Has this been posted before?

http://www.kongregate.com/games/gameinabottle/gemcraft

I remember seeing it on monkly-business.net here:
http://www.monkly-business.net/forums/showthread.php?p=232655
I don't remember if it was posted here. The original link was: http://armorgames.com/play/1716/gemcraft

Fun game, though. Very well done. I just barely managed to max out all of the abilities, which requires level 93 (288 million points).

Basic strategy was:
Level 1-22: Play conservatively. Complete as many levels as possible without pushing for high scores.
Level 23-39: Max out "Powerful gem bombs". Redo early levels, sending all waves (or at least the first 20 or so) at once, and kill them using nothing but gem bombs. Use mostly grade 1 gem bombs, especially at the start.
Level 40 on: Get lots of ranks of "Number of high grade starter gems". Place the high grade bombs and then send the first 20 or so waves.

Also, don't bother mixing gem colors; I used pure gems exclusively.

What do you do when you get a gem color that you can't mix for something pure? Seems expensive to toss it.

Well, there's a tradeoff to be made. You have two basic options for making a high grade gem:
* You can buy a high grade gem directly, and take your chances on the color. It'll be pure, but possibly not the type you want.
* You can buy a bunch of low grade gems, selectively combine the ones you want to produce high grade gems, and use the rest as gem bombs. This gives you more control but costs extra mana.

My approach was typically somewhere in the middle. Usually I buy gems of the same grade as an existing gem already in use, then combine a new gem with an existing gem once I get a color match. If I get the wrong color, I use it to replace a much lower grade gem in a different tower.

Also, you don't typically need high grade gems until late in the game. The main advantage of high grade gems is their ability to hit enemies with high armor (along with avoiding the escalating costs of building additional towers).

The skills that you earn (based on the sum of your high scores) will help significantly. Once you've earned a few skills you can start pushing for high scores, which come from completing levels as quickly as possible--you get a large bonus for sending waves early.

Also important is to use the "Mana Pool" ability as often as you can afford to. It'll increase your mana earned, max mana, and points earned exponentially. Check out the mana pool here:

Do you gain the same mana if you fast forward between waves or click on the next wave to bring it immediately?

If you fast forward you get the same time-based mana, I think, but no point bonus (or a small bonus, if any).
If you click to send waves early, you miss out on time-based mana, but you get a significant point bonus.

Sending the waves all at once clusters the mobs together, which is useful for gem bombs and red (splash) gems.

I went back and tried the first couple of levels on a new game. It turns out that bombing runs are effective from the start, even without the skill that boosts gem bomb damage.

Wow, it's just absurd how much the high level starter gems help.

How did you win the crazy all green secret level?

edit: Nevermind. I hadn't tried it since getting powerful starting gems. Too easy.

Wow, it's just absurd how much the high level starter gems help.

How did you win the crazy all green secret level?

edit: Nevermind. I hadn't tried it since getting powerful starting gems. Too easy.


Yeah the green poison bonus level is tough until you get high level starting gems. I found out I maxed out all my skills at level 88.

Yup, those high grade starter gems make it very easy to win most levels. But that alone won't get you high scores--you need to be sending 20+ waves at once at the start. (I think my best is 30 waves at the start; even on the red splash level I was unable to send all 40 and still win. I should go back and try again...)

If you play on the Armor Games website, it takes level 93 to max out all skills, since you have the "armor" skill available (which is locked on the Kongregator site, for some reason).

I got the glowing frame on them all by just using the high level starters, and not fooling with the bombs (too much work). Pretty much happened without me even trying, long as I kept on top of the mana pool increases, to keep the score increasing fast.

Was kinda disappointed nothing happened when I got them all.

Getting glowing frames is what opens up the "secret" levels (the single-color 40 wave ones).

In many cases you can nearly double the glowing frame score, though. I just went back and did the secret red one, sending all 40 waves at once--which I previously hadn't been able to do--and got a score of 8.4 million, for example. The secret orange one is another good one, since you can rack up a ridiculous amount of mana.

Yeah, same here. I got a few 10m+ scores, just placing the level 6 gems and then using that early time to focus on mana/score upgrades. It was like discovering compound interest all over again.

I was hoping for some extra bonus after I glowing framed all the levels and secret levels though.

UGH. So I've gotten the glowing frame on the first few, got to level 27, and either have the green bonus level or the epic boss as the only available ones and can't beat either. Every wave but the last one in the epic boss is easy, he I can barely get below 50% hp before he gets to my hut thing. The green one I can't even get past the 7th wave.

Sometimes it helps to respec.

If you can't kill an epic boss in one route, try to plan ahead and save enough mana to let it run twice.

Also critical is loading up on purple gems for that first pass. Armor reduction effects are cumulative; epic bosses start with very high armor, but once the armor is reduced to 0 they take a lot of damage quickly. (Click on the mob to see its armor, hp, etc.) Even grade 1 purple gems will be effective if you have enough of them.

In the case of the final epic boss, it took me 4 passes. I had to save up mana from about 10 waves to do that. (It's not quite as bad with the armor ability, but you can't buy that on the kongregate version of the game.)

Do Amulets do anything?

No.

Finally beat that epic. Somehow managed to kill it w/o him doing another lap, too. Just took me upgrading a few towers a lot and getting lucky on buying gems (lots of purples helped).

So what does dual color mastery or whatever that is called do?

Makes the two color gem combinations less dilute.

Oh, I never use 2 colored gems. Maybe I should consider it now.

What's the highest score you guys can get on level 1?

I got I think 860,000 at work today. I'll check for you tomorrow.

just got 905,820 on first level

1,134,200.

What are you doing to get that? I'm clicking mana as soon as it lights up, killing as few as i can with bombs to trigger the mana without killing too many. I'm making all 8 come at the same time.

Check the banishment cost of a single mob, then compare it with how much mana you regen in the time that it takes for the mob to make one complete trip. :)

And here I thought my 917,510 was good.

Maybe this will help...

so you just leave some up and let them keep running and running and running?

And how long do you sit there to let one keep running and running? lol

The most important thing is to not buy a mana upgrade with at least 20 points to spare right before the monster cycles through...
/sigh

After letting it go and go for 2 hours, I have to start all over. What a bummer LOL.

Haha, I did that last night too, but got tired of waiting and killed it with "only" 500k mana pool. Didn't even break 1m.

Either I'm doing it wrong, or it's going to require more patience than I can devote to a flash game.

Haha, I did that last night too, but got tired of waiting and killed it with "only" 500k mana pool. Didn't even break 1m.

Either I'm doing it wrong, or it's going to require more patience than I can devote to a flash game.

That's what I'm gathering from palarran. Which sucks, I want to see what score I can get, but I enjoy 'playing' the game too instead of letting it run in the background.

Check out some of the other games by these same guys (Game in a Bottle). They all follow a similar leveling scheme and are more fun than grinding out the diminishing returns of the gem game.

The problem with this particular challenge is specific to the early levels.

What I was trying to point out is that a substantial part of my score came from the fixed-sized bonuses at the end of a level:

Throw 75 gem bombs: +20k
Create 125 gems: +30k
Combine 75 gems: +40k
Create 7 grade 7 gems: +80k
Build 9 towers: +40k
Kill 60 monsters in a row: +22.5k

These bonuses are significant compared to the points you can earn normally in level 1. Two of them (Create 7 grade 7 gems, Combine 75 gems) require the use of a lot of mana, though building up to a 500k mana pool turned out to be overkill; the score bonus is pretty negligible when applied to a single mob.

On higher levels, these bonuses are relatively insignificant compared to the regular score, plus you should be well on your way to achieving most of these bonuses anyway. Creating 125 grade 1 gems and throwing 75 of them as bombs costs 2,625 mana, and gives you quite a bit of damage in the process. Building 9 towers costs 560 mana. You can combine your four grade 6 gems into two grade 7 gems for 270 mana (40k points); you might be able to use remaining high and mid grade gems to create another two grade 7 for an additional 20k points.

Also, the trick of having more mana regen than it costs to continually banish a mob will be much more difficult to pull off on higher levels, since the banishment cost increases but mana regen doesn't. I suppose you could intentionally avoid killing one low level mob, but that requires all your damage to come from gem bombs, which is very difficult on levels with more than 30 or so waves.

(Edit: Not sure why I was obsessed with the word "substantial" today...)

So here are alternate challenges that should be more fun:

Highest score on the red (splash) secret level? (Mine is 8,438,670)
Highest score on the orange (steal mana) secret level? (Mine is 8,624,080)

No tricks used like with the first level.

I understand what you were saying about the first one, but i have to let it cycle and cycle and cycle and cycle before I can place all the extra towers, buy the gems, etc.

I'll check my high scores on the red and orange sometime on Monday after I am done letting the first level cycle.

Two box it!

Red -- 8,872,570
Orange -- 8,073,170

Red: 8,129,850 (edit: That's better)
Orange: 8,172,070

8,625,600 on red. Getting closer...

left 1 running at work and have been remoting in to spend mana on mana pool increases every few hours. my mana pool is now up over 150,000,000,000

Heh, I was wondering if it would overflow at 2^32.

373 billion now

I broke the mana bar after hitting the mana pool thing again at 183 trillion mana.

If you guys haven't seen it, there's another of these out now:

http://armorgames.com/play/3527/gemcraft-chapter-0

Seems harder.

Definately harder.