New Blitz Mode Record Score - 3650

Hey Alpha. Good to see you on here.

We truly could not have done it without you!

For those curious about turret placement in our two player run, I whipped up this map with markers for all of the turrets.


(Hosted on my own web space.)

H is for the turrets we kept hacked. I couldn't find a Firebase icon, so it's marked at the top. (It was only there for Gap Shots anyway.) Oh, also, that Longshot in the bottom right corner was useless. I just tried it because I knew a Rockit turret wouldn't hit anything from there.

As I mentioned before, the turret behind the money ball should have been a Rockit turret, and not a Shaveice.

I thought I may as well list the different wave types, and our strategy for each.

From easy to hard:

Slimbots. Three Slimbots come from the two front gates and the two side gates. This is basically a free round. Time for some refreshing bacon!

Scramblers. Two Scramblers from the top two and side two entrances. This is also basically a free round, but the Support should be careful not to get too close, otherwise the hacking rotation will be disrupted.

Bouncers. One Bouncer from each of the top two gates. Get on the other side of the middle Shaveice, and these can be safely ignored.

Slimbot/BlackJack. One Slimbot and two BlackJacks come from the four active gates. You're Rockit turrets shouldn't have any trouble taking out these waves. Also known as the "combo."

Gapshot/Buzzers. One Gapshot and two sets of Buzzers come from the front. The Gapshot can be ignored, as long as you have a Firebase at the front, (which you should.) The Buzzers can be pretty deadly, though. If you can draw them under the front bridge your Rockit turrets should handle them nicely.

Gremlins. A set of Gremlins come from the four active gates. The tank would usually round these up and just Death Blossom a couple of times. The other option is to get them with an ejector.

Black Jacks. Three Black Jacks from each active gate. It is possible for a bot or two to get through if you're not actively dealing some damage on this round. I should also note that at first I was only watching the side gates, letting the Rockit turrets take care of the front. This would prove problematic for Jackbot rounds, because three Black Jacks also come out during that round. We eventually changed it so that I watched the front, and let the turrets take care of the inner bots. This let the Tank be immediately ready to take on a Jackbot round. Speaking of which...

Jackbot. Two Jackbots from up front, and three Black Jacks from the two side entrances. This is the big panic round. The Tank should stay in between the two Jackbots, and Death Blossom them both to death. This is a lot faster and safer to do if you're juiced up, but isn't absolutely required. The worst thing that can happen is getting knocked off the map by a Jackbot. If that happens, the Support either has to stall the Jackbots by jumping in front of them until the Tank spawn again, or hit the Annihilator. If the Jackbots get too close to the money ball (about under the bridge or so) it's very possible that your turrets will focus only on the Jackbots, letting the Black Jacks from the side have their way with your Moneyball.

So, to sum up, the Tanks job was to keep juiced up (which I forgot every now and then, and I'm sure cost us several hits on the Moneyball) and to take out the Jackbots. He should also be spamming Product Grenades at any bots running around. (The stun was invaluable.) Never be complacent! Keep killing bots and spamming grenades! Even a group of Slimbots is worth a Product grenade.

The Support's main job is just to keep his four turrets hacked, and help with bot control during down time. If the tank dies during a Jackbot round, the Support must either kill them with an Annihilator, or stall them until the Tank gets back.

I'm sort of looking forward to someone surpassing us and telling their story as well.

If you have any other questions, let me know!

Like I said earlier.. Great job..

But I will have to tell you guys that your turret setup up was probably the worst I have seen.. Though it did get you far, I feel like you guys probably worked harder than you needed to..

All you need is two shaveIce's and the 4 rocket turrets hacked.. Your tank should be doing most the work... but you don't even have to worry about the side bots.. as long as the tank injures the front bots.. on Jackbot rounds, tank juices, if second round of jackbots come support uses annihilator (tank goes and gets juice), 3rd round of jackbots come support juices and airstrikes and just hops up and, if 4th round of jackbots come then tank has juice... pretty easy... we got through 300 rounds without the ball dropping today.

The back 4 turrets should be longshots to help on jackbots occassionally if something happens and they reach under the bridge.

Great job with the score.. I got to level 2838 by myself with my turret setup, and with a tank it would work even better..

Lol. Worst you've seen?

We did think about other setups. You're concerned we did too much work -- really, there wasn't much to do after you got used to the rounds. I assure you, it was effective. The mistake was the shaveice at the back under the spawn ring. We recognize that. It was a "woops. Oh well, let's keep going."

I looked at your drawing. We experimented with your pattern early on, and decided on our pattern after trial and error (and ruling out your pattern). The locations of our hacked turrets were picked pretty carefully. Our layout offers some advantages over yours: The two central ones cross fire for things coming in the front, and aren't useless on the sides (yours can't hit the side bots) - so instead of having only 3.3 turrets guarding the front, we have the two lvl 3 turrets in front aided by two 3.3 turrets (more bullets in the air).

Moving the two from under the spawn ring to where you have your shaveice turrets gives maximal 3.3 fire time to side-spawning bots (they can see a larger portion of the path at that location). Again, the 3s that are next to the side doors are aided by 3.3s pretty fast. Your drawing looks like they purposely allow things closer to your spawn ring. 'Tis no point in that - kill em earlier.

Also, I'm left wondering why you'd put the firebase where you did. It doesn't look like it can kill the gapshot (I realize your 3.3s in front can... but what if you just happened to not have it hacked for a sec - a 3 can't hit the gapshot). I also imagine that where it is, it would take misc damage, meaning you have to think about babysitting it. Put it on the bench, man - set it and forget it and never worry about gapshots. With our setup, I never had to heal turrets or the fb. I overhealed stuff sometimes, because what else am I going to do, really.

Long story short about turret placement, not only do you want maximal number of bullets in the air, and your strong guns at max fire time (in other words put somewhere they can see more of the path than anywhere else), but you also want a placement that fires at the bots in a responsible way - in other words you don't want to say "why are you firing at that?!?!". Maybe this varies with playstyle, but our setup obviously fit with our pattern.

The buzzers were annoying until we realized all you had to do was go to the bridge and force them to fly under it. Made it easy for the turrets to lock on.

And to think I got to round 175 by myself and was proud haha.

I said good job but though you were a support I was meaning less work for you tank. You guys had a pattern and strategies work different for all.

Though you had the rocket turrets on the side hacked, those are unable to hit jackbots when done killing the blackjacks. The reason the ice turrets are where they are, is because they reach out the side door farther. The black jacks are killed easily with the front moneyball turrets hacked, and then the front two rocket turrets are hacked to help on jackbots and the blackjack rounds after the jackbot rounds that may be hard to kill (if something random went wrong).

The firebase is where it to help to damage longer on any bots that move by it. You don't need to heal it at all really. A good support should have 4 things hacked at all times and not mess up... so the front rockets take care of gapshots.

I was giving you my turret setup because the moneyball should barely ever fall with this setup. I just can't find a partner that would do it for that long with me.

Great job on your score and dedication... I just hope someone can beat my solo 3rd place score

Mental fatigue sets in, and when the mood in the room starts to slip, I've been known to be "wtf, I have only 1 thing hacked? I'm slackin' here!". Since that's what it's all about anyway, mental fatigue, I like the idea of erring on the most forgiving way (thus the fb takes care of the gapshots, and don't depend on me being awake).

We found ourselves spinning around a lot and trying to jump on the turrets from the jump pads, and sliding off. Dumb things just to make the time pass. Keeping the atmosphere fun was pretty important.

Protip: Avoid spinning as fast as possible while bouncing up and down on the jump pads, as it can induce some serious nausea. Or, on second thought, do it, because it's sadistically entertaining. My game setup happens to include a 104" image from a projector. With that, spinning on the jump pads is surreal enough to make you want to puke.

Another random note - the longshots are useless after lvl 60. The bots just move/die too fast. It would happen a lot that the bots would be long gone, and I'd get hit by a random shell from the longshots finally reporting in. They're in the corners of our plan not for usefulness, but simply because the other turret types wouldn't even fire.

I understand how mental fatigue can set in lol... cmon man stay with those hacks...

but yea I woudl put all 4 back turrets as longshots cuz every time the jackbots come out and they pound a shell or two hits them possibly... which helps.. any little bit helps..

I wish I had a person to jump in when I did it solo when I got fatigued. That would have been nice! lol

good stuff

DA: your hack setup doesn't work well solo. Tried it out last night and the Jackbots and blackjack waves after were too much to handle without hacked rockets outside the main door.

Pause game, come back to it later?

Bleh. Well, I'm not on a limb saying it's a totally different game solo . But, you're making me want to play with it. Funny enough, I hadn't done much solo on it. For one thing, dying is pretty catastrophic with 1 person. With the two of us, death was really a non-issue. The XLs would get lucky and send one of us off the map. And, we didn't care, because the other person could fight them off. We were sad when this caused the loss of bacon, but death really didn't cause the MB to drop. (The reality is that I just kept the XLs busy while Pi came back).

We were talking the other day about hatching a real, ernest plan for super sudden death. I think I saw one of the Devs mention the bots are written thru lvl 400ish, after which it becomes stamina based.

I got up to 846 or something yesterday solo after switching up the turret hacks to Grindout's setup. I used your turret setup, but I think I may try out Grindout's ice turret placement, but add one in the middle. I really only lost when I did because I was out of position to get to the annihilator. Dumb mistake on my part.

I want to give a solo tank a try too...I know it will be tough, but just to do something different and die a lot quicker because playing blitz solo 3+ hours gets really old after awhile. I started just running around shotgun grappling everything because I was bored.

Dying isn't too bad solo if you don't die at a horrible time. I died a couple times yesterday on jackbots, but got lucky and only saw one wave...more than one would have definitely crippled my game.

I am glad you are trying to it solo. I spent MANY of solo games perfecting the strategy and turret setup. If people do my setup solo and do well against teh jackbots you can go far... Funny thing is, I got to #3 without an ice turrets in front, and had the messed up ice turret in the back moneyball spot like DA did. I feel having the two front turrets ice help a lot, But from my score you don't need them....

Also playing solo doesn't mean local blitz all the time... tho usually I play local blitz..

im going to do solo assault soon ill let you guys know how it goes.

my record is around 180 i think.