RCL 4 Boosted Invaders



  • I believe that all invaders will suicide if all of your creeps are dead and they have access to the room's spawn. When a group of invaders spawns in a low level room, the most energy effective way to deal with them is to just kill all of your creeps and start re-spawning everything.



  • @hyramgraff That seems kinda ridiculous. So if you are in a competitive private server match against other players, you can get hugely disadvantaged by being forced to restart your base?



  • @Gankdalf I agree that it's ridiculous that a level 4 room can spawn a group of boosted invaders. But there are also tactics to counter a invader spawn that are equally ridiculous.

    If you're worried about the balance implications on a private server, I think the best solution would be to mod the server.



  • @hyramgraff It also applies to people competing with each other after a respawn, or speed running. Sure obviously for private servers anything can be adjusted, but I was curious why the devs had a system that appears this... "imbalanced" on the live servers.



  • Spawning a single AAM* creep will crush the RCL4 boosted invaders. I think the intent of the occasional boosted invaders is to get you move beyond relying solely on towers for defense.



  • The invaders aren't going to be able to get through walls very effectively.



  • @deft-code RCL4 boosted invaders can spawn with 50 parts in squads of up to 5. an A2M creep is going to get its face stomped in before it can even help a point-blank range tower kill a single invader



  • Maybe something has changed, but I wrote an A2M* (which at RCL4 is A12M6) with the MOVEs in front and target the healer (to avoid reflect damage). The tower dishes what damage it can but heals my defender once it has accumulated enough damage. Before this I'd regularly find invaders wailing away at my walls with my towers unable to take them down.



  • @deft-code Sorry I didn't understand the annotation. I didn't know the * meant "repeating"



  • Sometimes all your creeps get killed, and your room needs to rebuild itself. It seems fine to me that some invaders can poke holes in your walls and kill all your creeps. It should be rare (and it is), and it should be possible to develop out of it at RCL 8, but I think all the way up through development this should be handled by being able to rebuild the room, not kill the invaders.



  • @black0441 Why does that make sense? And the fact that it is random means it could happen to one person, but not his neighbor, who then takes advantage of it to kill him.

    It seems like a very odd design choice, especially since there is only really one room level that actually truly suffers from this design choice. RCL 3 cannot have invaders that can wipe the room, and RCL 5 with both towers up cannot have invaders that can wipe the room, so why is RCL 4 so special?

    It would be cool if a dev could give some insight into this @o4kapuk @Dissi @artch


  • Dev Team

    Hello @Gankdalf,

    Thank you for erecting this question.

    First, npc invaders never damage your structures except for walls/ramparts, so they can't cause a heavy damage to your base.

    Second, with some smart target selection even one tower could be enough to take down attackers (hint: damaged healer stops moving until fully healed, and attackers doesn't wait for them)

    Third, any case resulting in empty room (without your creeps) will trigger immediate despawning of the whole raid. Like, your creeps could just walk away to an adjacent room, wait one tick and then return (not saying about suicide/recycle scenario).

    But, despite of all aforementioned, I'll discuss rcl4 invaders with devs and keep you posted here.



  • @o4kapuk This invader can spawn with T1 boosts at RCL 4

    Healer 0_1523895353171_24282f79-f239-41df-93d0-f262c7d1e6eb-image.png

    That's 25 heal parts at 24 hits per tick ea. That is a total of 600 hits healed per tick. Could you explain how a single tower can kill this creep even if the creep stops moving?

    From what I hear, you can kill all of the attack creeps, which causes healers to despawn, which may be exploitable, but otherwise this creep seems impossible to kill at RCL 4 with towers.


  • Dev Team

    @Gankdalf I'd try to shoot the healer starting from edge of room, that should keep him there. Once attacker is far away from the healer, quickly shoot him, and the healer will despawn. I mean, you don't kill healer. You kill attacker and let healer suicide. But yeah... tricky. Was suffering from those raids myself when I was new player.



  • @o4kapuk Yes, and the classic "edge walls" prevent you from ever killing either of them, since the attacker won't leave the healer's range.



  • Rampart juggling is also effective. Just keep the invader marching back and forth between two of your ramparts. Sure that doesn't kill the invader but it dramatically reduces the amount of damage it will do to your wall.

    The real point here is there are multiple effective techniques to deal with them. In a tight combat scenario against an aggressive human neighbor strong invaders could be a real problem but that is true regardless of RCL. It might be a good idea to disable invaders in a battle arena but I think they're fine on the MMO server.