I Love this game! Endless mode tips

[axemongrel]

Just wanted to say that i love this game, so few traditional td out there that does it right basically been waiting for a few years for something to scratch the itch of defense grid! Very few games have managed to come close, this game imo does it at least as well. The endless mode is better than DG, managed to get to wave 78 so far.

As far as i have gathered the best basic towers is drilling laser and plasma flame? Flamethrower ignores shields which is very useful, i try to spam those two towers as much as possible and throw in lots of EMP gatling, slowtower and nuclear towers.

My question is if i am missing another good combo, i feel like missile and plasma cannon is underwhelming compared to drilling lasers as far as pure dmg goes and artillery does so little dmg that its useless on later waves, or am i wrong?

[Echofinger]

Check out the replay feature for whatever map you are playing. Skip to wave 100+, pause the game, and check out the pathing and tower selection.

Maps influence tower selection quite a bit, so what is best changes with the terrain. Also the meta is still in flux. The top scores keep growing and the tower selection is changing with it.

Some towers don't make the cut for survival mode because they don't scale well coming into the higher health Axon.

Some thoughts:

PULSERAY with global upgrade and range/fire rate upgrade. In groups of 3+ as close to perma-stunned as the game allows.

SIPHON CANNON/ORBITAL CANNON - no range limit on targeting. Almost every top score leans into one or both.

GENERATOR - grab resources cheap and early, along with the power generation. Turn them into 30 credits per turn, buff your guns, or add some slow.

RADAR - hit it early game and stack up 500+ lives for later. The extra power can be traded for gold every 10 waves with a meta tech. Oh, and they also do that radar thing, range boost for those out of the way locales.

NANITE NEST - almost every top score is running these. Try 'em out and see.

I know, you asked for a combo, implying two towers. There is my 5 tower combo instead.

Other stuff works good too. Like I said, hit a few replays. The devs did a nice job balancing out the towers with various abilities and damage. There aren't any I call junk. Pretty amazing given the variety present.

[RAMBO]

I hope they do create an endless mode for this game. The survival mode stops at wave 120.

[Naphal]

I recently hit the top 10 in endless (finished on 120 and could have gone a lot further) without using the meta loadouts, so no networks at all, so id just advice trying out a bunch of stuff and let your creativity propell yourself forward :)

What i disocovered so far:
-Perma stun loadouts dont work. I guess theres some kind of internal CD until another stun can happen and/or the larger stun doesnt overwrite the shorter one
-Trap only builds cant work because lifters need to be EMPd for sure unless you really want to EMP every one of them manually
-to be continued

[Echofinger]

Hit up the scoreboard for BLANK CANVAS survival. Acropolis just took the #1 spot with a neat load out, artillery included.

Week before this it was all Nuke and Network.

Week before that it was orbital spam.

Says something about the effort put in by the devs that there is a decent amount of variance in tower selection in the opening month of game play. Good stuff!

[Schakar]

If you don't get at last 3 of the towers you want before the first boss spawns > restart!
Not worth to try hard wenn luck is against you :(.

If you lost 25 lifes before boss 1 > restart!
Again not worth to try hard.

Some towers aren't usefull at all.
Linked Toiwers, Inertia Blasters or the tiny yellow AoE Cannons. Their short range is hard-countered by to many abilitys :(. Stealth, Speeders, wtf 4 range AoE disable (realy 4?? should be 2 MAX!) and imuns past by before this super shot towers could do any damage at all.
Basicly any tower with less then 3 range (base or upgraded) is either useless or are very restricted.

Don't count on any of your abilitys :(. Neither EMP, Slow nor Stune are 100% garanteed later.
Just watch the pack of super imuns omega speed past half yout towers while 2 disabler anihilate ther other half :(.

[Acropolis]

Here are some of my ideas:
1. Overloads: Must include Statis Wave. The other one should either be Radiation Cloud or Amplify.
2. Nanite, EMP mine, Orbital Cannon, Siphon Cannon are popular, but felt like traps to me.
3. EMP options: EMP Gatling or Electron Launcher only. I don't recommend Reaper or EMP mine.
4. Slow and damage amp are really important. Look for suitable ones and include them in the loadout.
5. Only reroll once per wave to avoid spending too much resources on gambling.

[Naphal]

Originally posted by Acropolis:

Here are some of my ideas:
1. Overloads: Must include Statis Wave. The other one should either be Radiation Cloud or Amplify.
2. Nanite, EMP mine, Orbital Cannon, Siphon Cannon are popular, but felt like traps to me.
3. EMP options: EMP Gatling or Electron Launcher only. I don't recommend Reaper or EMP mine.
4. Slow and damage amp are really important. Look for suitable ones and include them in the loadout.
5. Only reroll once per wave to avoid spending too much resources on gambling.

Agree with most of the points, although i felt tempted to add to this a bit:

1. I personally feel that the Backtrack overload is mandatory for a lot of builds. Not only does it prevent you from loosing to a boss if your maze isnt spread out far enough (especially the lvl15 one), but also works wonders in other use cases. (such as the guys which cant be hit from the front when your maze isnt prepared at this particular point)

2&3. Agree with everything but EMP mine which is my EMP source of choice for more convoluted layouts. With the global upgrade, the -10% trapCD talent and the CD-upgrade for the mines they have been the most reliable and cost efficient EMP source for me in mazes which dont feature long straight paths. Basically place them right after a corner so that the detonation aoe hits up to 2 tiles behind the creeps triggering the mine. Otherwise yes, i think Electron Launchers are the way to go if they have a place in your loadout :)

[Acropolis]

Originally posted by Naphal:

Originally posted by Acropolis:

Here are some of my ideas:
1. Overloads: Must include Statis Wave. The other one should either be Radiation Cloud or Amplify.
2. Nanite, EMP mine, Orbital Cannon, Siphon Cannon are popular, but felt like traps to me.
3. EMP options: EMP Gatling or Electron Launcher only. I don't recommend Reaper or EMP mine.
4. Slow and damage amp are really important. Look for suitable ones and include them in the loadout.
5. Only reroll once per wave to avoid spending too much resources on gambling.

Agree with most of the points, although i felt tempted to add to this a bit:

1. I personally feel that the Backtrack overload is mandatory for a lot of builds. Not only does it prevent you from loosing to a boss if your maze isnt spread out far enough (especially the lvl15 one), but also works wonders in other use cases. (such as the guys which cant be hit from the front when your maze isnt prepared at this particular point)

2&3. Agree with everything but EMP mine which is my EMP source of choice for more convoluted layouts. With the global upgrade, the -10% trapCD talent and the CD-upgrade for the mines they have been the most reliable and cost efficient EMP source for me in mazes which dont feature long straight paths. Basically place them right after a corner so that the detonation aoe hits up to 2 tiles behind the creeps triggering the mine. Otherwise yes, i think Electron Launchers are the way to go if they have a place in your loadout :)

Statis Wave is the strongest overload so it will always occupy one slot. In late waves, Amplify or Radiation Cloud will be used a lot to compensate the lack of damage. Other overloads cannot satisfy this requirement.

I have a quite irregular maze in my Islands record where I used EMP Gatling instead of EMP mine. Initially I also thought that EMP mine is the most cost efficient EMP source. However, EMP mine deals 0 damage and provide no debuffs other than EMP. When I was using EMP mines in my failed attempts. I always find that I lack damage to healing waves after wave 80 even if almost all supportive axons were EMP'd 95% of the time. The 30% damage amp and 20 dps from EMP Gatlings made them much more helpful.

EMP mines cannot permanent EMP Replicators or Carriers either. EMP Gatling on the other hand can finish this job perfectly.

[Valendrass]

I don't like the network towers and the arty, I've tried dozens of combinations without these two towers but none of them really work.
When I look at the highscore, one of these two towers is always there.Do you believe there is a tactic without these towers?

[Acropolis]

Originally posted by Valendrass:

I don't like the network towers and the arty, I've tried dozens of combinations without these two towers but none of them really work.
When I look at the highscore, one of these two towers is always there.Do you believe there is a tactic without these towers?

Digest the mechanism behind the Artillery build and Network Build.

Artillery:
Compact defense structure with very strong debuffs from several towers. Debuffs are the key in this build.

Network:
Long and distributed defense structure with 18% map wide slow and 34 dps dot from Networks. Debuffs are less necessary and less effective here, but still mandatory to have some.

Knowing how these builds work will help you find your own alternative loadout.

[Naphal]

Originally posted by Valendrass:

I don't like the network towers and the arty, I've tried dozens of combinations without these two towers but none of them really work.
When I look at the highscore, one of these two towers is always there.Do you believe there is a tactic without these towers?

I do runs exclusively without both of them because arty is just unbalanced(overpowered) at the moment,at the very least thats my personal opinion, and network is a bit boring to use over and over again.

Ive managed to hit 100+ with several builds, 120 as well, so there are actually more options.

If you check my replay for blank canvas ( i guess spot 11-14 in the leaderbord it was) i decided to focus on world engines as the main damage dealers. The maze design was something i came up with for three reasons here : a) maximum dps for the world engines b) maximum path length with this circular design c) allowing my other supporting towers to hit as many lanes as possible, thus increasing uptime.

The #2 tower i focused on here were arc reactors with the "damage increases on bounce" upgrade, as this has proven to be a very strong damage option over the course of the game. Ive had a few spots where an arc reactor can hit up to 6 lanes (coupled with ComLinks and the +2 range upgrade), thus in a single wave those arc reactors usually dealt 50k+ damage.

Theres a single major drawback to this design, and thats flying units, but i decided to just ignore this flaw and handle the later flying waves by using my overloads more often. In the earlier to mid game waves, even the flying enemies just died way before reaching the ending. Actually, if i had picked stasis wave this game would have been even easier.

Another very strong option to focus on is the combination of Axon fabrics combined with the "Vex defenses up to 4 tiles away from the exit gain 1 range or 1 AOE" perk. As their 1,5 baseline aoe now turns into 2,5, you can imagine what kind of damage boost this gives to an already very strong tower.

Just a few options which worked for me to help you get going :)

[Valendrass]

The idea of ​​making the path spiral is interesting. I thought about it, but I couldn't imagine that it would work because of the flying units

A few questions about your tactics, in the middle you don't use nuclear, is that due to lack of space or is there another reason

Why the radiation vent, for me it's a tower/mine that I always ignored, it didn't sound really useful

You have relatively little slow in it, have you ever tried whether the gravity generator would be useful

[Naphal]

Originally posted by Valendrass:

The idea of ​​making the path spiral is interesting. I thought about it, but I couldn't imagine that it would work because of the flying units

A few questions about your tactics, in the middle you don't use nuclear, is that due to lack of space or is there another reason

Why the radiation vent, for me it's a tower/mine that I always ignored, it didn't sound really useful

You have relatively little slow in it, have you ever tried whether the gravity generator would be useful

The idea is that the flying units should reach the middle way before the other units do, so all directed towers in the middle will solely attack the air units, thus providing enough dps to kill them. After roughly wave 90+ this didnt work anymore, as most space in the middle was designated to the world engines, and at some waves i leaked up to 100 lives to air units, but i did recover them pretty fast (had a few ComLinks with the life-regen upgrade plus a few life recovery talents). This run was actually my FIRST run using this tactic (i actually just had this idea and wanted to try it out), if i were to do it again, id change 2 towers and use another overload combination.

1. I didnt use nuclear in the middle because at this point its a) a waste of space and b) kinda pointless because i just used the upgrade to keep the debuff up, as a single nuclear can cover multiple debuff applications in this maze design and is thus quite cost efficient. If the creeps reach the middle, the whole concept would have failed, a few more seconds of the low dps debuff running wont make a difference here.

2. Radiation Vent is one my favourites in multiple designs for 2 reasons. One is the global upgrade which provides a 5% damage amp per vent upgrade ( unupgraded vents count as well!). Second its the upgrade which applies a 80% slow in an aoe, which is priceless wenn you need to eliminate some tricky units which have managed to somehow reach the middle area. And of course those nasty reversers.

Considering the slow, yes if i knew in advance that this design works so well, i would have used gravity generators with the global range upgrade for this design. So far, i basically only used the radiation vents. But - i wouldnt even need the slow. If they change endless so that you can go beyond wave 120, it would be useful, but so far its actually overkill.

[Acropolis]

Originally posted by Naphal:

Originally posted by Valendrass:

I don't like the network towers and the arty, I've tried dozens of combinations without these two towers but none of them really work.
When I look at the highscore, one of these two towers is always there.Do you believe there is a tactic without these towers?

I do runs exclusively without both of them because arty is just unbalanced(overpowered) at the moment,at the very least thats my personal opinion, and network is a bit boring to use over and over again.

Ive managed to hit 100+ with several builds, 120 as well, so there are actually more options.

If you check my replay for blank canvas ( i guess spot 11-14 in the leaderbord it was) i decided to focus on world engines as the main damage dealers. The maze design was something i came up with for three reasons here : a) maximum dps for the world engines b) maximum path length with this circular design c) allowing my other supporting towers to hit as many lanes as possible, thus increasing uptime.

The #2 tower i focused on here were arc reactors with the "damage increases on bounce" upgrade, as this has proven to be a very strong damage option over the course of the game. Ive had a few spots where an arc reactor can hit up to 6 lanes (coupled with ComLinks and the +2 range upgrade), thus in a single wave those arc reactors usually dealt 50k+ damage.

Theres a single major drawback to this design, and thats flying units, but i decided to just ignore this flaw and handle the later flying waves by using my overloads more often. In the earlier to mid game waves, even the flying enemies just died way before reaching the ending. Actually, if i had picked stasis wave this game would have been even easier.

Another very strong option to focus on is the combination of Axon fabrics combined with the "Vex defenses up to 4 tiles away from the exit gain 1 range or 1 AOE" perk. As their 1,5 baseline aoe now turns into 2,5, you can imagine what kind of damage boost this gives to an already very strong tower.

Just a few options which worked for me to help you get going :)

Artillery relies heavily on slow debuff while half of post-30 survival waves contain purgers, some even come with mass teleporters. Hard countered by lifters, skippers, reversers, marauders. It clears easy waves super fast, but faces much more problematic waves than other towers. Without Axon factories doing all the heavy work it can't even survive till the end.