I figured out quite fast a pretty good strategy for Cavern Survival, and I’m apparently not the only one, after some testfights against the top ladder.
To give every one the possibility to find out this strategy on their own:
Maybe make walls destructible, as “hide in a corner and place landmines when an enemy is spawning on top of me” is actually unbeatable.
I know that good ideas should be acknowledged, but playing against this strategy can at most result in a tie. Which is not fun.
I could ban the builder’s hammer in this level, or make it so that there are monsters that will kill you anyway. What do you think? Later I want to make the fences destructible, but it’ll take some time to make sure that doesn’t break the other levels.
Aren’t there already some fliers?
i agree… i didnt resort to the walling yourself up strategy until other people did… it’s the only way to compete now.
They will wait in some distance and shoot at you… which is blocked by the walls
Just applied a nerf that makes the fence strategy still sort of work, but less effective, since shamans will still kill you through it. How do you think it’s balanced now?
@nick
It makes surviving Stonehold nigh-impossible now.
Actually, the nerf I just used doesn’t affect Siege of Stonehold, just Cavern Survival.
@nick
shamans are hitting through walls
Yes, they always shot through walls (their projectiles are magic!).
So will those who did this previously hold their ranks? Or will the ladder reset after a certain time interval?
The rank isn’t set in stone, even after the initial ranking of new code runs, character still participates in fights and shuffles in the ranking according to results.
Wow, you can see in my Score when you applied the nerf…
i don’t think it’s doing as much as you thought. i’m still at #1 on both ogre and human… i was out of town so haven’t switched away from the strategy.
IMO just remove the hammer from this level. best way to fix it without nerfing regular folks. Otherwise you could make those casters do significantly more damage if your hero is not currently moving?
You also may be underestimating the number of opponents who have purchased gear though, Kevin.
I played around with Cavern Survival a bunch the other day - I was able to squeek in to the top 10 barely with a legitimate shield / bash / cleave / attack strategy and free play only items. It is holding steady in the 12-16 range both sides.
I watched a couple of specific matches when I was paired with you, and it wasn’t that you weren’t getting pummeled, it was just you had SO much more HP than I do that even with me taking less damage with me killing my opponents, I can’t keep up.
I have some thoughts for doing fences + missile dodging, but I am trying to see if there is a combat solution… If the doors are broken open, there ends up being some pass through, but it is difficult to get extra spawns to head towards your opponent.
Until there is a way to grind out more gems, the multiplayer will keep a major gear gap (similarly, on the Treasure Grove - the warrior characters just don’t seem to have any hope of being competitive with the magic characters at the moment).
True… but in my mind, the hammer shouldn’t be a viable strategy on this level. It’s pretty “cheap” if you ask me. (I only did it to stay ahead of the folks who were doing it, tried everything i could before stooping to that.) I’ll be changing mine back to the combat one shortly.
Yes. my combat solution is to ignore the creatures and destroy the doors and go right for the other hero.
Agreed on treasure grove. Warriors have no counter for being slowed and the opponent being hasted. Same goes for root / fear… Warriors are basically up the creek without a paddle. (i switched to magic user as well.)
An idea to help with this would be to give the warriors some escape skills… Like some sort of warcry or shout that both breaks them out of the fear / stun / root and at the same time stunning the caster briefly. (only very briefly casters can’t do much and will die immediately, maybe throw them across the screen away from the other hero as well so they have time to get away after they recover)
Or just increase the duration of the warriors bash skill. Make it last a good deal longer so that it’s actually useful to counter them if they get close enough. That might not be a complete solution but it’s something
I wouldn’t read too much into this.
There was a bug introduced a couple of days ago that completely broke my strategy (patch already submitted) but I’ve only dropped 40ish places in the ladder. I expect this is because there is a baked in assumption in match scheduling that if neither player’s code has changed the outcome of the match won’t change.
On the subject of turtles, I’m mostly OK with the current state of things (though fences should show up as either an item or an enemy) because while it is strong strategy it is beatable and the second most dominant strategy is much more gem dependent.
Fences were already rendered useless. No worries. they are banished now after you place them. Makes for much more interesting battles.
Though now the simulator is bugged for this map. I’ve been getting a huge rash of ‘losses’ since the last patch to this map that, when I check them, turn out to be wins. And I’m talking cases where the other guy lasts less than 30 seconds (my code can go until the time runs out, every time, without fences), or cases where the other guys code is straight up broken (red circle) and it still counted as a win for him somehow.
It’s been that way for some time on this level especially. About a month. Always get losses but never show as losses when manually initiated against the same players