Hello! I really enjoy playing this map. Awesome.

I have been playing with haste towers with forge build and managed to get some descent fruit kills.
I would like to hear your thoughts

Description:

Difficulty: Very Easy to Very Hard

Towers used:
- Haste(EFW) Main DPS tower.
- Forge(EF) Damage buff tower.
- Earth(E) Supplement DPS.

Build: $$ EFW EFW EF P

which is,

Interest, Interest, Earth, Fire, Water, Earth, Fire, Water, Earth, Fire and Pure Essense.

*On VH Public, $ EFW $ EFW EF P (to get a haste tower quickly to stabilize the ship)

Strategy:
- Spend as little as possible to hold off each wave to accumulate minerals using interests.
- Use Earth Towers to complement DPS on Water creeps where Haste tower is weak against.

- Build 3 Pure Earth towers. With 4-6 fully upgraded haste towers and 3-4 forges, it should hold up to level 60.
- Upgrading takes time and must be planned ahead. Between level 50-59, fill the map with 1st tier towers to be upgraded later.
- When the networth reach 500k minerals or the wave hit level 60, upgrade all towers to the max level.
- Build 1 forge tower for every 4 haste towers.

Tower Placement:
- Please refer to Tower Placement Guide. Excellent Guide.
- Place haste towers at location "2" and "4". Mix them with forge and earth towers.
- Place towers at bottom edge of the cliff so they auto target mobs about to get away.

Why?:
- This placement allows haste towers to stay charged up for two passes once it engages.
- Clears waves late. As a VH player, you do not want to clear waves first. EVER. It usually results in map full of creeps.
- Still have the last stretch "E" to deal with leaks when shit hits the fan.

Micro that helps:
- Try to send elemental beasts such that haste towers are still at max charge when it arrives.
- Manually cast Forge buffs on towers. It only auto-casts on attacking towers.
- On fruit round, click on fruits about to get away, if the lag isn't killing the frame rate. lol

Results:
- 356kills / 1068 pts - Public game, Normal, Pre v0.74(before haste tower buff)
- 384kills / 1152 pts - Solo, Normal, Pre v0.74
- 389kills / 1167 pts - Solo, Normal, v0.74
- 311kills / 1555 pts - Solo, Very Hard, v0.74
- 283 kills / 1415 pts - Public game, Very Hard, v0.76(Forge CD Nerf). Room for improvement.
- 394 kills / 1176 pts - Public game, Normal, v0.76. Revised placement

so u weren't even playing on VH?

I just played my first Very Hard Elemental TD(solo)

311 Fruit kills using the same strategy above.

Some points I can definitely improve on.

- 90k unspent minerals.
- Less leaks. 30ish lives left at level 60.
- Early game, better tower selling. It has to be precisely before the interest rate ticks.
- Kill the last creep near the exit.
- Better tower placement(for solo).

Try this in pub and leme know how it goes

(I apologize in advance for any sloppy grammars.)

I just finished a Very Hard pub game. It was actually my first clear.
That was a lot harder than solo but very enjoyable nevertheless.

Haste Forge combo netted 78 kills. The networth was about 170k minerals.

I opted to only get one interest early because I was spending most of my minerals on towers anyways and I wanted to get a haste tower up 5 levels earlier. I got my second interest at level 50.

Things I can improve on:
- I pressed a wrong hotkey and built a dozen fire towers.
- Leaks, 5 lives left at level 60. lol
- Better tower placement.


My opinion on wave finish timer:

Just finished a VH pub game with 283 kills

I filled the entire map with the usual haste forge setup but ended up with less than 300 kills.

If I didn't make too many Earth towers and got a few more lives left, I could have reached 300, I guess.

I'm starting to get a hang of Very Hard difficulty.

nice. i think u have too many factories so that means the capability of this build is even higher than what you got

do u really need earth towers for the fruit level?

how does the dps calculations work out for comparison?

Good points.

Those Earth towers needs to be replaced.

In theory, one forge tower can support up to 4 towers with 15 seconds cool down. It takes 45 seconds of continuous firing to reach its maximum dps with no manual casting.

My attempt at optimizing tower placement:

H = Haster tower
F = Forge
X = Empty Space

One building block looks like this:

HHX
HFH

Then adding on:

HFH
XHH

Yields:

HHHFH
HFHHH

and so forth.

HHHFHHHHFH
HFHHHHFHHH

I will try this and see if I can improve