Treim

Twilight Swiftclaws have the Anti Spell Aura as well. Lost Souls have the builldings that look like Lost Banestone card that will also block your casting. Additional cc units: Twilight Fathom Lords

Addendum Encounters with Twilight - I played this on expert with just the starter cards with deck level 0 (first map I played after reset - first to do it on expert): The spawn on the southeast is the key to complete the 2nd part of the map because the Whisperers and Vileblood respawn there. I pulled in the Vileblood and Twilight whsiperers to let Rogan handle them while i sneaked past with 4 Firestalkers and ran the bottom path to the spawn camp with the Abomination. CC the L and XL units at the spawn camp while attacking the camp on max range with fire stalkers. I think I used 1-2 Surge of Light to keep them alive long enough. Afterwards you can clear everything with windweavers or whatever unit you prefer. Vileblood and Whisperers are taken care of and you can clear the big camp with the Abomination after clearing t3. Swampdrakes sleep in combination with Curse of Oink and a couple Magma Hurlers are enough if you lure them out and take out the 2 L-units you pull first before focusing your attention on the Abomination. Addendum Behind Enemy Lines: The map becomes much easier if you refrain from killing the spawn buildings at your t2 and t3 as killing those triggers stronger waves. You can see this in a replay from @RadicalX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHd7xVPuIdc Addendum Crusade: Defense in the South - You can trap incomes if you do not kill the archers completely and only kill the melee units. You can achieve this easiest with Mark of the Keeper and taking the wall. The Archers will start running around but never attack anything (make sure to kill them once all the camps are down, otherwise the endwave doesnt trigger) You can also do this with Nomads as demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g52hVdIKqq4 Frost you can use Warden's Sigil, Shadow you can decimate the archers as shown in video above and just place 2 Embalmer's Shrine or somthing similar. It takes a while to take them down. Addendum Sunbridge: Even if you use the Gate trick on the right side at around 6 minutes an archer will come through and if it gets to your monument on the very right side on the map (if you already build it), it will pull the camp on top of it. You can prevent this by placing a unit at the gate to take care of that archer. Also you can use t1 towers to outrange archers at the wall. Phase tower with their relocation is especially good. Termite hill works wonders on those as well. If you start nature t1 you can use hurricane to blow archers of the walls and make the clear way easier. Furthermore the wall breaks down after you destroyed exactly half of the segments. You can use this to stay out of range of 1 half of the archers on the wall, if you positions yourself properly. The longer the gate is open within its 30 second cycle before the 2nd shrine is defeated the stronger the income will be that attacks you. The side that is attacked depends on which side the gate was last open when the last shrine was destroyed. Addendum - Convoy: After the Grinder teleports in the middle path you can shoot him with Rifle Cultists' ability from the outside to end the map a bit earlier. You can also use undead army at the beginning of the map and then scythe fiends ability to get in that area and then prevent walkers from advancing with placing buildings at the bottom at the bottom at the path. Left player can then shoot with Rifle Cultists from the outside to destroy the shrine after capturing t4. The walker block essentially eliminates any time limit you have on the map and makes this map pretty much unloseable. Overall a good initial overview for maps that should help newer players to get a idea on what is going on on these maps and to avoid replaying map starts over and over again or be stuck in them for 40 minutes+. I think especially the Nightmare maps are very bothersome if you do not understand whats going on and what to do (tbf they are bothersome even if you know). Looking forward for what you have for some of the 4 player maps.

The guide will stay as is for the foreseeable future as I do not plan on updating this any further. The speedrun meta has evolved over time though, so technically an update would be necassary. Also I am not sure how good the section in regards to pathing and task management for especially 4 Player maps is explained. That is probably the section where one could add a bunch of paragraphs and examples. I guess one could also go into how to develop and refine and perfect strategies for these maps in more detail. I think examples or a documentation of this process would be especially helpful here. As I mentioned though I am currently not interested in doing that. I am not the only experienced speedrunner in the community though.

@Dallarian got time to help out here?

I consider that deck to be more of a goal to work towards to. It does not sit well with me to recommend a deck that is not perfect Obviously on the way to get there one will have to make compromises or trade relentlessly (as you mentioned)

Nature splashs are usually easy to play and successfull. Nature Frost (Stonekin) is very safe but also limited in terms of speed which is a factor in rPvE (obviously). Meanwhile Nature Fire (Twilight) decks are less resistant but also have more access to damage. Here's my usual setup for Twilight rPvE level 9 maps. Cards with name [Nomad (nature); Sunstrider; Vileblood (fire); Twilight Creeper (shadow); Abomination (frost); Shrine of War; Mine; Eruption; Disenchant (nature); Curse of Oink; Lavafield; Twilight Warfare (shadow); Thunderstorm; Inferno; Earthshaker; Twilight Pestilence (frost); Cluster Explosion (fire); Cluster Explosion (shadow); Equilibrium (frost); Regrowth)] For a slightly more beginner friendly approach you might want to take in Skycatcher in t4 instead of Twilight Warfare and maybe consider a nature t1 start instead of fire (someting along the lines of Windweaver; Dryad (frost) or Shaman; Surge of Light; Ensnaring Roots instead of Nomad; Sunstrider; Mine; Eruption. In terms of priority cards that are not easily accessable: 1. Shrine of War; 2. Mine (if you play fire t1) otherwise Cluster Explosion (fire); 3.Thunderstorm; 4.Abomination; 5.Earthshaker. If you plan on playing level 10 consider opening up another 1 or 2 deck slots for cards like Gladiatrix.

added this months 1 Player Level 10 map. Quite interesting map at t2 where the tower from t3 can attack your wells and monument. Also if you step too far forward your monument attacks the t3 camp and therefor pulls it all. Forces one to trap the income and do not pull wells. The most elegant solution in terms of stability is probably Windelf Templar. Otherwise you can just wait for power, get the monument and then build a big army. If you play fire t1 you can also try to play with sunderers + Nomad and then build t2 to clear out the spawn and the tower first with cc support (remember you then have to trap the income from the camp towards the left of t3 again) and then build everything up at t2 and prepare to strike. Possible time with my current strategy : ~18:00-18:15

added 1 Player Level 1 & 9 Both very short maps. I had fun especially on the Level 9 map. Has a nice flow to it. Possible time probably: 10:35-10:40

added 1 Player Level 10 - 2nd try I think a well played shadow start is probably faster but also a tad more difficult to execute, especially the t2 clear, and as I am lazy fire it is. A time improvement of about a minute should relatively easily be doable just with cleaner gameplay without any strategic changes. With a good shadow t1 you can probably get into the 14:15-14:30 range. Alas as its already so late in the month and so close to the reset probably noone will bother

Blight Expert by LEBOVIN + Pritstift + Treim + Wanky = 10.10.9

Update for 4 Player level 9 solo. First try but maybe interesting to you as this month's map is pretty easy.

It can be quite refreshing to work on the small things in a run and see how much of a difference small adjustments to pathing and placing of spells and units can make. I started out with a 1:47 and just by placing the Mine on the t2 camp differently and not charging onto the unit I saved ~4 seconds. The remaining ~3-4 seconds are from small improvements with the "hold position"-command and timing Mines better than before which includes actually using thugs to kill the tower in order to get the Sunderer in position quicker to place Mine when it comes off cooldown instead of killing the last tower with Sunderer ability + AA's. Thinking about it now maybe one couldve tried using Sunderer ability on the first tower as well and the Sunderer might be in position in time for the next Mine. Another variation that might yield even quicker results.

Update for rPvE 1 Player Level 1 - extremely short little map even in terms of Level 1 maps. Took me like 30 tries to get from a 1:40.0 to the 1:39.7 that i got now. Very fun to optimize this run. 10/10 can recommend

solo Sunbridge 11:40.0 by myself

late update for the October map of 1 Player Level 10

This is a brief introduction to my thoughts on the matter as i stated it throughout the years on this forum Please note that some points are extremely abbreviated or incomplete (e.g. how to balance out faction strength). In regards to map structure I think it is unrealistics to expect to have a lot of different possible layouts on each individual difficulty, because that makes issues like balancing and deck building a lot more complicated, not sure how technically demanding that is, but Id imagine it for sure adds complexity to map generation and is outside of freak accidents (like right now) probably hard to implement without a lot of work. Even just restructuring 1 difficulty with 1 set structure is most likely a long ways away from us, so I will not further address that point unless there is further information provided on how balancing is supposed to work out and the technical feasability of it in the close future. Original post:

Here’s a list of gold per level and map type. Gold does not change if you e.g. play 4 player maps with 3 players. Gold from chests is not included in this list.

oh ye true.

Resource Booster heavily depend on how many wells that resource booster supports. You get an additional 0.35 power/ 2 seconds. With a static cost of 50 power for the initial investment. Break-even-point for just the booster occurs for x wells after y seconds: 1 well = 286 seconds 2 wells = 143 seconds 3 wells = 72 seconds 4 wells = 36 seconds

Empire 11:54.4 by LEBOVIN + Pritstift + Treim + Wanky

solo Sunbridge 11:51.1 by myself

Isnt that entirely avoidable if you just implement an entry requirement to get these Exp - let it be Skylord rank or something along those lines. If someone with a Speedrun rank comes along then everyone knows that he has at least reached that rank by normal means. Also I think it would make sense to lower rewards or exclude maps with fixed min. times like Defending Hope, Siege of Hope - guess Crusade, Treasure Fleet and Titans would be a couple other candidates for that, even though the exact strategies are a lot less known for the latter 3. With that approach not sure if it would be usefull to "save" Exp similar to a reserve that get applied to the account once it hits the minimum rank threshhoold (e.g. Skylord). Imo these ranks don't have to be super hard to enable (Skylord should be easily doable), the real test is getting all the high placings to reach max. rank!

Updated this month's 1 Player maps for Level 10, 9 and 1 I think this months Level 10 map has some interesting choices for Level 1, I think all colors besides Frost are somewhat comparable. Shadow takes a slight edge but my current time is definetly still easily doable with Fire and Nature starts (did 20:47 and 20:40 with them respectively with Batariel dying in both those runs). I think a low 18 should be possible on this map. Level 9 just pretty standard. I messed up my pathing in that run slightly which cost me some time, 11:50-ish possible. Level 1 ~ 02:08/02:09 possible

The rewards back in the day were given out manually by the devs depending on top 10 ranks on the leaderboards on each map while 10th place got you 10k Exp and 1st place 2.4 mil I remember the rewards given out for a few of the higher ranks, towards the bottom my memory is a bit muddy though: it looked something like this: 1st - 2.4 million 2nd - 1.2 million 3rd - 600 k 4th - 300 k 5th - 150 k 6th - 100 k 7th - 60 k | 80 k | 80 k 8th - 30 k | 40 k | 50 k 9th - 20 k | 20 k | 30 k 10th - 10 k Pretty sure about ranks 1-6 as well as 10; 7-9 I cant remember perfectly. Listed a couple of possiblities

3. I think that these spells should stay within the theme of their faction. I think Blood Healing does that pretty well and is definetly playable and enables a lot of fun decks already. I think with the changes to Martyr shrine currently proposed Frost has a reasonable way of defense as well which only really leaves Fire out there. Currently you have to get very creative around stuff like Moonshine's heal to get stuff done, but I think that is fine overall. You might want to get healing a bit more accessable for that faction, maybe one could work around some kind of rage effect which enables healing similar to Batariels aura damage, where after certain threshhold of damage applied the amount of healing is increased and make it a small AoE similar to blood Healing but no clue if that is even possible to implement. Also I do not think that making healing easily accessable to all factions is all that desireable. I do not want pure nature to have access to mass massive damage spells either. I'd rather see new cards introduced that further strengthen the identitiy of these factions. For nature you could introduce a mass cc spell that is pure nature, For Frost I think Shrine of Martyr changes go into that direction. Fire you mighth want to introduce a spell that ramps up damage of units in a certain area by x amount, kind of similar to Unholy Hero or Flame Crystal and Shadow is strong enough as is i think. I think that splash decks will almost always stay stronger because a well balanced deck is almost always more beneficial. I do not think that making certain unaccessable for these decks is the way to go. I'd rather see better options for pure factions that double down on their strenghts. if that is a viable path to take even from a developmental viewpoint I do not know. 4. I think i stated this multiple times over the years on the forums already, but I think that the current jump from level 9 to level 10 is just too insane for most players at the moment while level 9 itself might be a tad bit to easy, a few Lost Souls maps excepted. I mean if pretty much anyone with a somwhat passable deck can beat the second highest difficulty something is a bit messed up imo. The jump currently is partially due to the vasst differences in difficulty depending on enemy faction, but I think that the current layout difference between level 9 and level 10 is the far bigger contributor. I think currently the level 10 structure introduces two characteristics that people do not find on any other difficulty that just makes them unable to face these things as they simply dont have any experience with these things. 1. Clearing a camp results in being attacked at a different place on the map early on 2. Clearing camps with spawn buildings by themselves That in combination with the average understanding of key game mechanics by the general player base that beats level 9's being low further enhances this rather massive spike in difficulty which in turn leads to players being overwhelmed instead of steady increase in difficulty where people can slowly discover the importance of these few concepts. In current level 9's you most of the time do not need these concepts to beat the map or only a very very rudimentary "understanding", so why bother learning. Sometimes i feel like that concepts like aggro ranges, spawn mechanics or base structures and strengths are totally foreign words to some players, even in the relatively repetitive formats of level 9 maps. To be fair especially the latter point varies between factions which does not help. I think that most level 10 maps are reasonably well balanced as they are, maybe tone down some of the LS maps a bit and enhance difficulty of Bandit maps a bit and I think you got a well balanced top difficulty that still allows for a reasonably well diversity of decks and strategies to beat while the different factions have different spikes in difficulty that require certain type of cards to be in decks of at least a few of the players as well as knowledge of playing around certain concepts. E.g. CC cards against Twilight aswell as understanding how to play around enemy cc, strong t2 card combinations and playing around XL units in lower orb tiers of play. Lost Souls - understanding of debuffs as well as playing coherent t1 strategies to beat overarching strength at t1 stages. In terms of changes to steady the difficulty curve for level 10 you could delete Level 8 maps, which essentially are no different than Level 7 maps for Lost Souls, Bandits and Stonekin and are close to difficulty 9 for Twilight imo. Make current level 9 the new level 8 and add a level 9 that differs in structure. I had a structure in mind that iirc was in the game back in the day and was patched out later on, might be wrong on this but not quite sure as its so long back: Have t1 to t2 the same is it is now but afterwards positions do not have shared t3's and instead the map opens up into two paths. At each end you find a camp that is roughly the strengths of a t3 camp right now or maybe the current t2 camps for level 10. That means you get 2 incomes upon clearing t2 and and you have to clear your orb alone against while having to defend at another point on the map simultaneously. This should be a bit easier overall, because in t2 you have more options for play and cant be surprised by attacks at t2 because they start as soon as you attack t2. After t3 camps are cleared both players on one side have a shared t4 again. I am aware that a lot of people will currently probably not be able to handle that, but I think that is fine, it is after all the 2nd highest difficulty there is, why should it be easy. Make the difficulty according to that. Even beating level 8 shouldnt be as easy as most current level 9's are but that would be more of a minor issue after this is fixed initially. Again I am not sure if any of this is even possible right now or ever will be, just my current ideal scenario for rpve difficulties. P.s. I think the easiest fix to op Lost Souls maps is to not allow enemy towers at t2 camps which severely weakens Lost Vigils after the spawn building is down, maybe remove shielding Lost wanderers as well (the non shielding variant is fine though) if the camps are still a bit too unfair, would require testing for sure.