Woohoo, I beat Supreme Art of Defense!
The custom map Art of Defense is all the rage these days on GPGnet (sorry Zone Control). It is widely liked for how difficult it is. You can be a really good player and still need multiple tries to figure it out (like I saw when playing with Unconquerable), because it’s quite different than the standard game. But, last, night, I finally beat it, mostly as a result of several rounds of trial-and-error figuring out how to get the requisite defenses just in the nick of time for the arrival of the next round.
You can download the replay (v3254) if you want to see how it’s done. Note that the replay goes on for over nine hours, though. Every twenty rounds everything repeats, only harder, and I just set up a huge base and left it on over night, during which time I died at some point, but not before accumulating a score of over 20,000. I will admit to cheating in the later rounds; having used up all of the space behind my defenses in my own lane, I started putting artillery and mass fabricators in another lane, so if you really want to be nitpicky, I didn’t earn a clean score of 20,000+. But the basic strategy at the beginning, and how I survived the early waves, is all legitimate.
The map is fun because it introduces a nifty gameplay dynamic that isn’t present in most maps: the majority of your mass income (until the endgame) comes from reclaiming the dead husks of the attacking units that you kill. The map is extremely low mass, and you need all the mass you can get. I frequently had to scramble my engineers in between rounds to go out there and reclaim some husks, then move them off to the side so that they could survive the next round. A lot of newbie players don’t seem to understand the importance of this tactic, so you’ll see newbies hosting the game with double resources mod and prefab bases turned on. In this replay here the first player to go down thinks I forgot to turn on prefab bases (as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be played) and is astounded when two of us make it through all the way to the end.
Version 5 of Supreme Art of Defense just came out today. I don’t know what changes it makes. But if the normal version isn’t hard enough for you (and really, once you’ve figured out how to beat it once, you can beat it any number of times), there’s always the Elite version, which was recently uploaded to The Vault. As far as I know, nobody’s managed to beat it yet, but a lot of people are trying.
June 17th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
I’ve tried this map three times in skirmish and haven’t been able to do anything worthwhile. I think I made it to the 5th round once but my PDs got ripped to shreds by the MMLs, and by then I was completely out of resources.
June 17th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
The basic version seems super easy for me now…. I am not sure why I died in that game. I still haven’t beat elite.
June 17th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Got to mavor on elite…. Then it killed my hq.
June 17th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
There’s a replay of Unconquerable dominating the elite version of the map. Or atleast I think that was the elite version.
June 17th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
I love this map. In the future i would like to see maps like this come with an indicator for what will be coming in the next wave. It may seem like it takes the some of the challenge out of it, but really it would just make the game more playable as you wouldn’t have to play through it multiple times just to memorize what defences you will need for each wave.
June 18th, 2007 at 12:16 am
i also played last night and as i wasnt host there was pebuild on AND 2x resouces mod BUT i did end up getting to lvl???!?!?!?!?!?!?
10.5 hour long game (i went to bed after 3.5 hours and woke up proberly 10min after i would of died :( i would of liked to see the final :((
but when monkeys started spwaning with 350,000HP thats when i decided it was time for bed :D
ive uploaded my replay search for “meddish” OR “10 hour maraton”
acutaly the replay i running on my PC atm… waiting for me to get home from work… should still have about a hour left on the replay for me to ‘view’ :D
June 18th, 2007 at 4:10 am
Could you possibly upload the elite version to your site Cyde ?
For some reason i cant download stuff out of the vault, tho the replay vault works fine =/
June 18th, 2007 at 4:16 am
Spud: it always takes a while before a download gets started and even then it goes in bumps of 500 Kb it seems.
June 18th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Unconq managed one complete loop of SAoDE. But I wouldn’t say he dominated the map, he was cripped and the next 5 waves tore him to bits :P
Still, 4000 is the score to beat. Goes to show it can be done!
June 18th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Edmon, I will defeat it. You hear me?!?!?!??!
June 18th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
You suck wuped :P
June 18th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
You suck edmon. What im being serious.
(;
June 19th, 2007 at 5:22 am
new record, 30000+
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=13683
June 19th, 2007 at 5:26 am
Bastard…. I got 4500 im like… Yes it might take unconq a while to catch up then I hear you got 30k. );
June 19th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Cheater :P
June 24th, 2007 at 7:14 am
[...] resources on this map it turn out to be very challenging. Try it. Cyde Weys over at SupComTalk have beaten it, and his replay passes nine hours(!). Something to be aware of before [...]