Part 115: Flood Walls

Flood Walls

This mission is brought to you by koker93, upper-left corner of the Alpha Sector.

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This merely runs a hair over an hour. What a wimpy level. *Ahem*.




Oh look, it's He-Who-Projects-A-Finite-Existence, aka the being otherwhise known as Platius, aka ... nope, not going back down that rabbit hole.




This extends to the north some, but this is most of it. The print is really small at the bottom, but each of those emitters pumps out 1200 creeper every 3.33 seconds. Each spore tower produces 15 at a time. Now, at least there's a gap it can't cross on that eastern and southern edge ... but for the rest of the map we have walls and more emitters. So yeah, there's a bit of resistance here. Or, as I put it when seeing an inkling of what was up for the first time:

"Wow ... Oh, there's spores all over the place, there's emitters all over this ... Noooooo ... I WANNA CRY!"

But instead, I proceeded with uh ... something.




Now we do have all this stuff in place at the start. This is one of those deals where we have a crapton of resistance - but also lots of resources. Very Fortress Siege in that sense, without the actual weapons being built - but thankfully it isn't nearly that painful. All kinds of power zones to use, full ore storage right away, and is that a Command Node or a Totem? I wasn't sure.




Energy first, so I put a few reactors up - and can't figure out why they are building so slowly. The vigilant observer will note that under the left-hand Command Node - #1 - it is now 'clear' that there are lots of Totems. I didn't get this. I just looked at it and thought the ammo was just going to to the ore mines, and who cares because storage is full and we don't have anything using the ore yet, so they shouldn't be running. And they're not - but the Totems are gobbling up most of the energy so I've got about a 12-energy deficit. With 4.5 coming in from the Nodes. Not good. Skarsface was right.




I spend some time looking at what's available in the control panel; only thing I can't get build apparently of the normal stuff is Bombers and Sprayers, and there are schematics not far away to get those. Forge is allowed but I can't build one. Couldn't figure out why until I actually moved the Command Node - there is a Forge and a crap-ton of Totems underneath it. Well that's new. Shallow Moat showed that we can have pre-placed buildings closer together than is normally allowed, and now we can just stack them like Legos?

Obviously I'm getting overrun by creeper here about three minutes in, and soon afterwards I'm notified that several hundred - literally - spores will be showing up in the near future. On the other hand I have 250 Aether collected. Now that I actually understand what the heck is going on, I restart.

Take 2 - 4:30 video




Three minutes and change in. My favorite part of this is how the interface fails miserably in even displaying all the spore warnings, both at the bottom and left side of the screen. This is super-miniaturized of course, and you can't read the white at the bottom other than to know its there, I just wanted to show all of it.

Anyway, on the PZs I have two full rows of Reactors, then a few Mortars and a couple cannons and I'm starting to place Beams now. I did turn off ammo packets to get going here this time, though not particularly quickly.




I eventually had 5 SuperBeams ready by the time the first wave hit. It's a light show, and the Flood Walls mission title is only half the story. Laser Light Festival or somesuch is also worth considering.




It was hilariously inadequate, as about half of that initial set hit, obliterating a sizable portion of the infrastructure. And as you can see, that was just a small vanguard - there's incoming. LOTS of incoming. So I had a basic idea of how to start up but clearly I needed a lot more beams.

Take 3 - 9:05 video




This time I got the ammo packets off sooner, built a few less reactors, no cannons, and doubled the SuperBeams to 10. With a few regular ones further out added just for icing on the cake. Energy income is still 66 here. So that figured to suffice for now.




Most of the energy in the beams was wiped out in the initial wave, but they were enough. As more came in, they proved equal to the task and it was time to start expanding. This whole spore-beam thing would be a constant backdrop to the battle on the ground.




I moved the mortars off the PZs to make room for more SuperBeams, built a few Pulse Cannons to go over the wall and start taking out emitters, and then started using those locations for SuperNullifiers to take out more emitters in the third 'tier' past the next wall, as shown here at the top. This was to become a consistent pattern and the basis for advance throughout most of the fight.




Once that was done, SuperMortars would be placed to pound the creeper further out. At times the walls would still get over-run, and having cannons in place to clean it up would be necessary. There's a LOT of emitters, though they aren't as strong as the ones on the outer part shown in the initial shot. Doesn't take long for the depth to build up.




After getting the schematics as the second tier was cleared out, I decided to go nuts on bombers. The amount we have available meant 30-40 of them. After experimenting with using them offensively and reminding myself why that's not the best idea, I had them target the 'pivot' where the walls switch from north-south to east-west, which is the place where I was getting overflow the most.




Even with that, it began to be harder to expand. Here's one reason; apparently that gap at the edges of the map isn't big enough to prevent those massive outer emitters for overflowing onto the rest of the area. You can see here that it's disappeared, though I didn't notice this while playing through the level.




Eventually I decided Sprayers were a much better idea than bombers, and also started getting Berthas up. I'd want them to pound the deeper areas soon. A bunch more normal reactors have also been added by now to feed the machine.




By this time all but one of the emitters that were inside that gap - which was now starting to reappear due to the reduced flow - had been taken down. I needed beams further forward, so I started filling them in here as the rest of the weapons moved outward. It was just one more element added to the usual leapfrogging.




I started to get bogged down here for a while, as there was still part of the gap where creeper was flowing in from the perimeter. So naturally, MOAR BERTHAS. I also had to move more SuperBeams forward, as the spores began to target the nearby relays instead of heading for the main base in the northwest corner as they had been so far. At some point I got an achievement for AC storage, which reached above 2k as we still had stupid amounts of Aether coming in.




The final tier has no emitters and is a bit narrower. This far out though, I had a bunch of mortars along with the berthas pounding the outside section. And there's one heck of a lot of pounding needed, with a much creeper as those emitters are pumping out.




With a few berthas tasked to pound the area as well, I made my crossing in the northeast corner.




After getting one emitter down, it was time to play SuperNullifier Hopscotch all the way around the edge. Most of that isn't shown, as it was just really boring basically. Four at one blow here, most of the time it was three, I think I had a five or two in the southeast corner, but there was just a LOT of stuff to blow up.

I think this would be an interesting level for those who like speedrunning, because once you know what's happening it's really pretty easy to win - and its another one with lots of cathartic Creeper Violence.