my advice for level 5: invest all stars into secondaries. This will let your machete one shot every decayed that gets close to your car. Use the Mac-10, easier to shoot the grenades down with, and you can use the machete if you have to. When the boss goes ot the minigun, toss a grenade at it. It will explode and force him off of it before he gets spun up.
Yes, you still have to test the other levels. But it's still /possible/ to never need to if you understand the algorithm well enough. With the last level, it's run, see what it wants to make, set it up to make that when it needs to, run to see what it wants you to make next. but I've made my opinion clear enough I guess, and you still disagree, so I guess we just have to agree to disagree.
You miss my point,
dGameBoy101b. My gripe is not that the level is hard. My gripe is that it is bad design for a puzzle game like this. There are a ton of hard things they could have used as the final level, like outputting the fibonacci sequence, or even one of the challenge levels. What's wrong with the final level is /exactly/ what was wrong with Manufactoria before the malevolence engine was implemented. Except here, it's not merely possible to solve for the inputs you'll be given while ignoring the spirit of the game which is to design an algorithm to handle all cases, but /expected/ that you'll do that and in fact impossible /not/ to.
The black box level is everything a level in a game like this shouldn't be. It doesn't tell you want you need to do, but even worse, there's no algorithm to solve it. You are brute force solving the inputs you will be given.
for anyone stuck on the hadge, you can get 4 entries from glooples alone by baiting them into colliding until they collide and fuse, then repeat the process until what come out is a purple gravity based abomination.
You can use over-the-horizon radars like a second energy storage. Just hook one up to an energy source (but NOT an accumulator) and sell it after it charges up a bit to dump a large amount of energy into your stockpile. Can be useful to figure out just how much energy you need to produce to get out of the red.
Of course, because the virtual roads and power lines created by the underground passage and energy emitter don't actually provide resources to anything they pass through, the buildings that generate them may as well be more cumbersome warehouses and accumulators anyway.
It seems to me that the reason for the underground passageway and energy emitter is not to transfer resources or energy around. Warehouses and accumulators already do that. the Underground passageway and Energy emitter create virtual roads and power lines that can overlap other buildings.
You can power a Coal Quarry with a Coal Burner, and power the coal burner with the coal from that quarry, shipping either the excess coal or energy off elsewhere. In fact, this seems like the best way to produce energy to me so far.
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You can also talk to her. She's just waiting politely at the door :)