EntropyTD Battle Report

EntropyTD

Welcome...to...EntropyTD. Starting in the top left of the screen, I opened the Menu, to check the Ranks of the Players. This round I am the favorite to win with ~9k MMR, with Phlipp being the second strongest player. Interestingly Gabagong, Hercuul and Lappy only have MMRs in the 100s or in Lappy's case, it actually is his first game. This leads to the minimap having 4 spots revealed for me. My maze and the mazes of the 3 newbs. While the 3 newer players are revealed to everyone, they in turn get to see everyone's maze as well. Sometimes newer players start to copy better players, which is why they are granted vision, to learn. I no longer get to see other good player's mazes, but I can check the newer players, to see if they might have copied something worthwhile, so that I might copy their copied homework.

Still in the top left, part of the Menu is obstructed because my mouse hovers over the Waves button. On this seed we rolled 6 different waves, with mostly 18 lings and one boss wave with just 4 lings. 18 lings is a lot, so Towers that do splash damage or multishot should be good. These towers however usually have the drawback that they don't do a lot of damage. Then there is wave 6, which will repeat every 6th wave, the Armoredling...it demands a lot of damage.

Looking at the map for the first time, we see 3 different zones. Blue, Purple and Red.
The Blue zones, make lings go slower,
The Red zones make lings go faster.
The Purple zones make towers placed within shoot farther.
There is one more type of zone, but it didn't roll on this map, The Yellow zone, which would increase a tower's damage.

In the bottom right, I have edited this screenshot, to show you the possible upgrades of a standard tower into the 24 tower types. You might recognized that they have a colorful background, ranging from green to red. It indicates which price they rolled on seed 951594787x17x34.

Now, lings will walk from Start to 1, from 1 to 2, from 2 to 3, from 3 to 4 and from 4 to finish. This is why I want to group Start,2 and 4, so they have to walk as much as possible. Also, just under the Ready button (middle top of screen) there is a tiny $ and a x3.0 next to it. Every time the first ling of a wave passes over that, I get the wave level times 3 as minerals. So my plan is to group Start,2 and 4, make them go up, there is a tiny space at the left where they can fit through, then pass over the waves$x3.0 and proceed down, to the right of 2.
At least that is the plan. The first wave has not started yet. This seed the standard towers cost 8 and we start with 53 minerals, so I came up with this, guaranteeing 4 passes over x3.0 with just the 6 towers affordable at the time.

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Now my mouse hovers over the Map button. Max supply is only 21 this time, mazing will eventually be done with supply depots instead of towers, since they cost no supply. Speed/Upgrade refers to 1 of 3 upgrades available when you select a tower. You can upgrade it's damage,speed and type. 4% is low. You can upgrade a tower's speed to 245%, it will take ~61 upgrades this time, each speed upgrade cost's 1 more mineral than the previous one, so it will take a while before players rake up damage.
There is one set of Teleports on the Map. The Green Vortex labeled TP1in next to 4 is the entrance to the Teleport, can you guess where they will be teleported to?
My original plan was to group Start, 2 and 4 and make the lings go up to the left, over the x3.0 and go down right of 2. However being busy thinking about what to screenshot for this battle report and thinking I won't have enough minerals to do that now, I at least try to force the lings into the Green Vortex. I fail:

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Next to the portal I placed a 1x1 blocker. It costs supply and 33 minerals. It does nothing, but block a 1x1 space, instead of the 2x2 spaces towers block. They are not bad to use, but a luxury. As this is wave 2 and minerals are always scarce, I should not have placed it. I panicked. Luckily, if you do not upgrade a thing, you can get a full refund. There are also 2 more $x spots on the bottom of the map.

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This is wave 3, nobody has managed to kill a ling yet. I cleaned up the mess around 4 and I force the lings over the mineral spots in the bottom as well. I have disposable minerals so I start to think about the tower choices again. Then I remember my original plan:

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This is wave 5. My plan has become reality. I am also already max at 21/21 supply, so adding more maze, will be costly, as it will be done with supply depots. A tower cost 8, this time each supply depot cost as much as upgrading a tower into a Damage Field Tower would, 56.
onebranch friendly reminds everyone that this is not actually a tower defense map, but a FFA race to score 100 kills more than everyone else. So choosing a tower becomes more urgent. The Damage field tower has a range of 3. A normal tower covers 2x2 spaces, so it would shoot 1.5 towers far. The Tower I have selected in the middle of the maze is surrounded by rocks, however it stands in the Purple zone, so it would have a range of 2.4 towers, or ~5 spaces. It actually has a damage multiplier of 0.66, but most waves have 18 lings and the nice thing about it is, it would hit all 18 lings if they are in range, giving the tower 11.88 times the damage overall. However, before this wave ends, onebranch will extend his lead much further than 6 kills over everyone else and up next are armored lings. Their armor won't be penetrated by a damage multiplier <1.

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What a relief. Even though onebranch ended up 20 kills ahead, he seems unable to get any kills against armor lings, so he probably went the splash/multishot route. I also start to upgrade the Damage of my tower first, because it does not matter how fast it can shoot if it can't break lings armor. Now I went for a single target tower, the Minimum Range tower. It can't attack lings that get to close to it, but since it is surrounded by rocks I liked my choice. It also has a 2.18 damage multiplier, one of the highest ingame.
This felt like a good time to take a look how the newbs were doing:

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On the left we have Gabagong. He decided to make the lings go all the way around the middle rocks before entering the teleporter in front of 4. The problem with favoring teleporters over checkpoints is, with a check point lings have to go-to and come back from the checkpoint, so you get 2 passes through your maze, with a teleporter they only get teleported back once, so you only get half the path length. What he did with the Finish and 3, is suboptimal, but he failed to group 4 with Start and 2, so he kinda had to.
In the middle we have Hercuul. Unlike Lappy, this is not Hercuuls first game, however, he seems to be more into abstract art than puzzle solving.
Lastly there is Lappy. His maze looks somewhat like my maze looked earlier. He uses a 1x1 and a tower on top to ensure that the lings will 100% pass over the x3.0. Sometimes lings behave slightly different, depending on where you spawn, sc2 engine quirks. Maybe he had to do that. He also chose a bounce tower. It hits lings 3 times and has 0.7 damage multiplier. Since I didn't screenshot onebranche's Maze, I assume Lappy panicked when onebranch raked up kills early on and copied the tower choice.

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About 15 minutes later...

When a player is defeated he gets revealed. Here cabanaz got revealed. cabanaz had the third highest MMR, almost identical to Phlipp. If you think hard about this maze, you see it does one thing a lot better than my maze, it gets an additional pass over the $x0.8 and the $x1.4. He did this by cleverly breaking a rock, which you can only do on some seeds. It starts cheap this seed, however, the price doubles for each additional rock break. Sadly copying the rock break wouldn't help me, since I placed my tower where the path would open up...but since rock breaks are cheap and I am in the lead, they feel like a good Idea. So I type "bad map" in between waves, which triggers some nukes and leaves you with the aftermath for a short time:

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I do this, as it is easier for me to tell which rocks might overlap from looking at their base texture without the rock model on top. I decide to break 2 rocks (bottom right ability of the Builder), to add more maze at the bottom, when Phlipp starts to pull ahead:

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I need to stop with those expensive rock breaks and focus less on the late game and more on damage right now, when I realize two things: My tower is upgraded to a point where adding more Damage upgrades would be silly expensive and I can't fit another tower into the Purple zone without blocking the path on the left. So there is only one option: break more rocks!

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My second tower is already maxed out on speed upgrades, but it can't reach the lings when they go to 2, so I add some supply depots next to start to make them come further down, as my 2nd tower is further down. You can see it's range in the current selection, indicated by the dotted purple circle. The white circle is how far it would reach without the Purple zone and since it is a Minimum Range tower it has a third circle. Eventually I decide to upgrade overall tower range at my builder (D hotkey) and change the upper maze to this:

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Then it is more towers, which means more rockbreaks.

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For a moment I fear I might broken to many rocks (doubling price), as Phlipp pulls farther ahead. You might wonder why I keep putting my towers into the path that cabanaz used so skillfully to get more $x passes for the 1.4 and 0.8 spot. That is because there are 4 spaces left to the left, and I could still make a path there. For now space in the Purple zone is too precious. My final Maze looks like this:

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As wave 30 draws near, it is clear that I won. I type "-sight all", which shares my sight to all players, so Phlipp does not have to wait till the end of the wave to see how he was defeated. He returns the favor:

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The bottom half of his maze is better, my top half is better, but overall they are rather similar, considering we both build without seeing each other.
I actually think for this seed, cabanaz' approach, but with a melee tower to the right of his damage field tower where he put a supply depot, would have been a much stronger solution. It would have raked up kills too fast for the mazes that "won" to compete, as they relied heavily on expensive mazing techniques. So wp cabanaz.

I started playing EntropyTD when it was still called RandomTD, roughly 8 years ago.

TL;DR: It's fun.

EntropyTD Battle Report

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