Forums → Games → GCCS: Thoughts on getting from level 200 through 1000

So some further thoughts on mana-farming non-premium based on recent posts by UgAhgItHurts and previous observations.

In the end, it appears that mana-farming is possible for non-premium players. However, the way to do it non-premium is completely different than for premium. This means that all the current guides etc for mana farming are wrong for non-premium.

Differences for non-premium mana farming that I have observed for the people who have succeeded at it:

1) Different skill selection - the ideal skill balance recommended by premium guides/standard forum discussion is very different from that used y successful non-premium mana farmers. This is partly because premium players get more mana, and partly because in the absence of the white/black/red skills a different skill balance is more beneficial.
2) Different angering strategies - the standard recommended angering strategies are very different as the average creatures you get from premium mana-farming (endurance-based) appear different from the average creatures you get on high-difficulty maps (only choice for non-premium).
3) Different tower/trap layouts - essentially the standard layout strategies espoused for mana farming by premium guides and premium players have not been used by the posted non-premium mana-farmers. Unfortunately, the posted images focus on the gems and obscure the layouts, so the exact layout methods are unclear despite being obviously different.
4) Different gem combining strategies - from the posted information, it appears that successful non-premium mana farmers use different gem combining strategies than the standard recommended premium strategies. This potentially makes a big difference.

Ideally, someone could actually make a detailed guide at some point to address all these issues and actually help people mana farm in non-premium as many people have asked in the months since the game game out.

As a side note: Unfortunately for me, it seems it will never be possible for me as traps in the game fundamentally perform differently on my machines. I've tried using different browsers on my two different OS's, but they make no difference in trap behavior. So given that traps are ~1/3 as effective for me as they are for others (based on player reports), and given that the game has zero support whatsoever, I doubt these bugs will ever be fixed and I doubt mana farming will ever work.

Well, there's not really a difference non-prem or prem, the same things are effective. You can optimize, you don't have to, and the results of such don't show much in the "reasonable" gem grades. Skill selection won't prevent it from working, just poor skill selection or using too many skills (low starting mana) will make things tougher.

It's been covered before, but premium gets red/w/blk everywhere as well as orblets and chasing shadows boosts (more xp for things that benefit you a lot). The only thing that's important is orange and yellow of course, but those things help a ton.

No private messages here. If you're on kongregate, I can pm a link to my save games, maybe that'll help you diagnose problems. (Already uploaded, but don't want to widely distribute that.) That and level 200+ is nice to comfortably squeeze a billion xp out of maps that provide red/w and have a decent number of waves, there's at least a dozen choices there.

I guess it's not utterly trivial to get a mana farm rolling, but it's not that complicated either, the general limiting factor is people are skittish about summoning enough monsters to make that happen faster

Regarding the skill selection, I was pointing out that the only successful non-premium mana farmers appear to use very different skill sets than the standard recommended premium player skill sets. For example, I have been told numerous times to never put skills into traps or specific gem colors. I was also told to always keep the top row equally maximized. These things completely contradict other methods. This is probably because without the red/white/black skills, what combinations of skills work better is very different for non-premium. So either there is more than one right answer, or there is a better way of doing it for non-premium. Regardless of which it is, this points to problems with the premium-based guides for non-premium players. I was merely pointing out that guides for non-premium players would probably ber helpful (lots of people have asked, but no one has done it).

To date, the only thing that appears to be different for me is the traps issue. I don't know why they don't hit enough creatures, but it happens for me on two different Windows OS's over multiple browsers. I already know that the game has problems in regards to my computer speeds because I don't have loading screens for the fields, which means the compass secrets are impossible for me to achieve. Well-coded games have maximum speeds built into them so that the gameplay doesn't get ruined by faster speeds. Unfortunately, if this game doesn't have that there is nothing I can do.nothing I can do about that. I even asked about this issue previously regarding the compass fields, but that went unanswered.

The guides and most player advice is still geared towards getting lots of xp on endurance with red/white/black-centered skill sets. Nothing I have posted changes that. Lots of people don't have or can't get premium (because its not available to everyone). I just like to advocate for helpful information for all players instead of a limited set. I don't really consider guides fully valid if they are only for a select few.

I found that having points in Traps helped a lot, actually. Higher specials in traps means more chain hit, more blood/pool bound, more mana leech, more critical damage. It is not the only necessary skill, but it is one of them.

You won't believe this, I'm sure, Erile, but when I was first trying to get mana farming figured out for myself (yes, with premium) I had no points in Chain, because just having some red was enough. This was because of the magnifying effect that Pool/Blood has on the other, non-bound specials in the gem, and the effect of a trap in boosting the specials of the gems contained within.

To this day I minimize the amount of red in a gem, squeezing the red out, by making several of the 64 gem upgrades 1Red-Yellow/Orange-Black : 63 Orange/Yellow-Black. That means more Black to boost the Red and the Yellow or Orange further. Its NOT the Chain Hit that is your problem.

If anything, it would be the Black/White. Or your Trap issue, that you alone seem to be having.

I do believe you Astroshak I agree that chain-hit doesn't appear to be my personal problem. I think its been established pretty well that traps don't fire fast enough/aren't working properly on my machines (at ~1/3 of the rate).

However, this doesn't change the fact that the advice posted so far by UgAghItHurts contradicts everything else I've been told about mana farming by other players. And their methods clearly work for non-premium, while other methods posted don't.

I'm just pointing out that what appears to help with mana-farming contradicts the guides and the advice typically given to players and was suggesting that improved guides (including ones accommodating non-premiums) could help players. I have been told by numerous players in the forums to never put points into the trap skill (or any gem skills other than black or white). Other schemes don't even come close to adding up mathematically, probably because a level 3000 is forgetting how many skill points are available at level 200.

For my personal difficulty, I don't know exactly what the issue is. But if creatures are going by three times too fast for the traps to hit all of them, I strongly suspect that it is a problem with the game not operating at the proper speed or not operating all components at consistent speeds. I actually read about similar problems with the game that other players had discussed previously, but I I cannot remember where (this was a long time ago). But I do know from this that it's not a unique problem, even if it might be more pronounced for me. I also doubt any other players who ran into these problems actually bothered to continue playing and try to figure it out, they probably would have just quit.

Traps is the biggest payoff out of any of the skills besides the bound gems, faster special progression as well as making them fire faster so that's your first choice. Colors is a little worse progression than the specific gems, but it affects all gems, second choice. I'd probably go fury for third best (premium, it's insane). Cheaper gems or freeze for fourth, a dip in other skills pays out nicely too.

As I said before, the walkthroughs you bumped are practically for a different game, this isn't the CS where gremlion got more raw xp than bilbo did for finishing endurance last week Traps were a good option at the beginning, but probably not the best (the beam or/y/blk/w tower amped w/blk ruled I think plus amped orb). The game isn't difficult, although GCL was probably easier (wildgem came early enough to make any map pretty easy).

As for your comp performance, it's just so many possible things it could be, and diagnosing could be ugly (i.e. MS packaging during the changeover to 64bit was bewildering through xp/vista/7). The devs are probably interested, especially with the steam release coming. If an MS OS, use diag.exe to generate a text file of most of your comp info, other OSs have similar things to spit out that info (hardware and main software packages that affect video primarily). That won't give browser info, you'll need to supply that (especially if you used generic chrome like we suggested) and any anti-virus/malware stuff you have running.

So I thought I'd spend a half hour rooting for talisman parts, then wisdom sparks start flying (like 10 total, got up to 14x xp). So after an extra hour than I wanted, we have

So that's 16.7B xp. Level 1500 is 60M/lvl now... Best I have on a red no white map is half a billion (50ish starting waves), there's more of those, so I guess it could add up, but some of them are pretty horrendous as are some of the remaining red+white maps I have. There's not that many red/black without white, can probably cheese those pretty well too.

Oh, also a rarity 89 with all skills, that was nice--2.4 seconds from perma-freeze cheese. The other talisman and the 9 or so shadow cores found weren't

So can we just call level 2k non-premium doable and I can go try out some shard farming/finish endurance in 90 min before that's patched out? (The mana multiplier doesn't seem to enter into it without orblets, and it was funny trying to dig out 10^15 mana with grade 32s, took about 30 waves.)

Regarding the guides I posted in, I was told by other players on the forums to follow everything in all of those guides many many times, some as recently as within a couple weeks of me posting in them. Also, they are either linked from the Gemcraft:CS guides sticky or are linked from within other guides in that sticky. So currently, everything in those guides is being sold as current and 100% accurate by the forums and by people on the forums. You can't really "bump" guides that are essentially 'stickied' since they are by default being portrayed as up-to-date by being 'stickied'.

But ff they are for a "different game" because of major changes to the game after its release, then I consider it to be a very good thing that I questioned the information. If I hadn't, then people would continue to pass on that information as 100% accurate without any statements to the contrary.

As for my computer, I don't think "running the game too fast" is something to really be assessed on my machine. That's something that has to be assessed in the game code. Many games have limiters built into the code to prevent those exact occurrences. And I honestly doubt the devs are interested. If they aren't interested in helping people spend money on the game by purchasing the pouch, then they probably aren't too interested in bugs that affect a minority of people.

You don't know until you ask.

Flash games aren't compiled code, they're script and art/sound elements (using functions of the flash toolkit and runtime environment). Yes, flash is horrible and should DIAF as should most of the stuff Adobe does. GC stresses it in ways other uses of it like video or other games that don't have huge floating point numbers and other design stupid do, so it's reasonable that other things work fine.

Your comps aren't 10x better than everyone else's. 10x the price is 1.05x the performance in general, though there's specific uses of that 5% that pay off well (unless you got hold of a couple cpus from a cluster and somehow got them to run a workstation OS). From what lots of people say is normal for them to do, they've got decent to great hardware too. A freebie (because I'm not diagnosing your problem): lots of cpus have minor issues in different ways, check the designer's site (probably AMD or intel) for patches. That's the best bet, then make sure your hardware components are all supposed to play nicely together (i.e. motherboard + ram timings). And if those don't work, you're into the rabbit hole because it can be a huge number of things.

If that can't happen, a way to get a hundred million xp out of a map at your level without using chain + trap would be a pretty cool find too

Sorry if I wasn't clear about asking. I have asked - both regarding the pouch and the speed differences I have viewed in the game. So I was being sarcastic in that the devs don't respond and if they are not interested in earning money from paying players, than they probably are not interested in fixing anything anyway. (There is a blanket statement somewhere basically telling you that the pouch isn't available to everyone) With no response to either issue I gave up on them long ago.

Thanks for the advice. It was interesting to find out that I experience a difference in game functionality that makes the mana farming not work out. Its too bad that it took like 8 months of posting on the site for someone to actually figure it out. I've posted those details about trap functionality before, but noone else caught it.

However, there is a real speed difference that I encounter playing the game. The best evidence of this that I can easily relate is that I essentially do not have a loading screen for fields in the game. This is not because of lag or some other difference. I can literally click on a field and then it basically blinks quickly through the loading screen and then the field is loaded. From clicking on a field to gem-building takes less than 1 second. Thus, this is a definitive difference in how fast the game works on my machines. The speed difference is valid and quantifiable and unlikely due to someone malfunctioning. Whether this is the trap issue, I really don't know. I was just speculating that perhaps they are related.

But in the end, I'm honestly not really concerned anymore. I've just been trying to make contributions where I can with the game as it is available to me. I'm pretty happy with making it to level 250 non-premium and to have completed over 3/4 of the map on glaring with battle traits without doing any mana farming. I still think there's tons of room for guides to actually cover how to play the game at lower levels and with a non-premium account, especially since they explicitly say that not everyone can have premium. I think I'm mostly done worrying about new contributions at this point since I've spent a ton of time already and it seems that guides in these forums never change or update regardless of new information. (and while I do find it refreshing that you personally admit the guides are out of date, most people argue vehemently that they are not lol)

I don't think things have changed enough that most of them are totally bent yet (wait for 1.1) among the recently posted in ones here. The most common problems I see are:

- Over-emphasis on amps. They suck for a long time, especially for traps. Also don't take into account the huge differences between here and GCL. When and how to start using them...not off the top of my head
- Over-emphasis on skills. For a long time, starting mana trumps skills, below level say 100, only situationally cap a skill.
- Over-emphasis on yellow. One of the worst starting choices for a long time, of course later it's the answer for everything, the only purpose of other gems is to enhance it, minorly hinder enemies or get more of it.
- Over-emphasis on red. Situationally helpful I guess, good for combo gems since good fire-rate, but hard to make shine until you have lots of colors and skill for the gem you're mixing it with. And by that point you're level 200odd and can do whatever you want with anything

Also a walkthrough isn't too helpful because a lot of the game is very random. Like orders of magnitude, just restart the map random. There's reasons it's good, but the range of what you can run into can get crazy.

Red is almost always useful, though sometimes-such as with heavy armor foes-pure purple is more usefull.
Yellow...true, it's only good past grade 6 or so.

Red+Yellow combined?

Awesomeness itself, even at fairly "low" levels (60-100)

I say this as a level 1000 non-premium.

played through the game on looming difficulty, using all sorts of gem combos had loads of fun and scary moments. now I use a 4 trap mana farm 1white 1 red 2 orange and 2 kill gems in towers 1white 1red 2 yellow jumping levels at a silly rate!! but it has killed the fun of the game!! if you want quick xp from a low level i advise it but be warned it will kill the fun! ps skills max pool max mana high trap, everything else is optional.