Mid Game Strategy: Levels 1550-2850

Builds, Strategies, and Tactics to get you through the higher levels.

Beyond the Defender 12 Achievement

Once you achieve Defender 12 or 13 you will start to notice that your build strategy for the early game play isn’t working as well with the higher levels.
This point in the game play it’s more about strategy with builds then it is about packing the Gold Tree and clicking.
This guide will examine Artifact and Weapon builds for “Overpowered”, “Maximum Damage” and hands-free game play.
As well as earning Time Cubes you will be moving them liberally around the skill trees as you progress to higher levels with each warp and new time line.

Base Line
To give prospective these are my stats when this guide was published:

• 2 ½ hours of Maximum Damage game play between warps. (lvl 2500)
  
• Current max time for Maximum Damage is 56:58.
  
• Runs Overpowered on and off into the 900’s.
  
• 239 time warps with a total of 26.6 mil. time cubes, 10.8 mil. weapon cubes and 6.19e219 in gold.
  
• 200K Time and 100k Weapon cubes earned per time line.
  
• and way too many hours spent on this game.
  -note: When you launch from the desktop icon Steam does not track your hours played.

Except for spamming the ASDFG & 07 keys my build can run hands-free to 2880. When applying Weapon Cubes and doing my own targeting I can get to 3001 before I have to wait for Cooldowns.

The following are my best practices for build, tactics and strategy. Tweaks are welcome in the comments as it is a work in progress.
Sold by weight not by volume. Your results may vary.

Change Log:
03/27/2016 - added "Promotion Jumps, Fire Rates, and Deep Runs"
04/02/2016 - Gold Tree 3k+ text
04/09/2016 - added Respec chapter
04/16/2016 - testing results for damage tree
06/22/2016 - another reason to hate auto spell correct. Changed respect to respec.

Time Cube Build

Progress Tree

Progress Tree

Max the Progress tree except for ”Start on wave” that should be lowered to start at level 11. The reason for starting at this lower level is that you have the potential to stack 28 minutes of Maximum Damage by level 401, so it is well worth the extra minutes to go from 11 to 400 and even more so by 991. At this point your Team will do all the destroying for you. While the Team completes levels 11-400+ it’s your chance to go do something productive.

Gold Tree

Gold Tree

Focus will now move away from adding cubes to the Gold tree and more focus towards the Damage tree. By now it takes a lot of gold to promote a team member a single level; the Damage tree will get to further faster.
Rainbow Ball, Rainbow Enemy, and Yellow to Rainbow should all be maxed.
Gold Find is 198% beyond this point it becomes too expensive and the Time cubes are better applied elsewhere. Around Lvl 3000 you may want to increase gold find and gold per block if your team is still in training when you reach a large HP jump.

Starting a new time line the gold should be 46 of 200, that will put you at Spec Ops 1.4. The amount of cubes required to get to Spec Ops 2 is better spent on other augments. You don’t want to start your run with your team at a Training level as that will hurt your Overpower.

Balance your cubes on the Gold tree by examining the Statistics tab. Look at Total Blocks Destroyed for each color group and load cubes accordingly into the gold multipliers of each color block. This will change as you replay the higher levels so check it every 15-20 runs.

Click Tree

Click Tree

Click tree should be at about 7 of 10 for most augments and FULL on the cheaper ones.
Your Click Pistol targets the Pulse Pistol when in idol mode so I tried adding big multipliers to Pulse Pistol. There was little noticeable change to my stats. Best to just keep them level with each other.

Increase damage multipliers on White and Yellow blocks until they get too expensive. As with the Gold Tree, use the Statistics Tab to determine the spread.

Abilities Tree

Abilities Tree

In the Abilities tree it’s prudent to move cubes from Cooldown to Duration at this game stage. The reasoning is that the more Duration you have to longer the Maximum Damage will be. Cooldown will not be needed until you pass level 1500 and eventually past 2700. The drawback to this strategy is that your Dimension Shifts will take longer. Optimum Cooldown for the cost is about 53 seconds and Duration is 50 seconds. Any cubes left over should be applied to the Damage tree.

Damage Tree

Damage Tree

Damage Tree will get just about all your time cubes from now until the End Game strategy. Left side of the Damage tree should be “FULL” focusing on the Never Miss abilities first. I found that spreading the cubes evenly among the Team DPS and individual multipliers works well.

Note on Idle Mode targeting: Click Pistol targets with Pulse Pistol, Click Launcher targets with Rocket Launcher, and Click Cannon targets with Particle Ball not with the Flak Cannon.

In Idle Mode the Click weapons target the same block as the corresponding team member. With this in mind I experimented with heavily loading the Pistol, Cannon, and Particle Ball with cubes from Flak and Rifle. Speed destroying levels got slower as it did when I reversed the build putting more cubes into Flak and Rifle than the other team members. Best results were achieved with even distribution.

Respec

Use the Respec feature to re spec your build.

Spend your Time Cubes every time you Time Warp and get the 10% DPS bonus, don’t bank the cubes. For example; If it will take three runs to get enough time cubes to buy a cooldown artifact buy Team DPS each run and with the ”Respec” feature after the third run sell all the Team DPS from the previous two runs and buy the cooldown artifact. You have to spend the cubes to get the 10% bonus and there is no bonus penalty for moving cubes between artifacts.

Respec is also how you can determine which artifacts have the biggest impact at your current game stage. Try a run to Lvl 1500 with time cubes shifted from the Gold tree to the Damage tree and see how it affects the Most Maximum Damage and Fastest Runs statistics.

Weapon Cubes Augments.

Sell Sell Sell

Get all the Weapon Cubes you spent on Auto-Click for all the click weapons back (Right-Click on augment returns cubes to Bank) and spend them as described below. Since you are running now on Maximum Damage that function is near useless besides you will earn plenty of Weapon Cubes each run if you want to buy them back when you reach the higher levels where Auto-Click may be needed.
Each run should net you over 100k in cubes or about half what you earn in time cubes.

Weapon Cubes

Weapon Cubes

This stage of the game Weapon Cubes should be 100% complete; appearing 100%, drops increased by 100% and starting at level 100. No excuses get it done.

Click Launcher

Click Launcher

Click Launcher should be maxed except as noted above. It’s the cheapest to level up and will likely be your weapon of choice later in the game. It has good splash damage but moves slower than your other weapon when on Idle Mode. Those reasons are why you will probably want control this weapon yourself at the higher levels.

Click Pistol

Click Pistol

For the Click Pistol sell everything but Targeting Speed, that should be about 36 of 40. Gold when targeting is not really worth it since the bosses are obliterated so fast. Again you can buy it back with the newly earned cubes when it starts to take longer to destroy Time and Weapon cubes.

Click Cannon

Click Cannon

Expensive but worth it.
Click Cannon fires with every mouse click, has the potential to equal the bullet damage of the Pulse Pistol, and in Maximum Damage can surpass the Pulse Pistol in total damage per shot.
Buy Maximum Projectiles, Bullet Damage, and Speed; whichever is cheaper at the time.
Skip buying the Cone Spread until later down the time line then narrow the cone with the cubes earned on that run.
It is best to have a wide spread of damage in the beginning levels and to tighten focus as the butchery slows down to where the Cannon actually has time to acquire a target.

Game Play

New Time Line

Start by setting how to apply your gold to xP - Until Promotion for your team.
Now the fun begins. The start of a Time Line can be a bit hectic for you want to activate your abilities before Maximum Damage bonus kicks in after the first Boss is destroyed.
In the following order you want to:

• level up your Click Pistol
  
• Unlock all 10 abilities
  
• Press space, then 7, then 0
  
• Hire each Team member(press ASDFG or click each member)
  
• Finally set each Click Weapon to Idle Mode by pressing QWE.

Finish by spamming the GFDSA keys and promote your team up to Spec Ops 1.4 LVL 1500, Stop before any team member reaches Spec Ops 2 training; Training will slowdown the game play considerably.
If the first boss falls before you hit space it’s not the end of the world only the loss of the first activation of your abilities and 50 seconds from you Maximum Damage stack; you won’t get the chance to press the space key for another 2 hours.

For the first two hours the game will play by itself except for team updates. I set a countdown timer to alert me when I can press 0 for the one hour cooldown. This is only important for the Dimension Shift cooldown.

Team Upgrades and Auto Hotkeys

Team Upgrades
I found that Team promotions are best equalized when done in reverse order: GFDSA. This tends to keep them leveled closure to each other.
Watch the One Hour Cooldown – 0 and Dimension Shift – 7 or just spam them when you spam the team upgrades. Keeping up on your upgrades will keep you Overpowered longer and is a good strategy for the beginning levels of a new time line. Later however this strategy will be replaced by timing your promotions for jumping upgrades.

Delay my Promotions?
Many times during a run you may wish to delay promoting your Team and stack promotions. I always delay at Spec Ops 1.4 when you first start a time line since the drop in fire rate can really hurt the speed of the run and the Maximum Damage stacks further down the time line. Stay at Spec Ops 1.4 until you see the game play slowdown or a promotion stacked on a single weapon. You may drop out of OVERPOWERED while stacking but overall play will still be going faster than if you dropped into the Training level. The later game promotions into OPS Training happen around 2600 and 3100 just about the time the HP on your enemies takes a big jump.
The game screen shows how many promotions are stacked for each team member. Wait until you have a few promotions stacked on Team Member before you consider promoting it.

Promotion Jumps, Fire Rates, and Deep Runs
When you enter Training or new Spec Ops levels you suffer a big drop in fire rates.
You will make deeper faster runs and achieve higher Maximum Damage stacks by jumping over training and lower Spec Ops levels.
Before entering a training level gain enough stacks to reach the next Spec Ops level. For an example at Spec Ops 2.4 (LVL 2500) wait until you get 5 bars over the icons for Pulse Pistol then promote it. With a few key strokes the Pulse Pistol is at Training OPS 3.4 (LVL 3000) poised to enter Spec Ops 3. Lots of DPS gain without the fire rate penalties. Don't enter Spec Ops 3 yet because of the fire rate drop, instead start stacking again.
Do the same for the other weapons then start the process of stacking again.
Keep an eye on the speed of destruction, if it starts to visibly show down you may want to promote with only 2 bars to increase DPS and get the speed back up. At training for Spec Ops 5 you will may only be able to stack for one level jump until your DPS is higher. Finding the best times to promote will take some visual calculating and miscalculations will happen..
This is a very active process.

Auto Hotkeys(AHK)
Oops did I say a a bad four letter word "Auto"
There is no advantage to how fast to can press the ASDFG keys so I used a key macro on my Logitech keyboard to press all with a single key stroke and later wrote an AHK script to do it for me. AHK improved my time to level 2000 by zilch so I deem it Carpal Tunnel prevention and a keyboard saver not a cheat when used for this purpose. So when should I use an AHK script? If you remember what you read 43 seconds ago every where in this chapter you will realize that the only time to use an auto typer is for a bathroom break or to run unattended at lower levels. You are much better off without it for deeper runs into a time line.

Just for grins and chuckles I ran a popular autoclicker for firing my click weapons with my mid game build and found that there was very little gain (shaved 2 minutes off my time to level 2500) so auto clickers are of no real use for this stage of the game though I can imagine it can be a mouse saver when you first started playing Time Clickers but then you miss out in the ‘only a few seconds left and clicking like crazy to get that Time Cube’ and the satisfaction of finishing the level with only .8 seconds left on the timer. My mouse would have been much happier if I had an auto click program when I first started this game.

The Higher Levels

Take Control
Depending on your Damage Tree you will eventually hit a Boss that is determined not to fall.
Here is when you start actively playing the game again. Watch for a Click Weapon to attempt a high HP target while there are several lower HP targets available. You’ll want to take control of this weapon and target the lower HP Blocks.
The strategy here is to take out the lower HP targets allowing your Team to concentrate their targeting on fewer blocks eventually overlapping and speeding the destruction process.
Choose your targets by inside color then by border color. The easiest to target are the red bordered blocks. These blocks are being targeted by the Spread Rifle so there are always 3 to choose from, target one and start looking one of the other two being targeted. You can also target the Blue, Purple, and Green bordered blocks. All these blocks have good damage multipliers and will get you higher damage for your shot.
Avoid targeting black bordered blocks since there is no damage multiplier on those blocks.
In addition to targeting block with Colored borders here are some further criteria for each weapon, most will be obvious:
Click Launcher - Choose the targets that are grouped where you will get the most splash damage.
Click Cannon - Now is the time to spend those Weapon Cubes, narrow your cone of fire and target groups of blocks.
Click Pistol - Pick rows of low HP blocks.

Cooldown Letdown

Maximum Damage bonus has finally been exhausted and your abilities now have to cooldown. Here I’ve gone back to my early game strategies where I laid the cooldown times down in a spreadsheet and did the math combining activations and shifting cooldowns accordingly. For a repeatable algorithm I found what I believe to be the best times to activate abilities with the best grouping for maximum impact. The basic time period (cycle) is cooldown + duration for Automatic Fire. This is the minimum time to reactivate Automatic Fire as it has the shortest cooldown and I decided that I want all abilities to active along with Automatic Fire.
Since all cooldowns are not created equal, your results may vary, experiment.

Note that background timers are always counting down your cooldowns and are not affected by Fireworks, Maximum Damage or going offline.

There are 37 time periods before 0 is pressed then the cycle repeats. Within those 37 there are 5 groups that should activate together. Your observations may differ. Not all abilities should be activated when they become ready. If the wait is short enough; it is often better to group abilities around the Spread Shot and/or Team Work abilities rather than spamming the space bar. With this in mind watch the abilities and the groupings will become second nature.
Of course none of the above matters until you run out of Maximum Damage bonus.

Out of Time

When you know that you are not going to get this Boss to fall before time runs out with all your abilities active, get down to as few blocks as possible then focus all weapons on either the Weapon or Time cube. If you destroy one of those your job will be that much easier the next round. Also try controlling the Click Pistol to cut down the blocks in different orders.
When these attempts fail, and they eventually will fail, then you have two choices, Time Warp or build your Team DPS and your Bullet Damage.
To build your Team refer to my guide: Use Infinity to Beat that tough Boss
I usually Time Warp to come back stronger next time but now that I am at 3445 I will probably level up my team and press on, maybe tonight’s run will be the one that gets to 3500 and on to 4000 then I can write the End Game guide.

If you find some value in this guide please rate it.
© Cerus 2015,2016

[James with the Games]

Then again I have less than HALF the total number of times warps he has, I'm at 111 right now. I have 40% of his time cubes, and only around 25% of his weapon cubes. Yeah... I think he well overprepared. It's actually easy to breach that Spec Ops 4 barrier earlier than listed here, but it is more so rather hard to break into Spec Ops 5 is the thing.

[James with the Games]

Interesting... this actually helps me out since I'm at the point of Defender 15, but I somehow got to that point with WAY less time and weapon cubes than this guy. I can only afford to get 75% weapon cubes at my point. Starting wave 250, 81% spawn rate, +69% total drop (this was not intentional). So it is interesting to see such advice.

[Sata Leroer]

This guide feels a bit weird because it apparently lists the endgame of this section of the game. I just reached level 2000 with my trash natural build but I don't have nearly enough time or weapon cubes to reach this (I got maybe 1% of it).

I wanted to see a starting build for this section of the game, not just "ok max this and this and this". I mean, OK, I will, but in what order? What should I prioritize? Should I sell all my 10k upgrades and just get whatever is cheapest but listed in this build?

I understood that for weapon cubes it makes sense to max out the fourth category first, on top of everything else, but what about time cubes? What is the best progression to get to all of these top levels?

[CeiJael]

When you have Rocket Launcher and Flak Cannon Weapons unlocked with Weapon Cubes, you will want to delay promoting the Rocket Launcher and Particle Ball Team Members at ALL until you reach the training levels because their fire rate is too low compared to Spread Rifle and Flak Cannon Team Members that the cost to get them to the next promotion would better get the Spread Rifle halfway through the next promotion.

It's better to keep the Rocket Launcher and Particle Ball's fire-rate higher so that the weapons will be able to target and navigate enemies quicker. And even still, it's better to leave Particle Ball at an x.4 until you can power through the training levels to Training x.4

[CeiJael]

He must have never reached Wave 4000, because I'm not seeing any endgame guide >_>

[CeiJael]

When you hit around 2650, you'll hit a huge slowdown with the Training 5's, but it's important to press through because, when you hit around 2900, Spec Ops 5 is here, and your shots will destroy whole cubes again. This is another reason why upgrading clicks-per-minute in the weapon cube augments is important because, when you run out of maximum damage, the clicks-per-minute will keep you going past that after 2900

[CeiJael]

Loading a lot of cubes into the pulse pistol was helpful as it made the overpowered run much longer (800 - 1070), which improved the maximum damage output (1:04:27 - 1:06:13). It's also important to upgrade the pistol regardless of fire rate during this time frame because its fine by itself.

[CeiJael]

@beef bowl

One of the benefits of playing past maximum damage is the exponential weapon cube increase for higher levels. If your abilities only take you to wave 1680, it's better to keep on that timeline until, say, 1880 because of how many more weapon cubes you get in those 200 stages, which may be more than the 1080 stages beforehand

[CeiJael]

it may be expensive, but maximizing the auto clicks in the weapon cubes will add 3-5 extra clicks per second which will definitely come in handy for mid-game because of all the hp leaps

[klapman]

also if youre able to actively sit at the computer and keep an eye on it, I don't see a point in playing past the end of maximum damage. you'll get 50k more time cubes over the course of 6 hours but you can just reset, do another 3 hour run, and get 200k more. makes sense to do the former if you're idling a lot but this guide doesnt really seem to be for people who are idling