Winning without Area of Effect?

[MyUrp1]

I'm trying to figure out how to win at higher difficulty levels without using the standard Area of Effect weapons (Shock Tower, Thanatos), and I'm not sure how to do it. Piles of soldiers work for the first 50 days but after that the waves get scary huge and I can't grow my army as fast as the zombie hordes.

Wire fencing can handle medium difficulty final waves but I feel like I'm going to need more for higher difficulty. I've looked at the stats on Executors and I'm underwhelmed; they're very expensive and only a bit better than ballista. Wasps are effective but take up too much space and iron. Lucifers...

...hmmm, maybe that's what I should try. Lucifers standing in a gap in a double-wall should incinerate 4-12 zombies per second, and soldiers/snipers in towers can take down the specials that would otherwise cause trouble.

Is there another good way to accomplish what I'm trying to acheive?

[Liro Raériyo]

1K snipers should basically handle things

[MyUrp1]

Sure, but where are you going to find food to feed 1k snipers? Even on my best days I only have 300 troops, and usually less. (Especially if I'm playing Desolated Wasteland)

[Giers]

300 troops aint that much. I think I had 1100 soldiers for my solider only play through of map 2. With the food wonder you would be in a better boat.

[MyUrp1]

Food wonder only adds 266 troops. Are you maxing out the map with complete coverage of advanced farms? And you must have an enormous city of stone houses to support that. I've never tried developing my economy to that size... it must take a lot of work. And a lot of power plants and sawmills and...

[Gomez]

You can beat the game in many ways and using several different units.


Regards

[Heau]

Executors are a LOT better than balistas. Their spread is much wider than the balista bolts and rate of fire synergises better with other low dmg spam.

But I'm not sure how to interpret your header question with some of the info you have in the body of the text. Are you trying for some achievement or self-imposed challenge? If so what exactly do you consider excluded for your purpose?

For what it's worth, I haven't used shock towers or thanathos in months. Shock towers have a purpose for midgame waves but they generate so much noise (as do thanathos) I just avoid the snowball loss and wait for titans for mass noise. And shock towers die too easily to spitters in the late game. Executors are just better; or a few luciers for a funnel.

Thanathos though I find are just overall bad units. Too slow to really move around for map clear, lucifers are just better for choke funneling and I'll take 1 titan over 4 thanathos every day of the week for everything else.

Anyway, please be more specific about what you want to exclude for insights.

[Crypto Gamer]

In the campaign soldiers recieve the most upgrades and only soldiers can be used to win even on 800%.Albeit "higher difficulty" could also mean above default %.
300% is also "higher difficulty" to me.

In survival(and campaign) aoe is just more gold and food cost effective than mass single target past mid game if you can have like 4-5 of them.

That said you can likely win it with soldier/snipers only for self restriction if you can mass them like 500+ and have the academy built for veterans.

I won with like 800 soldiers ableit that was nightmare pop,100 day pre mutant patch,desert map.

Never tried it on 80 day nightmare post mutant.

Traps can help too,even just for the slow effect.And towers to extend fire range for millitary.

Albeit ballista also has a slight 0,3 aoe,while executors have semi-decent 0,6 aoe do not know if they count as aoe by your standards.

I suppose mass soldier sniper,traps could win with good chokes even on 900%.
You can chase zombies into your traps with some micro.

Wasp cost 10 iron,that is the problem but they are low maintance.I rarely use them,can be combined with shock towers,wasp snipe the 60+hp ones.

I do not remember if Lucifers dmg traps,but you could build walls with gaps in a choke,trap the open gap,4,5 lucis there+snipers in tower for high threats.+ attacktowers.Should hold well even without traps funneling zeds.

Venom aoe attack does dmg traps,but they can not manually targets traps.

Few lucies alone can hold runners forever in a good choke only specials need attention,that said lucifers also deal semi aoe,can dmg more than 1 zombie.....

So only true non aoe is ranger,soldier,sniper.
Not sure if wasp has a very slight aoe or not

[MyUrp1]

Originally posted by Heau:

Are you trying for some achievement or self-imposed challenge? If so what exactly do you consider excluded for your purpose?

It's a self-imposed challenge because I want to push myself to use some of the other options in the game instead of relying on shock towers backed by soldiers in towers like I usually do. I'm only excluding Thanatos and Shock Towers.

I've never had a problem with the noise shock towers generate, but that's probably because I don't deploy them until about day 40+ when I have solid stone walls and enough soldiers behind that I can just mow down everything that they suck in. Prior to that I use the usual ballista/ranger stealth mode.

Yes, Executors have an area of effect, but it seems pretty small. I've had a hard time finding videos demonstrating them but the few I've seen suggest they kill 5 or so zombies per shot which is barely better than the ballistas 3. So it seems like a wash -- 3 times as effective but 3 times as expensive.

Note that I'm only concerned about wave resistance. Soldierballs handle map clearing fine (yes, I do pause a bit to micromanage when I run up against giants). But I usually max out my army at about 250, which isn't enough to stop the late waves with thousands of zombies attacking.

Originally posted by Crypto Gamer:

I won with like 800 soldiers ableit that was nightmare pop,100 day pre mutant patch,desert map.
---snip---
So only true non aoe is ranger,soldier,sniper.

I'm just looking to exclude the massive AoE of shock towers and thanatos because they work so well, other AoE is fine (guess the title is a little misleading).

800 soldiers on deserted wasteland? Again, I feel like I'm doing something wrong with my food management, I struggle to even get 200 soldiers there?

[Heau]

Ok so Titans and executors is definitely the natural transition from your current playstyle. They're pricy but you need far fewer of them. A titan is basically a fast walking executor. So if you have a side you are unsure where the wave will hit, you can just get a few more titans there ready to move as soon as the waves begin and move them at the critical point, instead of upgrading all balistas to executors. The latter is safer but brutal on economy.

1 titan + basic defenses can typically handle waves up to day 50 if you had cleared the direction enough prior. 2 titans for the next wave after. Then 4 will take you to day 72 generally. And they move fast enough that they can return to your clearing team between waves. You may need to micromanage them a little (like clicking A and directing where the AoE lands) for some waves between day 50 and 70 if you have exclusively walls/balistas/titans.

Lucifers are very situational but exceptionally broken in those situations. Like if you have a funnel of no more than a few tiles, 4-6 lucifers on nearest target priority with 30 snipers on high priority can basically handle anything forever except giants. When I started I would often blow up my base backwards to a good funnel if I had expanded beyond it for the final wave. Like I remember a weird map where 4 lucis, 4 execs and 16 snipers in towers took the entire eastern final wave.

As far as empire scaling, at some point the best players (not I) reliably clear the whole map early enough that they expand to its confines and claim basically every resource available with advanced farms and all. I get one of those games in a blue moon. But it's in games like these that you get extreme scaling and can manage achievements like soldiers only and whatnot.

[MyUrp1]

Just 4 titans against the day 62 wave?

And looking at this video, somewhat underwhelming titan performance:
https://youtu.be/bYjOX-qf6-Q?t=6386

But maybe forcing myself to win with titans is exactly the challenge I need? I get the feeling I would need more like 40 titans than 4...

[Heau]

I've beat scuffed games with like 4 titans 150 snipers, a mix of executors and balistas and 4 layers of stone walls due to poor iron income. I usually like about 16 titans and 100-150 snipers for final wave and I just move my titans to hotspots (if any) if they are overkill on the side I initially put them.

Her day 62 pack was definitely overkill for the wave. A few more balistas could've done most of the sniper work (fatties). She had like 6 or 7 titans there and didn't even need to look at the wave despite not having cleared south much prior. So yes, if she had cleared a bit more prior, there's no doubt in my mind a micromanaged 4-titan with (a few more)balistas and whatever units were still at base would've been enough. micromanagement adds a lot of power to Titans. If they focus a fatty, the first 2 shots kill all other units within AoE and then they keep attacking it exclusively for a few hits whereas you can manually target bigger AoE spots and just finish the fatty as it closes up on the wall and packs with other enemies again. Or if you have enough prio target support in snipers or balistas, you just set your titans on nearest targets for the wave. I didn't notice how she had set them.

I didn't say 4 titans was a trivial handle of day 62 wave, but was enough if you are slower on econ. Based on what you are saying about army size and whatnot, I'm assuming you peak out maybe about 2500-3k civilians. That's how my early wins would be and I definitely didn't have the econ for a dozen titans by day 62 and generally handled it with ±4 a few freshly trained snipers and slightly thicker walls and balistas or executors for support if I was scared.

Her finale was brutal because she kept expanding like people pushing for score rather than building final wave prep for a couple of days prior like people looking to just beat the game. Like I've beat the game with half that econ and far less of the map claimed but a similar army size. Just more resources dedicated to prepping for final wave instead of keeping on expanding for score. If she's streaming this regularly, she was likely pushing for PB score so you aggressively expand and sometimes get finales like that. Doesn't mean she didn't have the ressources or units for it. Just that she didn't setup for the wave in a timely manner.

If you are looking for score pushes, titans are definitely key, but it's more about snowballing harder early and rerolling for better starting maps a lot. But that would be a different discussion and I'm not the greatest at this. I often let my resources cap out early despite pausing because I expand a bit slowly too often.

[MyUrp1]

Yes, my normal play is about a third of the map that she had covered. And I definitely focus on more defenses and less economy. But my focus on posting the video was less about her overall performance and more about the final battle around her command center. She had 10 titans there, plenty of snipers, and plenty of stone walls. I imagine that 20 thanatos in that same situation would have obliterated that horde. I did see that her one squad of 5 or so titans managed to hold off the northwestern assault. So they can be effective... is the 40 upkeep on the wiki accurate? If so that seems a fair price -- but I was hoping for something with better than fair price :)

As for their mobility, yes, Titans definitely look great for repositioning firepower in the event defenses are unbalanced (which is one of my biggest complaints about snipers, they're so sloooooooow).

[Heau]

I don't think I watched down to command center last straw defense but if 10 titan didn't hold, 20 thanathos generally wouldn't have. Their firing rate is dreadful. And without a lot of micromanagement, they often fire at the same spot because of delay between launch and kill (so they don't swap instantly like snipers) so there's a lot of firing power wasted with thanathos stacks if you don't do heavy micromanagement.

When a wave reaches command center, it spewed out hundreds more zombies than the initial wave along the way.

But the more practical answer is that your thanathos would've been caught off before being able to retreat to the command center anyway ;P.

[MyUrp1]

Fair point, yes, thanatos are also aggravatingly slow. At least I've found spacing them out does reduce the duplicate fire on the same point.

I'm looking forward to trying out the executor / titan combo... if I can survive long enough. I've played so many games recently on lower difficulty levels that I keep forgetting how zombie stuffed Caustic Lands is. So I've gotten myself killed 3 times in a row by day 20 because of zombie snowballs following a Mutant attack. I need to relearn ballista >> soldier for preventing that.

[MyUrp1]

So I finally tried out a Titan pile, and I'm fairly impressed. Each one seems about as powerful as 15 soldiers. So two or three aren't that hot, but when you get a dozen you really clean up. A day 78 wave (I was playing 100 days) just gets chewed up and spat out by that much firepower on the front lines. And three plus two dozen soldiers can hold a choke point against a modest final wave string.

Final result, 27 titans, 200 soldiers, cleaned up the final wave without any executors or other support, just lots of stone walls. I did have one section of my defenses that folded and had to retreat repeatedly, but I was expecting that and had plenty of fallback positions. Once all the other strings were complete I was able to relocate to shore that up and finish up.

It's a steep climb to get Titans -- Foundry, Oil Rig, Engineering Center, and gobs of research... at least 10000 gold... but those 2000 gold titans are worth the price.

Obviously thanatos and shock towers are more cost effective, but that was my whole point of this thread, to see if I could find a more expensive way to win. And I did!