Multiple Tower Strategy Question - 367 towers!?

[Manjosalph]

Hi Jeff... or anyone else that might have an idea,

First, I would just like to say that it is a heck of a game and I have a lot of respect for you for being so concerned with player comments that you respond quickly.

My question has to do with a multiple tower strategy. For example... I beat the map Focal Point with something like 16 towers and I received a gold medal blah, blah, blah. But I noticed that my top score is majorly dwarfed by people that had many more towers, 50, 99 even 367! My question is what kind of strategy do these people take? Obviously there is some selling and rebuilding that takes place, but what is the benefit to this? How does it make sense when calculating a score? To me if you spend 100 to make a tower and then sell it for 75 just to build it again for 100, then you are constantly losing 25 resources. How does somebody benefit from building 60 towers to beat a level with 15 will do?

Anyone that has any feedback on this would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[WolfWings]

You plant a small maze of low-level 100-cost turrets, with one-square gaps at either end and the maze large enough to hold an entire wave worth of enemies.

Now, you start 'bouncing' the enemies between the ends. Sell the 100-cost turret blocking one end, THEN build a new 100-cost turret blocking the other end. So you end up paying 25/pass to keep marching the enemies past your complicated, overlapping maze of low-level turrets, instead of upgrading any of them from their lowest-cost forms.

367 turrets? That could well be 17 level-1 guns w/ 350 'passes' through those 17 turrets to nuke everything in the level. And it would still be cheaper than 15 level 3 'Gun' turrets. 15 level 3 'Gun' turrets would cost 10500, if they were 'Inferno' the cost jumps up to 15750 total. In that case you could have *50* level 1 'Inferno' turrets and use the remaining 317 turrets to march the aliens through that maze of flame, and still only spend 15425.

There's 'upgrade versus sprawl' and then the truly high-end techniques pop up, 'ping ponging' as I call it. That's the real trick, when you're not trying for a 'fewest turrets purchased' victory where Upgrading always (obviously) wins.

[shujaa]

I've always thought of that method as cheating, and I think that's why they only let you build towers on the aliens' path on some of the maps. There's no strategy involved in that, it's simply a matter of clicking sell and clicking build repeatedly.

They can add a feature to stop people abusing this, where each time you sell a tower it takes 1 second longer to deconstruct than the last time you sold one. So it wouldn't really affect normal players, but would stop cheesy tactics like this.

[jeff]

We've definitely been amazed with the different tactics that people can take on the different maps.* The main mechanic that we see used by people to get high scores is for them to maximize the interest earned which can mean for some people building towers, lettting aliens walk buy them, sell them, and build towers elsewhere ahead of the aliens, on and off.* They lose 25 each time as you say, but if it can prevent them from building towers with their larger bank intact which is earning interest, it can be worth it to lose 25.* Ping ponging also takes place, but we did significantly reduce it's value by stopping the earning of interest when the last wave is on the level.* This prevents there*from being an*interest value*to keep the game going indefinitely which we didn't want to encourage.*





There are a lot of strategies, and our goal was to create a system that was solid that could allow many different people to explore how they want to play and what they can do to optimize their strategy.





Good luck!





Jeff

[mokn]

Meh no, you can't manipulate paths for an extra 100k income on most maps, there's a guy sitting on 2 billion.



I presume they are using hex editors.





Assessing the threat story top 8 scores are mathematically impossible only map i bothered to check.




fire control green towers only, 1st 84k with 24 towers, impossible.
rank 1 509 towers 83k resource, A lot of the top score on story mode are cheated a presume using a hex editor.



Rank 1 flight plan score 5,000,000



rank 3 cores left 44 towers built 0



guardians fall can't manipulate path rank 9 736 towers



lockdown story core left 2 double everyone elses score



Look at the consistency of story vs story challenge scores, Don't deny this isn't cheating or a game error as some maps appear completely legit with no boosted scores, i don't see why cheaters would avoid them.





I think xbox 360 will suit this game much better.

[jeff]

There are some cheaters out there, and we periodically remove those entries from the leaderboards that can't be real.* We likely haven't done this in a while and I'll try to do so tomorrow when I'm back at the office and can access the leaderboard tool.





Thanks for reminding us.





Jeff

[CreativeMFS]

Hmm. I have never even thought of this "ping-pong" strategy. It makes perfect sense though. I would not call it cheating, just beating the system, although, now I do not feel so bad about some of my scores. "sn - CreativeMFS_82" I did not know you could hex the game to get better scores. Anyway, great game. Keep more expansions comming please. I love resurgence.