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Here's a few tips.
When going for score, be confident in your gems and rush waves, they can do more than you think they can.
Don't fear letting enemies through, each enemy has a banishment cost, and panicking to kill an enemy could drain the mana that would otherwise banish them.
If an enemy is past your defenses, and you don't have enough mana to banish them, rush the next wave, killing the enemies from it will get you enough mana to banish the enemy.
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1. Hidden levels appear after you get glowing scores on all surrounding levels. It is not one concrete glowing score that will unlock the hidden level.
2. Once you are far enough to have "Pure gem mastery" (level 37) it's a good idea to reset your points and max it up, along with Initial mana, Mana replenish, Lower mana costs and Mana per kill. The game stops being a challenge at that point, basically (well, at least if you don't send all waves at you at the same time).
3. I got the final boss at level 78, you can probably do better than that. Get your mana to 9000-10000 to be able to banish him at least once and pray for enough high level purple gems (I did with one lvl6 and one lvl 7) to get rid of most of his 120 armor level in the first round, so all your fire-power will wipe him out in the second. If all is lost, throw high level gem bombs at him.
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I beat the game! I didn't get all of the amulets but I got all levels at glowing frame including the hidden levels. Once I got high grade starter gem skill I reset the skills in order to transfer the skill points from middle grade to high grade (and put the rest where they were). At the beginning of every level I would build some towers and 3 trenches right in front of the spawn point and put my free high grade gems there. When the monsters were killed I would call the next wave and use the mana pool spell (it increases score gotten) as soon as I could until level 25 about. Then I would build some more towers and trenches and raise the grade of the gems when I could for the rest of the level.
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@genius11 : For amulets:
The level 7 gem amulet is the best one. 80,000 XP per stage. If you get 1 level 7 gem, just merge 6 level 1 gems into it and it counts as 7 level 7 gems for the gold amulet.
Also, if you can leave one monster with a small banish cost at the end alive. So long as it's banish cost is less than the mana you build up as it goes along the route, you will gain mana over time. Turn on triple speed and leave it go around in circles for a while.
Mana builds slowly so you can make towers, gems etc after a while. You might need to leave it a while to get enough to earn whatever amulets you want.
The two biggest things for XP gain are:
(1) Casting mana pool as soon and as often as you can.
(2) Call waves early whenever you can. The earlier you call them, the better.
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Once you get level 40 the rest of the game is a piece of cake.. just respec into starting high level gems and mana on kill and yawn your way through 30 more levels and a couple easy "hard" badges. 5/5 for pre level 40 gameplay though.
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This game is amazing. Also an impressive transformation from this to Chasing Shadows. The last skill, however, was too game breaking for the game to be fun enough. Also the scoring system is bad. It collides with most people's play style and thus makes it needlessly hard to get a high score. Especially early game. 4/5 overall.
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if you have trouble leveling up for the epic levels, try going back to other levels, then fighting every two waves at the same time (1 & 2, 3 & 4, 5 & 6, etc.) to do this, just click on the bars that show when the wave is going to arrive. rate + to keep this alive.
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One of my favourite things about Gemcraft: To increase you exp on a replay, you have to do the level BETTER than last time. So your skills are based on just that: your skills, not countless hours of grinding.
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Okay, this is the second game in a row that isn't registering total kills or levels. Just to make sure it wasn't a matter of the bar not showing ongoing progress, I got 540 total kills and it's not registering. The bar for the second badge has not indicated any leveling yet as well.
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Note: Backup your saves. Always. I was at level 16 and removed my cookies, thinking that this didn't include my game files saved on the computer... stupid me, that's what a cookie IS. Anyways, check out the Backup Saves? forum discussion to learn how to protect your game.
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Glad to see I'm not the only one with badge issues. Two different PCs and browsers, and I still have a red plug and no badges... also no "report a missing badge" link on the Achievements page.
I don't think I'm gonna get this week's kongpanion :(
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Great game, even if it is a scary 11 years since I got the badges. The other Gemcraft are even better but that's no reason not to give this one 5 stars.
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This game is starting to show it's age after the dizzying heights of Chapter 0 and the great Labyrinth. The biggest slap in the face is the difficulty curve of the first boss battle. It's infuriatingly hard, especially when you compare it to the relative easiness of the rest of the game.
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does anyone know how to get a decent amount of XP? like what amulets to go after, if you gain more by gembombing, by speeding up waves or what
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I'd like to see Kongregate pick up GemCraft Labyrinth as soon as possible. I don't particularly like having to play it on ArmorGames.
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Coming back to this after having played the very last one goes to show how far this series has come. It's actually kinda rough playing this iteration again. But it makes me wanna revisit the newest one.
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Hint for the final badge: Finish the game, upgrade High Starter Gems to the max, play through the game again using tose gems and spamming the Mana Pool upgrade.
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It's really weird playing this one after hours of playing Labyrinth. Everything feels so much different..yet familiar. Such an amazing series.
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CaptainFactoid - replaying levels only adds the improvement to your total score. For example, if the first time you got 800,000 points and you replayed it and got 1,000,000 points, your total score would increase by 200,000
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Did the first epic boss at level 16- just make sure you have at least one purple pentagon waiting at the beginning and 5000+ mana to withstand 1 hit from the boss. When he comes and goes past your first few towers, take your purple pents and station them at towers so its always hitting him. Second run should be enough to kill him, if not bomb him till his dead.
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This game's hard badges are worth some 4h together, there are games with medium badges one can only get in several days worth of playing. And it's still alive after all those years - nice, solid, feature rich (for a first game in series) tower defense.
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How to win:
You have two options to increase your points: the mana pool, or calling waves early. The trick is to balance your mana between mana pool (an immediate cost with a long-term payoff) and gems (stronger gems allow you to handle earlier waves).
Strategy:
For the first half of each level, focus on mana pool. Invest your skill points in good starter gems that can handle the first 5-20 levels alone. Place the starter gems in towers, and go through as many waves as possible, calling early when possible, and investing all the mana you earn in mana pool.
Once your starter gems struggle to handle the monsters, begin buying gems. You should have a 1.5-3x mana gain multiplier. Use your extra mana to overbuild gems. Call waves early until the end.
This strategy will allow you to get 1.5-2x the glowing score on most levels.
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This is probably my favourite game on Kongregate yet. I absolutely love tower defense games, but they were all starting to blur together... until I tried this one.
Instead of building specific towers and upgrading them, building gems that give your towers abilities, and being able to COMBINE said gems, adds a whole new layer of depth. Combine that with the skills you can gain for leveling up, and you have one of the most complete, layered tower defense games out there.
If you're the type of person that enjoys TD games, but are tired of the exact same concept/gameplay being used, give GemCraft a shot. You will not be disappointed, I can guarantee you that!
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Great game :D i think we should be able to combine gems inside a tower.. also add more gem grades please ? and infinite mode :D