What happens in your brain as you play GemCraft: Chasing Shadows:
Okay, what gems do I get this time? That looks like a nice chokepoint. They’re coming from HOW MANY directions?
Okay, I’ll just put this tower here and … crap, reset, I’ll just put this tower here…
Easy waves to start, I’ll just enrage a couple of times, the extra hit points won’t matter … but that extra armor will, crap crap…
All right, settling into a rhythm. Let’s build up some mana, level up that mana pool. Very nice. Enrage a few waves. That was easy, let’s enrage a bit more. Yeah, just pour those swarmlings into the meat grinder.
I have 20 more waves of this. *sigh* No problem. Let’s speed that up a bit. Quintuple enrage the next five waves…
Wait, that one was a giant wave. Crap. Okay, no problem, just stop enraging a bit… although I already enraged the waves before and after it…
There are reavers everywhere! Freeze! Curse! Bolt! Zap, boom! Ha ha, getting ahead again, all right, all ri — crap, that wave’s still going and I’m out of spells. That’s okay, I can leak a few.
Freeze the giant, make him blow up on the other monsters… Come on, 2 seconds left on that freeze spell. Come on come on come on crap. Well, he’s dead now anyway.
Okay, whew, made it through that. No problem. Let’s take it easy for a few waves, catch back up. Okay, maybe not that easy. Oops, okay, maybe that was one too many enrages. Just one enrage for the wave after.
Pew pew pew. Freeze the swarmlings. It’s fun to watch them explode in clumps. Ooh, shrine’s full, let’s pop that.
And just the giants left… and done. Hey, three achievements, nice.
You then vary between “I wonder how far I can go in endurance mode” and “Oh god, endurance mode, I already went through 50 waves.”
: Zubon
I bought this game for $1.99 on Steam after reading your blogs on it. It’s a lot of fun and surprisingly complex with the layers of features.
I am finding the base difficulty quite challenging (H4 required multiple attempts with a 1.00 experience modifier). Overall very enjoyable.
I don’t mean to be “that guy” who humblebrags about how easy difficult things are. Once you get ahead of the xp curve, that base difficulty starts to feel easy, although not always. I recall several levels where I thought, “nope, come back with more skill points.” But since I love DoTs, levels that work well with poison traps just instantly die to my natural playstyle.
I did a bit of research since posting (because I don’t have a lot of tower defense game experience). The base difficulty became quite a bit easier once I learned the value of a kill-gem and how to maximize experience by enraging the wave stones and calling some waves early.
I also put very few points into skills at these early levels since the initial mana seems a lot more valuable than some of the low-ranking skill benefits. I do have 15 points in the True Colors skill, but everything else has 3 points simply to snag the secondary effect and unlock the ability/gem for all levels.
Not a bad plan. I parked most of them at 12 because I use most of them, upgrading most to 15 as I get more skill points. Poison and True Colors were early no-brainers for me. I don’t gem bomb much, so that’s low. I enrage waves a lot, so that’s high. Suppression stays low just because the base value is ridiculously high. I have had a trap that reduced healing by over 100,000 per second, which is pretty much “all” until you’re a ways into endurance levels (and even then, one tick usually takes it all).
I need to get the Chain skill, so I can always have red-orange traps at the start of levels for mana farms. That seems to be pretty key.