way to damage it ** Fortify ourselves behind a wall against Nexus with a tide of creeper on the other side ** Mysteriously have the plans for the Thor appear, in a schematic just out of reach beyond the wall ** Have Skars blather on about how it's an unwinnable battle, but even if it's interminable we will soldier on to infinity, we will never give up ... ** Are told the Thor is our only hope of success(and this time, it's actually true AFAIK) Not everything is the same, but this has all the appearance of 'Golly gee willikers, I don't how to end this game so ... uh ... let's just do what we did in the original! People thought that was cool. I'll just throw in some more metaphysics BS and a couple twists, and wrap it all up in a neat little bow!'. I was actually really glad CW2 didn't have the Thor. It's just so OP compared to everything else. The idea of having to build an army to take down the Nexus. Slowly. Was more satisfying to me. But it is what it is. Of course, we are in no position to go after that right now. But it could stay there for another billion years, and like so many other things, the creeper would just look at it and go 'uhhhh ... '. I'm sure the Hive doesn't just come over and destroy it right now for a really good reason. Anybody? No??? Ok then.  Here's the most immediate problem. When the Hive deposits an emitter this close to the wall, overflow is a significant threat. That means it's time to deploy a Nullifier ASAP. All of the emitters it drops produce 75/second, so they're not nothing but any one of them isn't a major threat. Right after plopping down the nullifier, I upgrade energy efficiency twice. That cuts the deficit by a third despite the additional expense.  Meanwhile more reactors slowly go up as we eat into the energy gap. The sprayers are running, and set to always on, deploying a blanket of anti-creeper around the perimeter.  Here's more, but by now I've got another energy efficiency upgrade and actually have worked my way back into a surplus. It's imperative to always be watching. The sprayers really help a great deal, because the Hive likes to drop emitters outside the walls. That screws up the entire ring and it's very easy to get steamrolled as it cuts off part of the network, then without any weapons in that area more creeper flows over the wall, and pretty soon you're overwhelmed. From what I've observed, I don't think the Hive can drop emitters or spore towers directly into anti-creeper, so it's a powerful prophylactic approach. And if we keep them under control it's actually going to help us, because this emitter can be turned into a friendly PZ.  Next up, I start boosting the numbers of reactors being built, and also throw a few cannons in each corner of the map for a rapid-response force. I'm almost ready to push over the wall and go on the offensive.  This would have been much, much worse had it been an emitter instead of a spore tower. The Hive found a gap between the AC and used it. As it was I took it out before it finished, then threw a nearby mortar on top and turned the tables.  Meanwhile the first push has begun back in the east. First goal is just to create enough of a clearing to use that nearby power zone.  Just as I was securing that, the Hive decided to be an arseface, dropping this emitter ... which I think got away from being in a previously AC-covered area because it's technically on top of the wall. Of course I can't put anything on the walls, but the Hive is like super-cool or something so it can. A beam and a couple relays went down, and this is exactly the kind of thing that cause a big problem. The anti-creeper will slow it down and I'll try to fight back with my weapons that were put in these areas for just that purpose.  This is just seconds later, as it places another one on the wall just west of there. This takes out the relay in the area, cuts off that trio of cannons with a mortar, and generally makes my life a lot more complicated. Good example here of the Loki Hive being a royal PITA and I need to handle this, which means I don't have the time to multi-task and keep attacking. I don't know if it's coincidence or not, but the Hive very effectively seized the initiative just as I was starting an offensive.  I evacuated the trapped weapons and got the emitters nullified ASAP, which I couldn't have done without having the firepower in place ahead of time. You can see some AC spilling inside the ring by the SuperCannon at the bottom of the screen; that's because there's now a small hole in the wall where the emitter used to be. So long as I keep weapons there I should be better off than before, using the Hive's attacks to effectively strengthen and enhance my defenses.  This one proved that the Hive could care less if there's AC in the way, setting it down in a nice pool of it right in front of my primary base. I can't emphasize enough the importance of anti-creeper and extra, flexible defensive weapons platforms being in place to mitigate and quickly handle these attacks. You can't get tunnel-vision in this mission either ... always be checking regularly on what the Hive is doing. On the PZ inside the ring, I had a SuperMortar there to clear out the surrounding area for a little bit, and now I'm throwing in my first Bertha.  I lost the Bertha though, as I withdrew cannons to deal with the emitter. Then, a SuperMortar is a fine idea on those locations just outside the wall. And you can see that the energy situation, once handled, has gone against me. Ore as well. Sizable deficits everywhere in that sea of red.  The Hive then moved off to other areas deeper inside the ring, and I used the opportunity to recover energy and push towards the Thor schematic. As we made the connection, I also made use of the nearby PZ for a SuperNullifier. There are a LOT of opportunities to do that in this level, and it makes things much easier. This one just removes a spore tower, but everything you can take out helps -- saving on energy for the beams to shoot them down and creating a future location for a strong weapon point.  One gets the impression here that 'Aliana' doesn't even know about the Thor from the first campaign. Which would be bizarre if Skars never told her that story, never read it in history, etc. Not to mention that she's an infinite being herself of some type, etc.  Guh ... we know exactly what this thing is! Stop pretending!!!     Let me see if I got this. Somebody knew this would happen so they designed the Thor's cannons to damage the Nexus. But the Loki knew that as well, so they designed a shield to protect from the Thor's cannons. Instead of, you know, destroying the plans for the Thor, or adjusting the Nexus materials themselves to be impervious to it, or any number of other timeline changes they could have made which would have prevented this from occuring. Sure.      Ok, but how does that help?  I can't take it. I just can't take it anymore. The Loki knew to fortify themselves against the Thor(sort of), but they didn't know about this? The location where the Arc Eternal was to be revealed wasn't worth fully investigating in every detail? Really?? And also, how are ballistic missiles going to be better against a shield that can withstand any bombardment from weapons billions of years more advanced just because it 'wasn't designed for them'. Throwing a rock at a tank won't do much, even though it wasn't designed to stop slingshots. Arglebarglezorz! WHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHYWHY!!!!    This is indeed sound tactical advice.  Four groups of four missile sites, one in the direction of each corner of the map, are shown by these green circles. We don't need all of them or even close to it.  We've reconnected the ring around the bottom, and the Thor needs a significant area of open space in order to be built. This'll do. Like the first game, it requires considerable energy to construct.  Gradually our attack extends further, alternating SuperNullfiers to take out nearby creeper emplacements, SuperWhatevers to clear out the nearby area, advances of the supporting weapons, and building more reactors to supply the required energy. The Loki Hive is now completely on the defensive, adding more emitters and spore towers where it can within the parts of the ring it still controls.  A couple of Terps are deployed as we reach one of the silo sites, and they work their way down a few levels through the terrain to the required depth of 1.  Here's one of the things that confuses me. The Hive comes back down in this area, approaches two different locations like it wants to place something, but doesn't. My question is, why not? It did the same movement as before, but nothign happened. Was I preventing it in some way? That's why I thought at one point was an AC thing, but obviously that's not the case as we've shown, so ... I dunno. Start at about 39 mins. in the video if you want to see this. Also, the Thor is finished, and powering up it's energy. Which is considerable.  It, uh, has a few things it can do. And holds 3k in ammunition. Alrighty then.  Shortly after that, I have the Thor lift off and move around. Important for it to stay within range of a relay, but aside from that it's not quite as absurd as the one from the first game, but close. Stuff goes away quickly when it shows up.  Here's a missile taking off from the site. We have to 'build'(green bar) something or other each one of these silos, then just constantly give them the energy ammo they need. Which again makes no sense because they aren't energy weapons. Also, they apparently have unlimited range which only our Berthas do, but the projectiles fly much faster. And damage something that we can't damage. But they're primitive and obsolete and we wouldn't care about them for any other purpose. I can't even.  Just throw reactors anywhere. Stupid, insane, crazy amounts of energy. Each missile impact lowers the Nexus shield by 1-2%. It's just a matter of getting enough of them to fire. Over by the Thor, I get another quartet of silos working to speed up the process.  Eventually, enough hits from the missiles take down the shield.   Sounds fun!  That was not an idle threat the Hive just made. It now starts throwing out 'Creeper Torpedoes' every few seconds. That cylindrical red thing in the middle is headed towards a cannon, which is on a bed of AC so it doesn't care. First time though I didn't have sprayers moved inside the ring laying down this protection ahead of time, and they caused much more problems. When they hit, kind of like those Phantoms from CW2, they explode into a creeper cloud. I disable all of the Thor's standard weapons(probably should have done that sooner); Left Cannon, Right Cannon, Beam Cannon, and Sniper Gun. The FIRE MAIN CANNONS thing is all I want. It takes 100 energy per shot to do so, and I had to wait for it to power up.  That white projectile is what it shoots. They are homing something-or-others, so they apparently never miss and I can fire them from anywhere. Another weakness in the Nexus is that it appears utterly unable to even attack, much less damage, the Thor. Those creeper torps can only shoot at the surface. The green bar shows I'm damaging it, so it's just a matter of time until I get enough energy to fire enough of that white shtuff ... The Hive flies around, doing minimal damage with it's torpedoes but nothing I'm particularly concerned about.  After a few minutes, I've done enough damage to take it down.    The Hive becomes a living fireworks display as red goo falls around the various explosions which happen in rapid-fire succession. And then ...  In a flash of white particles, the Loki Hive is no more.  *sigh*  How? Did you just decide to become finite? Is it like flipping a switch?    And yet you show no signs of not wanting to immediately slaughter me for a fraction of a percent of the things I set in motion. Why??     Interesting word, 'greatness'. Not 'monstrosity'. Not 'unspeakable, unfathomable evil'. Not 'bane of all life and sanity in the universe'. Nope. Greatness. Look who's become a Loki fanboi as well.     'Which brings us at last to the moment of truth, wherein the fundamental flaw is ultimately expressed, and the Anomaly revealed as both beginning and end.' What Skars/Platius/Imperator Abraxis has already done isn't enough. He's going back 10 billion years ago, as Platius. And there's no indication whatsoever that he's going to do anything different. No, he's going back so he can start the infinite cycle all over again. Just ponder that for a moment. If you can do so while maintaining a full and firm grip on your sanity, you're a better man than I.  Thus we are taken to the Epilogue/End Cinematic. This begins at about 52:25 if you wish to watch it. There is music that goes along with it. What follows is the galaxy gradually rotating in the background, with accompanying text that I'll screencap here.  This is one of those 'staggered reveal' deals with one line of text appearing at a time, but if you want that experience watch the video.   Another way to reveal the Arc? And the Seloi know of this?  And so, the Creeper World 3 Story comes to an end. Alternate ending, bonus material, all that stuff yet to come.
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Oct 10, 2018 07:49
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What was the purpose of any of that, then 
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Oct 10, 2018 14:21
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