another hint for endurance: do NOT try to survive when mobs come with more than a billion hp and you can beat them in no way - end the game with three gembombs and get the "do not let any monster reah your orb"-Amulet and 30% more score.
So, to cap up: Endurance - Survive to the last wave, and collect the battle-amulets. Nothing to win on early waves or summoning other than amulets/time/mana.
Pylon - Summon for dear life, suicide when over-run. Prioritize summoning over number of survived waves.
Shadows - Kill it, kill it with fire, no reason to wait or farm spawns.
And last; shrines does not work with level 18+ gems. G18+ with 100%+ health-reduction should reduce HP down to 1 and poison. Worked nicely when I had a wave that would just have been difficult to beat otherwise, but only straight-out killed a few, and otherwise nothing when I had 12000+ of super-angered giants with alot*10^144 HP and more armor than my most powerful gem, times a thousand, at least. Perhaps intentional as that would downright allow the same kind of exploit as GC0 had on the last level before the fix.
So well, I add: "and you do not think you can make a grade 21+ gem any soon"...and that probably fits to most players, because there ae not that many 500+ players...and its just boring to always make grade 12ers, put them in shrines, make new ones and so on...
OK, after a couple levels, I came to a conclusion:
You do not want to call the first couple waves early. In doing so, you actually lose mana, because you gain more mana from letting the pool fill naturally than from calling waves early. I tested this a couple times, and you should probably start calling waves early around wave 5.
few things need to be added: 1: Auto-duplicate. Every time you put your mouse on those gems when you are having too much enemies on your screen it becomes very laggy 2: Speed X 6 or higher, or just a button to send all the rest of enemies. People are trying to achieve higher score by playing 53X mode with 1337 waves of monsters, so you want us to spend 1 hour for each map? Jesus!
3: XP for playing those previous maps with even lower XP!! I spend 1 hour playing a map and get 23 millions, but I did not level up simply because I did not beat my previous record and that sucks so bad!
4: higher XP and longer endurance: I got 600,000,000 XP or something like that, and now I can only get few skills leveled up for every hour, you expect people to play this game for 8 hours a day just to get every level beaten with 53X71? and what if I beat all those maps in highest XP? then I guess I am done with this game since I will get no more XP no matter what.
I am willing to pay even $100 for a decent game, but $5 dollars for a game with loads of problems? no good
1. How to count - how much times need to duplicate gem? Input field? For each duplication? 2. Use speedhack, it have x20 3. No way. 4. After beating all fields on endurance, you can go with madness summon multiplier. It can be higher than endurance.
1. Disable Info Panels ('I' button) while you do your duplications. 2. Speedhack, yes. As suggested above. 3. Never. This is the unique scoring part of Gemcraft series. Definitely won't be changed till the end of the series. 4. You can play 169 (-5) maps for highest multipliers and there will be no more Gemcrafts for 1 year. So you'll have to play with this till Q1/Q2 2012.
And remember this is a game developed by only ONE person. Have you ever played a flash game that was half addictive and replayable as this? I think it is almost perfect this way. Next update will have even more surprises (optional hp cap removing -> higher xps).
