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Scrree posted:I beat it last night. As far as I can summarize, the basic tricks are: My Pure Nexus gold medal run for Tactical Tower D doesn't match up with all the advice in this post, but I do agree with this point: Scrree posted:*But don't be afraid to spend keys immediately to grab atk+ items. You're going to end needing basically every atk+ item in the tower, so if it's gated by a key instead of an enemy there's little cost to grabbing it sooner than later. And basically the reason my other advice doesn't match up is because I agree with this particular point so thoroughly. Even in towers where you're more focused on building DEF than ATK, ATK is still a very important stat. In towers where you're underleveled (which is most of them), ATK drops the damage that enemies deal to you at a much faster rate than DEF does. Given the fact that ATK is the rare commodity that it is in this particular tower, anything that raises your ATK by even one point should be treated with the same level of priority usually reserved for Golden Feathers and Life Crowns, if not more than that. Scrree posted:*That said, once you get to the higher level where the stairs are blocked by a red door (I think level 5) everything above that is pretty tough, so you can ignore climbing for a while and focusing on clearing the lower levels as efficiently as possible. Basic spoiler: I thought this was true too, for a while. But this comes from a mindset that assumes keys should be preserved, in general. More detailed spoiler: There are a ton of potions on floor 7, including some Heavenly Potions that raise ATK. If you spend enough level-ups on keys, you can hit this floor and grab some of those potions early, even before you've really advanced very far in 5F. Raising ATK this early, at this junction, will help save even more HP while clearing out earlier floors. Scrree posted:*You shouldn't need to take keys on levelup more than a few times. I think I took 2 +3 yellow keys and 1 +2 blue keys over 40 levels.  The following advice on keys is general advice that's true for any tower, but I'm going to put it behind spoilers anyway because I think it ties into what Tactical Tower D is probably "trying" to teach from its layout: Any level-ups you spend on keys, you probably want to front-load all of those keys into your very first levels, and there's a couple of reasons for this. The first reason is that, although the amount of ATK or DEF you can get from a level-up is always increasing, the amount of keys you can get from a level-up is always the same. This means that keys inherently become a "less valuable" choice the higher your level is, and you're "missing out" on more ATK or DEF if you get keys on later levels. Although it probably feels like it's dangerous to postpone ATK or DEF for that long, this ties into the second reason it's actually a good idea. Oftentimes, the powerups you can unlock with keys will increase your ATK or DEF much more than if you had increased those stats through level-ups alone, and it's especially important to build ATK and DEF as early in the tower as possible. Plus, if all you're doing with a key is opening a door that you would've eventually opened anyway, then as soon as you pick up the key that you ordinarily would've used on that door, you can now use that key on a different door and get those powerups even faster, too. But it is also worth considering opening doors that you wouldn't have otherwise opened, especially shortcuts. Whenever you see a locked door that you don't need to open to reach powerups, but the only other path involves fighting enemies, you need to ask the question, "How long would I need to delay picking up these powerups if I decide to take the path with the enemy?" Particularly if there's something like a Golden Feather there, yeah, you could wait until 20 levels later to become powerful enough to fight the enemy blocking it, but how many levels did you miss out on by waiting that long to get the Golden Feather? Sometimes it's worth it to spend even a rare key like a Violet Key to open a shortcut like that, even if it means missing out on opening some other door later. One other thing: I was stuck on silver for a long time after optimizing my path through Tactical Tower D. The only reason I ever reached gold was because I was way, way more stubborn than I should have been, since it's not always possible to earn more than a copper on any given Pure Nexus run (and in towers in later chapters, you can't always even get THAT much). I wasn't even close to gold, but then I realized I had skipped over something very simple, but very unintuitive.
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Apr 24, 2020 13:26
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why is tower G more than 30 floors jesus christ, i had to abandon a 3 hour run because there was just more and more and more, and eventually I couldn't keep up with the scaling.
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Apr 24, 2020 16:29
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Yeah, it does seem like in some towers your first run is doomed to failure, which sucks when they get super long. Like, I hosed up my first run of Tactical Tower NEW because I mishandled my keys and proper use of your violet keys is absolutely vital for that one.
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Apr 24, 2020 16:33
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Arzaac posted:Yeah, it does seem like in some towers your first run is doomed to failure, which sucks when they get super long. It sure as hell is. Update from last page: I went back to my prior save in TT NEW, and managed to eke out a silver. Things are looking bleak in Tactical Tower D now, but maybe I'll turn it all around and get a silver here, too? Third time's the charm!
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Apr 24, 2020 20:55
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I've tried the Mini tower three times now, each time coming up short barely to kill the Dreamer. Time to try three more times.
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Apr 24, 2020 21:05
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Yeah, my first Mini run failed horribly. Every sector felt like I was doing okay except for the last one, where I was just hemorrhaging health. I'm not too sure what I should be doing differently. I know I messed up getting a heart potion or two. Maybe my stat build needs to be different too, it's probably worth seeing if I can do it without ever putting points in health. Or maybe only at the end so I've got a buffer to kill the final boss? Idk.
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Apr 24, 2020 21:07
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Oops, I meant to respond to this one earlier. Oh well, I can tie it into my response for those having trouble with Tactical Tower NEW.Elswyyr posted:Further trip report: I've cleared towers 1,2,3 and 5! I even got a silver medal on 2 without using any nexus stuff. Speaking of nexus stuff, it does not seem all that impactful. Maybe poo poo gets extremely real once I unlock higher nexus floors. By the sounds of it, you're making really good progress. In regards to the Nexus, you're right that things really start ramping up once you see what's beyond the staircase, but also, I have a comment about the powerups on the lower floors. Initially, you look at what's locked behind some of the doors and it's just like, "I spent hours getting a medal on this tower and all it does is let me unlock a potion for +3 ATK, what's the big deal?" And it's true that you don't really start seeing a difference until you've gotten at least six medals or so in total, but also, don't underestimate the usefulness of a few extra points of ATK! If you can figure out how to stick to the "curve" of the tower and keep pace with the enemies, then once you add like 10 points of ATK to that, you're always 10 points ahead of that curve. You're saving HP on every enemy in the tower, and that adds up. But that may not be enough to sell you, so here's something else to consider. Here's the first floor of Tactical Tower NEW:  It would be really nice to be able to get that Golden Feather so early in the game, but as you can see, even after clearing out all the enemies in this floor, I still don't have enough to make a dent in this Ranger. Those who have played this tower enough times are already familiar with the fact that once I leave this floor, it's going to be a while before I get the opportunity to return to it. It's a long time to leave a Golden Feather lying around. Well, let's stop by the Nexus and pop ten Sun Stones into this Sunwisher here (you do this by walking into it with the arrow keys):  What happens when I check the Ranger now?  That's a pretty big chunk of my current HP, but the important thing is that it's possible to get the Golden Feather now. I should still have enough HP to survive, and the HP loss I experience here will be more than made up for by all the extra levels I gain throughout the tower. I just gave myself a huge new boost, and since I only used Sun Stones rather than Nexus Medals, this still qualifies as a Pure Nexus run! (This wasn't what I did to get a gold medal for this tower, but I don't think it's an illegitimate strategy to use or anything.) Anyway, a lot of the progress you make in Tactical Nexus will be centered around discoveries like this. Though items in the Nexus might seem underwhelming at first glance, there's often a way to make use of them to take an alternate path you wouldn't have been able to take otherwise, a path that substantially increases your score. Arzaac posted:Yeah, it does seem like in some towers your first run is doomed to failure, which sucks when they get super long. Arzaac posted:Yeah, my first Mini run failed horribly. Every sector felt like I was doing okay except for the last one, where I was just hemorrhaging health. Don't worry, even with the medals I've accrued, I'm still not able to complete Tactical Trip Mini without dumping several level-ups into HP somewhere near the end. There could feasibly be other problems with your build, but... well, that's another essay entirely. In regards to when it's best to spend a level-up on HP, you can always hover your cursor over the Dreamer, try one level-up option, ctrl+z out of the level-up, then try another option. For me, once the HP bonus is greater than the HP I save from putting points in ATK, that's when I start focusing on HP. I can outline the strategy for TTM if you ask for it, but it's hard for me to make real hints about it without just giving away the whole thing. I suppose the only real hint I can give is to point out that, if you haven't already noticed, Golden Feathers don't work quite the same way in TTM that they do in other towers. Consider the implications that has for your run as a whole. What would the ideal run look like, if you didn't have to worry about running out of health at all?
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Apr 24, 2020 22:02
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tactical tower mini is dramatically easier with even a few sunstones, since you can invest them all into DEF and save a bunch of early HP
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Apr 24, 2020 22:17
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I figured it out, and what triggered it for me was the concept of spending levels on HP is a tempo play: not as good long term, but excellent when you need to kill just one thing. As it turns out, mini has a lot of situations where killing a high level enemy will give you many more levels than the levels you spend on killing them, plus also a feather or heart. Only got a bronze though, but I think if I tried again I could manage at least silver.
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Apr 24, 2020 22:20
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 I'm still awful at this game but at least I got the Bronze!
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Apr 24, 2020 22:28
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Trip report: failed at Tactical Tower D, the first time I've failed to actually get to a clear segment. Just misprioritized, I suppose, although I THOUGHT I was doing alright. Once more unto the breach! edit: I'm presuming that the lack of an HP% scale means there's no heart crowns in this stage at all? Took me quite a while to twig to that. John Lee fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Apr 25, 2020 |
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Apr 25, 2020 00:48
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John Lee posted:edit: I'm presuming that the lack of an HP% scale means there's no heart crowns in this stage at all? Took me quite a while to twig to that. That's correct. If you don't see a percentage value next to your HP, then you're locked at 100% and therefore free to down potions with reckless abandon. Everyone seems to be making progress at a good pace. It's fun watching so many people make their first steps after my own long and lonely journey to where I am now. Now I can pretend I'm everyone's dad. #tacticaldad
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Apr 25, 2020 01:23
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Got my first gold! On a Pure Nexus run, even! The initial DEF boost from Sunstones really helped, which makes me wonder why using them doesn't disqualify you from a Pure Nexus run. It's funny that there's no mechanism to reward you for a "true" zero-carry-in run, or even record the score separately from a no-medal run that does use Sunstones.
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Apr 25, 2020 02:07
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Elephant Parade posted:Got my first gold! On a Pure Nexus run, even! Congratulations! I'd say this graduates you from the initiation phase of the game. All you really need to make progress at this point is patience. Your first medal in any rank is a big deal, though, and makes it considerably easier to get more medals of the same rank. It's probably going to take at least a few weeks before you get your first platinum, though. Elephant Parade posted:The initial DEF boost from Sunstones really helped, which makes me wonder why using them doesn't disqualify you from a Pure Nexus run. It's funny that there's no mechanism to reward you for a "true" zero-carry-in run, or even record the score separately from a no-medal run that does use Sunstones. It only takes a few Sun Stones to see a significant difference in Tactical Trip Mini, and there are a few other towers similar to that, but it's not something that can be said for every tower. It's not that Sun Stones don't help in other towers, so much as you need more of them before you really start to see a difference. Also, although several of the earlier towers make their gold medals relatively accessible, this isn't a statement that can be applied to every tower. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get better than a bronze in tower 4 without using several Sun Stones (although I've been reconsidering my approach on that one, lately). Once you've become more familiar with all the towers, you'll probably start noticing just how carefully they were designed to make it so certain milestones were achievable only after you've surpassed a certain number of Sun Stones or a certain number of medals. Your first 20 or so Sun Stones are basically up for grabs, but past that point, you're limited in your options for which towers it's actually feasible to make that much more progress in a Pure Nexus run. Basically, the towers are designed so that you can always get more Sun Stones from somewhere if you try hard enough, but you also have to get good at recognizing where it's actually possible to do so with the number of Sun Stones you already have. Also, at some point you have to become more reliant on getting Sun Stones from the other end (i.e. a super-high regular score). As for why they don't reward you for a no-anything run, I think it's because it would lock the developers in a position they don't want to be in. Not every tower is beatable with zero outside help. You might be able to do it in every tower in the base game (I'm not sure about Pop Tactical Lord, though), but several towers in future chapters are working under the assumption that you're arriving with several medals already in hand. Even if you don't trust my own judgment on that, I have two statements from the developers to back this up. Although chapters 3 and 4 do provide a small number of towers that are doable fairly early in the game, it sounds like from chapter 5 onwards they want the difficulty to scale with the large number of medals you'd be expected to have after playing over 20 towers. Or at least, that's how I interpret this statement they made on the Steam forums: Oren posted:Because of the Legacy system that will be implemented in the future, Chapter-5 will be much more difficult than Chapter-3, so we designed it so that you can get more medals and Sunstone in Chapter-4. Then there's this: https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1248519108133449728
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Apr 25, 2020 03:21
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Thank god for the demo because this SOUNDS like my jam, but I cannot beat ANY of the tutorials in the demo. 
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Apr 25, 2020 14:23
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I think this game definitely has its hooks in me at this point, I'm like 5 towers in and I'm already eyeing the towers I already did, like, I can do these better, surely... Although your claims of Pure Nexus gold on the first 3 towers baffle me. Silver's easy enough, but I've been going back and doing the first tower trying for gold and it's drat hard. I can get like, halfway between silver and gold? I guess I'll just need to keep throwing myself against the wall. Also, unrelated side note: what is a "Burgeoner" even supposed to be? Is it like, Dungeoneer? That's the only thing that makes sense to me. Arzaac fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Apr 25, 2020 |
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Apr 25, 2020 18:48
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Yeah I'd assume it's either supposed to be Buccaneer or Dungeoneer. The translation's definitely quite rough. The different towers should probably have more descriptive names instead of just being named letters.
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Apr 25, 2020 19:13
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I'm pretty sure Burgeoner is an accurate translation of the Japanese term! 1a : to send forth new growth (such as buds or branches) : sprout 2 : to grow and expand rapidly : flourish It's just that nobody who speaks English would ever use it, and one could argue that it's improper grammar as well; you're the one who burgeons, not the enemy, although it could also be "one who causes/works on burgeoning," like a gardener. Any other word would likely end up a bit poetic, like "expanders," or even "farmers." "Bloomers" would work if it weren't for, you know. Oh, and it occurs to me that this post might not make much sense if people haven't noticed that burgeoners give a bunch of extra EXP? That's their purpose, they're EXP nuggets. edit: oh, and Strix: maybe try the game this is based on, Tower of the Sorcerer? It'll make for good training! Here's the English site: http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA013374/game/egame0.html
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Apr 25, 2020 19:23
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Oh huh, I never knew. Google translate can teach you some new things, I guess. At any rate, I feel like a less direct translation would work better, just to reflect what they do. Maybe something like "scholar".
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Apr 25, 2020 20:15
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John Lee's right, "burgeoner" isn't a mistake and is actually the intended word hand-chosen by the developers:Oren posted:Regarding "Burgeoner", the name of the enemy character of this game comes from another game of Team-Nexus, and the characters in this series had a gimmick that became very powerful after a certain time. Arzaac posted:Although your claims of Pure Nexus gold on the first 3 towers baffle me. Silver's easy enough, but I've been going back and doing the first tower trying for gold and it's drat hard. I can get like, halfway between silver and gold? I guess I'll just need to keep throwing myself against the wall. I save my game at the end of each successful run for future reference, so here's a screenshot of my final score tally for each of the first three towers. This shows how I used my level-ups, as well as what my end stats were, so maybe it will help you to use these as a reference. Tactical Tutorial Tactical Tower NEW Tactical Tower D (I reiterate that this one was the result of unreasonable stubbornness and maybe I shouldn't be advising new players to do this one) ...I wish it didn't override the original date with today's date just because I had to step on the goal again to see this tally. If you'd like some advice specific to Tactical Tutorial, I stumbled on it a bit at first because, when you first see how scoring works, it's easy to assume you should be prioritizing LV, ATK, and DEF over HP. In a tower as small as this one, though, there's not a whole lot you can do to boost those three stats, like, you might gain an extra level or two if you get every Golden Feather. There's a TON you can do to boost your HP levels, though. In fact, even in later towers, I've found that whether you make or break a rank is really dependent on how good you are at managing your final HP values. Anyway, not every player is going to have the same kind of experience with the game. You might discover towers that are much easier for you than they were for me, and one of the nice things about Tactical Nexus is that you have the freedom to prioritize getting medals on those towers instead, then come back to these earlier ones to make them easier for yourself. I've been stating what my scores are so people know what's possible, but don't worry too much about whether you're matching up to what I did, just have fun with it. You might take a different path to get there, but you may very well end up surpassing me someday. StrixNebulosa posted:Thank god for the demo because this SOUNDS like my jam, but I cannot beat ANY of the tutorials in the demo. Yeah, as cool as I think the game is, it's absolutely not for everyone, and I'm glad they have such a big demo available for it for that reason. You might just need a little help getting started, though. Do you think it would help if I made a big effortpost running down the fundamentals to survival in this game? For that matter, is that something others would like to see?
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Apr 25, 2020 20:26
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I absolutely would love to see that! I'm still working on having proper heuristics for what to prioritize, and want to hear from someone more experienced.
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Apr 25, 2020 20:28
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It is baffling how a game with a translation and UI this incomprehensible and ugly could be so engrossing. I wish there were more tightly-crafted towers like the mini tower though, I was finding tower D pretty sloggy at 10 floors, the remark that there are 30+ floor towers sounds exhausting. Question: some of the towers have the tier 3 "crown" checkpoint listed, but when you get to the top it only seems to have the tier 2 "star" checkpoint. Is there some secret to unlocking extra floors on these towers, or is there some other mechanic I'm misunderstanding?
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Apr 25, 2020 23:52
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King of Bleh posted:It is baffling how a game with a translation and UI this incomprehensible and ugly could be so engrossing. I wish there were more tightly-crafted towers like the mini tower though, I was finding tower D pretty sloggy at 10 floors, the remark that there are 30+ floor towers sounds exhausting. I'm not sure, but maybe it's gated in the Nexus? I've seen in a lot of these towers there are enemies hiding a staircase in the Nexus.
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Apr 26, 2020 01:46
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Lead By Example posted:I'm not sure, but maybe it's gated in the Nexus? I've seen in a lot of these towers there are enemies hiding a staircase in the Nexus. Here's my effortpost on Tactical Nexus fundamentals. I'll be linking this in the OP. If you thought I was wordy with my advice before, boy, are you in for a treat! Help, I'm dying Tactical Nexus is a tough game, and each tower has a tendency to change the rules around enough that it can be hard to keep up with what it's expecting you to do. In some sense, blind experimentation is both expected and unavoidable. However, there are a few fundamental "truths" to the underlying system that can help put everything else into perspective. Not all of the following rules apply 100% of the time, but none of the towers break every rule simultaneously (yet), so this should still give you a good place to start. In what order should I fight the enemies? Well, that's always the central question, isn't it? In some sense, the game is basically just a bizarre trade economy where your HP is the currency. If you trade in some HP to fight an enemy, then you receive some powerups in return, or make some progress to open up new trade opportunities. The idea is to make smart trades where you don't buy powerups for more than they're worth, and you try to get powerups in such a way that you build HP interest off what you pick up. Before I get into which items are worth the cost, though, there's also the issue that fighting a battle, itself, is kind of its own reward. All enemies provide EXP, and in most towers, they drop items of their own. If you take items and tower pathing completely out of the equation, which enemies are worth fighting first? First off, generally speaking, you want to completely clear out enemies of lower ranks before moving on to enemies of higher ranks:    Junior >    Standard >    Elder > etc.This is true in this game for the same reason it is in most RPGs--you start off not strong enough to fight most later enemies, and even when you initially gain enough stats to defeat them, the EXP they provide isn't enough to be worth the cost you pay in HP to get it. If you want the best EXP exchange rate, you always start with the weakest enemies available. But there's also item drops to take into consideration. Fighters drop DEF powerups, Slashers drop ATK powerups, Rangers drop HP potions, and Burgeoners don't drop anything, but they're worth a lot of EXP. So how do you compare enemy types to each other? Fighters or Slashers >   Burgeoners > RangersThis list of priorities actually frequently overrides the priority of fighting weaker enemies first. Like, you still want to fight weaker Slashers before moving onto stronger Slashers, but you might want to finish fighting Slashers that are several ranks ahead of the other enemy types before you go back and try to bother with those other enemy types. Fighters and Slashers are the only enemies with the benefit of dropping items that you want to pick up as soon as they become available. You may have to fight several Slashers to match the EXP you would get from one Burgeoner, but the combined ATK powerups you get from them will often raise your ATK more than a full level-up would, and this is on top of the fact that they're still giving you more EXP towards your next level-up regardless. Also, to some extent, you should be trying to postpone getting both EXP and potions in a lot of cases. The reason for this is due to the presence of Golden Feathers and Life Crowns. These two items provide a multiplier bonus to any EXP or HP bonuses you receive, so another way to look at it is that any EXP or HP you gain before picking up these items involves lost EXP or HP. So the longer you can postpone fighting Burgeoners and Rangers, the better, since EXP and HP are all they can give to you in return for fighting them. Note that in towers where enemies don't drop items, all of a sudden Burgeoners move near the top of the list of priorities, since now they're the only enemies providing you with a substantial reward for fighting them. When is it worth trying to pick up an item? First, let's outline which items are the most worth getting:  Golden Feathers and/or  Life Crowns >    ATK and/or    DEF powerups >    HP PotionsYou definitely want to prioritize any items that give you multiplier bonuses. ATK and DEF provide a similar benefit, since the earlier you pick them up, the more HP you save on fighting ALL enemies throughout the rest of the tower. I already outlined why you want to postpone getting potions for as long as possible, and it's because you want to maximize how much HP they actually give you, which you do by waiting until after you pick up Life Crowns. A lot of times, powerups will be locked behind doors, and you have to weigh whether it's worth spending a key to get them. Consider this: In a lot of towers, you can spend a single level-up getting three Yellow Keys. Therefore, if you see powerups locked behind a Yellow Door, what you should ask is whether the combined value of those powerups is worth more than 1/3rd of what you could get for a level-up. By the same logic, anything behind a Blue Door should be worth at least 1/2 a level-up, and a Crimson Door should be worth at least a full level-up. It's harder to measure the worth of a Violet or Platinum Key, since there's no corresponding level value for these keys. However, what I've found from experience is that a Violet Key is worth one Golden Feather, and in fact, the most common use you'll have for your Violet Keys is trading them in for Golden Feathers. Platinum Keys are usually more rare than Violet Keys. It's usually not worth spending Violet or Platinum Keys on stat powerups alone unless they're extremely good powerups. When it's enemies blocking powerups rather than a locked door, that's when things get a bit trickier to measure. To be honest, most of the time, I just follow my instincts here. However, I feel that if you're given the choice between fighting enemies to get powerups and fighting enemies to progress further into the tower, and you have to fight the same types of enemies no matter which of the two paths you pick, then the obvious answer is to fight the ones blocking the powerups first. The reason for this follows up on the rationale from the previous section; in general, you want to clear out all enemies of the weakest rank before moving on to higher ranks anyway, so it makes more sense to fight the ones that provide greater rewards first. Now, which is more valuable, a Golden Feather or a Life Crown? If you're free to choose either one, then given that you get diminishing returns the more of them you pick up, it makes most sense to balance the two of them, all other things being equal (though, you would still want to prioritize getting all the Golden Feathers you're going to get before getting all the Life Crowns you're going to get). However, things are rarely equal in practice. Golden Feathers tend to be less effective in smaller towers, since you're not gaining many levels to begin with. Also, depending on the design of the tower, sometimes there's so many Potions available that Life Crowns provide a more noticeable bonus to your score... or else there's so FEW potions available that you need to pick up more Life Crowns just to survive. Really, you just have to play by the rules of the tower in question--just don't forget to consider all your options. What about ATK and DEF? Which of those two is more important? Hoo boy. *breaks out easel stand and flowcharts* The short answer is that ATK is better in towers where you're underleveled, and it tends to favor (or at least permit) a more aggressive approach. DEF is better in towers where you're overleveled, but it favors a more reserved approach. What you DON'T want to do is balance the two stats. Whenever you raise ATK, you're potentially reducing the number of times the enemy hits you. Whenever you raise DEF, you're reducing how much damage each hit does to you. What this means is that, every time you raise ATK, you're also reducing how much benefit you would gain from raising DEF, and the reverse is also true. By purposely keeping both stats balanced, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot. This is especially true when you consider that the bread and butter enemies of Tactical Nexus, the Fighters and Slashers, are easier to defeat when you're focusing on raising the same stat that they boost for you when you defeat them. Meaning, if you fight Slashers, raising your ATK reduces the damage they deal to you at a faster pace than raising DEF does, and on top of that, they also drop powerups that raise your ATK even further. Fighters operate the same way, but with DEF instead of ATK. This is the other reason why it often makes more sense to focus on fighting through several ranks of the same type of enemy before backtracking to fight lower ranks of the other types, usually after they start dealing 0 damage to you. You're not really saving HP by trying to balance them out unless you just don't have any other choice. Now I'm about to start getting mathy to explain some of this stuff, so if you want to skip the rest of this section, you can. I think it will help you to have a more detailed understanding of how these stats function, though. Let's take a moment to consider the final boss of Tactical Trip Mini:  Wow, what a jerk. Okay, so let's assume I have the bare minimum stats required to win this battle, namely, 501 ATK and 0 DEF. In this theoretical scenario, I would need to withstand about 80,000,000 damage to win. Now let's assume I have free stat points to invest in either ATK or DEF. My goal is to reduce the damage I take as much as possible. Let's see how much my received damage drops based on whether I invest those points in ATK or DEF:  Well that's a pretty dramatic difference. If I have only 100 points to invest, I know which stat I'm putting them in. But what if I have a lot more points than that? Let's try a different starting position: In the actual example shown above, I'm coming into this battle with 1022 ATK and 264 DEF already. Now let's assume I'm given free points to invest starting at this point. What does the graph look like now?  It still makes more sense to boost ATK up to a point, but the difference between the two stats is less stark now, and there's a more obvious cutoff point where raising DEF is the smarter thing to do. See, the thing about ATK is that, although its initial benefits are much more valuable than the benefits of DEF, ATK's benefits flatten out at some point, while DEF's benefits just keep going. If I wanted to get the Dreamer to deal 0 damage to me, I would need 44,944 points of ATK to reach that point, but I would need only 1800 points of DEF. Most towers aren't this generous with level-ups, but if I happened to know that I would have over 2300 stat points total by the time I reached the Dreamer, it would've made more sense to spend the whole tower focusing more on my DEF than my ATK. I might even get through the entire tower never taking any damage from any enemies. So I should pick either an all-ATK build or an all-DEF build, depending on how powerful the enemies are? ...Not quite. I mean, that's not a bad rule of thumb to start with. But personally, I've come to see most ideal builds in terms of the same four phases: First items, then ATK, then DEF, then HP. Items: If you have the ability to get keys or similar items from level-ups, in a lot of towers, it makes more sense to focus on those first. The extra stats you can gain from opening doors can often be greater than what you would've gotten through spending the level-up on a stat directly, and sometimes keys let you access wholly unique benefits outside of that. Even if keys make your stats more balanced than you would have made them yourself, depending on how many stat points you get from it total, it may still make more sense to take this approach than the alternative. ATK: Once you have all the items you need, ATK is the next obvious choice. As illustrated above, your first points of ATK are much more valuable that your first points of DEF. Technically, every enemy has a cutoff point where boosting ATK no longer helps as much as boosting DEF, but it doesn't really matter, because you still have to take into consideration that you also want to set the stage to make it easier to move onto the next rank of enemies. Boosting ATK to reduce a high-ranked enemy's damage from 2000 to 1000 is more valuable than boosting DEF to reduce a low-ranked enemy's damage from 50 to 0. This also gives you the option of moving to higher floors sooner than you would be able to with a more DEF-focused build. DEF: Nevertheless, that ATK-to-DEF cutoff point still matters, because at some point you run out of new enemies. It gets complicated by the fact that while you might have a single super-powerful boss to deal with like the Dreamer up there, where ATK is still more valuable, you might also have a large number of enemies to contend with that are a rank just below that, and it might actually technically save you more HP to raise your DEF to deal with those rather than raise your ATK to deal with the one boss. I'm... still not good at judging exactly the best way to handle this situation. HP: There are some towers where, for a variety of reasons, raising HP actually ends up being better for your end score than other stats. Sometimes that reason is "I need to not die". But you still need to wait and have it be the last thing you try to increase. So that's my four-phase build. Not every tower requires that I go through all phases of the build, or even more than one or two of them, and some towers require that I cycle through the phases of the build more than once in order to survive certain particular hurdles. But thinking through things in terms of this four-phase cycle has helped me, overall. I'm looking at some of these later towers, and there's a lot of stuff you didn't cover here... Weapons and accessories get introduced near the end of chapter 2, and expanded upon in chapter 3. Chapter 4 introduces orbs. There's also a few other elements I haven't mentioned. However, once you get enough experience with those towers, I think you'll find that a lot of the concepts I just covered will still apply to those things, just in different ways. I can go over it in more detail if someone requests it, but until then, I'll assume you'll have more fun figuring it out for yourself. Beyond that, though, assume none of what I said is set in stone. Every tower has a unique layout, and many involve altered mechanics. Every tower seems to be designed to make at least one of my above statements irrelevant, or even outright untrue. If you start with the above concepts as a baseline, though, it shouldn't take you too long to figure out which parts to change, how best to adapt to whatever the tower is throwing at you. (Also, if you keep your mind open, you might discover something that I haven't even considered yet.) Well, that's it. I feel like there's still a lot more to say, but most of it is probably tower-specific. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
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Apr 26, 2020 02:41
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I can't believe I played the demo for like 13 hours. I assume the mechanics get a bit more interesting with things like equipment and accessories? Not that the items, stats and enemies in the first 4 towers aren't interesting but I'm just curious if I get a taste of these with the base game.
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Apr 26, 2020 03:23
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I'm looking at your Tutorial clear and One million health? Seriously!? I can get to like, maybe 700,000 by the end of it. I'm honestly not sure how you're doing that, it feels like there isn't that much health in the tower. Even trying to follow your advice about saving HP, I seriously can't even fathom what I'd have to do in order to manage that. Great game though, I should probably just play other towers instead of banging my head against this wall.
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Apr 26, 2020 03:37
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Oh dear. This is going to consume me, isn't it?
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Apr 26, 2020 04:14
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Thanks for the advice post. It helped me get to silver on completing the tutorial tower. I think I was too afraid to consider attacking an enemy that could do over 10k damage to me even if it meant grabbing a life crown before.
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Apr 26, 2020 05:00
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pumpinglemma posted:Oh dear. This is going to consume me, isn't it? Yes
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Apr 26, 2020 05:05
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This game is hosed. It's crack.
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Apr 26, 2020 05:14
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Arzaac posted:Great game though, I should probably just play other towers instead of banging my head against this wall. Yeah, just take a break from it for a while. I didn't get the gold on that tower until after I'd already tried most of the others, myself. It can help to gain a broader perspective on how the flow works for all towers in general. And, like, now that I've played through Tactical Tower G however many times, I think I understand what I have to do to get the diamond, but it's so unintuitive to how I prefer to play, and I'm so sick of retrying the tower at this point, that I think I just want to go back to other towers for a while. So I'm in kind of the same position you are now, and I've been in it before, and I expect to be in it again in the future. It ties back into the Getting Over It aspect of the game (if Getting Over It let you give up on one mountain and move to a different one for a while). Tremis posted:I can't believe I played the demo for like 13 hours. I assume the mechanics get a bit more interesting with things like equipment and accessories? Not that the items, stats and enemies in the first 4 towers aren't interesting but I'm just curious if I get a taste of these with the base game. Towers 11 and 12 in the base game use weapons and accessories, but to a limited degree. Tower 11 (Tactical Tutorial 3) is intended to be the introduction to equipment, so nothing particularly complex happens with them, but you do get a better understanding of their importance in towers where they exist. Tower 12 (Pop Tactical Lord) is the boss tower of the base game, way, WAY harder to figure out than any of the other towers, and as a result, it's not really a good tower for coming to a better understanding of how equipment works. There's just way too many other things going on. Chapter 3 is definitely the "equipment" chapter. The first tower in that game (Sword Tactical Lord) is a much more natural extension of the lessons you start learning in Tactical Tutorial 3, and the remaining towers experiment with equipment in the same way that towers in the base game experiment with regular mechanics. But yes, equipment adds a new layer of complexity to the game. As I mentioned, it's still building on the same basic concepts I described in my survival guide, but it gives you more opportunities to be clever with how you achieve those basic goals--and it expects you make full use of those opportunities. The way equipment works is that each piece of equipment has its own stat boost associated with it, and that stat boost increases every time you gain a level. For example, if you're level 1 and have the Standard Sword equipped, the Standard Sword will give you +3 ATK. If you're level 2, it will give you +6 ATK instead, and if you're level 3, it will give you +9 ATK. This is true whether you've had the Standard Sword equipped the whole time, or whether you pick it up for the first time at level 3; it gives you +9 ATK either way. However, if you ever trade in the Standard Sword for a different weapon, you'll lose that +9 ATK bonus and replace it with whatever stat boost is associated with the new weapon. Equipment disappears when you replace it, so you can't come back and get that same Standard Sword later (but there might be extra copies of that weapon throughout the tower). That's all the Standard Sword does, but several weapons have a unique additional property. For example, the Giant Slayer (shown in the OP) notes that it increases your ATK by +1 every time you defeat a giant. A "giant" is any enemy with a level higher than your own. Also, it's increasing your ATK, not the weapon's, which means that if you ever trade in the Giant Slayer for a different weapon, you keep all the extra ATK you gained from slaying giants. Some pieces of equipment enhance the effectiveness of item pickups, some pieces of equipment give you new options for what you can do on level-ups, there's some neat features in there.
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Apr 26, 2020 13:57
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Reinstalling the demo now, let's see if that advice post helps me clear the second tower.
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Apr 26, 2020 14:02
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 I thought I was doing better, but I slam right into this floor and get stuck. It's like there's a huge jump in everyone's HP and I cannot surmount it. I typically wind up like this: 
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Apr 26, 2020 14:54
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you can click the icons below your stats to level up
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Apr 26, 2020 15:03
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StrixNebulosa posted:
Just below your defence on the right of the screen is your XP. You get it for killing monsters, and on level up you can choose between stats that scale with higher levels and keys that don’t. The buttons just below your EXP let you choose what bonus you want. The LVUP! x17 means you’ve levelled 17 times without picking a bonus. Basically you’ve been playing a horrifyingly difficult challenge mode!
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Apr 26, 2020 15:04
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What the gently caress
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Apr 26, 2020 15:11
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No what the gently caress I thought everyone in this thread was some kind of genius savant and this game was insanely hard
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Apr 26, 2020 15:13
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Also I don't recommend clearing out that floor (or many floors, in fact) when you reach it, I left most of the stuff there and came back later. If you want one of the things in the boxes, you can try and find a safe way to get there (pro tip: opening the yellow-key doors on the corners of the boxes/rooms lets you walk around otherwise badass enemies)
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Apr 26, 2020 15:16
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Wanton Spoon posted:Yeah, just take a break from it for a while. I didn't get the gold on that tower until after I'd already tried most of the others, myself. It can help to gain a broader perspective on how the flow works for all towers in general. Thanks for that!
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Apr 26, 2020 16:14
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Did buying the game really delete the four hours of work I did on the demo? Is there some way to maybe find that progress?
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Apr 26, 2020 17:59
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