0.81b Infinite Fruit Kills. Yes, as in never-ending.

[HiggsBoson]

I think I just broke the game.

The nerf to Interest has allowed me to expand my 4 color testing, mainly into 3322 builds. And I've just stumbled onto something pretty (okay, completely) broken.

Typically, I test on Very Easy to see if I can get close to filling the map, all in public games to balance efficiency with being the last to kill yet minimizing leaks. If I find a build, I ramp it up through Normal and Very Hard.

But, as I type this, my game is still going. I'm Alt+Tabbed, and I've taken some screenshots to show what's going on, but here it is.

*HiggsBoson's Infinite Fruit Kill*

Version: 0.81b

Public Game

Mode: Standard

Difficulty: Very Easy

All Pick

Normal Game

Build:

I WDL WDL NNNW (Interest, Hail by 20, Comet by 35, Fountain by 55)

Beginning: Standard maximum interest gain, build and sell grenade towers when Interest ticks. I miss the "I" key at wave 5, so I go one round without 3% (oh noes). Few other mistakes here and there, but as you can see later the margin of error is ignorable.

Middle: Hail 1 goes down around Wave 25, top left corner of position 5, and I build a second next to it on the right for a Earth wave because again I was learning the build. Often I was switching OFF the AoE Storm in order to do less DPS, so units could go around the bottom. I happen to be in a game where someone is attempting that horrible lifegain strategy, so I'm often not in control of when the next round starts. I screw up a few times, over build, under build, but again, margin of error is largely ignorable.

Late: Upgrade 1 to Comet around 42, or when that hard Earth wave goes by. Should probably have 3 Comets for the 50+ Earth level, but I underbuilt. I built a Level 2 Well just to see how it would help that round, but 30% is crap, and I should have just had a 3rd Comet on full blast. I respond to some the fairly typical "HOW DID YOU GET THAT MANY TOWERS/MINERALS, HAX" comments. Went into Level 61 with 37 lives and 320K extra minerals. I haven't lost one life since.

End: The attack speed of Comet Towers is usually 0.31, but with the buff, you get -0.17 for a lovely 0.14 weapon speed. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you where to build the Fountain Towers, or at what approximate ratio of Comet:Fountain. Also, I build Two Pure Nature Towers just for the hell of it.

At some point, it's so laggy, and only one guy sticks around for a bit,

Here's me breaking my old 0.76 Haste+Factory 777 Very Easy raw kills record. I also flip my video and texture settings to Low in risk of crashing SCII:

And yes, if you look at the timestamps, it has taken over an hour to get here due to the lag of the Comet tower shots. I can post a useless replay file once I feel like leaving the game

Most of the time, my screen is off to the side, to reduce the lag of course, and I'm shocked I can even have my web browser open while SCII is chugging along Alt+Tabbed, killing fruit.

And just for kicks, here's me breaking 1200:

So on and so forth. I'll probably just leave the game running tonight and check it tomorrow morning to see what ridiculous number I get (or to see SCII.exe having crashed and burned), either way hopefully a final screenshot and a useless replay file are to follow.

[flyjum]

If you check memory it will be maxed

I did a build that lagged like hell as well

Mass torrent towers with level 3 springs

Anyway nice build I got to like 1k kills and left because it never got harder or ended was just mass lag.

After I left sc2 was still using all my ram (was using 3.5 gb of my 4gb) even in menus

I think its a problem with the sc2 game engine.

[gwho]

*notices very easy mode...*

*ignores*

[HiggsBoson]

Update: OVER 5000!!!1!

If you check memory it will be maxed

I did a build that lagged like hell as well

Mass torrent towers with level 3 springs

Anyway nice build I got to like 1k kills and left because it never got harder or ended was just mass lag.

After I left sc2 was still using all my ram (was using 3.5 gb of my 4gb) even in menus

I think its a problem with the sc2 game engine.

Yes, indeed SCII.exe is maxing out at the default 2GB physical memory for a 32-bit application. I was told hyperthreading isn't utilized in this game, so since I've got a quad core with 8 threads I've been running at ~13% CPU utilization from the application this whole time. I could probably do an energy balance and find out how much this one game will cost on my electricity bill lol.

*notices very easy mode...*

*ignores*

Wow, I can't believe I specifically added my "this was just supposed to be a test" line just because I knew you'd be a dipshit about it. I should have just wrote "Very Easy mode is pro, Very Hard is for suckers, suck it" and gotten the same result.

[Chiquihuite]

Yeah, if we're talking infinite fruit kills, that's kinda broken.

They should very rapidly scale up in difficulty more or less indefinitely - unless you reached some kind of limit. We'll have to check this out.

[Megadramon]

The gap between Very Easy and Very Hard is far too big.

Anyone capable of doing the harder difficulties can easily break the easier levels. That's how big the difference is. If you ask me, we need to work on this, though a solution might be hard to come up with.

Something needs to be done so that anyone who has an idea of what they're doing shouldn't be able to do this. Very Easy, and the easier levels should be for the lesser skilled people, but not so much that the gap between skilled and lesser skill is big enough to abuse the game. I believe we need to find a way to fix the problem of higher skilled players abusing easier difficulties.

So far I believe we fixed the issue of Very Hard being able to fill the map with the highest tier towers; now we gotta find a solution for the other difficulties.

And just so people know, Element TD is not about filling the map full of high tier towers. It's about proper towers, proper placement, and proper resource management. It's just that on easier difficulties this skill is far too easy, easy enough to abuse the difficulty, and the game.

[Megadramon]

Ok well the result of proper towers, placement and resource management leads to the ability of potentially filling up the map.

I just tried a build that allowed me to fill like 99% of the map of the highest tier towers on VH (I forgot to fill up areas in the crappy / and - positions). I was able to obtain a 442k networth using $ D L D W W D W L E E or something in that order. I leaked a bit in the beginning on various levels where I underestimated the creeps, thought I'm confident I can do the build again without leaking and maintaining around the same networth (most likely less). My main towers were (believe it or not) mass Pestilence (DW) for dmg, Glacier (EWL) for hp reduction, and Mire (EDW) for slow; though I had Comet Towers, they were mainly used for creeps leading to fruit level, covering up the weakness of my Pestilence towers.

This build utilizes the the longest double pass at position 8, income farming to the max, so even if I was solo, I'd still be able to income farm well.

A replay would be futile, so I'll show you some screenshots of the nearly maxed map.

Also note that even though I didn't fill positions / and -, I still had 100k leftover, and i was able to fill them up after I took the screenshots.

EDIT: Honestly I was pretty shocked, especially since I screwed up the build. I originally wanted lvl 3 dark, water and nature with one fire so I could give the DW tower a huge atk speed boost, along with 10% debuff Corrosion gave.

[HiggsBoson]

Yeah, if we're talking infinite fruit kills, that's kinda broken.

They should very rapidly scale up in difficulty more or less indefinitely - unless you reached some kind of limit. We'll have to check this out.

Specifically, it seemed like every 50 kills was the message that the Fruit got harder. And at 350 kills is the "You die now!" message, but after that it didn't look like they got harder. With my Haste and Celerity builds, they'd both crap out at this point, ending with ~380 kills.

Which is odd because I remember there definitely being a difficulty ramp in the 600-700 kill range back in 0.76 when i was first stress testing this map, such that it was really hard to recreate a 700 kill Very Easy run.

BTW, here's the replay file, but don't even bother. It says I lasted 9 hours before BNET crapped out, so I can only estimate I got around 6000 kills, but if there's some magical way to watch these in the future, here ya go:

Element Tower Defense 081b infinite.SC2Replay

I'm debating whether to spend time ramping this strategy up through Very Hard to see if I can go infinite there, or to try out the other strategies to see if they can go infinite at all (Torrent seems similar to my build, and I'd try modifying the Pestilence build to include Fountains, so I'd have to go 3331 on NDWL)

[Chiquihuite]

lol...9 hour replay. that's amazing.

[Daikoru]

Comet indeed seems to be really powerful. I did something similar, where I used a bunch of Comet towers and built a Deceit tower for every 4 of them. It was extremely lagtastic, but worked surprisingly well for a tower that does not deal damage in an area. I've been having fun with all dual towers, as in going only for one specific dual tower (and adding single element tower if that tower was a support type like Deceit), and as soon as I went for Comet, I easily doubled my record of fruit kills. Also, normally, I had trouble with waves that resisted my dual tower, but with Comet, the only time I leaked was once at the beginning because I did not have any triple tower set-up yet, and 12 lives at wave 59, because they were earth, but also because I was so focused on getting my towers ready for wave 61 that I did not upgrade my defense at all for a long while.

So yeah, seeing how you were at Very Easy, managed to fill up the map without Deceit towers, and increased their attack speed with another tower, it does not impress me that it's able to score infinite fruit kills.