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Author Topic: Weekly Seed #41 [Alpha 8] [Seed: Pinned Down]  (Read 2565 times)

zxc

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Weekly Seed #41 [Alpha 8] [Seed: Pinned Down]
« on: May 19, 2016, 12:08:11 PM »

This week's seed: Pinned Down

Will you crack under pressure?

The Weekly Seed is open to anyone, and we encourage you to to share your experiences, stories, and tactics over the course of your run.

The rules are as follows:
  • The Weekly Seed begins from the date this thread is posted and lasts about seven days.
  • Make sure you are running the correct version of Cogmind (see thread subject).
  • Enter the seed and abort your current game to initiate the seed (more details are below).
  • Verify you are not running the tutorial and that the screenshots below match your game.
  • Play through the game once. This is a friendly event and we are all honest people.
  • When finished, post your scoresheet here (it should be the newest file in /scores) and any other screenshots/stories/strategies you wish to share with the community.
  • If you want to share details about the seed or your approach, make sure you use spoiler tags.
  • Due to the spoilerific nature of this thread, be sure to avoid reading details about the seed if you haven't completed your run.

Good luck and have fun!





HOW TO ENTER A SEED

Press F1 to go to the MENU, select OPTIONS, select Seed, and enter this week's seed:




Select GAME, select ABORT:




If you have followed the steps [Manual seed applied: Pinned Down] should display in the log window.

Congratulations on entering the seed, now get in there!
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Shobalk

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Re: Weekly Seed #41 [Alpha 8] [Seed: Pinned Down]
« Reply #1 on: May 19, 2016, 06:17:59 PM »

Not sure if I'll make it back for this one, but the DCSS tournament is winding down, so I'll be able to jump back into the weekly seeds soon!
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Kyzrati

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Re: Weekly Seed #41 [Alpha 8] [Seed: Pinned Down]
« Reply #2 on: May 21, 2016, 11:21:31 PM »

Lots of good leg stashes in the first half of this seed. Fortunately I'd gone with my legged combat bot, aiming to focus on offense and use as many cannons as possible.


Oh I'll just sneak up on this Garrison and seal it... or not. First thing I did was overload one of my cannons and blast the access point.


I was basically taking every first exit I could find regardless of where it might lead, and ended up passing through some caves. Then I came across one of these scary outposts...

I got surrounded immediately, and then my power source was rejected AND my corruption forced me to move away from it, so I was suddenly without power :/.


Barely made it out of that one alive (finished almost all of them off with a single railgun after equipping my heavy armor).


Bad meeting after bad meeting in that cave...



Heading back towards 0b10. Now here's a scary looking place. I don't even remember what might be in there, and I'm not sure I want to find out... Times like this you *extra* wish you had sensors in the caves. Very useful for not dying and all :P


In -4, I immediately wired up a nice little Assassin friend, and even a shield to protect him. He did a great job of covering my back, and together we crushed about 15 bots in that one area :D. Unfortunately before the last of them went down, they called reinforcements from a nearby garrison, and one of those freaks brought a Hvy. Rocket Launcher. Still, we got that batch, too, and my Assassin only fell when we were taking the Garrison Access itself. By this point I'm already thinking I need to work on getting the alert level down, because I've too often been ignoring that while approaching the end game.


Interestingly, I'm already on -4, and I've only found a single rating-2 EMP Blaster by this point :/. I am still keeping it handy, however, just in case I run into Swarmers. It's already saved me a couple times. By this point I've got some decent hacking gear, and morphed into a half-combat/half-hacker, with zero armor :/


Here's what I looked like just coming into -2. Pretty weird build that's all over the place :)


And then here's what I, and the room, looked like after a Sentry, 3 Grunts and 2 Hunters walked in on me :P

And before I could even leave the room or fully rebuild, another Grunt-Rogue squad showed up with a pair of Hunters! Crazy start for -2... I'd probably have been dead if I wasn't jamming transmissions the whole time. (Also the Exp. Focal Shield, which helped keep the Hunters from shredding me too terribly, althogh I did finish the battle with no armament but a sword taken from the Rogue.)


Still hanging around in the same small area fighting battle after battle, and seriously underpowered now... but at least I have a Hauler buddy? :P. That and I just checked the security level, and it's still Low. Whew. Then I grabbed a Sentry buddy, too. Being underpowered is a good thing when disruption weapons take effect, because it means you haven't completely shredded a potential ally :)


Fortunately the exit wasn't too hard to find, and here's my build on entering Access. The main issue is I'd be worried about facing Programmers with these weapons, but I think I'll nuke them if I have to (finally just my second explosive weapon this entire run).

Spoiler: End-game map, Access (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Score: 26,862 (click to show/hide)

Overall a fun win, one that I don't think I would've gotten if streaming, because I probably would've made the wrong decision too quickly at a few critical junctures. (I should try to stream at least once in the coming weeks, though, before I'll be away from home for a few weeks...)

So it turned out completely different than I planned. I went lighter on the weapons, and transitioned from combat to a very hybrid approach that could even hack and evade pretty well, but still hold its own in a fight.

Also, my build only ever had a single Lrg. Storage Unit ;)
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Josh Ge, Developer - Dev Blog | @GridSageGames | Patreon

Happylisk

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« Reply #3 on: May 22, 2016, 06:49:53 AM »

After a little break from Cogmind I picked up this seed.   -9 hit me with 2 swarmers squads, 3 grunts, and a sentry all at once.  What an embarrassing splat. 

Nice win K!
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Kyzrati

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Re: Weekly Seed #41 [Alpha 8] [Seed: Pinned Down]
« Reply #4 on: May 22, 2016, 06:55:01 AM »

No bottlenecks in sight? :P

There was certainly a distinctive lack of AOE. I found three the entire game, and two of those were shortly before the end. I ended up almost never using them, though, for fear of running out of matter and other salvage.

I did the splat last week, and played more carefully this time as a result. To fairly good effect :). The closest calls were in the caves--scary place, sometimes!
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Decker

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Re: Weekly Seed #41 [Alpha 8] [Seed: Pinned Down]
« Reply #5 on: May 22, 2016, 09:35:52 AM »

Nice win, Kyzrati!

Quote
Average Core Remaining (%)
  Depth 4 Exit             144 <=====  :o I demand an urine test!

Quote
Also, my build only ever had a single Lrg. Storage Unit ;)

Hah! However I couldn't help noticing that you had some slots conspicuously empty after a fight :)
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Kyzrati

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Re: Weekly Seed #41 [Alpha 8] [Seed: Pinned Down]
« Reply #6 on: May 22, 2016, 09:56:02 AM »

Happy to have gotten an Alpha 8 win under my belt; now I can fool around a bit more again!

Quote
Average Core Remaining (%)
  Depth 4 Exit             144 <=====  :o I demand an urine test!
Hehe, it's one of the few known but unresolved bugs--I have absolutely no idea why that's happening :/. Seems to be completely random, but I'm sure there's a specific resolvable cause in there...

Quote
Also, my build only ever had a single Lrg. Storage Unit ;)
Hah! However I couldn't help noticing that you had some slots conspicuously empty after a fight :)
Sometimes ::)

...okay a lot of times, but that's where Cogminds can really feel alive, in that uncertain space between life and death!
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Sherlockkat

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Re: Weekly Seed #41 [Alpha 8] [Seed: Pinned Down]
« Reply #7 on: May 22, 2016, 11:12:57 AM »

Nice win. Gratz K.
Ooh. The alien artifact. Is it the fancy one that we find in Zhirov? I was thinking that I should pick it up instead of equipping it immediately. Does it just serve as an escape tool outside Zhirov's?
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Kyzrati

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Re: Weekly Seed #41 [Alpha 8] [Seed: Pinned Down]
« Reply #8 on: May 22, 2016, 08:13:50 PM »

Yes, the fancy one, and yeah it's just an escape tool, one that I ended up never needing but it's nice to carry just in case :). Technically there are terminals indirectly linked to the artifacts that describe what they do and imply that particular one shouldn't be attached right away, but in a case of bad decision-making I made it so you encounter those terminals shortly after getting the artifacts. I was trying to make the area look interesting... but I've been wanting to go back and adjust the layout to improve the design--terminal then artifact.
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