Part 134: Hopping

Hopping

Video





Warm up the Guppies - thematically this is quite similar to the last map. Islands and Digitalis galore. The emitters are of varying strength, and a bit of everything with runners and spores as well.







'CAIN' again.




How about a status report on that spell-checker routine, Lia?




The reactors in place there are a not-so-subtle hint as well, but it'd be a tough location if that emitter was active.










A small little corner of the map, but that one-minute delay and the energy boost at the start make it easy enough to get going and secure it. We get all three Nodes here but it seemed clear there wouldn't be enough space for all of them.




This was my first try, using SuperGuppies just because. They weren't the problem. I tried this four times, with the same level of non-success on each basically. I found we were more or less breaking even with the creeper on the southeast island I've targeted here. Five Pulse Cannons, Two Mortars was the group I sent. Part of the problem is that, as seen, the mortars like to pound the Digitalis which isn't exactly useful here.




I hadn't gone with Berthas initially due to space concerns, but I decided I needed their firepower, recalling one of the Command Nodes. Turns out this is a much better idea.




This landing was an immediate success, and eventually resulted in this: a SuperSniper putting down any runners that got close, and SuperBerthas deployed to aid our next attack.

By the way, in the truly random mission design specifications category, we have:

** Berthas cost 270 energy instead of 250. Why? What purpose does such a small change serve?

** Even weirder, the Forge is cheapened from 100 to 75. There are no Totems on this map. It could be 1 or a million and it wouldn't matter. It doesn't bother me or upset me or anything, but why spend the effort of making an irrelevant change like that?

** Shields and Siphons are locked. Why lock Siphons on a planet where they can't be deployed? There are no resource sites for them.

I wonder if the author was possibly under the influence of ... *ahem* ... 'adult substances'.




This was the next target. Not the most brilliant idea to land where guppies can't help out, and I shifted to the west before landing. The three emitters here are weak, but on the other hand there's constant assistance from the digitalis winding around part of it. Took a couple of attempts but it wasn't hard to get a foothold.

Also worth noting: Spores have a payload of 250 on this map. You do NOT want them to hit.




I landed a second node here and spent significant time just having artillery keep the digitalis under control while I built up energy here. I needed more than our small starting island could provide. MOAR GUPPIES, and all that.




To the west of there, this curved island had a stronger emitter, 50 per half-second iirc, but only one of them. I now had a trio of SuperBerthas positioned and that made creating a landing spot not hard at all.




That Digitalis SuperCannon is located where one of the runner nests used to be, and proved very useful. I still had to have guardian cannons on the west and south, but I had about half the map occupied now. This was a much better positioning for the sniper as well.




This one took a bit longer. There's not a lot of room, and between the digitalis ribbon and two emitters a fair number of things need to be crammed in. On my first try I had the Nullifier powering up, then had a smallish delay in energy delivery, the digitalis got out of hand, and nearly ready to fire the nullifier and other things were destroyed. I was less than amused.




This bit along the north of the map was easy to take afterwards, esp. with our third node in place. Mostly this is just here to show how we've got the major digitalis crossroads cut off. There is only place left to hit ...




It wasn't hard to get a group of weapons in here with bertha support. Interesting fact: I had a Terp built most of this map, but never actually used it. Probably should have here, because this digitalis does not go gently into that good night.




This does a decent job of showing that, with as much digitalis as there is here, it was hard to cut it off. It just kept regrowing every time I tried to move something.




In order to finally take down one of the emitters and start clearing this out, I pretty much needed more everything. Five guppies might have been a bit much, but not by a lot if it was. The finish here was a pretty solid example of how digitalis can suck if not given enough respect.