I like how the health upgrades are so directly copied from Escaped! that the upgrade descriptions are going to 65, even though the actual health is going to 90. :-P
I've won 10 levels now on hard with a total of 6 retries, so difficulty seems reasonable. For people who are having trouble: Use your spells when the going gets tough, upgrade your monk and earth towers to full ASAP. Earth towers are pretty boss; Most of what they can't kill, your monk can kill, especially if you back him up with some fire towers. I didn't bother with slowing towers until level 9+, and tried never to use a tower that was not fully upgraded. Oh, and spells in general are a lot better after 3 upgrades. Rain especially saved my ass a bunch of times.
Please allow the player to select which upgrades are actually used. It would be nice to be able to take the grenadiers along for a bit without worrying about it screwing up your later game.
Might also be nice to have a slightly longer and more difficult normal game. I beat it on Captain without the skill reload buff, so there seems to be a lot of room for making it longer and more dangerous toward the end.
Something zenlike about level 15. After the neutrals are dealt out, it's just looking around the board, seeing where you can make a quick capture, and then doing that over and over until you erode the AI's initial advantage and win because it's too slow to defend all of its holdings.
With regard to debuffing, I would suggest modifying the mechanics so that only the best debuff of a given stat applies at any moment - stacking them up like I do is making monsters completely nonthreatening toward the end. About the worst they can do to me is debuff my attack so it takes longer to kill them. :-)
Good game, not too much monsters in your way and the battles are reasonably challenging at insane difficulty. However, once you get a critical amount of debuffs the combat becomes trivial as monsters will no longer damage you more than about 10/hit after the first turn is spent debuffing.
How to abuse boss AI in the final level: It will always fill up the two turrets next to it up to 100 or more. This means you can farm it for mad cash if you can get to one or more of the labs early on. Take over a turret, send the guys in the turret to the lab, rinse and repeat. Won like this from a pretty desperate position.
How to get high altitude quickly: Use boost only when you are out of fuel, and only in very short bursts to barely keep Santa going. The altitude will still increase at a decent pace for some reason.
@hawkeyes06 well, it's a good chance to train some dodging skills :-) other than that, though, you can at least make the bits with eyes only very easy by shooting everything from one side first. And IIRC there's some exploding dudes at the end so you might want to make sure your shield is charged by then.
Arrrrgh 496,931 points. I'm loving this game at the higher point levels in MOAR POINTS mode, it's just an endless swarm of these huge piles of monsters.
Is there a point in this game at which dropping barrels and waiting for stuff to die becomes a nonviable tactic? I haven't found it yet, though I'm just at level 20.
2:11:50. Like people keep saying, max out research, then whatever keeps you alive, then max out plant growth and start growing. Avoid putting points in regen, it's a waste since instant heals are cheap. Let the monsters hit you rather than move away from the research station / plant if you want good times. Your character is the biggest badass on the planet and he can take it.
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