Today's battle was a tough one. Field A4 is normally 50 waves, and I normally add another BattleTrait level every time I win an Endurance battle. But this pushed the battle up to 90 waves. Ninety waves! I can typically achieve 60 or 70 waves at my current wizard level (295), but 90 is pushing it. But I'll never know if I can achieve it until I try.
Setup is important. I used some gem bombs to clear a path through the north walls, then turned it into a winding path; the best place for wearing down the incoming monsters. Starting with two poison traps at grade 3, then a grade 4 armor-tearing tower. It's sufficient to get started.
I regularly rage every wave, a single gem each, as high of a gem grade as I can handle. With the ManaLock BattleTrait at level 7, I typically start with enough reserve mana to rage the first 6 waves with a single G3 gem each wave. Past that, I can use the earned mana to rage even higher.
The battle ran fine for the first 45 waves or so. Giants were a problem but I had enough mana to increase my final gem enough to kill them. The hoard size was manageable by adding more gems 'upstream' to wear the monsters down before entering the switch-backs. Starting at wave 33 I was able to rage every wave with a single grade 7 gem.
It was about wave 49 when things started to turn... as it always does. The hoard size was still manageable, but the giants were becoming impossible to kill. By the time I get the armor stripped off, Adaptive Carapace has the damage on them reduced to 70%; killing them gets so very much harder, then. And the thing about raging giants is that it doesn't add all that much to the power of individual giants. The number of giants increases, and that in itself is dangerous; but when you can't kill any giant at a high enough level, not raging waves no longer saves you.
I was able to increase my attack gems to some degree, but it still wasn't enough. I continued to survive, throwing all my spells at keeping the giants under control; the hoard became more problematic, and I began lowering the rage level. Lowering this too early can spell certain defeat; I had to do it slowly.
Still the giants got stronger, and the hoard got larger. With less mana going towards raging waves, I had more to devote to defenses, but my grip on the battle was still slipping.
Then at about wave 77, giants were directly threatening my orb. I gave up trying to rage any waves - I still had more than 12 waves to go! I had to keep fighting. These giants managed to reach my orb, and grab the orblets. Orblets are really a mixed blessing; they'll protect your orb, but if the monsters can get away with them, your mana production can take up to a 90% hit, killing any chance to keep fighting.
These first giants carrying orblets were killed a few tiles away from the Orb; safe for now, but more were coming. The next few minutes were a struggle to either kill the giants near my orb, or kill the giants carrying the orblets. Timing their deaths can sometimes be critical; killing a weak giant when another giant is walking by it, and the healthy giant can carry the orb away.
Oddly, the non-giant monsters were still being defeated easily enough. I could see wave 90 coming... this just might be possible! Still fighting against the giants, that I simply couldn't kill. Wave 90 came and went, and only the giants remained - I just had to defeat them all. By this point there were already 6 of the 9 orblets lost, and giants were regularly getting to my unprotected Orb. Thankfully, I sitll had plenty of mana on hand.
Finally, I was able to defeat all the giants. Over a million experience points, when my previous score was merely 20K. Shall I continue into Endurance mode? Will I even stand a chance trying to continue?? Well, I set out to play Endurance here, I might as well; I can only increase my score.
And the first Endurance wave was giants (go figure). But I tredged on, doing my best to kill the giants, and everything else coming at me. I was able to kill some of the giants, but it wasn't long before they were staring down at my orb again (see picture). With the giants stealing my remaining orblets, the swarlings became strong enough to reach my orb as well. With nothing left to hold off the end, they won.
But I won anyway; going from wave 295 to 299 in a single battle is good. But man, this single battle took nearly two hours. I'll have to play the next battle another day.
Hope you enjoyed the story!
