Defense Grid Strategy

[Rik Meleet]

It just dawned on me; how to get a really high score. As high as you want.
Build a maze; kill the first 98 waves juggling and then replace your kill-towers by non-kill towers like temporal. Juggle for 24 hours (or 100 hours if you want to) and collect all that interest.

[barbu1977]

From: http://defensegrid.hiddenpath.com/node/722

"When you play some maps on xbox 360 the interest will keep going for 2 minutes after the last wave, so you have to juggle the last few mobs to get the full interest, it's the difference between 110k and 150k which is huge. "

It seems to be also the case with the PC version

[Shabbaman]

Originally Posted by Rik Meleet

Juggle for 24 hours (or 100 hours if you want to) and collect all that interest.

Sounds like a fun game!

[ProPain]

Originally Posted by Rik Meleet

It just dawned on me; how to get a really high score. As high as you want.
Build a maze; kill the first 98 waves juggling and then replace your kill-towers by non-kill towers like temporal. Juggle for 24 hours (or 100 hours if you want to) and collect all that interest.

That won't work as interest stops when the last wave has hit the field.

And as I don't believe everything the makers tell me, I also tested this a few weeks ago (but not on a grinder map, took a shorter one ) and I juggles using temporals. No interest after last wave.

PC version doesn't have interest for 2 mins after last wave. My grinder attempts only added kills way before 2 mins had passed. And at 2M + scores it's really easy to see the difference between interest increase or the 20G per swarmer.

[Rik Meleet]

True; it doesn't work.

[Rik Meleet]

Originally Posted by ProPain

the promised pics

Also I now never upgrade damage dealing towers above yellow. Different for temporal and command. Command needs to go red asap, temporal is best at red because it makes the killzones slower compared to non killzone pathing. This basically creates a trap in the killzone which makes juggling easier and deals more damage

I beat your score with about 30k.

I only build 2 green guntowers on the East platform and I kept my 4 concussiontowers on the south platform green. The temporal, command and inferno tower were red. And I increased the length of the path in the west slightly.

Dark blue: green guntower
Light blue: juggle guntower
Yellow: red inferno tower
White: green concussion tower
Red: Red command tower
Green: red Temporal tower

[Beorn]

2 quick realizations:

1. Concussion towers don't deal damage at random, they deal steady dps in their aoe. This is particularly useful when dealing with red shields since hitting any shield will hurt the shield cover equally. Every other map I'll start with green laser + green concussions instead of the cookie cutter mass guns - because it works evenly.

2. Inferno towers are best used when aligned with their outgoing lane. If you drop the yellow dot to the spot directly south from it, it will never have to move when changing targets, always keeps firing in a straight horz/vert line away from it. Doesn't work quite as well against yellow decoys though unless you have a command to reveal the hidden pack.

[Beorn]

Btw I tried that build on Story mode and nearly hit 100K (I did upgrade a lot more towers too, to make juggling less of a bore). I easily could have done 150K if I had had the patience you did.

[ProPain]

improved last stand grinder to 2694843. Due to a mistake I lost 2 cores in the last wave so that cost me 4K points but I couldn't be bothered to rerun the last 10 waves.

Basically I adopted Rik's 1 killzone model but kept the meteor from my setup and kept a shorter path in the west part of the map. Also skipped the 2 concussion towers on the S platform that weren't part of the maze. I did however upgrade all concussion to yellow.

I'm convinced that you need yellow towers in your damage zone.

1 yellow equals 3 green towers.
yellow conc upgrade = 550, at 75% resell this costs you: 137,5
juggling costs something between 1 or 2 towers depending if you need to build a 2nd blocking tower to force a turn around. I think you need to do this more often than not so 1 juggle is close to 2 * 100 * 25% = 50 gold

basically 137,5/50= <3
cheaper to upgrade than to have 3 more juggles. You'll have 3 more juggles at least on your last wave, but as you have to start juggling sooneer I think your lucky if you get away with 10 extra juggles.

10 juggles = 500 gold which is close to 4 conc yellow upgrades.

Also there's the interest issue.
UPgrading a tower means losing interest on the 550 gold per tower. This will actually add up quite a bit, but is partly offset by killing mobs sooner which gives you more interest than a slower kill.

I did some calculations and killing quicker in the early waves does really add up. Killing the first wave 1 interest tick earlier wil add up to 575 extra gold over the entire grinder run. getting 2 interest ticks extra on that 1st wave will get you about 1150 gold.

Even though waves get bigger in the late game, interest obviously becomes less of an issue. Getting 1 extra interest tick on the much bigger 50th wave will amount to about 36 gold extra. Not worth upgrading for.

Fiddling around with the tower upgrades might be worth it. I'll try some more runs later and keep you posted.

[Rik Meleet]

PP: good score.

I knew skipping the 2 non-maze concussion towers would increase the score. Why did you shorten the West - it leads to more jugling thus higher cost ?

Do you sell your towers at the end ?

I think interest is more than 550; because you also get interest over the interest.