Hi everyone,
The competition has ended and I am happy to announce our winners!
🥇 chuckjirka 40590
🥈 Tobbzn 16390
🥉 Kn1nJa 11438
Congratulations to our top 3 competitors! These scores are once again amazing.
Winners will receive the following rewards:
• 🥇 Design a new card, curio, shape, event or elite modifier with me
• 🥇🥈🥉 Name or nickname permanently added to the source code of the game
• 🥇🥈🥉 Role competition-winner with bragging rights on this Discord server until the next competition
Our winners were kind enough to provide us with some insights into their strategy:
🥉Kn1nJa🥉
"My strategy was to focus on lucid towers as they have more module capacity and range. Then I made sure to get a decent amount of extra energy and card draw. The main source of damage came from collector and wealth, with wealth doing a majority because I saved my credits up. Then as always, moon was invaluable."
🥈Tobbzn🥈
"I've experimented with many new builds recently; enrage, poison, and overload have all earned my respect. I used to think only Frost and Moon could be relevant, but my runs with that combo didn't actually get as high as my moon and overload run, which is the one that got 16k. While I think the perfect moon and frost run probably beats this score on a shapeless damage sponge, I think Overload is going to be more reliable on regular stages."
🥉chuckjirka🥉
"Once again moon and frost were the best options, frost basically increases the amount of time it takes the shape to travel, which allows all the other towers to shoot it more. When you stack frost like this, you actually get an exponential damage boost to all the towers in range to shoot at the shape, which is what makes frost so powerful, and moon is the only current way to boost frost tower's attack speed. This makes a good balance and placement of frost and moon towers the best way to maximize frost stacking.
Since the player can only draw 5 (or 6 with extended vision) cards per turn, and only has 3 mana (or 4 with one mana boosting curio, or 5 with 2 mana boosting curios, in which case they can no longer have extended vision), the maximum amount of cards a player can play while having enough of a choice to not have very poor placement and cycle through core cards fast enough is 32, since 4 mana with extended vision is fairly manageable, and there are only 8 waves. An alternative that I mentioned that could surpass this limit would be infinite mana through reshuffling with 2 change target cards, 5 other cards in deck and energy recycler + extended vision, but that would require the right 2 specific curios and a lot of card removals, not even mentioning the right cards to make a good use of the mana. That setup could probably beat the shapeless completely, but it is way too unlikely to happen. Since the more realistic setup allows only 32 cards to be played, and our strategy is built around elemental towers, we can only place 16 towers. Fortunately, each of the 2 spaces for towers in the shapeless boss fight layout had just enough space to fit 16 towers. The best way to place those towers is to have as many towers attacking the shapeless at the same times while applying as many frost stacks; the standard strategy of prolonging the path by tower placement is simply inferior to more frost stacks at once.
That led me to this tower placement. Behind the score is hidden another frost tower. the placement in this case wasn't actually ideal, because I had way too many damage boosts in my deck, but the goal was to stack as many frost towers at one place and supports them from the sides with moon towers. This maximized the amount of frost stacks by giving all the frost towers as much attack speed as possible and making the all share similar range. as for actually getting a good deck and curios, card removal was definitely a must have. In fact this run I didn't manage to get credit extractor, a credit boosting minor curio, and only got a credit generating card, which still helped a lot with card removals, but it wasn't enough to get rid of more damage mods. The towers I aimed for were primarily slingshot towers; the reason for that was that they are the only high range tower with the highest high range attack speed without increased mana cost. Rapid fire towers could also be used near the path, but I didn't get them in this run so I settled for slingshot only. As for the moon towers, as long as it's high range and low cost, anything worked.
That's about it, as you can see I placed 15 elemental towers, which adds up to 30 mana, and I applied 2 damage mods to the bottom right moon tower, a total of 32 mana."
I very much enjoyed the competition and would look forward to organizing one again in the future. Should something change for future competitions? Let me know in the comments.
Enjoy!
Alexander