ForumsGamesGC:CS Need help (despite all the guides)

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Dalahan
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Dalahan
3 posts
Peasant

Ok so before I ask for help here's what I'm dealing with:

- LVL102
- I don't want to &quotay to win" so no premium (at least yet)
- Skills available: true colors, masonry, fusion, mana stream, bolt, manaleech, critical, freeze, beam, poison, curse, slow, armor tearing, amplifiers, ignition, demolition, traps
- skill cap 15
- skill points total 876

The problem:

I'm basically stuck and simply "gaining a few levels" doesn't make any **** difference. All the guides I have seen are useless either because the rely on premium skills, rely on insanely high level or are simply not replicable because guess what, I don't have enough levels/skillpoints/premium to replicate.

So what I need is a guide that uses the information above to devise a strategy for getting lots of levels and beting the tougher fields without losing because I run out of mana. And before you say "just manafarm lol" yes I would have but all the tactics shown in youtube pretty much rely on premium skills.

I feel the game should be beatable without paying for it. Hopefully some of you can devise a strategy for progressing in levels and beating the tougher fields. I did the same with labyrinth, beat the game without paid content first and then went for the 1337 waves in endurance etc. Each GC chapter is a game of its own and I have to admit I'm virtually pretty much stuck. I can go into further detail depending on what kind of advice I get. Any help I get is appreciated.

  • 11 Replies
bilboCGL
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bilboCGL
323 posts
Peasant

Even if I like my premium-slot with WL 3600+, I also played and won without mp, I finshed the game by WL 69 IIRC, so you should be able to beat any field you can reach.
You don't have to pay2win, it just makes things much easier...
Nevertheless some hints that might be helpful (they could be much more detailed, when you tell us which fields makes you can't beat).
- Don't spend all your skill-points! Starting mana is really important, at WL 100 you should be able to start with a grade 5 gem or, if swarmlings come through, two g4 gems.
- I found the following skills useful when I recently played (and won) Y4 with WL 69:
1 row: 11,3,11,11,9
2 row: 3,0,11,0,6
3 row: 3,0,0,0,0
4 row: 3,0,0,0,3
5 row: 3,0,0,0,0
For a fully walkthrough of Y4 with this low level, look in the comments I wrote, three days ago... (page one, two or three)
- Most times it is better to start with only one or two tower gems
- Forget manafarming, no way at this level
- Use the talisman fragments and upgrade them all
- If you don't have enough sc, just replay easier levels
- to gain more xp (and wl), replay levels with some traits,
- really important: ENRAGE, in almost every level you can enrage at least the first 40 waves with one or two g1 gems...
- When available, use some amplifiers

As written above, tell some fields you don't think you can win, maybe(!) I write another level-walkthrough...

Edit: A link to the mentioned Y4-Walkthrough: http://armorgames.com/play/15760/gemcraft-chasing-shadows?comments=direct#comment-1524979429

Dalahan
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Dalahan
3 posts
Peasant

What I'm having trouble with is pretty much ALL levels with starting hp 90+ so you see it's not level specific. I know that I need initial mana to win, but what I namely need is TACTICS, what skills to use (thanks) and what kind of gems EXACTLY to use, how much EXACTLY to rage at my level (formulas?)

Or maybe I should do like someone suggested at another forum, just go through a hard grind until level 200ish and suddenly everything is so much easier. Apparently you can beat the game at level 50ish, but that requires very specific tactics with each map separately. Maybe I should use the term "detailed strategy" instead of "detailed tactics" to describe what I need.

psorek
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psorek
447 posts
Jester

[url]http://armorgames.com/community/thread/12310679/gemcraft-chasing-shadows-guide-for-low-levels[/url]
No premium needed in this guide. You can use any gem, I for example like yellow, orange and purple. Most important thing is angering as much as you can bare, then nothing is really a challenge. Replay previous levels with traits to gain xp.

bilboCGL
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bilboCGL
323 posts
Peasant

Level 50ish? That would IMHO be a big challenge, I tried hard and was kind of happy that I managed it in the late (last!) 60ish
OK... So let's have a look...
Skills: The top row shown above is /my/ weight of the skills, it is important to get the gems cheap and powerful so I put skills on fusion and true color, resonance is also important, even if in my example it is only set to 9. Masonry... unless you don't have to build many buildings, 3 is enough.
Bolt, beam and barrage... Depending on your way to play, I've set them all to three, curse is IMHO the uselest spell so I spend no skillpoints to it, WoE and even more freeze is much more powerful so they get 3 and 6 points...
The lower row is not that important, but amps should get a little boosted.
At WL 70 I get an initial manabonus of 2261, enough for me to beat the most level till X5.
The gem-skills... you should put a lot in crit as it is IMHO the most important...

Enraging... Look at the armor and the hitpoints and the damage you can deal - the concept of armor is, that every damage of the shot you fire is reduced by the amount of armor. Let's say, you have a monster with 135 hp and 100 armor and a gem with a damage of 80-120 this monster will hardly be beaten by that gem as only the shots having *more* than 100 damage can break through the armor and these shots can deal a maximum damage of 20, so you probably need around 20 or more shots to bring this monster down... OK? (Assuming that the damage dealt is randomly spread) .
Using bolt enhancement spell (or poison) will ignore armor...
So you ask for exactly numbers in enraging... I can't tell Everytime you bomb a wavestone you will increase the hp, the armor and the ammount of monsters depending on the gem-grade you bomb with. It is important that you don't pay more for bombs than you gain from killing the additional monsters, so keep an eye on the information panels.

And: IT IS hard at levels under 2-300, you (and me!) can't rush through the higher maps, you have to think, you have to retry sometimes and change the strategy...

So, now I have a little hunger, hope I could help a little

Dalahan
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Dalahan
3 posts
Peasant

Thanks for the help. Funnily enough the most useful piece of advice was to upgrade those critical hits gems... 60% chance for 10x dmg per hit with 3 hits per second kinda makes the difference against late waves and thats just the beginning... I should be able to build my levels and pull on through.

Reechi
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Reechi
14 posts
Peasant

On the topic of manafarming: I'm way lower level than you and non premium as well, but still can generate quite a lot of mana with it. You won't be reaching millions yet, but your overall mana will be multiplied by 10 at least by the end.

I like to put a lot of points into traps, purple and orange gems, and it makes angering easy and very profittable on every map. I also keep beam very high as it makes orange or orange/purple towers fantastic.

So build a long trap of low level orange then purple gems, in the end followed by your kill gem. If there are no better starting gems, I roll with half purple (strongest base stats) and sometimes I combine it with orange for simplicity and easy combining with the trap gems. I level one of my orange trap gems as high as the kill gem, and when beam is charged I put it into a tower - target swarmlings, rush them if needed - and generate tons of mana in seconds. Before beam runs out, I put it back to save the enchancement.

After the early waves I anger everything at least 5 times, as I get stronger I raise the bar to 10, 15 etc. I keep upgrading my purple traps as much so angered monsters still become armorless. With my excess mana I build extra towers to hunt beacons, demolish buildings or help out the kill gem when I overanger. Since monsters are armorless lower grade gems can help in killing.

If there's one thing that makes leveling easier that's destroying beacons. If you destroy all the beacons they can give 2-3 times as much xp as all the killed monsters combined. The more you anger every wave the bigger this difference becomes.

UgAhgItHurts
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UgAhgItHurts
259 posts
Peasant

Good advice there, except there's lots wrong now with fractalman's guide. I'd just add that if regen is a problem later, suppressing gems do scale well and are great in traps (combine with slow or mana, lots of low level ones along the path that you upgrade to 4 or 5 or hit with specials when you can).

Y4: you don't have red or white gems (you have red Y5 and white + red on Y6). I won at level 120 (put a few points in slow, really helps its punch, and I don't max skills except the first, fusion and usually traps). Orange gem at top right in tower (grade 4). Kill gem in the bottom middle, you can get 4 or 5 amps on it (pure yellow). Beam mana gem when available, upgrade/amp kill gem then mana gem. Save beam for kill gem if there's lots of swarms in a row, though barrage isn't bad, might want to hit your traps with it too. No angering, calling lots of waves early once settled (might consider just calling the first 4 or 5 at once so you have the spells to work with).

Generally the test is the vision fields. You should be able to squeeze more than a 100k out of 2 and 4 for example, if you can't, consider new tactics. You don't have V3 non-premium, that one's good for millions if you're careful (80k starting mana, all gems, 227 waves).

What to enrage when depends on skills and what gems you have available and how good they are. Early in a wave, you definitely want more kill mana out of monsters than the gems you anger with for example, and don't anger too far ahead.

At level 100, any field starting with less than 50hp with one or two entrances that has red or better yet red + white can be worth millions of xp to you. Oh, have you tried X7 yet? That one is tricky in a couple ways Y4 isn't

UgAhgItHurts
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UgAhgItHurts
259 posts
Peasant

Forgot: it's not as easy as GCL to duplicate what you're working with (that's just skill selection). If you post your giabGc2CsSaveData.sol file (you might need to add show hidden in whatever file explorer you use to find things, public dropbox or somewhere like filedropper.com), I and others would be happy to show how to get through that map or get millions of xp from where you're at.

jdguy99
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jdguy99
58 posts
Farmer

So this thread made me go back and try the game without the pouch. There were a couple of maps (T6 in particular) that i found really hard, that made me go back just to level up. I managed to "beat" the game when i was level 104.

it is a totally different experience doing it that way. Much more of a challenge. But people have to remember, a big part of the entire GC series isnt just about "beating the storyline part of the game", it has always been about dominating the game for alot of people. Sure some are happy with just winning the basic game, but most players of this series arent. So while i am glad i tried this, and i may continue to see how dominant i can get without the extras, i will still back to my purchased version to see what i can do ( currently about level 3300)

UgAhgItHurts
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UgAhgItHurts
259 posts
Peasant

Agree, that's one of the toughest, maybe rougher than X6. It depends on when you get hit with the spire and the shadow, if it's early you're good, if it's late, doubtful you have enough artillery to cut them down, or even if you do it means ignoring a few waves of critters that you really can't afford to ignore

There's current interest in how far you could cheese one say the k, m or p maps that are nice arrangement + red gem with your non-prem game.

BlakeLupa
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BlakeLupa
48 posts
Shepherd

I beat the game without the pouch. I don't remember what my stats were at the level, but I know I put the most points into the yellow gem critical hit stat until was around level 100. I had a sad one yellow gem strategy XD After 100 I upped resonances true colors and mana stream alot. I have a few points in the mana leech and trap skills but I haven't had much luck with mana farming on any level.

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