Forums → Games → Gemcraft Chasing Shadows Endurance: Is it beatable?

Exploit ideas: Go beyond e400 hp/armor and see what happens.
Try using a mostly black gem (black hole), and just the tiniest bit of red and yellow or orange.... Then use amplifiers to multiply that amount.
Use a corrupted mana shard, starting only once one gets to 1e45 damage. See if you can get 1e45 mana somehow, even if this could only happen once.

Also note: when you get to a 1e19 mana pool, your creation of g1 gems is completely free! This is because it is below the significance for a "double value" in the machine code. In theory, one could create a script to create millions of g1 gems and combine them into a g2 gem, making a really, really expensive g2 gem for free. You could then upgrade that gem to grade 7 and use it to amplify other similar gems, maximizing skill traits while minimizing damage and hits per second. This win was exploit free, however.

That's simply an exploit which would allow creation of arbitrarily large gem grades. Double values have a maximum of about 1e400, so you could never go beyond that.

A 1e53 monster is as tough as the mass in kilograms of the visible universe. If each hp of a monster means it weighs 1 kg more, the monsters at the end are the toughness of the visible universe.
One could speculate that in the game world, the forgotten gains energy from the destruction of its monsters equal to its hp. We are accidentally creating two co-equal forces, ourselves from the mana gain and the gem creation and the forgotten, by winning endurance, ending the game's universe in the process.

(The only way to win would have been to not play, letting the forgotten stay forgotten.)

@grinchy01: Mixing black/yellow/orange in any proportions with any amplifiers won't be more efficient than formulas we've computed with ieee. Also e400 hp armor has got a cap according to Peter and nothing interesting happens here. Creating g1 gems is free as you say, but you'd need ~10^18 combines what is far beyond any reasonable time do get less than e30 mana what is quite easily achievable. But still good job seeking exploits

I can certainly agree with it has to give me a factor of 10 or it's not worth trying. The one thing to do is optimize your mana gem(s) amplifiers then gem, that makes a huge difference. Then you'll be able to get a few factor of 10 more mana in the same time and be able to build bigger gems. 8 combine does this pretty well (g+g)+g+g+g+g+(g+g). Do not let your mana gem kill things, very important.

Corrupted mana shards were capped at something like 30M mana a long time ago. High level gems lagged way too much to take advantage of that when it was exploitable and besides there were even easier ways to win back in the day

When I used 16c, I noticed something.

One might be silly and wait to get enough mana to upgrade 3 grades with 16 gems, put them in the box on the right and wait until one has enough to cleanly combine.

This is unreasonable and inefficient. An efficient way to upgrade while playing is to constantly do pieces of the upgrade and put the resulting gems in amplifiers or traps.

You have a grade 5 gem to start with 32 c, then you upgrade to.g8,g11,g14, up to g 32 before you slow down.

Then you have longer and longer breaks between upgrades.

Once you get to g55, you can start by duplicating the g55, then putting it in another trap near the original amplifiers.

Then remember the upgrades for 16c and do it in pieces.

It is (2+1+2) +(2+1+1+1+1+1+2+2)

You can make the first part (2), while keeping a 1 in a trap. Just u upgrade after d duplicating. Then d duplicate twice, u upgrade one of them and you have the (2+1+2) part of the 16c.

Just throw it in a trap with barrage and have a 1 ready for duplication for later.

There's no real reason not to break it up this way. Keeping gems on the fiels gains mana, keeping them in the combine space is no real use.

Each u upgrade gains about 40% efficiency, and that means 40% faster upgrades. This may hold for 64c also, but I've never tried it, as 16c works fine.

Are there formulas for how much a 2+1 adds to specials vs a u upgrade?

Well, that is exactly what some of us (including me) do you can do that for any combine by just building tougher gem from every pair (coming from top) first.

In order to beat endurance past f3, we need a better mana gain than mana farms.

What immediately came to my mind was to use more mana farms.

If a mana farm makes x mana, 2 of them costs twice as much and make 2x mana.

Yet, u upgrading the whole farm costs twice as much ans makes 1.4 times as much mana.

The main issues are space and time. The computer processing takes more than double the time, and usable spaces are further and further away.

In theory, one would set the monster hp to be enough to go through banishment 10 or 20 times. Then one would let hundreds of thousands of monsters on the screen and slowly drain them.

Computer processing speed limits prevent this, the same issue that prevents one from getting 100,000 hits per second, and would make u upgrade the best upgrade strategy. The real game is to keep gem power growth in line with monsters hp growth, with the computer speed limits.

Moore's law is just more cores.

As a response to an older post:
Doing the combine on map is indeed very useful. Interestingly, when doing the 64c, I found that having it divided in 2 gems (one 20c and one 44c) gives significant more mana than joining them directly.

Now that the patch is out, I'm calling C3 the most exploitable field, but I don't have the patience or lag tolerance to take it as far as it can go. At least I haven't found anything crazier (H2 also has both shrines but much harder to make good use of creeps):

Edit: I got 14k extra damage out of the first use of the gem shrine, would have been better to wait a bit longer on that, only 6k hits.

I beat F1 endurance on looming with no traits. I used a bl/bk/rd slow gem and three mana traps amplified to the gills at the very beginning, enraged the first 50 waves with a thousand g1 gems each and &quotermafroze" everything over the traps. I was able to sustain about 7000 bad guys over the mana traps during that time and racked up about 1.0 ^28th power in mana. That took about 5 hours, I got bored and hit ctrl/send rest of waves.

I then made a few y/bk/rd killgems amplified with pure yellow. The first 900 waves were quite uneventful but the incoming bad guys (flying crap and spires) started getting really hard to kill. Final enemies had about 8^55 hit points and required several dozen WoE castings each to finally die.

Waves 950-999 absolutely stunk. I had to freeze/WOE them constantly and just barely killed the last one.

On this run I did use the WGemCombiner script to do all the dirty work of supergemming but I didn't bother to "grow" my killgems by racking up hits. Had I grown one with 64B hits or so the end would have been very quick.

The same level on Haunting with everything but Hatred maxed out I was able to get to level 796 and got just over 218B points. Total mana was 1.071^32. I used roughly the same strategy as the "easy" mode I beat but man....it took FOREVER. 218,240,091,836 points. Right around 18 hours total. Had I bothered permafreezing everything at the beginning I might have beaten endurance on Haunting but it would have taken days if not weeks. I'm guessing that if you let the program run and check it every hour or so (with the lag it's quite possible) over the course of a week or two I'd say that it could be beaten.

BTW the endscreen for defeating endurance is quite anticlimactic. I thought there'd be something special, maybe an achievement, but no. Just says Endurance Victory on the top. The icon for the level with the yellow/orange/red lights changes a bit. The yellow light is now white. Stats page says "endurance battles won: 1" "highest wave beaten: 999". Total points for the beaten endurance battle was only about 90 million. It was not run for exp. My level is just over 10K, talisman is all 100 rarity with "farmed" center pieces for freeze duration, two of which have WoE health loss too. The outside ring all seems kinda "blah".

I am 2k+ WL and had never ever beat an endurance even in the field F1 with Looming and no battle traits. Lol. I must stop after 3+ hours, those tiny little creeps just running around back and forth through my orb mocking me LOL. and even my top g60 killgems didnt do any harm to them. Someday I'll beat those tiny little *******s. Greets and salutes to all Endurance Beaters.