I don’t recall to be honest. I’m always searching out TD games when I start to get bored but this was a while ago, so I’m thinking that this was right after Defense Grid because I had such a great time with it (DG is what got me off of Desktop Tower Defense).
I found it because I noticed a Steam friend playing it all the time and he had over 200 hours in, so I checked it out. Steam friends has been a great way to find games for me.
I found Gemcraft on Kongregate a long time ago. It was a top-rated TD game there. I spent a lot of time playing it then, which is the only reason I haven’t played Chasing Shadows much.
Can’t beat that price!
If only I could remember my password…
For the life of me, how do you close the game? I hit ESC and do not see a button to quit the game and have looked in the Tutorial for a keyboard command.
I play in window, so I just hit the normal Windows close button. Or “exit” on the main menu. Guess I don’t understand what you are asking?
I could not find the exit game button. I thought it would appear if I hit the escape key.
But as soon as I wrote my question I finally discovered you have to hit return to main window and then you can hit exit.
Am I correct in thinking that you you can go back to a field to beat a higher difficulty only when you have unlocked it on another field? I am going to have to re-read Tman’s suggestions above!
From previously in this thread…you unlock difficulties on special fields.
Glaring and Haunting Difficulty
Yet another way is to unlock Glaring and Haunting difficulty. Glaring is unlocked at field K4. Haunting is unlocked at T4, but only if you complete Q6 on Looming.
Question:
If I have more than one gem in my inventory and I use the shift key method would that bomb the wave with all the gems in the inventory? I am assuming it does.
It doesn’t bomb ALL the gems, but I recall being very careful of how my inventory is filled as I would sometimes “win” a gem and I didn’t realize it showed up in my inventory, and then I’m happily gem-bombing and the SHIFT is grabbing this new gem - which is typically way above a level 1 to replicate & bomb.
It has something to do with the position of the gem in the inventory I can’t recall if it’s the left-most gem, or the top-most gem, but will become evident when you gem-bomb. Look at how much it enrages. Higher level gems don’t give more enemies, but it enrages them more, making them way tougher + more armor, which has led to many a demise for me when I didn’t realize the 50 gem bombs I just used to enrage were a level 12 instead of a level 1.
When crafting a gem does it matter that much how much of each type you put in if you are only worried about the effect on a trap? For example am I better off with one red chain hit and two poison? Or should it be in equal amounts?
I have been trying to experiment but it is hard to tell if there is a huge difference (I am presently at level 89 - so maybe it doesn’t matter until I am higher up).
It matters. If you put a level 8 poison gem in with a level 1 slow gem, the slowness effect will be minimal, to the point where you shouldn’t even bother. I am really rusty, but you should be able to see all the strengths in the tool tips, so experiment and then look at the results. I tended to to build gems which were about 60-40 in favor of the main effect I wanted.
I know it’s a crappy way to learn a game, but I learned a ton by watching YouTube videos. Not the guys who use a program to make perfect gems so much, but just to get some tips and see how other people do things.
I have been watching videos too, but the problem is that most of them are way higher level than me. Or if they build a gem they really do not explain why they are doing it. Waervyn’s stuff is the best that I have found so far.
I played less than ideal. If I was going to make a 50/50 gem between two colors I would start with two of each color level ones gems. Combine each like color so that I have 2 level-2 gems of each color. Duplicate each gem, then combine the like colors again. Repeat until I had two level 4 gems of one color. Finally combine those two to give me a level 5 two color gem. Them I would create a level 5 gem of the primary effect color I wanted and combine that with the two color gem I just made. If I wanted to improve it, I would duplicate it and combine. As I needed more of that kind of gem in other places I would duplicate it so I didn’t have to start from scratch.
If I was in a rush I would just start with higher level gems, but if you compare the two, the tedious build I used starting at level 1 was the more powerful gem.
As I said, I am sure my way was “wrong” but it worked for me.
Actually what you are describing is called gem weaving by Waervyn. I have been doing that somewhat. I just never added the primary color at level 5. I will give that a try.
This game looks interesting so I picked it up because it’s on a huge discount right now. I started to play it but then realized I had no idea what I was doing. I put it down and will pick it up again once I have the patience to do some research on how to actually play properly.
FWIW, it kind of releases it’s mechanics to you at a deliberate pace, not all at once. That said, if you lack familiarity with the series a good beginner’s guide is a good idea. It’s a wonderful TD game IMO. Chasing Shadows is one of the genre’s finest but I loved them all.
That’s probably where I learned it from. I read/watch some guides and the amount of work some people put into making a gem was just far too complicated to me (or they used the program to make gems). I just started playing around and seeing how the results differed. That is kind of what I love about the game though, as a casual player (who played it a lot), I didn’t let it bother me, just played on difficulty levels that challenged me, but I could still beat if I tried. I was never good at most of the puzzle type levels where you are restricted to what you can use.
Once you can make a good mana farm though, the game does get a lot easier. Pretty much every map becomes “where can I fit a farm in?”