Help with The Pit

[pendell]

Well, just finished the pit on medium after 8 tries. I found the strategies given here required some … adjustment.

 

I lost 5 of 8 times due to the airborne enemies, and the other 3 times they were serious contributing factors. In earlier missions I had dealt with them using a combination of line lasers and beam turrets, but in the Pit there is no particularly easy place to use a line laser.  I attempted to set up a network of beam turrets to defeat them.

 

This did not work, because beam turrets are simply too expensive. I’ve not mastered the technique of farming money, and entered wave 119 with just $23.   While I would welcome suggestions, I’m not convinced I want to make the game run longer than it does already — some 2 hours 23 minutes to complete this scenario.  Also, I didn’t grind. While I did repeat some levels because I lost, I never repeated a scenario purely for the sake of grinding.  My commander was level 11, and so did not have access to Plasma Rain.

 

Because of this, I couldn’t just throw down beam turrets wherever I needed them.   The turrets only become capable of engaging multiple targets at the highest ($600) upgrade, and I needed that money for other things.

 

The solution, I found, was the guided missile turret. I had previously ignored it because it only engages air targets, and when not at maximum upgrade can also engage only one target at a time, just like the beam turret. So the beam turret is a better buy not-upgraded, because it can engage both air and ground targets and does more damage.   But in this case, when I’m being swarmed by air enemies, it was just too expensive.

 

I needed something to kill lots of air enemies at once, and I found the solution last night in the guided missile turret.  It’s final upgrade is $300, half the price of the beam turret, and it can engage up to 6 enemies at a time!

 

So I solved the level using lots of artillery and guided missiles. Both are extremely effective at full upgrade and can actually do terrible things to bosses as well.    So a combination of artillery/guided missiles/sniper/booster/slow/aerial slow saved the day.

 

This is what I did:

 

 

First few waves: Save up money and build two artillery units in the back (near the base) and one fully upgraded missile turret forward where the paths join.  When I saw that turret buzzsaw the first few air waves I knew I had my answer.

 

Add an aerial slow to support the beam turret.

 

Add repair and energy drones.

 

The waves around 40 to 60 were the toughest, because I did not yet have a solid defensive network. I needed to use the Sentinel weapons, which meant I had to really leverage the Aurora armor’s capability to regenerate energy quickly.   Turret repair plus napalm kept me in action.

 

After the artillery and missile are upgraded, add a sniper turret.  My air defense are being overwhelmed so add two more missile turrets up front.

 

From this point on my defenses are : guided missiles up front, artillery and snipers in the back. I fall into a schedule of adding 2 artillery, 1 sniper, 1 missile turret, repeat.

 

I try to build the artillery and snipers in  a square formation so I could plunk a booster in the middle and increase their firepower further.

 

About wave 65 the front barriers went down and I had to concentrate defenses around my base. I built a slow in the lower left hand corner of the pit and added two fully upgraded missile turrets directly to its north and east (anything less than a fully upgraded missile turret is a waste).

 

By wave 119 I had: 5 artillery batteries , 4 snipers,  6 guided missile turrets, 2 aerial slows, 1 ground slow, and 3 boosters, only 2 of which were fully upgraded. I wanted to support the front guided missiles with a booster as well but ran out of time and money — they were needed for other things.

 

The trickiest wave is around 107 when the last amphibious wave comes out. I had previously lost 1 of my 8 tries by using napalm on this wave and was thoroughly depressed when it had almost no effect at all.   So I used turret energizer instead, and the artillery coupled with the snipers cleaned them up in a hurry.   Once I had enough turrets turret energizer replaced aerial laser as my go-to last resort in difficult boss waves. I only used aerial laser once in the entire run, around wave 85 or so to wipe out that pesky egg in the NW corner. For some reason it seems to upgrade its damage potential as time goes on, an a single hatched egg could take a big chunk of health out of my final barrier.  So I wiped it, but after that stuck mostly with turret energizer and turret repair, although the wall was solid enough I really didn’t need it until about wave 107 or so.  I also wound up using napalm on the last airborne wave.

 

I was a bit disappointed to see the behemoth on wave 120 — the game built it up as a special one of a kind enemy, which did prove somewhat difficult to kill in scenario 13 (I had saved up aerial laser for the occasion, and was disappointed to see it didn’t work at all), and to see it again detracted from the achievement of killing it last time.  Anyway, when I realized the artillery couldn’t touch it I sold all my artillery units and replaced them with snipers, within range of my fully upgraded booster towers when feasible.   About 7 sniper towers, 5 or 6 guided missile turrets, and turret energizer killed it and ended the level.

 

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Author]

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