Trying to jump from normal to Very hard

[Maelstrom]

Hello community,

I discovered this game on SC2 only about a week ago and having never played tower defence games before still feel very noobish but am enjoying myself a great deal. I started playing on normal and went from quickly dead to now I can easily get to fruit and usually win the game with interest gathering, a Blitz tower/factory combo or an Atom tower /factory combo and a few pures.

Doing the same thing over and over when it is no longer challenging is boring so I decided to jump all the way up to very hard. Yikes! I'm getting my ass kicked. I find myself with almost no time between waves - I can't sell - rebuild and upgrade my towers quick enough to gain interest without leaking. I seem to need all my minerals to be in the towers to kill the waves so my interest income is nearly nil. Without the interest income I have a lousy networth and eventually get overwhelmed in the mid thirties.

Does anyone have a similiar story? How did you make the leap into very hard and is it reasonable to be able to consistantly make it to fruit on this difficulty in the multiplayer game? Any tips on making the transition? I was considering trying a switch to random so I could use more elemental towers earlier with 100% return for interest - is that the way to go? Any guidance is appreciated.

[Maelstrom]

I just noticed Megadramons nearly Identical post below. Sorry for the duplicate. Clearly very hard is vastly more difficult than normal and a bit of discussion about the different strategies they allow/require would be nice to read. This is especially true considering the number of new players I imagine you have since SC2 became active.

[Megadramon]

Well if you're doing VH in mixed difficulty setting it might be a tad more difficult since other difficulties will be able to rush you.

It might be best to watch pros play on VH to get an idea of how it's done before you can start working on doing VH.

[Arc Project]

Hello! Getting used to VH games can be rough, especially in VH public. I still get myself stomped mid game but I have cleared my share of VH public games.

For me, elemental TD is about finding the sweet spot between survival and interest, which most of pub players are not aware of. Partly because the concept of Elemental TD is counter-intuitive to most other games where unspent resources are a bad habit.

Things I noticed going from Normal to Very Hard:

- Throw interest out of the window for the first a few waves. Spend everything and try to gauge the pace of other players.

- Squeezing interest here and there. @2% interest(default), you get 1 mineral for every 50 minerals you have. @3% every 33 minerals. @4% every 25 minerals. If you have a tower you want to upgrade(13 minerals) and your mineral count is 105 with a few seconds left on interest timer, holding the upgrade till the tick over yields twice as much interest(2 instead of 1!). It may sound minuscule but those little bits can trigger snowball effect later on.

- Timing on Elemental Beast Killing. There is only a few windows of opportunity offered for killing them in time. If the timing is missed, towers can't be upgraded to keep up with creeps. Build additional arrow towers in advance to aid in taking them down if so required.

- Tower Placement, every tower counts and must be placed in a optimum position. The optimum positions are often affected by range of tower, its abilities and if it's a solo or public game. In a solo game, massing towers between entrance/exit area is quite effective as it offers chance to fire at each wave 3 times while taking as much time to clear them. In a public game, cluster of towers in that region either leaks or has to clear too fast(bad idea) because often waves reach the end of the maze just as a new wave spawns.

- Knowing characteristic of each wave. I seem to have trouble with fast moving creeps, so I build additional towers or upgrade existing ones right before them. Zergling, Predators, Mutalisk and Kerrigan to name a few.

- Luck. As much as I hate to admit it, your success rests heavily on shoulders of fellow players. Best scenario is when another player choose very easy and clear waves first. You end up with 45 seconds between each wave. Worst scenario, a player chooses hard/VH and go for a fast clear, he is not doing everyone a favor, including himself

- Figure out weak and strong elements for your build. If your build is mainly fire, water waves are your biggest obstacles. Couple that with special abilities like immunity, undead, healing etc, those waves can give you nightmares. Be sure to upgrade towers right before those waves and place towers with different element types to complement each other.

Conversely, fire is good at nature rounds. If your towers withstood the previous round fine, there is usually no need for an upgrade.

- Practice and have fun cuz it's only a game.

[Aranneas]

Very hard on multiplayer is a grind right now. That's just a fact. I only survive maybe 1 of 8 or 9 games (but I'm playing almost exclusively random, so take from that what you will). I'll post some replays of my better games when I feel like it; who knows, might learn something myself.