Struggling with 80 days

[MyUrp1]

I've gotten good enough that I can comfortably win Nightmare population on Caustic Lands and Desolate Wasteland on 100 days, but I still struggle to win at 80 days either on Brutal or Nightmare. The population count doesn't seem to make a difference either way, it's rushing to have a map clearing army by day 60 that seems to be the issue. Pouring resources into the Foundry tech chain just really hamstrings my economy when I should be expanding my base population or footprint instead.

Should I just give up on the iron tier and go back to trying to win with just shock towers and soldiers/snipers? This works fine at lower difficulty levels but I feel like I'm going to struggle with it at 900%. Or is there a way to turbocharge my economic growth that I'm missing?

I feel like my problem is that when the 52 - 57 - 62 day waves hit my titans all have to hurry back to defend the base when I should be growing... or maybe there's something else I'm missing?

[Andrewbh2003]

you can def win without foundry tear tech ^^ though it does of course help but the thing is most foundry tech is a luxury and you can't really afford luxuries in 80 day scenarios cause 80 days is well...every day counts lol

[MyUrp1]

So soldier spam and shock towers / snipers is a viable 80 day strategy? OK, I will give that a try. Any tips on how to improve my odds? Obviously ballistas and troops in towers to help defend the shock towers, but inevitably they get sprayed anyway.

Kensei loves spamming ballistas everywhere but I never seem to have enough room for them. Is there another low level tech that would help? Wasps don't have enough range or do enough damage for the space they take up.

[Andrewbh2003]

Originally posted by MyUrp1:

So soldier spam and shock towers / snipers is a viable 80 day strategy? OK, I will give that a try. Any tips on how to improve my odds? Obviously ballistas and troops in towers to help defend the shock towers, but inevitably they get sprayed anyway.

Kensei loves spamming ballistas everywhere but I never seem to have enough room for them. Is there another low level tech that would help? Wasps don't have enough range or do enough damage for the space they take up.

im not THAT good at the game lol so i can't be that much help unfortunately

il leave that sort of advice for the pros

[Dslim]

You have already said you have won at 900%, was that a lie?

[Heau]

Viable vs reliable are two very different things.

Shock towers aren't particularly reliable for 800% imho. They die too easily from spitters and it can easly snowball to a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ once they fall.

Can you beat the game without iron? Sure but you'll need significantly more units in wooden towers as balistas are not remotely as strong as executors and the lack of highly mobile titans to move around if the last wave doesn't hit exactly where you expected it makes you more vulnerable(or you need to overstock everywhere). Same with the last 2-3 waves before the final wave where having even just 1-2 titans can spare you from moving a very slow batch of snipers over very long distances to defend the wave.

My earlier wins, would often be done with only a single big housing area and some scraps here and there but avoiding to expand beyond a critical choke. Like I'd hover around 2k-2.5k gold income until T72 preps and sink terribly low for the final wave. My growth from say day 30-70 would more or less only cover my increased maintenance and hardly more.

If you have a few natural and predictable bottlenecks, you don't need to expand on the entire map let alone claim all of its resources to win. Hell, I've even had some wins where I hadn't been able to clear like a quarter or more of the map and just geared up my defenses around the path I expected they would take for the final wave. Only if you face multiple giants converging to a single spot almost simultaneously does it become untenable. Just pack more snipers in stone towers for the range bonus to have enough fire power to deal with the very few giants you couldn't clear if any.

To be clear, I'm far from an expert either. I lose a ton. I especially still struggle vs the first mutant pull(s) and occasionally when east/west are clear and I'm starting to push north/south with a still small pack of units I mismanage and get trampled. But I very rarely lose the final wave if I make it there without resetting. I just expand within my limits and exploit natural terrain to my advantage. I'm still awful at pushing score.

[MyUrp1]

Originally posted by Dslim:

You have already said you have won at 900%, was that a lie?

I've won at 900%. But it's hard. Which is why I said "I struggle to win at..." -- I lose about 75% of the games I play. I'm trying to improve on that.

[MyUrp1]

Originally posted by Heau:

Same with the last 2-3 waves before the final wave where having even just 1-2 titans can spare you from moving a very slow batch of snipers over very long distances to defend the wave.

Yes, that's why I'm so reluctant to give up on Titans. Having a mobile defense force able to strike back wherever the enemy shows up is wonderful. Fixed defenses require that you overkill everywhere, snipers are painfully slow, and soldiers are missing the range to clear several layers of walls.

My fixed defenses are doing better since I've gotten in the habit of pairing ballistas with any shock tower I drop. But having a large enough economy to drop multiple shock towers as soon as the wave direction is announced is very challenging.

BTW, thanks for the tip on Giants. I keep forgetting that they do a miserable job against walls. So letting them survive to the final wave could be an option... although I worry what the spitters will do to my walls while everyone else is targetting the giant. Chubbies are bad enough.

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Originally posted by MyUrp1:

Yes, that's why I'm so reluctant to give up on Titans.

Foundry troops are straight up a noob trap. Every single one of them. Titans were viable before they were nerfed into the upper mantle, but that's 6 years ago now. Lucifers were always hard countered by spitters, making them useless for final waves. Thanatos' targeting issues have always made them a liability - especially when massed.

The amount of setup, initial expenditure, and upkeep required to use foundry troops is in no way offset by their actual combat effectiveness. Sure, you can mass 75+ Titans (on some maps) and forgo map edge defense for easy chokepoint defense on a final wave. You're still better off with a wall of attack towers/soldier towers backed up with 1000+ soldiers or snipers, which is far easier to set up without straining your economy. You can even start final wave prep relatively late, since barracks are cheap to spam and a late-game economy can support upwards of 40 of them constantly producing snipers, provided the map didn't screw you out of food.

[MyUrp1]

Usually I'm looking at 20 titans and only a population of 2000 colonists... my typical end base is only a quarter of the map, and if I throw everything into soldiers/snipers I'll only have 300-500. I'm not an edge-to-edge player, I'm very reliant on choke points and pockets. My first 900% win was on a map where there were only two entrances into my base and I don't think I've won a game with more than five.

BTW, this is a big part of why I've never won at 800%, Desolate Wasteland has no where near as many pockets and chokes as Caustic Lands.

It sounds like I need to learn how to build bigger bases... maybe I really should go back to Peaceful Lowlands 80 days and focus on maximum map expansion instead of minimal win size like I usually do.

[Heau]

Originally posted by Commisar Jon Fuklaw:

Originally posted by MyUrp1:

Yes, that's why I'm so reluctant to give up on Titans.

Foundry troops are straight up a noob trap. Every single one of them. Titans were viable before they were nerfed into the upper mantle, but that's 6 years ago now. Lucifers were always hard countered by spitters, making them useless for final waves. Thanatos' targeting issues have always made them a liability - especially when massed.

I couldn't disagree more. Giants are painfully slow to handle without at least one titan. And they really can't be without expanding electricity on nearly the entire map to ranger kite into a wall stripe without titans. Also, off the top of my head, titans were first buffed (a little too much) and then nerf back a bit during EA. But they are frankly in a good spot. Free titan mayors have some of the highest win rate.

While its true that lucifers are weak to spitters and highly situational, 1-2 tile choke points with a hitch can be completely trivialized by 4-6 lucifers and a dozen snipers in towers which is significantly cheaper than a normal defensive setup.

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Originally posted by Heau:

snipers

80 snipers focus firing a giant from towers is a 16 second kill time - 7 seconds if they are veteran. Less if you factor in potential chip damage from other sources. There is nothing slow about that. Equivalent cost of titans (minus all the setup costs) requires a minute and change; you also must devote your attention to kiting.

You can disagree all you want, but the math involved says you're wrong. That you would even suggest Titans are an effective way of dealing with giants is insane.

Originally posted by MyUrp1:

I'm not an edge-to-edge player, I'm very reliant on choke points and pockets.

And there's the core of your problem. If you want to succeed 100% of the time on max pop/80 days, you need to exploit the entire map to fuel your economy. Choke points are yet another noob trap. Choke points just focus the hordes - and more importantly - the final wave into a small area that is overall less defensible than if the entire edge of the map were your defensive zone.

Yes, you might have less concentrated defenses because you have to defend a far greater surface area. Yes, you may have to produce fallback zones if you mess up. None of that matters. By filling in the map, you have room to fall back. You also have an economy that's four to seven times stronger - and by extension a military that is similarly larger - than if you just huddle in the middle of the map.

The harsh truth is that TaB rewards both military and economic aggression and punishes weakness in either. I frankly don't expect to be listened to because this is this internet. That said, I didn't git gud all those years ago by being perfect and awesome all the time. I learned from quite a few failures. I didn't pioneer the sniper spam meta because I decided one day I wanted to make a run suck, but rather because soldier spam was boring and had glaring weaknesses that I didn't like.

[MyUrp1]

Well, I'm not looking for a 100% win rate, I'd be quite happy to settle for 50% or even 75%. So I don't need a wall-to-wall conquest of the map. But you are right that I probably do need to learn how to push my economy out further. I'm playing a Peaceful Lowlands map now to test that out and see how I can do with lots of ballistas covering large expanses of open wall.

As for snipers, my biggest problem with them is that they are mistake intolerant. If you're pushing north with 40 soldiers, and suddenly a stream of harpies shows up and starts eating them, you can turn tail and run and survive with maybe 3-5 dying before you make it back to the safety of your ballistas. Do the same with 40 snipers and they all die, running is simply not an option. Meaning mistakes are not an option. Soldier spam may be lame, but it works better for worse players.

BTW, is there any scenario where four wasps is more effective than a single ballista? I'd like to find a use for them so my defense isn't so boring.

[edit] I think I just figured out one use for them. 8 gold and 0 workers is a lot cheaper than 15 gold and 3 workers. If my ballista pile is bankrupting me wasps might be the low (upkeep) cost alternative.

[Heau]

@commisar You are just setting unreasonable expectation from a struggling player.

Your sniper kill on giant assumes you are using walls or towers to soak the 1-2 swings from the giant. Surely you don't play around losing 10-15 of your snipers in the 7 seconds it takes them to kill the giant. And you are telling that this is how to do it to players that don't have the early game tempo to stretch their expansion to the entire map, so they don't realistically have the luxury to use barriers to soak the hit - and probably don't have the tempo to replace a big loss of vet snipers taking a giant in the open without a titan.

The game is also punishing agression with early mutant pulls. If a new player averages half the remaps of a player pushing for score, his experience with overly aggressive will be much more miserable and a learning player will naturally fall back to a level of expansionism that requires different strategies if your goal is just to beat the game, not to high score or bust.

You are saying if you want to succeed 100% of the time on last wave you need full expansion. But your premise would instead cause the learning player to fail a significantly larger proportion of the time in the early game because your premise is extreme agression or remap. Again, that's a very efficient use of your time if your goal is to go for score, but a rather bad strategy to steadily learn the pacing of all 80 days.

To a player trying to learn and improve, starting to lose again a lot more very early to excessive aggression would actually feel more like a setback. Not particularly helpful to buck through the learning curve. Get them to get a few wins, learning the tools available to them to win even when the game doesn't go flawlessly, and then pace up the aggression. And once they feel they've hit their ceiling, they can figure out if they have what it takes to push for score(I don't).

Congratulation on being so good, but your suggestions strike me more as those that would tip an excellent player accross the 400k score line than tips that would push a struggling player to a win.

[Dslim]

Originally posted by Commisar Jon Fuklaw:

Originally posted by Heau:

snipers

80 snipers focus firing a giant from towers is a 16 second kill time - 7 seconds if they are veteran. Less if you factor in potential chip damage from other sources. There is nothing slow about that. Equivalent cost of titans (minus all the setup costs) requires a minute and change; you also must devote your attention to kiting.

You can disagree all you want, but the math involved says you're wrong. That you would even suggest Titans are an effective way of dealing with giants is insane.

Originally posted by MyUrp1:

I'm not an edge-to-edge player, I'm very reliant on choke points and pockets.

And there's the core of your problem. If you want to succeed 100% of the time on max pop/80 days, you need to exploit the entire map to fuel your economy. Choke points are yet another noob trap. Choke points just focus the hordes - and more importantly - the final wave into a small area that is overall less defensible than if the entire edge of the map were your defensive zone.

Yes, you might have less concentrated defenses because you have to defend a far greater surface area. Yes, you may have to produce fallback zones if you mess up. None of that matters. By filling in the map, you have room to fall back. You also have an economy that's four to seven times stronger - and by extension a military that is similarly larger - than if you just huddle in the middle of the map.

The harsh truth is that TaB rewards both military and economic aggression and punishes weakness in either. I frankly don't expect to be listened to because this is this internet. That said, I didn't git gud all those years ago by being perfect and awesome all the time. I learned from quite a few failures. I didn't pioneer the sniper spam meta because I decided one day I wanted to make a run suck, but rather because soldier spam was boring and had glaring weaknesses that I didn't like.

I mean i wouldnt listen to you just based on you have less than 300 hours in the game. The fact you think you can win 100% of the time is a red flag. I doubt if you have even beaten anything higher than 500%

[Dslim]

Originally posted by Heau:

@commisar You are just setting unreasonable expectation from a struggling player.

Your sniper kill on giant assumes you are using walls or towers to soak the 1-2 swings from the giant. Surely you don't play around losing 10-15 of your snipers in the 7 seconds it takes them to kill the giant. And you are telling that this is how to do it to players that don't have the early game tempo to stretch their expansion to the entire map, so they don't realistically have the luxury to use barriers to soak the hit - and probably don't have the tempo to replace a big loss of vet snipers taking a giant in the open without a titan.

The game is also punishing agression with early mutant pulls. If a new player averages half the remaps of a player pushing for score, his experience with overly aggressive will be much more miserable and a learning player will naturally fall back to a level of expansionism that requires different strategies if your goal is just to beat the game, not to high score or bust.

You are saying if you want to succeed 100% of the time on last wave you need full expansion. But your premise would instead cause the learning player to fail a significantly larger proportion of the time in the early game because your premise is extreme agression or remap. Again, that's a very efficient use of your time if your goal is to go for score, but a rather bad strategy to steadily learn the pacing of all 80 days.

To a player trying to learn and improve, starting to lose again a lot more very early to excessive aggression would actually feel more like a setback. Not particularly helpful to buck through the learning curve. Get them to get a few wins, learning the tools available to them to win even when the game doesn't go flawlessly, and then pace up the aggression. And once they feel they've hit their ceiling, they can figure out if they have what it takes to push for score(I don't).

Congratulation on being so good, but your suggestions strike me more as those that would tip an excellent player accross the 400k score line than tips that would push a struggling player to a win.

I agree, i think this guy watched alot of youtube videoes and is trying to act like he is a master.