This is not anything new, just a demonstration that without a massive maze and an army of archers you can still defend a Level X Purge easy and safe.
Because as a player in a public server, you want to save public resources for the benefit of all, and
Less thralls + Smaller Bases = Better Performance for All
Layout
Doorway with Foundation Bait → Entrance with Cauldron → Player’s Platform as Meat Grinder → Backyard with Treasure and Guardians
Personnel & Usefulness
Cauldron - : Placed right above the entrance, slows everything down
Burning Cauldron - : low damage, but can reveal thieves
Fighters - : Your most reliable comrades
Archers & Archer Posts - : Useless.
the Player - : You are the One Man Army
Ok, let’s get started. with subtitles.
(there’s also a personal reason behind it - my neighbor built a HUGE treasure house with 40-ish people guarding it. He summons several purges every night. Every time he does it, I can’t enter my own house nearby cos nothing renders. I wanna let him know a smaller setup can also do the job just fine)
I suggest to make 100 levels and after level 10 it should simply state “You are about to get destroyed, do you want to continue?”
Then content creators have something to chew on that generates tons of content.
Let it literally take several months before people can figure out how to beat a level 100 purge with a 10 man team armed to the teeth behind a 25 layer base protected by 100 thralls.
Thats it, thats all they have to do to give players enough pve content for an entire year.
People want a challenge, right now the purge is just funny for a solo experienced pve /pvp player, imagine 4 or 5 experienced players together…
Great video, you just totally destroyed all these forum users who demand thrall numbers to be higher and thralls themselves to be buffed as their legions are too weak to stop the purge.
Thanks!
Skills aside, I think it’s also a playstyle thing.
Some people prefer to play the “commander” role and sit in their throne, watching their army fight. It’s ok if they are on single player.
But on a public server, please don’t. It’s another way of over-build.
Well executed.
However, you left out how significant the placement of your base was.
Indestructible choke point and canopy defense.
The Lemurian ruins you built in funneled the purge for you as much as your build and further ensure meteor mages are not relevant threats.
Location is extremely utile and there are few places on either map that offer so much natural advantage.
As for proving anything…
There were far too many jumps and cuts in the video for it to be taken as anything other than a showcase.
You were fortunate that the explosive golem wave came when it did and that they didn’t glob up.
Part of that was good proactive defense in your part… But it was also good luck.
Very good use of the non explosive golems as xp fodder for thralls.
It looked like most of the time, the enemy got stuck on the corpse piles and just stood there excavating their noses for hidden treasures.
Anytime that sort of situation hits on this one’s games, the purge just gives up.
One other use of the bringing cauldrons is they reveal Thieves. Invisible thieves take damage and are now seen. Same could be accomplished with some gas arrows as well (from the player, not a volley from thralls).
Given how close the Stygian base spawns to your neighbours, how often does it not have a path or cancel midway?
It’s definitely an advantage, but not a necessity.
Of course you can’t build in a huge, flat, empty place and expose yourself to the raiders. You can build at the foot of a hill, or on top of a ramp for example, then you will have good control of where they come from.
Then, you build your own choke points with foundations, pillars, fences, because nobody except Explosive Heads care about them. Those huge mazes work the same way, I just shortened the route.
As for Meteors, yes, canopy comes in handy. But if you can spot the star caller early enough like I did in my video, you can prevent it. It’s hard and dangerous and I don’t recommend it. In fact, I don’t recommend taking a level 9~10 purge at all. Their rewards seem to be the same as level 7~8
I have the “full-length uncut footage” of it if you will. But I assure you it’s much more boring. You will see archers stuck at the entrance for a lot of the times.
Purges bug out for no reason. But that never happens to me.
What actually happened to me, and very a wierd one, was when a thief successfully picked any lock, no matter it’s a door leading to the treasure room or your bedroom, the purge would immediately consider their target unreachable.
I never built doors after that, only door frames.
Good Good. I will reconsider the usefulness of burning cauldrons.
The ven diagram of places that can be built for good defense and the places where a purge will successfully spawn is not particularly overlapping.
You have the principles of pathing to be certain, but actually applying them is far trickier depending on how finicky the Stygians are being. Sometimes this one has to trigger a purge multiple times for one to actually take. Two responses of no path, but on the third try, here comes the snakes.
This one isn’t implying you are engaged in duplicity.
Just noting that any video that has jumps, cuts, and doesn’t confirm that the participant isn’t in admin mode can be a good demonstration of principle, but cannot carry more weight. As for the long form being boring, of course it is boring. The choke point is doing it’s job and any time funnels or blocking terrain is doing heavy lifting it is going to be boring because, tactically, that’s what they do, they slow the advance and control the pace. If it’s boring, the defensive counter measures are doing heavy lifting and indicates a well orchestrated defense.
It is good that it exists, keep it in the back pocket in case anyone watches thru and calls shenanigans.
That said, as for the purge not bugging out…
You just demonstrated that it did. It just didn’t give up. Enemies standing there, not attacking, that’s buggy. Not a purge specific bug, but still bugging out, and the raw density of the action possibly contributes.
It would be a lie to say there isn’t some envy of your lack of purges packing up and going home.
Good lead on thieves and doors, this one will definitely give that a go and see if that improves Stygian Morale.
May this one inquire what platform you are on?
While hypothetically the purge should play out the same on all… Perhaps there are variances.
This one assumes PC.
Yeah, you are right about the bugged out.
I encounter this more frequently in Single Player. I think it’s because my PC is weaker in handling a large number of AI than a server.
Let there be Shenanigans, I ain’t scared.
Cheaters are rampant on my server.
Shenanigans or not, it’s just a matter of time before I lose everything.
archers are EXTREMELY usefull in the right circunstances, devide and conquer (tip i will add)
your two purges you got lucky there with golems, i did liked a few ideas with how you set up your spear attack, also hard for archers to reach you, but in the right circunstances, they could over run you.,
Of course, but I don’t think 5 archers alone will defeat a purge, which is what I am trying to demonstrate here - a minimalistic design which uses as few as thralls possible and takes up less server resources.
That’s also true, because it’s the player who decide win or lose. Some careless mistakes can cost you everything. However, through many trials and errors, it’s safe to say this specific design is relevantly safe if you stay vigilant all the time. If a huge group of Head Hunters & Golems come in at the same time, take out your star metal spear, stand your ground, keep them at bay and forget about those goddarn unleveled thralls, then you’ll be fine.
I also later built two more foundation baits so no more explosive heads did slip through.
You are welcomed to try mine
The result may surprise you~
(you don’t even need 5 for a Level 8 Purge or lower)
Explosive heads won’t explode if you don’t kill them.
You leave them hanging while they are busy chopping the foundation baits with their hammers til the purge is over.
As for the other golems, I am not the only one with star metal weapons, two out of the five guards also have star metal weapons that can 1-hit them.
That is another one you can chuckle in the “Iron Manning” bucket.
It may come as a shock to the people who are in the other side of the argument, but most people dont really want to “work” in a game.
Sure, maybe some people would find it “amusing” to have to once or twice know the number of specific weapons and thrall builds plus terrain and buildings to do a purge, but most people, they want to smash buttons or not even, and loot.
People talk about “that game” as if it was hard. That game is not hard, it just requires someone to not think in terms of raw damage. Once you do, it is as easy as most games are.
The history of game development is full of examples of “complex game” flops, because even the people who keep asking for higher level of complexity come to regret it later.
I am sure half of the people who ask for a more complex purge would not beat one.
Think about it:
It is easier to the developer to make harder enemies than easy ones. Machines only makes mistakes you program them to. Almost all problems with enemy AI, even in CE, comes from the implementation of mechanics to make them beatable.
Static NPCs that cant attack: The result of a mechanism that prevents them from attacking each X seconds so they can be attacked.
“Turn-base-ish combat flow”: A form of preventing async free combat to be unfair to humans, as the machines dont need to wait to see/hear something to know it is happening, and they have unlimited number of things they can process inside the game world. Players probably stop registering by the third concurrent cue being offered.
Non-Teamwork combat: Players on average will not process teamwork with their NPCs over the go/stay/flee pipeline, while NPCs could flank, wall, turtle, tictac, blob, wave, recoil deciding by the second.
It would be exceedingly easy, and mostly a matter of simpler code, to make complex mechanics to put WoW mythic to shame. And it would work better. Games dont do it because your average “theorycrafter” cant handle it.
Game developers learned it long ago when trying to make games popular and facing what people actually said about difficult in games…
I still demand more thralls, otherwise all the stuff I build looks empty and desolate. I am fine with thralls being weak as they are it has become more fun to play, asides from me only being interrupted by enemies a bit too much.
: Useless.
