Loved GemTD in WC3, one of my favourite custom maps and have been waiting for it to make an SC2 appearance! My goal has been to defeat the Extreme damage test, which i have done and found it a fun challenge! It looks a little dead here so i just came to give some feedback. Not the most neat format, sorry.
Great update to the terrain and also a speedy fix on that annoying 'make-a-great-gem-and-your-waves-stop-spawning' bug. Also killing the Thor with my Red Facet and other air towers was very fun while it lasted but was too imbalanced.
No idea whether it is intended or not but it appears as though there is a slow speed stacking effect from the Yellow Sapphire/Silver and Uranium.
Been getting Lucky China Jade by about level 18 or 19 (very easy) in my build and the 1% chance mineral return pays massive dividends throughout the whole game. Borderline required/imbalanced. You can dump so much money into maxed lucky chance and still afford all upgrades on towers towards the end. I think i did lucky chance every level from 31-48. Also, when you have the Jade even before level 30, it hits the Thor A LOT and gives quite a few minerals. I dont think you should get a return from the Thor. It is strangely not OP to just stack the Lucky China Jade (3-4) though because if you do, you do almost no damage to the final damage test because you wasted so many rounds of gems on this tower.
I tried the game with and without increasing the gem chance. Increasing the gem chance was better every time. I like that you cannot be carried by massing beginning/starter tower combines and you need the late game combines to beat the game.
Not sure about the addition of the zones. Great that it can be turned on or off but unsure whether turning it on gives you any advantage or an increase in difficulty. Simply designed to give people an option to not build the same generic optimised maze every time?
Took a few tries to understand the best way to battle this map which i liked. The difficulties seem very spot-on. Easy is... easy. Hard requires a good maze and extreme requires a good maze, good towers and a little luck. The problem was once you understand the basics; maze to cut every second waypoint, spend all minerals on gem chance, dont upgrade towers until very late and keeping correct gems it feels like there is only one way to win. Maybe this is what the zones feature is for. For instance, every AoE tower is useless. A good maze negates any need for AoE towers to be required and they are useless on the Rerun and final Damage Tests so why get them? Even with the worst of gems on any ground level monsters dont even make it halfway through the maze. Air is the only level you can actually leak on and having a spash slow and high dps single target tower (facet) does the job. Leaking 10 air at 5% vs Leaking 3 air at 100%. Ground is way too easy and makes you want to fall asleep while you kill it. Air feels VERY balanced. If i miss a tower, an upgrade or a little bad luck you leak 3-4 monters on air. I suggest possibly adding more monsters per wave on Extreme settings or even just increasing numbers per level to give AoE towers some need. Another suggestion is to have ground units gain movement speed at higher levels to speed the game up since as discussed, ground is not really a challenge.
Making Extreme only have 1 life as in the original could be very fun. I have defeated Extreme lvl 50 with maximum lives in current version but it severely hampers your ability to kill the Damage Test because the key to doing that was actually setting yourself up to leak at the expense of getting faster gem chance. This was a fun balance to play with.
The main key with tower optimisation was the combination of the Black Opal (+40% dmg bonus) and the the Perfect or Great Opal (+35-50% haste). The difference between having them and not having them is very large and if you combine them with multiple crit multiplier towers such as Pink Diamond/Gold then the damage is absolutely insane. Do these buffs apply to the Ability/AoE towers?
Finally, the damage test is a fun goal to try and beat and is a good challenge although now that i've done it, it would be fun to have a real damage test. Virtually unkillable and be able to set high scores without limit. This would only be for Extreme with Easy-Hard capped at 2.5M. I will leave a screenshot of the kill. He died with still another 3 runs to go through the middle which would probably be another 1.5-2M damage. Increasing the cap to 5M could be a massive challenge even :)
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Loved GemTD in WC3, one of my favourite custom maps and have been waiting for it to make an SC2 appearance! My goal has been to defeat the Extreme damage test, which i have done and found it a fun challenge! It looks a little dead here so i just came to give some feedback. Not the most neat format, sorry.
Great update to the terrain and also a speedy fix on that annoying 'make-a-great-gem-and-your-waves-stop-spawning' bug. Also killing the Thor with my Red Facet and other air towers was very fun while it lasted but was too imbalanced.
No idea whether it is intended or not but it appears as though there is a slow speed stacking effect from the Yellow Sapphire/Silver and Uranium.
Been getting Lucky China Jade by about level 18 or 19 (very easy) in my build and the 1% chance mineral return pays massive dividends throughout the whole game. Borderline required/imbalanced. You can dump so much money into maxed lucky chance and still afford all upgrades on towers towards the end. I think i did lucky chance every level from 31-48. Also, when you have the Jade even before level 30, it hits the Thor A LOT and gives quite a few minerals. I dont think you should get a return from the Thor. It is strangely not OP to just stack the Lucky China Jade (3-4) though because if you do, you do almost no damage to the final damage test because you wasted so many rounds of gems on this tower.
I tried the game with and without increasing the gem chance. Increasing the gem chance was better every time. I like that you cannot be carried by massing beginning/starter tower combines and you need the late game combines to beat the game.
Not sure about the addition of the zones. Great that it can be turned on or off but unsure whether turning it on gives you any advantage or an increase in difficulty. Simply designed to give people an option to not build the same generic optimised maze every time?
Took a few tries to understand the best way to battle this map which i liked. The difficulties seem very spot-on. Easy is... easy. Hard requires a good maze and extreme requires a good maze, good towers and a little luck. The problem was once you understand the basics; maze to cut every second waypoint, spend all minerals on gem chance, dont upgrade towers until very late and keeping correct gems it feels like there is only one way to win. Maybe this is what the zones feature is for. For instance, every AoE tower is useless. A good maze negates any need for AoE towers to be required and they are useless on the Rerun and final Damage Tests so why get them? Even with the worst of gems on any ground level monsters dont even make it halfway through the maze. Air is the only level you can actually leak on and having a spash slow and high dps single target tower (facet) does the job. Leaking 10 air at 5% vs Leaking 3 air at 100%. Ground is way too easy and makes you want to fall asleep while you kill it. Air feels VERY balanced. If i miss a tower, an upgrade or a little bad luck you leak 3-4 monters on air. I suggest possibly adding more monsters per wave on Extreme settings or even just increasing numbers per level to give AoE towers some need. Another suggestion is to have ground units gain movement speed at higher levels to speed the game up since as discussed, ground is not really a challenge.
Making Extreme only have 1 life as in the original could be very fun. I have defeated Extreme lvl 50 with maximum lives in current version but it severely hampers your ability to kill the Damage Test because the key to doing that was actually setting yourself up to leak at the expense of getting faster gem chance. This was a fun balance to play with.
The main key with tower optimisation was the combination of the Black Opal (+40% dmg bonus) and the the Perfect or Great Opal (+35-50% haste). The difference between having them and not having them is very large and if you combine them with multiple crit multiplier towers such as Pink Diamond/Gold then the damage is absolutely insane. Do these buffs apply to the Ability/AoE towers?
Finally, the damage test is a fun goal to try and beat and is a good challenge although now that i've done it, it would be fun to have a real damage test. Virtually unkillable and be able to set high scores without limit. This would only be for Extreme with Easy-Hard capped at 2.5M. I will leave a screenshot of the kill. He died with still another 3 runs to go through the middle which would probably be another 1.5-2M damage. Increasing the cap to 5M could be a massive challenge even :)
http://i51.tinypic.com/1zbqhwi.jpg
The time is so large because i went afk between waves (zzz ground levels)