Tips for nightmare?

[Master Turd Blaster]

Nightmare is even harder now than it was before! (And survival is kind of too easy for me) The ranged fire elementals are kicking my ass. They are destroying my towers and nearby buildings from outside my walls. I spend all night furiously banishing them away then spend all day fixing what they broke. There's no time to expand the village like this. I know elemental towers will clean the floor with the mobs but I can't seem to keep up the amount of essence I need for that even with a steady flow of crystals. Any tips?

BTW this is probably the most fun I've gotten out of a $2.50 game.

[BladeofSharpness]

I play on Nightmare too :)

A tip that will cost 0 mana is to have a moat so that the elementals die when they approach your towers.
Also, bow towers fire farther than elementals. You should put some up...

Essence is precious indeed, I don't put forward elemental towers, or they would burn through it at an insane rate. They are a bit in the back, with their range reaching only the outside wall, so they can fire on specters that move through them, plus the stray monsters.

[Wolfier]

drop them in the lake

[Jay and Silent Rob]

I haven't played much on nightmare but fire elementals give me trouble even on Survival. Villagers burn to death frequently because they don't run AWAY from the elementals, but parallel to them. But since the elementals are ranged now, they just keep attacking them. Medics can't heal high, constant burn damage very well, either. And on top of that, golems won't go out and soak damage for my guards anymore. They tend to sit half of their number around my golem combobulators and the other half patrol the inside of the village while my guards go out to the perimeter and fight monsters.


As for essence, I've found that getting several essence collectors built and upgraded and making sure I have enough crystal harvesters and crystillers to keep them fully stocked with crylithium is vital. On top of that, upgrading your essence-using towers generally increases their battery sizes.


So with like 8 essence collectors built around a crystillery and fully upgraded, and a dozen elemental bolt towers in the field, you can end up with a 20k essence pool that lasts quite a long time before you risk running dry. I've had nights followed by eclipses followed by a blood moon, I think, and stayed supplied on essence through all 3 events in a row on my current survival game.


Range and ice damage helps a lot vs fire elementals. I've found that adding space between my walls and towers, to force fire elementals to approach more closely, and then setting up ice bow towers and ballistae helps thin them out. I've also begun adding multiple choke points instead of just 1. Because sling towers don't seem to fire over walls anymore, I create one initial entry zone with few towers near the entrance, that forces monsters to funnel in through one opening. At max range inside that courtyard, I have 1-5 sling towers set up to fire their boulders through the densely packed horde of monsters that charge through the 1-tile opening. Anything that makes it a few tiles beyond that is then subject to bow towers and elemental bolt towers, with a spray tower or two for skeletons.

Very efficient on essence. Creates a killing field in that courtyard that I place an attractor tower just in range of to keep my villagers from running out and clogging up the stream of monsters.