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 Since I had no idea whether this topic would last longer than a page or two back when I created it, I didn't reserve the second post for resources, so now I guess I just have to dump them right here instead. Useful links:
 What's all this then? Tactical Nexus is a game about trying to climb to the top of a tower (well, several towers) by fighting a multitude of birds and cat people who are blocking the way. You accomplish this through a series of simple, automated JRPG-like battles, where the protagonist and the enemy trade blows until one of them runs out of HP. The challenge isn't in the fights themselves, but rather in what order you initiate the battles. Climbing the tower, you'll find you have access to only a limited number of powerups. Enemies have different stats and drop different items upon defeat. You need to plan your pathing very carefully so that you gather items and EXP in the appropriate order and don't lose too much HP on individual fights, or else you're going to wipe out before reaching the top of the tower. The end result may feel more like a resource management game or a puzzle game than an RPG. This sounds like another game I've played before... As I suggested in the thread title, the premise behind this game is similar to Desktop Dungeons. However, it's more directly inspired by a Japanese game called Tower of the Sorcerer, and the tower layout is static rather than randomized. You might also draw a connection between this and DROD RPG: Tendry's Tale, which was also partly inspired by Tower of the Sorcerer. Tactical Nexus is entirely its own beast. Although I tried both Desktop Dungeons and Tendry's Tale, neither game clicked with me in the way that Tactical Nexus has. While I have only a few hours invested in the other games, I have over 400 hours invested in Tactical Nexus. 400 hours!? AND I've barely scratched the surface of it. Although Tactical Nexus can be billed as one game, it can also be billed as sixty separate full-length games, since it can take several hours to figure out how to complete any given tower. But on top of that, the sixty towers in question are interconnected in such a way that you have an incentive to play through each one multiple times. This is thanks to the Nexus system.  If you somehow manage to survive to the finish line of one of the towers, you will be given a score. This score is calculated based on five basic things--your experience level, ATK, DEF, HP, and basically how far you actually made it into the full tower (there can be up to three "goal spots"). If your score is high enough, you will be awarded a medal for that tower. You can earn only one medal per tower, but you can upgrade that medal at any time by getting a new high score in the tower--ranks can include  bronze,  silver,  gold,  platinum,  diamond, and  moon. Once you get a medal, you can spend it in the Nexus. Every tower has its own Nexus, a place full of additional powerup items. But the powerups aren't free--to reach them, you have to open some doors that can only be unlocked by using the medals you've earned from completing the towers. The especially powerful items tend to require that you spend several medals of higher ranks, but you can also choose to spread your medals across several individual powerups if you prefer. Once you've unlocked a door with a medal, you can't reuse that medal for the rest of the tower, but your collection of earned medals is always resupplied with every new start. In addition to medals, there are also  Sun Stones, a kind of "currency" that you can earn by completing towers without using any medals--so there's still an incentive to do more minimalist runs. However, you can also earn Sun Stones by making your score go way over what's necessary to reach the top rank, even if you do use medals.In short, the idea behind the game is that you don't start off with all the resources you need to get the highest score in each tower. Instead, you start off by getting a series of bronzes, silvers, and golds, and then once you've collected enough medals, you return to previously-completed towers and use Nexus powerups to boost your score even higher. This will earn you better medals, which you can use to improve your scores in other towers, and so on and so forth. Each tower has a pre-determined layout, takes several hours to complete, AND you have to replay each tower multiple times? Isn't that extremely tedious? Honestly, no, it doesn't feel that way to me. I feel there's a couple of reasons for this. First, I compare the game to Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy in the sense that, although you end up failing and starting over a lot, you pick up some new skills with each attempt, and you start getting through the tower faster with each new attempt. In Getting Over It, it can take you several hours to learn the mechanics and beat the game for the first time, but the entire game CAN be completed from start to finish in just a couple of minutes if you practice enough. Tactical Nexus isn't quite that quick a play, but it does get a lot faster over time. The only thing you're ever actually doing is just walking into enemies, after all. Second, the towers tend to be designed in such a way that there's a specific solution you have to implement in order to boost your rank from one medal to another, and often the solution requires that you approach the entire tower in a completely different way from earlier medals. For example, when you're low on medals, you might have to use your keys to unlock doors early on in the tower in order to get the powerups you need to survive until the end. If you can afford powerups from the Nexus, though, then you can hold onto those keys and use them much later in the tower, on much better powerups, but you still have to take a different track from before in order to survive that long. Keep in mind that this is just one simple example--in practice, every tower is completely different in what it's asking from you. So even though I've retread the same ground multiple times, it rarely feels like padding to me--I'm always gaining a better appreciation of the game's mechanics, I'm always looking for ways to optimize my pathing, I'm always on the lookout for new clever tricks I can pull off with the items as they're provided. I'm often thinking about these things even when I'm not playing the game. The fact that I still feel this way even hundreds of hours into the game is honestly astounding to me. There are so many different layers folded into the game design, and I have no idea how they pulled it off so well. I'm curious, but I'm not quite sold on this yet. What's the price of it? Before I get into the pricing, I should note that there's a free demo of it that includes the first few towers of the game. By all means, try it out and see what you think of it before you purchase. The game's a huge investment in terms of time and, eventually, money. With that out of the way, I won't mince words--the pricing is both steep and controversial. The game debuted at 60 dollars, despite looking (and, really, playing) like an indie game from the '90s. It's only $15 USD now, but this price is only temporary. The developers increase the price of the game with each new expansion added to it, and the plan is to bring it back to the full $60 price tag eventually. And this is NOT because the expansions are included in the game--they're not. The expansions are sold separately, and their individual price tags also increase with every new expansion that comes out. The expansions are expensive, too, with the later ones being even more expensive than the base game. If your plan is to get all of the expansions as soon as they come out, even with the release discounts, you will be spending about $305 total. If you wait to get all of them until after the discount period is over, you could be spending $705 in total. 700 dollars!? It's not Train Simulator levels, but yeah, it's still extremely high. When I said the game is more like sixty full-length games, part of the reason I put it that way is because the developer uses the same rationale for why Tactical Nexus is priced the way it is. If you consider each tower to be a separate game, then when you've gotten all 60 towers through getting all the expansions, the average price comes out to be about $12 per "game". It's a bit of a harder sell when the only way to purchase the "games" is bundled together like this, though (especially since bundles are usually cheaper than buying games individually). Still, I think the expansions are priced with the idea that you shouldn't buy them until you've played the base game for a few hundred hours and are already positive that you're going to continue playing for thousands of hours into the future. In that sense, I think the pricing scheme makes sense, and is actually maybe the only viable scheme they could've gone with. That said, if the pricing is a deal-breaker for you, I totally understand. But there's still a ton of good content to be had from the base game alone. Try the demo. If you like the game enough and you think $15 is fair for a few weeks' worth of entertainment, go ahead and get it while it's still "cheap". It's still possible to get top ranks in every tower in the base game even if you don't have access to the towers from the expansions, or at least, that's what the developers claim. I'm an imaginary person who wasn't turned off by the $700 thing and I think I'll try it out. Is there anything else I should know about it? Don't ever make any hard assumptions about what score is possible in any given tower--if you feel like you're close to a score but just can't figure out how to get the extra points you need, it may literally be impossible, so consider moving to other towers for a while. Just be patient, take your time, do the best you can, and play the towers in the order you feel like playing them. For your first goal, I would suggest either: 1. Try to get bronze medals in the first eight towers, or 2. Try to get gold medals in the first three towers (yes, this particular goal is possible at the offset, though tower 3 is especially tricky, and you might prefer tower 5 instead). Either accomplishment puts you in a good spot to get better ranks in the towers that are still giving you trouble, but don't neglect getting more Sun Stones where you're able, they're more valuable than you might think at first. If you'd like any hints or advice about anything, I can provide it--I've gotten diamonds in a couple towers already. If you haven't played yet and have any other questions about how the game works, feel free to ask me those, as well. Also, if you've already played the game some and find you're having trouble with it, I put together a huge guuide with general advice for survival/improving your scores. Oh yeah, and the game's translation is great and I won't hear any arguments to the contrary:      EDIT: Incidentally, the developers seem to be monitoring this thread and responding to various comments on their Twitter account: 
Wanton Spoon fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 21:05
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GetDunked posted:Oh sweet, someone else is finally iterating on the Tower of the Sorcerer/DROD RPG formula. Extremely my jam, awful translation and pricing scheme hangups aside. GetDunked posted:Looks like there are 6 more expansions coming over the course of about a year or so. That's... a lot of towers. Not every expansion contains the same number of towers, but also, some towers are longer or shorter than others, anyway. There's only five towers in chapter 3, for example, but they're much longer than the towers in chapters 1 and 2 on average (and the focus on equipment arguably makes them more complex, as well). Towers can also be measured in terms of how much replayability they introduce to earlier towers once you've played them. In news updates and forums posts, the developers often reference a "Legacy" system that will be introduced in chapter 6, and from what I can gather, this chapter will start providing access to one-time rewards that let you unlock new difficulty settings for earlier towers, giving you a score multiplier for those towers. It also sounds like it will unlock new types of upgrades, allowing you to destroy walls, which would completely change the optimal strategy in some towers. I think this is the other reason for the prices being so high... Due to the nature of the Nexus system, the amount of content added with each new expansion isn't so much "+n", but more like "^n". I doubt most people would ever want anything more than the base game, since it's worth hundreds of hours on its own, but personally, I'm in it for the long haul just to see if the full game fulfills its promised potential.
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Apr 20, 2020 00:44
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I'm glad some people are already enjoying the game. To be honest, I wasn't sure if this thread was going to go anywhere, since this game doesn't exactly fit the type of thing that usually takes off on these forums. If even a few people get to try it, though, I'm happy.Elephant Parade posted:Yeah. The enemy sprites look good, IMO, but the rest of the graphics are XP-freeware-esque and none of it is put together in an aesthetically pleasing way. Personally I like the aesthetic, but it might be just nostalgia. It reminds me of when I was young in the '90s, the Internet was still a novelty, and I had a lot of fun exploring all the different freeware demos out there. I do think it can be hard on the eyes at times, though. Since they use the same bright, contrasting color palettes for absolutely everything, there's no real visual cues to help you distinguish different types of objects from each other. Usually the floor layouts have intentionally cute designs with an obvious path to the staircase, so it's not always an issue, but then sometimes they decide to put together something that looks like this:  I'm pretty sure the visual theme of this tower is "garbage". Thanks for making the floors nigh-indistinguishable from the impenetrable walls, guys. Makes it easier to decide how to spend my finite resources clearing a path. Then there's the towers with "underground" segments where you have to unlock pathways to powerups, and since all the powerups look kinda the same when put side-by-side like this, trying to find the powerups you actually want is a bit like playing Where's Waldo:  Can you find the Platinum Key in this image? More importantly, would you have been aware there was a Platinum Key in this image if I didn't point it out?
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Apr 22, 2020 00:35
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Elephant Parade posted:I don't even know where to start with the Dojo tower. Adding limited moves to everything else going on makes my brain explode, especially given that said moves are defined by weird-rear end pathing rules. Hitofude Dojo is less bad than it looks at first. It helps if you look at each floor as a self-contained puzzle where the goal is to leave the floor with more Anchor Hooks than you started with. This is impossible for the first few floors, but around the fourth floor, it starts picking up. It helped me to write down exactly what I did on each floor once I found the optimal "solution". Regarding pathing, you will always prioritize moving all the way up or all the way down (north/south) before ever moving left or right (east/west).
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Apr 22, 2020 12:28
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Char posted:What the hell is this game and how did I just spend two hours on a tutorial level If it's any consolation, after 400+ hours of gameplay I still haven't fully completed that tutorial.
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Apr 23, 2020 02:21
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Hey everyone, senpai noticed us: https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253103199810015232
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Apr 23, 2020 03:35
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Although they don't say so specifically, it feels like the Team Nexus twitter account is now being used to respond directly to a lot of the comments made in this thread. If you'd like to see the developers' response to something, make a comment on it and see what happens. Also, they've released more details on how chapter 6 is going to retroactively expand the content of earlier chapters: https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253243422367866880 It's kind of difficult to understand the descriptions as translated, but what I think they're saying is this: "Mythical Trail" describes a specific single Nexus-like area that can eventually be accessed by ALL towers from chapter 6 onwards. The Mythical Trail contains especially powerful upgrades, for example providing passive bonuses to levels you gain or items you pick up, but you need to spend tons of Sun Stones to activate these upgrades (some of them costing literally hundreds). Also, the Mythical Trail doesn't initially contain any of these upgrades. To unlock any given upgrade, you first have to retrieve that upgrade's associated "Legacy" item within one of the towers, and Legacy items will generally be extremely hard to reach. Once you reach one, though, that upgrade will then permanently be accessible for purchase in any tower that allows you to access the Mythical Trail. It sounds like Mythical Trail might not ever be made accessible in chapters 1-5, but an alternative will be provided in the form of "Mystic Gates". Mystic Gates will be hidden in towers from chapter 6 onwards similar to Legacy items. Each Mystic Gate corresponds to a specific tower--chapter 6-1 will contain the Mystic Gate for chapter 1-1, Tactical Tutorial. Once you've unlocked the Mystic Gate for a tower, you can use that gate to apply a multiplier to the enemy stats, which means the enemies give you more EXP, which means you have the opportunity to greatly increase your score for that tower. Also, beating the tower with the Mystic Gate activated will then unlock new powerups for use in future runs of that tower, presumably similar to the powerups found in the Mythical Trail. This is the kinda stuff that makes me really excited for the future of this game. The gameplay itself is engaging enough, but I wish more games made use of a Nexus system like this, too. I love games with built-in challenge runs, and I love games where mastering one stage will give you new bonuses in others. Lead By Example posted:It's crazy that there's literally no English press for this game at all -- we're already on the first page for Google. I try to limit my online presence, so I wouldn't set up or manage a Discord myself, but from time to time I might pop in to one that someone else makes. If you're looking for guides for your own sake, though, just ask me! I have enough experience that I can provide anything from hints to a full-on walkthrough to get at least a gold medal in any of the first twelve towers. grate deceiver posted:Game looks cool and all, but that pricing strategy is honestly insane. They're aiming at a final price, just for the base game, to be the equivalent of idk, XCOM2? I agree that they'd probably be more successful overall if they put at least the base game on discount from time to time. That said, I'm more defensive of the pricing than I imagine most people would be, due to a variety of factors including perceived longevity, quality, nicheness, and cultural differences, but I also don't want to be a huge pain in the rear end about it  I brought up the pricing in the OP because it's dramatic enough that I thought people deserved a warning up front about it, but outside of that it's not a discussion I want dragging down what I think is a quality game, so I'm going to try not to comment on it too much myself. I'm willing to wait and see just how much the pricing impacts the success of the game. Wanton Spoon fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 13:57
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Hogama posted:I'll have to see how I feel after working through the base content but you sold me on this game nearly sight unseen and three hours later I'm through the first two tutorial towers. I'm not quite sure on how to use the medals in the nexus yet. Medals are used in the same way keys are used, by walking into a door with the associated medal shown on top of it. That said, a door can be unlocked by any medal of equal or higher rank; for example, a silver door can be opened with a silver medal or a gold medal, but it can't be opened with a copper medal. ...Unless you mean you're not sure which powerups to purchase, in which case, I get you. Once you learn more through regular gameplay about how different powerups are useful in different towers, you'll start figuring out which ones you want to focus on. That said, I wouldn't try to start using medals until you've gotten more used to Pure Nexus runs. Although using medals will disqualify you from a Pure Nexus run, using Sun Stones actually doesn't disqualify you, so you can use your Sun Stones to help you earn more Sun Stones, and then you can use those to help you earn better medals. Plus, I find that working with limited resources helps me gain a better appreciation for how to play more effectively. This game is extremely good about teaching concepts through gameplay; in most of the towers, there's usually a specific hurdle that's impossible to overcome unless you figure out how to utilize a certain gameplay mechanic properly. Hogama posted:It's already pretty compelling, though. I had a bit of a chuckle when I went nearly all-in on boosting my attack value on leveling and I STILL couldn't beat the final shield-types' defense rating on Tutorial 2. GetDunked posted:I'm also a bit bewildered by the level naming convention. I get that "Tactical Tutorial 1" is probably a good place to start, but what exactly can I expect from "Tactical Tower G"? Or "D"? Some of the translation is awkward because they're using machine translation, but based on some of the comments I've seen from the developers, and what I've seen in the game itself, I think some of it also comes down to them trolling players on purpose. They do list the difficulty rating for each tower, but I find these are hit-or-miss estimates, especially when you get into the matter of how hard it is to achieve a particular rank in a tower, rather than just reach the end. I definitely had an easier time getting platinums and diamonds in some later towers than in some earlier ones. I think it's just part of the conceit of the game that you're meant to be dropped into the middle of everything, and slowly explore and figure it all out for yourself. The towers themselves work the same way, since it's hard to know how to play optimally until you've seen the later floors, know what enemies to prepare for and how many keys to hold onto. Also, because each tower is so different, you can't really compare the difficulty of the towers to each other, anyway. There's important lessons to learn from each one that aren't found in the others. On top of Tactical Tutorial, though, my suggestion for your other first tower is Tactical Trip Mini. It's harder to finish than the tutorial, but it's also the shortest tower, so it's the easiest to replay until you get it right, and you learn a lot of fundamental concepts very quickly. Infinity Gaia posted:So I'm going through the demo (very robust, by the way, four towers is actually a lot of content for this game) and I'm mostly just trying to understand the scoring mechanics. I'm pretty sure I almost totally cleared the second tower top to bottom and I still only managed to barely clear the requirements for the silver medal. Is it just the case where you NEED to grind out each tower to get upgrade items to get better scores or am I just misunderstanding something? I have gotten a gold medal in Tactical Tower NEW without using any Sun Stones or Medals (though I'd have to replay it to remember exactly how I did it). But yes, in most towers it's literally impossible to get medals of the highest ranks without spending some medals of your own. It should eventually become clear why this is the case once you start paying closer attention to the Nexus, but I won't spoil it yet. Incidentally, though, clearing an entire tower isn't necessarily the best way to get the highest score possible, and from what I remember, this is also true of Tactical Tower NEW specifically. Infinity Gaia posted:Edit: Also, yes, this game really needs a way to turn off the music. Please. Unless that's a feature in the main game that's not included in the demo? It's not, but behold, the developers are indeed paying attention to the thread: https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253329472452886530 #tacticaldebug
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Apr 23, 2020 15:41
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I'll refrain from making my own comments as stated, but since you were hoping they would, I'll just point out that the developers did respond to the comments on the pricing: https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253352428000497664 Lead By Example posted:A big part of the confusion regarding using your Nexus Medals is for some reason you can click doors that require keys to open them, but you seem to have to use the keyboard to open a nexus medal block. I was very confused about it as well since I've been using the mouse for everything. Really? Weird, I find the keyboard much easier to use, most of the time, since I'm usually sorting through groups of enemies at once. I'll occasionally switch to the mouse in towers where the staircases are placed far apart from each other, but most of the time even these are placed in such a way that it's easier to traverse ten floors just by holding down one of the arrow keys. Now that I'm getting used to holding down "X" to speed up the combat, though, maybe the mouse would be more precise. I might try it at some point. John Lee posted:I gotta say, I'm terrible at this game and expect my interest in progressing to slow to a crawl, but I really enjoyed the rollercoaster in Tactical Tower New. I think pacing yourself is important in this game. When I said I got a gold in Tactical Tower NEW, that was only after hours of study and failed attempts, and this doesn't include the hours I had already spent in other towers. Even now, I'm still constantly falling short of goals I set for myself and having to start entire towers over, but I still learn something new each time. You're not bad at the game, the game's just extremely hard, and it's designed so every single rank-up feels like a huge accomplishment. If you're getting frustrated, my advice is to move onto another tower for a while, but it's worth it to write down some notes about the current tower before you do that. Just enough to refresh your memory about which parts are important when you eventually return to it later. (The in-game notes should prove to be a godsend in this regard.) Call Your Grandma posted:Title change plz Yeah, but which part?
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Apr 23, 2020 19:43
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Char posted:Can I get more than two sunstones from each tower? Oh yeah, I haven't explained this part in detail yet.  You can earn multiple Sun Stones in both Pure Nexus runs and Best Score runs, but the number you earn is calculated differently depending on the run. In a Pure Nexus run, your score is compared to the medal rankings. However many "ranks" your score is from the bottom, that's how many Sun Stones you earn for that run. Meaning, if your score would be good enough for a copper, you get 1 Sun Stone. If your score would be good enough for a silver, you get 2 Sun Stones, and so on. In the example above, my Pure Nexus score is above the 900,000 points required for a gold medal, so I get 3 Sun Stones for that score. Separately, for the Best Score run, you do not earn any Sun Stones for any of the initial medal ranks. However, every tower has a "Sun Stone score" above all the normal medals, the number with a plus sign in front of it. What you do is you take your total score, subtract whatever points are required to reach the top ranking medal, and then look at however many points you have remaining after that. Divide this number by the "Sun Stone score", round down, and that's how many Sun Stones you earn for the Best Score run. In this case, the highest rank possible is platinum at 7,000,000 points, but my top score is over 9,000,000 points. Since you earn a Sun Stone for every 2,000,000 points you earn above the platinum score, I have 1 Sun Stone from my Best Score run. You keep all Sun Stones you earn across both types of high scores, so in this case, I have a total of 4 Sun Stones from this tower.
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Apr 23, 2020 23:25
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Pladdicus posted: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? Save files for the full game are stored in SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Tactical Nexus\tmp1\wwdata\. See if you can find the equivalent files in the Tactical Adventure Demo directory, then copy over the "save" and "medal" folders from that directory. If your clear status doesn't show up on the main menu, it may also be worth opening one of the towers and trying to load from one of your original save files. It's helped me before. Tremis posted:Thanks for that! Just for the record, I'd like to note that it's not like equipment is the first time the game explores new ideas. Every tower plays with a new gimmick, sometimes unique to that one tower, sometimes based on a new item that then continues to show up in future towers. For example, Tactical Tutorial 2 (tower #7) introduces dirt and stone blocks that you can dig through with mattocks. This becomes standard fare in most future towers. StrixNebulosa posted:What the gently caress I'm very sorry. On the plus side, you're probably going to start steamrolling everything now.
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Apr 26, 2020 20:02
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Aw dang, first platinum of the thread, that was quick. Good job! I wonder how much variation there will be in where people get their first platinum medals. Mine was in Tactical Tutorial 2.
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Apr 27, 2020 01:25
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I got a diamond in Tactical Tower NEW while listening to some New Jack Swing. How appropriate? Actually, I feel like I barely scraped this one out. I had to redo the last half of the Nexus Stage a couple of times to get this to work. After falling short of the cutoff score by about 300,000 points twice in a row, I was a bit scared I wasn't going to make it. This game can be nerve-racking sometimes  So now I have four diamonds and I'm not even entirely sure what to do with them. It's bound to open up some new options somewhere, right? I... I don't want to go back to Pop Tactical Lord. Don't make me go back Call Your Grandma posted:I love how the Tactical Nexus team is eager to receive and respond to feedback but also smart enough not to touch the poop. I'm not sure how much of it is that they're keeping their distance, and how much of it is that they're not sure how to register on these paid, English-speaking forums.
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Apr 27, 2020 05:09
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John Lee posted:I tried demo tower K (for keys, presumably) and it's looking like it'll be another one I fail on my first try. A bit of a bummer, but I knew I'd fall behind eventually... I was just hoping it would be, you know, out of the tutorials. Honestly, although the first tower makes it easier to reach a goal point than any of the other towers do due to the number of potions they give you, I don't think any of the towers qualify as "tutorials" except in the sense that they introduce and explain new gameplay concepts in the middle of them. I STILL haven't "beaten" Tactical Tutorial. King of Bleh posted:It looks like the dev has a quasi-walkthrough video for tower W: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcOyydF347c. I'm not sure useful it is in specific terms for beating W, since Yeah, I haven't looked at the walkthrough myself because I prefer figuring things out on my own As I mentioned in the OP, and somewhat illustrated in my post with advice on how to get the Golden Feather in the first floor of Tactical Tower NEW, the strategy you use to get a gold in a tower can differ substantially from the strategy you use to get a diamond in the same tower. The powerups you get from using medals can open up huge new options, sometimes by letting you access gated portions of the early tower that you wouldn't ordinarily be able to access until much later (such as by giving you a Platinum Key at the very beginning), sometimes by giving you the resources and powerups you need to skip over entire portions of the tower that you'd normally need to deal with because you wouldn't be able to gain the levels you need otherwise. For Tactical Tower W in particular, there's the strategy you use to survive to the first goal point, which from what I remember is basically an automatic silver but maybe you could also get a gold, and then there's the strategy you use to survive to the second goal point, which is basically automatically good enough for a platinum. Platinum, not diamond. This is the important part. You've already seen the entire tower, you already know what resources are available to you, but that knowledge in and of itself is only good for a platinum. In most towers, Pure Nexus runs can be hard, but they're hard because just surviving is hard. Because death comes easily, it's easier to see exactly where you failed, and so you can just back up a few steps and try something else. But when your failure takes the form of completing the entire tower but falling short of a diamond score, you can have very little clue about where you were supposed to improve your score. You have an entire tower's worth of gameplay that you could've approached from a different direction: maybe you should have leveled up differently, maybe you should've completed some floors before others, maybe you should've unlocked different doors, maybe you should've picked different powerups in the Nexus. Obviously new players have to go through a lot just to start getting their first medals, but I feel like it's more of an inevitability that they're going to sort out the game mechanics well enough eventually. The early game is very good about teaching you through trial and error. Due to how much the game opens up your options when you gather more medals, I feel like it's actually late-game players who might stand to require the most help from other people's advice and walkthroughs. Arzaac posted:Well, I got a Gold Pure Nexus on Tactical Trip Mini. Honestly, it feels really good. Feels like I've learned a lot! You inadvertently discovered the same trick I discovered that helped me upgrade my Tactical Tower D score to a gold. Even knowing how big of a difference it can make, though, it's just so easy for me to forget that those enemies in the Nexus exist when I'm already halfway through a tower.
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Apr 27, 2020 13:23
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Arzaac posted:Quick Question about sunstones: is the amount of sunstones you get from a tower equal to your best pure nexus run + your highest scoring run, or does it take the higher number of the two? I really just don't know how those score overflow sunstones work and I'm not anywhere close to finding out for myself. I briefly mentioned it at the end of my earlier rundown of how Sunstones are calculated, but yes, you get the total sum of Sunstones from both your Pure Nexus score and your Best score. Infinity Gaia posted:Ahhhhhh gently caress. I ended up about 1k HP short of being able to (probably) finish Tactical Tower K. God dammit. Tactical Tower K ends on floor... Actually, maybe this is a good time to do a rundown on how big each tower is. Here's where each goal is located in each tower (this covers only goals that are the farthest goals you can conceivably reach in a Pure Nexus run, not the actual final goals): 1. Tactical Turorial - 7F 2. Tactical Tower NEW - 20F 3. Tactical Tower D - 10F 4. Tactical Tower K - 8F 5. Tactical Trip Mini - 1F 6. Tactical Tower G - B11F (The first goal is in 20F, so this tower is more like 25 "real" floors total) 7. Tactical Tutorial 2 - 11F 8. Hitofude Dojo - 25F 9. Tactical Tower W - 26F 10. Tactical Tower P - B26F 11. Tactical Tutorial 3 - 12F 12. Pop Tactical Lord - 49F 
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Apr 27, 2020 19:11
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Flapjack Monty posted:Playing the demo, got silver on the first two, but TacTower D and K are really insidious. K was going fine until I ran into something way too beefy, and D is just a slog. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Without more details than that, I can't tell what you're doing wrong, either If you can get a silver on the first two towers, your strategy can't be TOO bad. D is a bit more dependent on item pickups than the other towers. For K, you already know what's stopping you, so think through what you might have to do in order to properly prepare for that particular hurdle. I have a guess on what your issue might be, so let me ask this: What's your thought process for how you spend your level-ups? Alternately, you can read through my huge survival guide and see if it helps you any (particularly the last half of it).
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Apr 27, 2020 21:44
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King of Bleh posted:Sunstones are a truly-free bonus, I don't think the score recorded by the game even tracks how many you used. Tremis posted:drat Tower K. I get within 20000 life points of what I assume is the last major enemy. I seem to be missing like one purple key to be able to open all the purple doors which would do it. I've tried a bunch of different setups. I don't advise skipping that shortcut. Or trying to get every powerup.
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Apr 28, 2020 01:51
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pumpinglemma posted:What should I be aiming for on a pure nexus run of tactical tower K with 8 sunstones? I scraped a bronze last time with the persistent feeling that I was missing something important and silver might be possible. When I was first playing through the game, first I got a taste of each of the twelve towers (some more so than others), then I decided to start over from the beginning and try to optimize my scores. I was looking for a way to measure how well I was actually doing, and what I made up in my head is that the gold medal score must be calculated to be roughly equivalent to the maximum possible score you can get in every tower without using any Sunstones or medals. So that's what I decided to aim for, a gold medal without using any medals or Sunstones. I spent hours theorycrafting, I remember going to bed late on some nights, but that's how I got gold medals on the first three towers, because of those efforts. Tactical Tower K made me give up on that premise. I tried multiple times with a variety of approaches and never got anything better than a bronze. Knowing what I know now, I don't think there's supposed to be a set standard for what's achievable on any given tower. Everything's kinda wishy-washy, towers go up and down in difficulty as you progress, but on the average I think they're generally meant to scale with the number of medals/Sunstones, or at least the amount of personal experience, that you're getting. I also suspect that with some towers, like tower K, they purposely make it hard to get even the lower-ranking medals in Pure Nexus so that they leave room available for you to return to those towers and make new progress in them at a much later point. At some point you're going to think, "I should farm some more Sunstones, where haven't I been in a while?" And there's Tactical Tower K, still with three more medals left to reach. My current Pure Nexus rank in Tactical Tower K is just barely a silver, and that's with 35 Sunstones.
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Apr 28, 2020 04:46
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Oren posted a community update not only mentioning the surge in popularity that came from this thread, but also declaring that they're going to make the game even longer than initially planned, partly inspired by that popularity surge and the supportive community that came from it?Oren posted:[Around April 18th, the game broke (popularity) / "Thank you" announcement] I created this thread because I cared enough about the game that I wanted to signal boost it if it was within my means to do so, but I never expected something like this to happen. I thought there was a distinct possibility I'd only get like one or two extra people to play. I wonder how many new players it actually ended up being? Thanks to everyone for giving the game a shot in spite of its initial appearances. I'm glad everyone seems to be enjoying it a lot. Please accept mine and Oren's request to play Tactical Nexus in good health: Oren posted:(By the way, there is "immunity boosting" as one of the prevention of infectious diseases.
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Apr 28, 2020 06:07
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Arzaac posted:It probably hasn't happened yet because it's pretty obscure. It doesn't really have any marketing going on and it's barely translated, so I can see why nobody's heard of it. Hell, I really don't know how Wanton Spoon found out about it. Culka posted:One thing I don't really like about the game is being uncertain if I can even finish a tower when selecting it. The difficulty stars give some indication, but they don't really tell if you need a lot of sunstones or if the tower is otherwise hard. Some kind of recommended amount of sunstones for a pure nexus run would be nice. One of the reasons I wasn't sure this game was going to take off is because it's technically a solvable game. These forums might thrive off of long, analytical games, but I think they depend on a bit of creativity as well--experimenting with different character builds and the like. You can experiment with your builds in this game, but some builds are clearly less effective than others, for the most part. But the game does allow some creativity, or at least some level of personalization, in the order that you clear the towers and their associated medals. I thought it was cool how Heiji's first platinum was in Tactical Trip Mini while mine was in Tutorial 2. I think it's cool how people's different approaches to the game seem to be giving them better medals in some towers than others. If the developers gave a recommended Sunstone count for each tower, a lot of that personalization would disappear, because everyone would be trying to clear towers in the same order. But in line with your statement and the fact that I agree with the sentiment behind it, though, it probably would be a good idea if players came to some kind of consensus on which towers were easiest to start with, in general. That way, there's always some question as to how true the consensus actually is, so it's easier for players to break away from that mold if they wish. I still hold that the pair of Tactical Tutorial and Tactical Trip Mini are the absolute best two towers to start with. I think you can probably get at least a bronze in the first eleven towers without using any Sunstones, but I can't remember if I actually completed that particular challenge in every tower or not (that's why I limited my original recommendation to just the first eight towers). Pop Tactical Lord might actually be possible without Sunstones as well, but I haven't made any serious attempts at it myself. I reached the first goal in Pure Nexus using thirty-something Sunstones, personally. Elswyyr posted:I made a discord. Unsure if anyone would use it or care, and I have no idea how to admin a discord, but here it is: https://discord.gg/BYTegrg. Wanton Spoon, I copied your big strategy post in a channel there, of course attributed to you. I'll probably tweet it at the developer too. John Lee posted:That's good to know, I guess; I've made three attempts at a Pure run of K now, and the first one stalled pretty late, the second was an abortive attempt at some crazy stuff that didn't go well, and the third just stalled in the middle of those two. I can't remember exactly what strategy I had left on when I finally gave up on the tower, but I seem to remember that a couple of different approaches could work. You can either use a ton of keys to skip several enemies and then super-power yourself when you arrive at the treasure room, or you can spend only three or four level-ups on keys, hone your focus on your preferred stat of either ATK or DEF, and skip the rest of the powerups, but no matter which of the two paths you take, I feel it's pretty necessary to use a Violet Key to get into the upper left corner of 2F as soon as possible. That's three Golden Feathers and like a billion other powerups at once, son. Don't pass that up. Also, Team Nexus recently tweeted an image of a Pure Nexus gold clear of that tower, and it uses 139 Sunstones. So it's not just us having trouble with that tower. Heiji posted:What's the general approach for tower G? I can make the first goal just fine, but even with a nexus feather at time 0 I just stall out in the last room, which is frustrating since apparently there's a way to get it even without that feather! Important point #1, the "easy" tip: Since you can reach Golden Feathers as a level-up reward, Golden Feathers have an accelerating effect on each other; if you get one Golden Feather, you can reach the other Golden Feathers even faster, since you reach them through level-building in and of itself. So you want to make a beeline for every Golden Feather on both fronts. When level-building, you should be unlocking absolutely the shortest path possible to each Golden Feather in the Underground. Once you've gotten the last Golden Feather, then you can focus on unlocking doors that give you better stat powerups, and now you'll have the full selection available to you to maximize those benefits. Important point #2, the "hard" tip: This is the part I struggled with when trying to figure out how to get a diamond (which I still haven't done). Tower G is the rare tower where it actually makes more sense to focus on DEF instead of ATK. The reason for this is because you CAN get the last enemies in the underground all the way down to 0 damage if you pick up basically every (worthwhile) DEF powerup available to you, but this does mean essentially bypassing most superfluous ATK powerups, and it means defeating a lot of the Final Fighters even when they're still doing a ton of damage to you. You really have to have a good understanding of HP management under a DEF build to pull this one off. Wanton Spoon fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 18:03
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12 rats tied together posted:One problem I have with it is that I'd like to play fullscreen, but the fullscreen game seems to repel my mouse and any keyboard input except for alt+f4. Anyone else having trouble here or is it just me? Zaodai posted:I play in fullscreen and have not had that issue, though I will note that it doesn't seem to properly lock my mouse sometimes (I have multiple monitors), so maybe it's not capturing yours correctly? John Lee posted:I'm gonna have to take notes and do math, aren't I? Aren't I!? The only time I've ever done real math was in trying to determine the proper curve for improving ATK and DEF, and I reported my resulting findings in my big strategy post. I've never bothered with math otherwise, but I do try to be mindful of the pace at which received damage goes down when I'm comparing character builds to each other. Culka posted:I would actually be really happy with a record list of the fewest used sunstones for each tower that have reached at least bronze. Minimalist challenges are also fun. Tactical Tutorial - Tactical Tower NEW - Tactical Tower D - Tactical Tower K - Tactical Trip Mini - Tactical Tower G - Tactical Tutorial 2 - Hitofude Dojo - Tactical Tower W - Culka posted:Also uh, I smashed immediately the buy button for all the DLC and these orbs have the potential to make this so hard to optimize. For those curious, orbs are a brand new mechanic first introduced in the chapter 4 DLC. Here's some of the things orbs can do (these aren't really spoilers so much as features): - Give you one full level's worth of EXP points. - Destroy most walls. - Make you swap positions with an enemy. - Swap your ATK and DEF values (my personal favorite). As you might imagine, this gives Tactical Nexus even more of a puzzle game feel. By the way, public service announcement/reminder, Team Nexus is continuing to monitor this thread and respond to some comments on their Twitter account. On top of that, I'm pretty sure they're doing the same thing with the Discord, too. So be sure to follow them for updates on bug reports, new features, and  Don't tell me that, Team Nexus. Please keep that information to yourself
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Apr 29, 2020 14:57
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pumpinglemma posted:This might be a stupid question, but how do you see? I massively prefer windowed mode because it lets me keep notes in another window, but the default window size is unreadably tiny on my 1920x1200 monitor and (as far as I can tell) can't be resized. I've had to resort to setting my resolution to 800x600 before I start the game. This might be a douchey answer, but... I dunno, I just see I do wish the window could be made two or three times bigger with nearest neighbor pixel interpolation, but I can read it okay as it is. It's possible my monitor is bigger than yours.Fortunately, the developers do have a response to this issue: Oren posted:我明白了。 Hope this helps!
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Apr 30, 2020 02:08
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Hey everyone! I beat the tutorial!
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Apr 30, 2020 15:57
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pumpinglemma posted:I'm slowly continuing my pure nexus runs - I now have golds on tutorial 1, NEW, G and mini, silver on D which I'm hoping to turn into a gold today, and bronze on K. I think my issue with D is that every single level you can eke out at the end is worth 21k+ points, so it's worth paying just about any price in health to get your hands on a feather before you start killing all the low-level stuff. I wasn't aggressive enough on my last try, and I should have taken 12 levels of keys instead of 11 - taking one extra red key would have given me much faster access to a +3 ATK deck near the start, and let me open up that potion room with 10k health near the end. With my 8 level-ups on keys I was still able to hit everything pretty early, and I was able to reach every powerup except the Life Potion and three Crimson Keys behind the platinum door in 8F. I can provide screenshots of which doors I opened, if you would like.
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May 1, 2020 13:23
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King of Bleh posted:The second phase of tower G is ruining my life. I managed a bronze just based on levels, but have now failed twice to reach the "star" clear. It's a long, long tower to have to retry. I have a pure gold in tower G, just got a diamond+1 as well, and I have never once unlocked any of the doors in 20F. It is absolutely not worth it to spend eight levels just to reach what would qualify as "normal" rewards for the bottom floor.
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May 1, 2020 17:37
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Arzaac posted:I've been running the Dojo for a little bit and...I think I just don't like this stage at all. The whole anchor gimmick means that there's just a whole lot more going on, and it feels way easier to strand yourself in ways that really just aren't possible in the other towers. Hitofude Dojo definitely has the most bizarre gimmick of any of the towers that have been released so far, requiring a fundamentally different thought process from the rest of the towers, and maybe not one that will make sense to everyone who otherwise "gets" the game. Still, I say it's not as bad as all that. Although you have to add the new mechanic to everything else you already have to think about, that new mechanic also greatly reduces the number of viable options you can take. You can't spend too long on any given floor, and it's impossible to return to earlier floors, so whereas in most towers you'll be going back and forth trying to figure out the exact order you want to finish everything, in Hitofude Dojo your thought process is more often going to be "Okay, I'm picking up these three items, and then I'm leaving." So then it's just a matter of taking the time to calculate the most efficient method of doing that. I've seen multiple other players comment that it's a good idea to make a new save file at the beginning of each floor, and I agree with that. Although I've stopped taking extensive notes with other towers, I still refer to the notes I made for Hitofude Dojo, because once you've "solved" a floor there's no reason to make yourself go through the arduous process of figuring out the exact path you need to take every single time. Just repeat what you did last time, and make adjustments in the few places it makes sense to do so. I haven't gotten better than a gold yet, but my strategy for getting that gold is a very simple one: Pick up every key and every Golden Feather on every floor. Yes, even 1F.
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May 2, 2020 14:06
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Char posted:Three times I try Tactical K, three times I stop at the corridor with the 4 different keys. I guess I'm not leveling up enough but I don't get what I'm getting wrong exactly, I get a bunch of keys in the first levels... and I end up being too weak once I get to that floor. Since several people have reported trouble with tower K, and since it's the hardest tower available in the demo, I have decided to create a walkthrough for it. Hopefully this will help to get more new players on board.  Warning! The rest of this post contains a full playthrough of tower #4, Tactical Tower K! Just scroll on past if you don't want to be spoiled on that! This playthrough can be completed without using any Sunstones or medals. So the theme of this run is "Golden Feathers first". This isn't the only way to get through the tower, it may not even be the most efficient way to score points for a Pure Nexus run, but it's usually the best way to set yourself up for a smoother post-game once you're ready to tackle the Nexus Stage. The issue with going for Golden Feathers is that, if you want to maximize the benefits of getting them, you have to minimize how many enemies you fight along the way, since it's better to save their EXP rewards for after getting the EXP multiplier. What this means is that you'll have to be fairly aggressive in your approach, skipping past lower-level enemies and fighting through multiple high-level enemies. The only realistic way to pull this off is by focusing your build almost entirely on ATK rather than DEF, since DEF is not going to prepare you for underleveled play nearly as quickly as ATK is. This brings up another issue with Tower K specifically, which is that there's a treasure room that can give you a ton of rewards if you have the keys for it, but you don't gain access the treasure room until you're halfway through the tower. We'll cover how to deal with that over the course of this guide, but let's go ahead and get started.  First, I head straight for the Golden Feather in the upper right corner of 1F. I gain a level on the way, and use this level to get the Crimson Key I need to open the door. I could've opened the other Golden Feather instead, but this corner has more rewards in it.  The next Golden Feather is the one on the left. I already have a key for opening this door.  I don't want to spend any more level-ups on Crimson Keys, so in order to unlock the remaining Golden Feather, I need to get the Crimson Key that was just above the Elder Slasher in the lower left corner. Instead of a Crimson Key, I want to spend this level on Blue Keys. The Elder Slasher still hits pretty hard, so I don't want to fight it JUST yet. After getting the Golden Feather, I fight the Junior Burgeoner blocking the Violet Key and head upstairs.  In 2F, I head straight to the Violet Key in the upper right corner, spending another level-up on Blue Keys. My next goal is the upper left corner, but since I have to fight through two Elder enemies to get there, it makes more sense to make a detour back to the first floor:  When faced with two paths of similar difficulty, take the path that leads to the stat boosts first. Okay, now let's head back upstairs.  Three Golden Feathers in a row. This is the key survival technique to this tower. There's a few different approaches you can take, but the powerups in this corner are just too valuable to pass up, especially if you're planning on spending even more level-ups on keys. Which I'm not, incidentally. I'm done with getting extra keys. I'm spending my remaining level-ups on ATK. Well, almost. You'll see. We're still kind of under-powered at this point, though. Whether we're aiming for the remaining Golden Feather at the top center there, or just wanting to progress through more of the tower, we're going to have to fight a Great Slasher either way, and those still deal 3969 damage. Let's try to cut that down a little. First, I get the two Power Pieces in 2F and the Power Gem in 1F in order to go up one level, then I come back to 2F and get the remaining ATK powerups there.  I'm level 6 and now the Great Slasher deals only 1764 damage. Not bad. I get the Golden Feather up top, as well as the two Guard Potions just because, and then I fight the Burgeoner in order to get the Violet Key required to move to the next floor.  The Burgeoner made me gain another level, dropping the next Great Slasher's damage by about another 500 points. Hopefully it's becoming clear how quickly ATK makes itself useful in the early parts of the game. The tower's layout gets a little confusing in 3F and 4F since you keep going up and down between the two floors, but the pathway is actually very linear. The next Golden Feather is at the top of the screen, there. Here's how you get there:   I'm not strong enough to fight through that nearby group of enemies, so the next Golden Feather is just up the next set of available stairs:  And I'm not strong enough to fight that General Slasher, so the next two available Golden Feathers are just down the next set of available stairs:  It takes the same amount of damage either way, so I go ahead and get both Golden Feathers. There's some powerups on the next floor, but it's not really worth fighting the enemies required to reach them quite yet, and I'm still not quite strong enough to fight the additional enemies beyond that. Instead, it's time to do some backtracking. Maybe you've forgotten about that Golden Feather in 1F:  The Elder Burgeoner is now a very manageable 2603 damage, and I get some nice EXP and powerups as a reward for the fight, to boot. After this battle, though, my HP has been reduced a fair bit and I'm still a little under-leveled for moving forward. Fortunately, at this point my stats are high enough that there are several enemies spread throughout the tower that deal 0 damage to me. I go back through the tower and clear out enough enemies to reach some potions and go up to level 11. At that point, I then return to the end of the main path and clear out the Elder enemies in the lower part of 4F:  Then I return to 3F and clear out most of the enemies in the lower part of the floor:  If I fight the Great Burgeoner, it will deal 5800 damage to me. Manageable. But you know what's a better idea, in my opinion?  Fighting these two enemies first. The Great Burgeoner gives me more EXP than these two enemies combined, so I stand to gain more EXP by getting this Golden Feather first, rather than the other one. That said, if I went in the opposite order, I'd save about 1,000 HP instead, since I would go up a level before fighting these two. In the end, it's not a big difference, but I prefer pushing levels forward faster if I can. Okay, at this point, I don't have enough HP to afford side trips. Time to continue progressing through the tower:   Fortunately, there's yet another Golden Feather on the way. After that, I fight my way through the remaining sets of staircases until I reach the end of the path:     ...You know what, that's still not enough EXP for me, personally.  Here we go. After getting this Golden Feather, I get the Platinum Key behind that Great Burgeoner, and then I use the key to head to 5F:  We already have some keys, so what do we do here? As always, the goal is MORE FEATHERS. The most immediate way to accomplish this goal is to open up three Golden Feathers in the center, then to get the Golden Feather behind the Blue Door near the top:  We can't get any other Golden Feathers quite yet, and... man, Yellow Keys don't really get you anything good here, huh? Let's fix that. Time to make a trip back to 1F:  Yeah, I'd say this is a fair trade. With the three Blue Keys we have now, we open two doors, both leading to Drops of Dream Ocean. We need to hold onto one Blue Key for later. In the meantime, what we really want is more Golden Feathers. If we can get a Crimson Key, then we get two Golden Feathers right away. So let's do that.  Back in 1F, there's a Great Slasher blocking a Crimson Key. Doesn't even deal any damage at this point. We take this back to 5F and get the two Golden Feathers. All the remaining Golden Feathers in 5F require Violet Keys, and besides that, there's still a few Golden Feathers here and there behind enemies. I'll just speed through them real quick: Elder Burgeoner in 2F:  Legendary Fighter in 1F:  Legendary Fighter in 4F:  Slashers in 6F:  Fine Burgeoner in 4F:  Also note that the three Violet Keys shown here are to be used to unlock ONLY the first three doors in the lower right corner of 5F:  Although the room in the upper right corner has a Golden Feather, unfortunately we just don't have enough Violet Keys in the tower to ever afford to open it. This is a good reason to get a Violet Key from the Nexus, if you can. Also, you may notice I opened up two more Blue Doors. I did that by getting two more Blue Keys as my reward for reaching level 17. Here's the rationale behind that:  If I had spent a level-up on just ATK, I would've gotten 20 points' worth. By spending it on two Blue Keys instead, I got to pick up two Power Decks, which are worth +30 ATK in total. Ordinarily, if you're ever going to get keys from level-ups, it's best to get them all at the beginning of the game before you ever start raising stats. However, some towers, like this one, don't make that a realistic option. I couldn't afford to miss any other ATK boosts before reaching this treasure room, not if I wanted to take the speedy, corner-cutting route that I did. And now that I'm on this path, it no longer makes sense to spend level-ups on keys. If you're using an ATK-focused strategy, DEF is next to useless, so you can skip any of the blue powerups. There are some doors blocking additional ATK powerups, but none of them are worth what you would get from spending a level-up on ATK. The only consideration left to weigh is whether some keys would be worth the HP rewards that come from picking up additional Drops of Dream Ocean... which is possible. But let's stick with this strategy for now. Now, as you might have noticed from following the thread, not everybody uses the strategy I use for this tower. Some people DO spend a ton of level-ups on keys specifically so they can make the most use of this treasure room once they reach it. And it's entirely possible to make that path work well enough. The downside is that, if you do, your stats are going to be too low to actually fight the majority of the enemies you face up to this point, so you also need to spend several keys just skipping battles, not getting any powerups in return for it. This includes using an additional Violet Key to skip the Great Burgeoner blocking the Platinum Key. Anyway, back to the tower. I have every Golden Feather on the first five floors, so it's a straight shot to the two in 6F:  At this point, I have to get five Violet Keys off of this floor before I can continue. There are six Violet Keys total. I skip the one behind the big Master Burgeoner boss for now. Outside that, the order doesn't REALLY matter, but there is this to consider: I will gain levels much faster from the Burgeoners than from the other enemies, so I'll probably want to do those first, and raising my ATK will reduce damage I take from Slashers faster than it will reduce the damage I take from Fighters, so it makes more sense to save the Slashers for last (since then they will be left until after I've raised my ATK as much as possible). Once I make it to 7F, I'm immediately greeted by a Golden Feather:  We don't have the keys to open that series of doors quite yet, and we'll get to it soon, but first I want to get one more Golden Feather:  Okay, so we need two Crimson Keys and one Blue Key. Let's backtrack. Fine Fighter in 2F:  Burgeoner also in 2F:  Line of Master Slashers in 6F:  Now I have all the keys I need to get into that reward room in 7F:  And using the Violet Key I got from there, I can open the last door at the bottom of 5F. I use the extra Blue Key to open another Drop of Dream Ocean, but I hold onto the Crimson Key:  Only two Golden Feathers left to get now, both in 7F. I get the one on the left first:  But I don't want to get the remaining one quite yet. Up to this point, I think I saved HP about as efficiently as I possibly could while still maximizing my EXP multiplier. But at this point, well, look at it. I'm at 1090%. Is it really going to be a big deal if I postpone the last 30 percentage points for a bit? If I can increase my ATK by a couple hundred points, I should significantly reduce the damage that the Master Burgeoner and the Final Slasher deal to me. Let's take a break for now. I go back through the tower and fight all enemies that deal 0 damage to me:  Once I clear out enough enemies and pick up some powerups, reaching level 32 puts me at the point where Final Slashers hit me only twice, and Star Fighters hit me only thrice:  I clear out everything in the tower except the Star Slashers, and it's finally time to get the remaining keys I need:  When I reach level 36, Star Slashers stop dealing any damage to me at all, so I clear out the rest of those:  Fighting the remaining enemies is just enough to put me at level 37 before fighting the final boss. As it turns out, raising my ATK at this point will reduce the damage I take by 959, but increasing my DEF will reduce it by 1,000. But you know what saves even more HP than that?  Taking two Blue Keys so I can open the last two Drops of Dream Ocean here. Mind you, that's not the only thing to take into consideration. When your final score is calculated, ATK and DEF receive a multiplier bonus that HP doesn't. Sometimes just a few points of ATK or DEF are more valuable than adding 20,000 HP. Not in this case, though... I checked. Also, if I'm ever going to spend level-ups getting HP instead of ATK or DEF, the end of the tower is the time to do it. It wouldn't have made sense to get these potions before now, given the savings that come from increasing ATK instead. And maybe I should've also spent a couple levels getting Crimson Keys so I could get a couple more Drops of Dream Ocean, but, eh. Then I wouldn't have saved so much HP fighting the Star Slashers for 0 damage.  Well, here we are. We've reached the goal point with 0 Sunstones, and we have 366,598 points, 16,598 points ahead of what's needed for a bronze medal. That EXP bar is halfway full, too bad we couldn't push it all the way to the end. ...Wait, I forgot an enemy.   Now we have 29,470 more points than we needed Yes, only spending medals will disqualify you from a Pure Nexus run. Doing anything else in the Nexus, be it using Sunwishers or fighting enemies, will not disqualify you from Pure Nexus, even if it ends up granting you ridiculous amounts of experience. Something to keep in mind. Well, that's it. Hopefully I've introduced you to some new ideas for how to plan your own runs in the game, whether for this tower or other towers. Or maybe you already have a few ideas of your own for how I could've optimized my score better. I kinda doubt that enough could be changed to increase the score to 450,000, but who knows? Maybe you'll figure something out. Thinking up new ideas is often rewarded.
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May 3, 2020 02:23
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Heiji posted:Success! First diamond (in tutorial 2)! Tutorial 2 is definitely fun to play around in, and by far the most approachable nexus level. Definitely give it a shot once you meet the metal requirements! To everyone else, don't stress yourself out trying to match this pace. I promise you're not bad at the game, Heiji just happened to take to it like a fish to water. I imagine most players will need a few months to get their first diamond. Heiji posted:Tactical tutorial 4 is fun with orbs, and orbs are bonkers, so that's a fun to to look at too. I was able to get a pure gold without many issues. If you're interested in getting the DLC in the hopes that having extra towers/medals will make it easier for you to get medals in the earlier towers: Don't. Yes, chapters 3 and 4 have at least a couple of towers apiece that can be finished with no Sunstones or medals, but these towers are about the same level of difficulty as the last third of the base game (not including Pop Tactical Lord). The rest of the towers in those chapters, as far as I can tell, aren't even completable in Pure Nexus. Seeing some of Team Nexus's posts, I've definitely learned some humility in regards to my own skill level so I know better than to say that it's definitely impossible, but if you're coming at it from the perspective of trying to make earlier towers easier for you, it's better to just assume that it's impossible. That said, if you're already working on the latter parts of the base game and are just interested in having more of that, then you should be perfectly fine with either chapter 3 or 4. Either one scales well with the number of medals you should have by this point. It could be argued that the two "easy" towers in chapter 4 are easier than the two "easy" towers in chapter 3, but due to the presence of orbs, doing well in chapter 4 requires a different kind of approach from most other towers. Team Nexus created a simple, one-floor demo level to illustrate how some of the orbs work; this demo can be downloaded directly from their website. This same demo can be seen in their sample video for chapter 4. I highly recommend downloading that demo and making sure you can beat it before buying chapter 4.
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May 5, 2020 02:42
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Arzaac posted:Having done that, I decided to really take a solid look at Pop Tactical Lord and WHAT? What the hell is going on here!? You only get one chance on each floor, but it doesn't really seem like any of them are decent starting floors. I really don't want to dip in and only do about 25% of a floor before retreating, but I'm not really sure what else I can do. It's possible to get at least a silver medal in Pop Tactical Lord in a Pure Nexus run, at least with 30+ Sunstones. Also, I feel that Pop Tactical Lord is the kind of tower where if you can't figure out how to finish a Pure Nexus run, you're not going to know what to do with your medals in order to finish a non-Pure Nexus run anyway, but maybe that's just me. I will say this, though: My advice to everyone is not to attempt Pop Tactical Lord until you've gotten at least a gold medal in all eleven of the prior towers (Pure Nexus or otherwise). This isn't because you need the medals, but because you need the experience. While most towers limit your options so it's easier to stumble your way into the proper solutions, Pop Tactical Lord is incredibly wide open by comparison. I think you'll have a much easier time if you're already experienced in all of the lessons in strategy that the other towers are designed to teach you, so you'll have a better idea which pathways in Pop just aren't going to work. I might offer some more specific advice for Pop Tactical Lord once more people take a shot at it.
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May 10, 2020 01:43
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I updated the OP to include a list of resources at the beginning, since newcomers probably won't want to have to dig through several pages of the thread before stumbling across the introductory survival guide I created, for example. If anyone else would like to write up a guide or walkthrough worth linking, or they think anything else in particular should be listed there, let me know.Heiji posted:G tower diamond (+1)! I mentioned in the OP that I just keep making new discoveries as I analyze these towers, and it's still true, another ~100 hours later. Heiji posted:If you're looking for good starting nexuses to run, K isn't that bad (and only needs 3 plat medals). You also can get your K gold by playing the nexus a little, which is probably the easiest way to get K gold.
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May 11, 2020 06:11
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Arzaac posted:And at least for me, that requirement feels much easier than the nexus stage requirement for K. You can pretty reasonably get those 8 medals just running through the chapter 1 and 2 towers doing pure nexus; seems like to get more platinum I'll need to do some heavy medal runs. Yeah, although the Nexus Stage itself is easy (compared to other Nexus Stages), getting into it is another issue. Usually the easiest way to get a platinum in a tower is just by dipping into the Nexus Stage long enough to boost your score a bit, then return to the last goal point you reached, but obviously you don't really get access to that option for a while (and it doesn't work with every tower, anyway). Probably the best thing to do is return to towers that you feel you already have a pretty good handle on, for example towers where you have a pure gold already, and just work on optimizing that score with medals. pumpinglemma posted:Team Nexus have put up their Tactical Tower D early walkthough here if people are interested - it's much more newbie-focused than the W one. Even though their tutorials are inconsistent in terms of who their target audience is in terms of skill level, I should probably link to the Team Nexus Youtube in the OP, so I'll go ahead and do that after posting this. Jester Mcgee posted:I’ve gotten bronze or silver in every tower up to W, but I’m finding W super hard. Should I just move on to P or is it time to start going back and actually using these medals instead of doing only pure nexus runs? My notes claim that I got a pure silver on tower W with 0 Sunstones, and I know from more recent plays that a pure gold is possible with enough Sunstones. That said, this is where I reiterate the point that the best thing to do is take whatever path feels most comfortable to you. You learn different things depending on whether you're aiming for Pure Nexus or doing a run with medals, but the things you learn can be carried over into either play style. Same with going back to optimize old towers versus exploring uncharted territory in new towers. But since this game requires patience above all other things, it's important not to let yourself get frustrated with what you're doing. Breaks can be very good. Tower W is hard even if you know what you're doing, though. You start losing stressful amounts of HP somewhere around the middle no matter what you do.
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May 12, 2020 21:50
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pumpinglemma posted:I just tried the ATK -> DEF build that Team Nexus suggested in their walkthrough video for W and failed miserably in the third transition. But it feels like you can't manage a pure gold without being able to kill the final fighters and slashers for zero damage, and going pure DEF from the start seems impossible. The key requirements being so incredibly tight doesn't help matters either. I'll try one more time tomorrow, then say "gently caress it" and move onto medal runs. I've never actually looked at the walkthroughs that Team Nexus has posted, but my understanding is that that particular walkthrough is designed more for diamond-level Nexus Stage play rather than gold-level Pure Nexus play. I imagine the appropriate strategy differs a lot between the two. Case in point, for my own pure gold, I went almost entirely DEF for my level-ups, but this was combined with relying heavily on using keys early and often to boost my ATK. You probably can't really afford to use your keys that early if you're planning on doing the Nexus Stage, but in a Pure Nexus run, you're kinda needlessly wasting HP otherwise. Even if you save up your keys, by the time you can afford to open any of those end-of-tower powerups, there's not really enough enemies left to justify it.
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May 13, 2020 00:27
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pumpinglemma posted:I can see spending red keys fairly liberally, but the blue keys in particular seem like they'd really repay being stingy if I could pull it off. Six of them can be traded in on 14F for a relatively early feather (and access to another feather via red keys), 27 of them can be traded in on 20F for an absolute fuckton of dream drops and continental potions, and then... that's it, unless I miscounted there aren't any more blue keys in the entire tower. And even though you won't get the feathers behind the yellow doors on 19F until towards the end of the tower, considering you'll be killing final fighters and final slashers for zero, that should still mean an awful lot of extra HP levels which will then be doubled by two eternal potions... Tower W pure gold spoilers continued: On Blue Keys: There is still survivability to consider, though. Opening blue doors to open shortcuts to potions in the second segment may not be as great towards your end-game score, but it helps you double your HP to considerably higher levels in the middle of the tower, which is where you really need that HP. You can still reach quite a few of those 20F potions eventually, you just have to wait a while. Also, I've just given up on trading in six Blue Keys for a single Golden Feather. Those keys are just too useful in fulfilling their other purposes, regardless of whether it's a Pure Nexus run or otherwise. Individual Golden Feathers aren't actually worth a whole lot once you're that far into the tower. On Yellow Keys: Even if you save up, there's no way to unlock those Golden Feathers without fighting a bunch of the second-tier yellow Shadows, and there's enough of those around that you should be able to unlock those Feathers at some point even if you do spend the keys more liberally in the earlier parts of the tower. You're only losing out on however much extra experience you would've gained from defeating enough Shadows to make up for the missing keys, that's probably barely enough for a single level, anyway. ...And I got a gold even without getting those feathers. Similar to the Feather behind blue doors, I feel like there's not enough enemies left to justify the expense.
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May 13, 2020 01:07
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