Forums → Game Walkthroughs → Gemcraft CS: extreme end-game guide
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This guide is outdated for game version 1.1 - new guide can be found here
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Introduction
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First of all, this guide is beneficial only for 1000+ level players with all skill unlocked who also know how mana farms work and fully followable for 2000+ with at least +10 to all skills talisman. If you are lower level, better check out fractalman's and thunderrider's guides. They explain respectively low-level (0-100) and mid-game (levels 100-2000, basics of mana farming and endurance).
Another important thing is Magician's Pouch - if you don't have it you also won't be able to follow this guide as it heavily uses premium-only content.
If you are able to set up some macro for clicking mouse, it will help a lot. You will have to anger waves for example 500 times, so click-ten-times button is highly recommended.
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Skills
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Must be is 45 points (+ your talisman) in following skills:
True Colors, Fusion, Mana Leech, Bloodbound, Freeze, Amplifiers, Fury, and Traps
Very important and heavily needed but not essential are:
Masonry, Critical Hit, Chain Hit and Barrage
Least important (but also recommended) skills:
Mana Stream, Resonance and Poolbound
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Map to choose and difficulty settings
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Easiest places to set up a mana farm are maps with a single entrance. I prefer fields M7, Q4, U1 and X4 (not single entrance but nice too). Q4 is nice for beginners because no beacons will spawn there, and the gem resocketing ones are really annoying. I will use this map for my example in the rest of this guide.
I prefer all traits except manalock maxed and haunting. It really doesn't matter for a play and gives huge 70x XP multiplier.
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Gem combining methods
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As you probably know (or not), pressing "U" isn't the best option for gem upgrading, and not every colors proportion in gem is equally good. To squeeze every drop of power out of gems I recommend using following gem combining methods - they are carefully designed to maximize power of this particular gem combination and probably won't be so efficient for others, so for best results use them in way I recommend.
I'll introduce two kinds of methods: 32-spec and 16-combine. First one (32-spec) is one-use only, it combines 32 g1 gems of three colors to get g5-equivalent with the most specials. Second (16-combine) is repeatable, it combines 16 equal grade gems to +4g-equivalent. It's used to upgrade gems and allows faster special growth.
32-spec for mana gems
32-spec for killing gems
16-combine
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Basic setup
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Get around 1,000,000 mana however you wish (white mana farm or something). You will now need 6 amplifiers surrounding 3 traps and one trap directly after and one directly before - just like on this picture:
You can also perform a corner setup.
First make 32-spec for mana gems to get basic g5 gem. Then set it to random targetting. Copy it and save a copy somewhere in order not to need to craft it again in case of mistake. Upgrade it twice with 16-combine.
Create 2 white, 1 red, 1 blue slowing gem, upgrade it by pressing "U" to 1/8 of mana gem value. Duplicate. Place in traps before mana gem. Set targeting to Random.
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Early gameplay
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Anger 2-4 waves of reavers by g1 gems (no swarms and no giants) to e24 armor and send them all. Using permafreeze (freeze spell with recharge time shorter than minimum freeze time), freeze them all as precisely over the managem as you can. When your mana is high enough and you have got barrage spell reloaded then pause, use 16-combine on managem (sometimes your mana grows so fast that you can do it two or three times), put in back into a trap and reload it by barrage. Upgrade your slowing gems to keep them 1/8 of managem price, (but not higher than g40) and reload if have got some spells (other than bolt!) to spare. If not, upgrade first of slowing gems, wait it to reload and upgrade second then.
When your mana gem is about grade 29, craft amplifier gems. You do it by simply getting g1 orange and applying 16-combine for amplifier gems to it. Go until it's grade 28. Always keep your amplifier gem 1g lower than mana gem!
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Late gameplay
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When all monsters are frozen, remove slowing gems. Keep monsters in this state by constantly freezing them. Then upgrade your mana and amplifiers using methods explained to g59 and g58 amps. It's enough for very good xp gain, ideally you do it by wave 65.
If you wait very long for 16x mana to upgrade mana gem, I advice to duplicate it and hide somewhere a copy and then perform the formula step by step - wait for enough mana to perform next step of 16-combine, duplicate your hidden copy enough times and combine into mana gem according to current step of formula. After that don't forget upgrading amplifiers.
In order to farm hits slightly faster, create some duplicates of managem, put them into towers and combine in during next iteration of 16-combine.
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Killing gem building
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You are now ready to build killing gem. Similar to the managem, build g56 one (using 32-spec for killing gem and 16-combine). Also build 8 g58 yellow amps, using 16-combine for amps. Don't farm hits yet. Combine 1 red and 7 black. Upgrade by pressing "U" to grade 50. Place in tower and farm some hits on this gem.
Build "fortress" - 8 amplifiers around the tower. Put yellow amp gems in. Perform 16-combine, but combine your g50 gem with hits into one of 16 copies of basic gem before combining it with anything. Now your killing gem is ready to kill the mass-enraged monsters, but still don't place it on tower.
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XP gaining
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You should be now around wave 90 if you did everything right. Fill at least 1/10 of your mana pool. Finally, you can put your killing gem into its tower
Create a gem with value about million times lower than your mana pool. Take your killing gem's damage (round it down to two digits) and multiply by critical hit multiplier, rounded down the same way. It's HP of monsters you want to reach. Anger by gem you've created untill you reach it. Try not exceed it more than 10 times or you probably won't be able to kill the monsters.
Anger in this way every wave and send angered early. Remaining 40-50 waves should boost your XP by roughly 300,000,000,000 points before endurance. You can then proceed in endurance with exactly the same bombing technique, further boosting XP. Go into endurance as deep as you can and then finish it - I recommend around wave 500
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Final conclusions and other stuff like that
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- You don't have to follow this guide exactly, it's just an example.
- I can play it through in about 3 hours, but it surely can be done faster.
- Feel free to leave comments, as I can use them to improve this guide.
- If you want to know some even more complex gem combining techniques (in order to perform g100 run for example) also ask, I can post them for you.
- All gem combining techniques I use are computed by my PC, I will probably share software I used for it somewhere.
- The guide is published over CC-BY-ND license. If you want to copy it, please also post link to original one (there will be the newest version).
Good luck in hardcore GC:CS gaming!
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Informations for true addicts
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64-combine, use it instead of 16-combine if you wish to beat g100 or something. Doable, but lots of patience. About 2x better at g78-e than 16-combine.
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Credits
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Main author and math dude - psorek
Man who wrote everything I've forgotten and inspirator of every manafarm-crazed person, including me [psorek] - thunderrider (Armor Games) aka Takiza (On IRC and Kongregate)
Our fantastic graphics author - cronos51
The people who helped us in creating this guide and developing showed methods - Astroshak, borthelcash, dsizov and many others.
- 88 Replies
With the nerfs, is it even practical to reach those levels anymore?
I performed everything at the newest version which was .17 and gained 1.3e12 exp. It's still practical and would be rather hard to nerf without destroying the game.
Can you explain in layman terms why the ***** gems, gotten through "combining" methods, are better in every aspect than normally duplicated ones?
I thought that every color has different stats for its gems. For example, duplicated 1/1 RY gem will have worse damage output than 1/23 RY simply because R component doesn't scale that great and its gem has lower base damage than Y one. But that means 1/1 RY will have greater R component than 1/23 RY. So it's kinda trade-off. But this isn't the case with "combined" gems, they are better than duplicated gems in every aspect, including specials, whilst having the same cost.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Gemcraft/comments/2385eg/sc_about_gem_combining_mechanics_and_why_we/
I have a hard time wrapping my head around the math myself. All I know is that it works.
If you have a high-mana Vision field unlocked, give the standard 'U' upgrade gems, the standard supergems (DDDUGGG, where you make 3 copies of the gem, U to upgrade it, then combine the upgraded gem with the three copies of the original, one at a time), the 16 gem method, and the 32 gem method (initial gem creation only), all a shot to see what works best.
What am I missing in the 16 combine? The second row say (basegem+basegem) + first row's 7result, but that's... 6+7.
If I start with 16 of the grade 5's created by the initial 32 combine, what is the resulting grade for the 16 combine?
Also, the mana 32 combine lists a g2 black/orange in the key but that gem isn't used in the combine steps, oversight or mistake?
I'll introduce two kinds of methods: 32-spec and 16-combine. First one (32-spec) is one-use only, it combines 32 g1 gems of three colors to get g5-equivalent with the most specials. Second (16-combine) is repeatable, it combines 16 equal grade gems to +4g-equivalent. It's used to upgrade gems and allows faster special growth.
Oh so that's why my recent foray into supergemming was such a disaster.
P.s. R4 also has a single entrance after some "trivial" cleanup. (trivial for level 500+, that is.).
Can you explain in layman terms why the ***** gems, gotten through "combining" methods, are better in every aspect than normally duplicated ones?
the basic idea is simple: when combining, some stats are thrown away. by combining a cheap gem with an expensive gem, most of the "throwaway"comes from the cheap gem rather than the expensive gem. the math merely tells you details such as what grade difference to use.
do note, though, that it's really hard on firerate.
is there some place that can give me a hand on "how to" for marcos? gem bombing hundreds of time is a pain.
thx
I figured it out, and... I am so impressed with how much better this is than what I was doing. The mana cost of pure orange gems vs the leech value is just orders of magnitude better than my old ill-advised and ill-thought-out method at higher gem levels. Mine worked really well in the low levels, providing a massive boost to mana pool level early, but it's not sustainable and this totally is.
Very nice.
If you want an in-action representation of the 32-spec & 16-combine, I made a video - All I ask for is you like/sub, I'd like to help more people with my vids.
Fear not: I only have that much mana so as to more easily show you how to do it, with minimal mana shortage.
With zero Fusion, it costs only about 6K mana to do a 32-spec. 16-combine for amps, 0 fusion again, about 3K mana.
I started trying this method out around wave 45 of map H2 with all difficulty selections maxed - the 9 traits, and haunting diff.
The talismans all sucked (all 60s and 70s, the bottom of the range possible) but the XP... 781 billion from that map alone. I wonder how I would have done if I had been doing this from wave 1. =x
And, to put a final proof to this guide's effectiveness, here are two gems, one
mine, the other is cronos' grade 87.
At half the bloodbound, and half the mana cost (G86e), AND with amps three grades lower (vs. cronos' 2xG85e and 4xG84e), I am leeching around the same mana per hit. After weeks, I have finally equalled this first goal I set. Now to finish the full setup.
Great guide. You made most information easier to understand then the other manafarm posts.
Could you clarify enragin waves? Do you use average/min/max dmg for multiplication?
thx
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