Ok people. Time for some community spirit. How in gods name do we beat the new version of gem td on extreme?
I've had maze length ~ 1400. And in that game I died to air because I didn't get the red anti air aura tower. But I cannot kill the damage tests. That's my big focus at the moment because the money is so important. Anyone got any ideas how to kill the damage tests?
My tactic: Head for jade and dark emerald towers. In the TFT version, the stun was the only way you could win. So I try and get a couple early jades and then move towards a base for the emerald. I also get a blood ruby because it really helps with the ruby waves as I tend to have a lot of sapphires. Apart from that I just try to get all the big towers. I can upload the replay if anyone wants to check it out.
The basic strategy that I use is to alternate the waypoints inside and outside of your maze. This maximizes the number of times the creeps have to pass by the towers to get the most damage output. Every time a creep goes from inside of your maze to the outside or outside to the inside it multiplies the effectiveness of your towers. So for example, numbering the waypoints from the start it is something like:
You want to get 1, 3, 5, 7 inside and 2, 4, 6 outside or vice versa. Ideally the waypoints would be at the end of the maze and your towers are concentrated in a spiral at the entry/exit to the maze. In the replay above I used 3 and 6 because the debuff zones were in the way. I would have liked to have had 7 inside the maze and 6 outside but it wasn't necessary. I eventually worked in 1 and 5. I've managed to kill the easy damage test with this strategy (2.5 million damage).
Surround #1, #3 and #5 with rocks, and get a common choke where you maze it up back and forth 5 or so times. Then you just stack all your special combo turrets in the common choke which should be just a little towards the original spawn from the "x" where the air units pass twice. Then you just keep removing and replacing rocks and get more and more imba towers until you win. Overall maze length should be about 1300-ish, yet you have extremely concentrated dps vs both ground, air, and damage tests. It's a little harder without slates, like you had in the original, but it's still not very hard to beat extreme if you know how to properly maze... and don't have too much bad luck with the gems of course
Edit: As far as towers go, you should always try to rush for a blood ruby, partially because it's amazing in the early-mid game, but also you should get it at about the same time as you will be mazing beside the choke in the beginning anyway, so it will get in a good place. Late game, you should try to go for just about everything. Silver and Malachite you should never try to get unless you get them in one shot of course. Red Facet... is ok, but don't get it unless you really suck vs Air. Otherwise, just try to go for everything. Paraiba, Black Opal, Pink Diamond and Gold are all must haves.
Ok so I'm doing all of that. My maze length is about 1600, and beautiful and im actually dying before level 50. What level has anyone got to on extreme? (Admittedly I did have super bad luck in this replay.)
Just finished Extreme for the first time - I use a 2-way spiral design centered around the intersection in the middle of the path. I believe this was considered the optimal design in the original WC3 Gem TD map, though I modified it a bit to that there are mini-arms extending to waypoints 1 and 7 instead of mazing the whole spiral out to those waypoints (the lack of transplantable slates makes me a bit iffy about the risk of good gems ending up on the outside edges of the spiral since you would build towards 7 and 3 about the time when you're starting to make the power towers)
The biggest headache is figuring out how to initialize the spiral at the intersection without dying before you can seal off one of the waypoints. It took me a few tries to figure out where to leave holes in the spiral framework so that creeps still path through the center of the spiral while it's under construction. I suppose theoretically you could start from one of the waypoints and build it from outside to inside (e.g. 7 -> 3 -> 5 -> finish spiraling inwards)? Edit: oh hey I guess that's how most people do it, instead of wasting time like me trying to plan it out from the middle...
Anyhow, the 2-way spiral design easily took out Tassadar on Easy/Normal/Hard. The rep below, I had terrible, terrible da- I mean, luck and had almost no DPS towers at all (2 Pink Diamonds + 1 Mystic Black Opal; no Gold, no Paraiba -_-). Ended up having to waste money on 2 dedicated anti-air towers because of how bad it was. But even with all that mineral sink in useless AA, I still manage to take out 40% of Tassadar's HP. Only leaks were the Thor damage test (3x because I didn't have a single decent tower at the time...) and air units (...stupid Perfect Aquamarines denying me Paraibas and forcing me to waste money on Red Facets as;dlkfjsaldkfj). I think if I had had half-decent luck, it might have been possible to clear Tassadar on Extreme.
Blood ruby saved my life that game (stupid RNG...). Also that was possibly the most efficient Uranium-235 tower I've ever had (sitting right in the very center spot of the spiral) - it managed to overtake the blood ruby in overall damage despite being created much later.
It would be so much easier if Tassadar was stunnable *grumble grumble*
Edit: The purpose of the spiral is so that you can dump all your power towers in the very middle and thus maximize their firepower. If you set up the maze correctly, the creeps have to pass through the middle of the spiral 8 times, which makes burning towers like blood ruby and uranium ridiculously cost-effective. Of course it works better if the game decides to give you the gems you need to build DPS towers...
EPT
