akoto

I did it once back when very easy was fun and you could permanently stun units... Then I realized very easy was very easy and they also patched the game. AFAIK it's impossible to do this now (except if you cheat...keysersoze 99999999) I propose OP should make a custom version of ele with a "death machine" build on the entrance to the maze. That would be really fun.

Yes, it is definitely possible. I'm a lazy player and depend more on building the bare minimum than the sell/rebuild strategy. I'm a bit rusty otherwise I'd go and make a replay for you now. In that case, the fight continues and I'm glad I bought one of your mousepads! From my previous visits to this forum a while ago (forgot the account info) I was under the impression that buying/selling (even on off elements, even on random mode) was highly discouraged to the point of it being cheating. I still don't like the idea of ele td (or any td) being micro-based tho, because after all I (and I'm sure other people) started playing td from the get-go in starcraft 1 because they were too lazy to play starcraft and I still wanted to see units get slaughtered. Then ele td happened and it introduced some actual strategy and thought to the game. (Mazes don't count as strategy and thought, neither does generic tower placement and pure knowledge of the game like every version of green td and wintermaul, and every other td I've ever heard of.)

I watched one of those replays...all he does is sell and buy towers like a crazy person... I can do that...its not even a little bit hard to figure out or play that strat. It's just so un elegant and stupid; I'm really disappointed. Is it's possible to beat the game on random VH without selling towers like that? Obviously it's allowed if you spawned a new element and need to make adjustments in efficiency...but really if I don't think this game should be about micro.

They're too unpredictable I guess. That being said, in random only I find they're still useful.

Can you give us a hint about some of the differences? It would be cool if the elements had some unique characteristics instead of just armor type.

Not really... They wanted info...

So I should have sold my life towers after level 40 or so I guess and replaced them with more damaging towers. They were lvl 2 right off the bat which was nice (extra short mode due to lazyness), so I thought I could get away with stacking them on a later earth level to recover some lives and didn't want to sell them immediately and be called on 'cheating'. I don't totally understand why I wouldn't shoot for 100% damage though. It's not like I'm being finicky about it, it's just when you have a nice spread of elements all with unique abilities and comparable damage, why wouldn't you try to even it out? In this case I was using mostly hail and evened out with the life towers, and then building drowning on the weak levels. Even with a strong economy I never seem to be able to beat levels with 100% damage and this doesn't seem to make sense on account of saving up about 10000 gold before hand and gaining all that extra money. I guess what you're saying is I need to transition right away into stronger hitting towers when the life towers fail? What if the later combos suck and lvl 2 life towers still do the most damage out of any of the other ones? (Although I guess its still not much if we're talking damage/$...)

I couldn't agree with OP more. VH SR is by far the most fun mode to play.

OOH, OHH!! <raises hand and waves violently> PICK MEE I'm seriously the biggest eletd fan ever, and have been moving on to SC2 only to find a bunch of horrible td games...How do we sign up for beta testing? Not that I play online much, but I have never ever been beaten in Random mode. I think ele td is the thing I do best in life on a whole. One time someone asked me what I'm best at, and I first had to describe what war3 was, then war3 custom games, then I had to describe what tower defense was, then ele td...I felt like an elitist nerd, like someone who owns a store which rebuilds 80s arcade machines. AFAIK, this will be changed and improved at some point in the future. Furthermore, the TD games at the top of the list as it is now SUCK. They really do. Horribly imbalanced, reminding one of greenTD but much less fun and buggy as heck. EleTD was a Premier custom map in war3...it will become popular absolutely. Even if the system never changes, it could easily gain popularity in other ways such as posting on the forums and competing in those custom map comps they have. Really and truly there's no other TD I've come across which is as intricate and well balanced as ele and you guys could absolutely blow that category of SC2 custom games out of the water.

Does this extend to random mode? I have been playing this for years (and still do), and I think this is the single greatest TD ever made BY FAR. (by a lot a lot, nothing compares) But why the crap can't I beat random mode? My tower placement is pretty good I think overall, I'm building the most balanced mazes I can build (everything quite close to 100%), I'm predicting when certain creeps will come and building accordingly, I'm using AND ABUSING the economy, and I just can't even beat HARD mode consistently. Here's a replay I got to level 50something. I wasn't economy abusing (I usually don't but do sometimes just to prove a point), and I had a really nice starting amount of elements and managed to mass over 70 lives before loosing everything very quickly (as is usually the way of course) What the heck could I have done differently? Like I say, even hard mode is a big challenge on this mode and cannot be beaten consistently. This is probably the closest I've been on very hard. Random mode FTW...I don't think I'll be playing AP any time soon. This is VH btw. I can definitely beat hard often, just not always. VH is a real challange though. I feel like I will have mastered this game if I can beat it with literally any element combo. eh.w3g