AuthorA difficulty themed around crawlers.
Chart editorAlmost everything spawns crawlers: nexus, breeders, the monkey cannon (!), swarmer tunnels, eggs. They spawn during waves and swarms and you will never stop seeing them. This diff is playable with fire comp but the role of Driller is quite tough since crawlers will just jump over sticky. One of its quirks is that the stationary phase is tougher than in other diffs so some mission types will naturally be harder, especially refinery and escort. Tip: think very hard before popping a nexus or triggering a swarmer tunnel, especially if you are alone, and try to call it over comms.
The difficulty has not been balanced for 64 aggro bitfix and the author's recommendation is to play it with the 32 vanilla aggro.
This version’s notes (from the file, original language)
A difficulty themed around crawlers, with ND as the base difficulty, but scaled to tier 6.5 (based on Von's tiering system). MEV, DEA, EEE required. Not recommended to play with 64 aggro cap. Recommended to play with a mod that minimizes crawler puddles.
Thought Process: When I first started playing modded DRG, I used to play with pH-JPEG and crew. The most enjoyable sessions we had were when we felt like we were against the longest of odds, but through good coordination, and good teamwork, we overcame seemingly insurmountable odds and came out victorious. Eventually, things started to feel more routine, and I attribute that to the static movement style of default DRG. Grunts and company move in a very predictable pattern as do mactera, so fire comp, as much as it encourages movement, also began to feel boring. Especially when most of the swarm/waves/wave timers are mostly grunts. Mop them up and move on. It left me wanting to find a new style of cave madness, vary the movement, require more from the player to overcome and improve from a movement perspective.
Enter monke. There is a 6x2EX Monke Edition floating around out there somewhere as an earlier proof of concept, but I think this difficulty provides a significant challenge to even the most coordinated teams to overcome. Monke also forces traditional fire comp teams to work beyond the 'lay sticky, run through sticky' mentality, and improve their game. Build variety is encouraged, but teamwork is a must. Voice chat is almost a necessity because the punishment for being out of position is severe. I think this difficulty captures the original feeling of when I fell in love with the game. Absolute chaos, but with a few memes. The most important thing is having fun.
Feature List:
- All warnings, mutators banned except parasites, cave leech cluster, swarmageddon
- Stackable dwarves in the space rig
- 40/50 standard resup cost, 40 flat in sabo, 20/50 in deep dives for pacing
- Deep Scan, Escort, and Sabotage have been scaled back from a stationary, and encounter standpoint compared to the rest to make it not feel like tier 7
- Resup notifications when one is available
- ND timers
- Fat waves
- THE FAT WAVE
- 80% chance hyper diverse waves, 20% just one or two enemy type waves
- Stationaries added Nukeballer, Penta Nukeballer, Monkey Baller, Monkey Barrager, Fat Cave Leech, Korloks, Stabber Vines
- Enemies added Diddy Kongs, Donkey Kongs, Bloon Tower Defenses (whales that spawn either fast sentinels or turbo menaces), Monkeypox Breeders (whales that spawn Diddy Kongs), George, Fast Nemesis
- Extraction Hell (see wave spawner for extraction)
- Everything that can spawn something spawns a monke, try a swarmer tunnel for a demonstration
- Silicate harvester wave spawner (thank Yo)
Credits: I'd like to thank everyone who helped me test this as well as anyone who had input. I'll try to be specific:
- Von (tester)
- Yo (tester)
- Fayree (tester)
- Cass (tester)
- Marian (tester)
- SecondVerse (tester)
- Aynush (tester)
- Cez (tester)
- Dahl (tester)
- Darth Syphilis (tester)
- Fresca Insalata (tester)
- Gabriel (tester)
- haslem (tester)
- joanlamrack (tester)
- mel (tester)
- Nad (tester)
- SimonM (tester)
- temp (tester)
- pH-JPEG (sensei and ND developer)
- Donnie Danko (creator of DEA)
- glyphid_teleporter (creator of EEE)
- Creator of MEV (?)
I'm definitely missing a few here, and I apologize if you are one of them. Ultimately, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and we have help from our friends along the way. Team up with your friends. Coordinate. Do the impossible. The real cave madness is the friends we made along the way. It's late I need to go to bed, ggs.
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