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Author Topic: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows  (Read 65834 times)

LordBucket

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #45 on: April 10, 2014, 03:00:37 pm »

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Just broke 100k mana. Then I just farmed the mana shards so that I also hit 300k. Sadly you only get an achievement for 100k

There's an achievement for one million mana too.

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the grind involved in shadow cores

I've just been macroing for them. Field F1 gives 5 most of the time, plus a trash drop to sell sometimes. It's about 200 every 11 minutes. Make the macro smart enough to sell your fragments as they drop, turn it on before you go to bed, come back the next day.

Then be amazed at how quickly you can burn through 3000 shadow cores and wonder how they expected anyone to actually legitimately play for them.

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Looks fine post-nerf, images of me on M1 using only 2 gems to beat it:

L field is premium only. So is chainhit. I've tried poolbound gems on a few of the fields they're availale o me and they don't seem to work very well without the ability to increase their relevant skill.

I think this strateghy might be a premium only strategy, but I'd be curious to hear how well it works on endurance.



In other news I've discovered an interesting trick. Shadows occassionally spawn groups of spawlings that give xp. So, set a map on difficult settings and if  shaodw appears, don't kill it. Surround your orb with towers to kill the aeriel attacks, and put up some traps to kill the spawnlings.

Sit back and watch.

It's worth about 1700 xp/minute assuming no traits. Do it with 26x settings and that's 44,000 xp/mnute. It's also a good way to farm some of the more nuisance achievements like bolt/barrage kills on frozen/cursed targets.

However, apparently the shadow's barrage attack does increasing damage with time. So leaving it on and going to sleep is unlikely to work. I've seen 200,000 damage volleys. If you do this to farm achievements I advise not being too greedy as it's possible to spend a lot of effort and then be one-shotted. But it's a decent way to add a couple hundred thousand to a score.

MoLAoS

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #46 on: April 10, 2014, 03:20:07 pm »

I refuse to macro a game in order to be able to play it. That's fucking stupid.

Also the answer is that they didn't expect people to play for them. They expected you to buy them.
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LordBucket

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #47 on: April 10, 2014, 03:41:04 pm »

Actually, it appears that shadow core drops rates increase as you level. A little bit. I was only getting 5 each at level 67 yesterday, but just ran my macro now at level 154 and I'm getting 8. Yay.

To give you an idea just how bad the shadow core problem gets later, here's my first orange fragment:



You'll notice that it's only level 6 out of 7. Because I, afk macroing shadow cores for hours a day like I have been, nevertheless couldn't afford to fully level it. For the curious, the cost is/will be 76+92+112+137+166+205+249 =  1037 shadow cores. For one fragment. Plus  whatever was spent on traits on the field I picked it up on.

So yeah, it gets kind of bad. I don't feel bad for macroing for them. Poor design choice. I suspect there will be backlash for it.


MoLAoS

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #48 on: April 10, 2014, 04:43:00 pm »

How the hell are you level 167? Just from the exp from macroing cores?
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LordBucket

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #49 on: April 10, 2014, 07:48:39 pm »

How the hell are you level 167? Just from the exp from macroing cores?

No, only highest score on any fields counts towards your total. But it helps a lot to be able to casually throws around hundreds of shadow cores on every field.

If you want a simple recipe, first download autohotkey and make a macro to farm shadow cores from F1 and sell any fragments it drops. When I clocked mine back at level 60 something, it generated about 200 shadow cores every 11 minutes.  Leave it on overnight.

Unlock glaring. It doubles the shadow core cost of every trait, in exchange for giving you .7 multiplier instead of .3. Haste, Beacon Storm and Mana Lock all at 7 on Looming mode costs 84 shadow cores and gives a 7.3x xp multiplier at relatively low amount of actual difficulty provided you base a starter mana pool large enough to survive receiving no mana for the first few waves. Same traits on glaring costs 168 and gives a 16.2x multiplier. If you can't do glaring yet, and you're at least level 60 or so you should be able to quickly and easily spam though any field on tiles E, F, I and probably H just by placing a couple towers and armor traps, setting it to fast mode and quickly duplicating/upgrading as you collect mana, pressing next wave before each wave starts on its own, and pausing then spamming your spells if things start to go bad. If you see a shadow or get a particularly obnoxious beacon in a bad place, just restart. It takes too long to deal with that and you don't lose shadow cores for restarting a level. Testing that on field I4 just now it took under two minutes to beat and it was worth 56,000xp. Testing H2, it took just under three minutes and was worth 106,000xp. There are 24 fields on those tiles. If they average 75k,  for ~2000 shadow cores you can get almost two million xp in about an hour. Granted, it's not actually adding two million xp to your total because you've already beat those fields. But maybe it's worth a million xp. It's a lot faster and easier to get that million xp this way than to suffer through tougher fields for it.

Then with that xp, go back and start over at F again and do them on harder settings and anger every wave you can. All of those fields in the E,F,I,H tiles are worth hundreds of thousands of xp and they're much easier to do than later fields. For example, on F1 I have 234,000. On F2 I have 470,000. But for examle, on field M7, I only have 5732. Difficulty scales with the field. I was farming talismans on F1 with a 26x multiplier at wizard levels in the 60s. Whereas J5, for example, was a nasty horrible evil thing that I actually still haven't beat because I keep insisting on trying it with high multipliers and it keeps giving me near-million-health giants and spires and things.

Granted, I think my F2 score is inflated because of the shadow xp trick described here. When that happens, great. Take advantage of it. Sometimes the shadow will utterly fail to find your orb and you can use that to add two to three hundred thousand xp to your score just for 10 minutes of sitting there watching the screen. Or you can use that time to farm acheivements. Sometimes you can get 10 at a time on a single field. Other times it attacks it right away, or you don't even get a shadow at all. But even without a shadow, with Haste, Beacon Storm, Mana Lock, Corrupted Banishment and Giant Domination all maxed on glaring, that's a 26x xp multiplier for the low price of 280 shadow cores. Which only takes about 15 minutes of sleeping while your computer macros for you to get.

But yeah, ~10,000 shadow cores, pretty easily.



Alternately, if you don't wantg to macro, you could probably get a similar result by simply saving up a couple hundred from regular play, then get into the habit of using something like haste  7, mana lock 2, beacon storm 2 on every field you play as you advance through the game. There are enough fields that drop 30-60 shadow cores for beating them that you'd probably come reasonably close to breaking even, and you'd get a ~4x score multiplier on every map you played for neglible extra difficulty. If you hve 2 million xp now, you could have 8 million instead simply by spending shadow cores as you get them on easy traits. You'll eventually end up selling all those fragments you've been upgrading anyway, and the benefit of being half again higher level is probably comparable or better to all the random orblet/curse/"xp for wizard level"etc bonuses on most fragments.

MoLAoS

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #50 on: April 10, 2014, 08:09:50 pm »

I have autohotkey from when I played ATITD but for most games I find that I'm better off playing a game that doesn't force me to macro than I am using it. There is no reason for single player games to force me to do boring shit. It only works in MMOs cause that is necessary for fair emergent gameplay with large groups of players.
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LordBucket

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #51 on: April 10, 2014, 08:13:11 pm »

There is no reason for single player games to force me to do boring shit.

I agree. Which is why I'm macroing for shadow cores. :)

Anyway, no worries. I agree Peter went too far trying to monetize this.

saracoth

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #52 on: April 10, 2014, 08:38:02 pm »

In other news, I poked around the SWF file with JPEXS. (Just looking, of course. Not like I can change stuff and put it up on ArmorGames.) Talisman rarity is something like like Min + ((Max - Min) * Random() * Random())

Most standard random functions spit out a decimal between 0.0 and 0.9999999999 or so. Multiplying two of them together like that does heavily skew it to small values, as other have noted.

Lots of other stuff is at least a little random, but this is the only "unfair" randomness I see. Looks like talisman fragment rarity probably caps at 100. Starting at around 70 there's some vChanceForAllSkills kicking in, starting at 15% and climbing to 100% at 100.

So...yeah. While I don't care to follow the code more deeply than that, it's clear that gambling for talisman fragments is a long, long road.

At least one attribute of the GemCraft games is that most of this stuff is completely optional to actually play and win the game. That still doesn't make it hurt less to think of all the stuff I'll never see or do.
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LordBucket

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #53 on: April 10, 2014, 08:47:26 pm »

Proceed to field T5.



That is all.

Trevasaurus

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #54 on: April 10, 2014, 08:57:11 pm »

Do you find amplifiers useful at all? They seem pretty weak compared to just investing into damage gems.
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Toaster

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #55 on: April 10, 2014, 09:00:21 pm »

The range boost can be significant, I've found; that does require a moderate space/mana investment, though.
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MoLAoS

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #56 on: April 10, 2014, 09:20:18 pm »

Amplifiers are incredible except their high cost to build. Using a ton of amps and one gem makes abusing spells incredible and also works super well with black gems.
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LordBucket

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #57 on: April 11, 2014, 10:26:39 am »

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Do you find amplifiers useful at all?

I've found amps to be marginally useful at higher gem levels on maps where space is an issue and/or there is no path for armor traps. In general it looks to me like amps are not usually an efficient use of mana. For example, if you have two grade 8 gems sitting next to each other, you might not have enough mana to duplicate a third and stick it down next to them. But you can put a smaller grade gem in an amp next to them and upgrade as mana comes in. Or in a map with no trap path where you're angering waves up to several hundred armor, the extra damage can allow you to still do damage anyway.

Other than that I think they're more likely to be useful for traps than towers. If you're building a mana farm or making a poison trap gauntlet, for example, very often you can't simply add more traps because there isn't room for it. Adding amps allows you to increase the effect of the traps in the space you do have.

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Using a ton of amps and one gem

That worked well in Labyrinth, but I'm not really seeing it here. I haven't found many fields with enough space to do that and still have a maze around them, and even if you did I'm skeptical that it would generate better results than the same exact gems in the same exact positions except all in towers.

I realize it's the mana issue. Doing what you describe you can have a grade 9 surrounded by grade 3s. Whereas if you're using all towers and no amps, having one grade nine and 8 grade 3s would be silliy. But for the cost of a grade 9 and 8 grade threes you could have could have 4 grade 7s. I think I'd rather have the grade 7s and that's not even counting the cost of the amps.

The single grade 9 would give better armor penetration, but that's what armor traps and curse are for. Multi-target issues are much more significant here than in Labyrinth. A single gem tends to have problems when both smarwlings and giants are on the screen. Which is often.


In the time I spent typing this message, my background macro generated over 300 shadow cores.

MoLAoS

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #58 on: April 11, 2014, 01:27:28 pm »

I prefer amps mainly for orange/black or orange/black/red combos. Black simply gets a massive boost in hits, red lets you hit many targets, and with orange as primary you get shittons of mana and you can have beam on almost constantly, dropping bolts if you ever manage to burn through beams. I usually don't use a maze in this case, since maze maps with the above gem combo is rare.
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LordBucket

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Re: Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows
« Reply #59 on: April 11, 2014, 10:13:57 pm »

Passed level 200. Sadly, it appears I may need to levelup more to beat this. I'm on X tile and on minimum settings there are giants with over 15 million health. Also, the forgotten occasionally shows up and turns off the game interface. It just goes black and the controls don't respond until the effect wears off.

Picked up this nice little toy:



That +1 "crafting skill levels" appears to give +1 to Masonry, Fusion and Mana Stream. Though before I noticed the +1s on the skll screen I tested with two similar fragments with same starting level of same effect, and upgraded them both. The one I upgraded while that fragment was equipped got better upgrades despite the fact that it was actually a lower rarity. So either upgrades are random, or that effect helps upgrades.

Also finally the "% of wizard level goes to mana" bonus is actually worth something. Still not as good as the raw mana bonus, but getting there.

The power curve on this game is not only steep...but long. I think this is a game that was intended to be played for months, not weeks. Chapter Zero was that way too, but reaching skillcap only took weeks and the game just kept going. Here, I'm still seeing new things happen.

I did have some early frustration with the difficulty, but I think I'm mostly past the point where it's stupidly hard. Even if I can't beat a level yet, I feel like it's beatable. And if I want to level more, I can without having to make tough choices on which of only a couple fields I can possibly get gains from. Now there are entire tiles I still haven't tapped. Which is a nice change from a few days ago.

Also, to the above comment about chasing fragments being a long road...yeah. I spent hours and a couple thousand shadow cores doing that. Waste of time. Well, maybe not a complete waste. It did help me get past an early hurdle. But then I kept doing it and I think it would have been better just to keep pushing ahead on fields. Contrary to what I thought a few days ago, "just level more" really i the answer to the difficulty curve. There's no trick to it, you just need lots of levels and lots of skillpoints. As slow as level gains are it's sometimes difficult to see that. There were a few times where I'd do three or four fields to get one level. At those points in the game it was difficult to see that "oh, just gain 30 more levels and that will be good." But yeah...it really is a case of just gain 30 more levels. Or maybe 50. Whatever the number is. It's not even the starting mana. I start with about the same mana every map at level 200 as I did back at level 100. All those +4%s in True Colors, Fusion and Mana Stream eventually add up and the game starts to get way easier. Then unlock Resonance from T5 and suddenly i's "oh, wow I can actually kill things now."

I still think the shadow core thing is ridiculous. It's even worse than I originally thought, actually. Whomever said 40,000 would last you forever...no. Upgrading that one single fragment shown above w something like 1300+. I didn't count. 15 of the those would be 9500, plus assuming you actually have 15 of them you probably did 15 levels on max or close to max settings. That's another 3 to 5 thousand. And that fragment is only rarity 67. I assume higher fragments are even more expensive. And this is only late game we're talking about. I think I'm coming up on 20,000 that I've macroed to get where I am, and it's happened a couple times now that I had to stop playing and go get more because I ran out

I actually kind of suspect that the developer misjudged who many would be needed and it's something that will be adjusted some patch. But anyway, a few complaints aside, I am liking the game.


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