I just completed floor 23 of Drill Pod on Easy, unlocking the achievement. Here is my feedback. SPOILER ALERT!!



Use the first 10 floors to grind as much research, levels and industry as you possibly can. Floors 10-18 become a true challenge to continue to pool industry while efficiently clearing waves.



Floors 18-24 the following becomes true:



- Merchants no longer spawn.



Good luck grinding dust with emergency modules! This is probably the biggest nerf. Gone are the +3 per door dust bonuses given by your wit hero plus a couple wit modules. These are the first to go, so you start having to set up very strong defenses. My go-to defense is a room filled with tesla followed by 1-2 rooms with seblsters followed by the hero kill room. This strategy soon becomes not possible due to the rest of the bullet points here.



- Dust rooms become scarce.



Maybe 1 out of 5-8 rooms had dust. Remember getting that early dust from the rooms around your starting crystal? Yea forget about that. You'll be placing emergency modules if you open more than 1 of the doors adjacent to the crystal. You start with 12 dust, good luck getting to 20 within your first 5 door openings.



- Every floor spawns Silic Zoner and Silic Bulldozers.



Makes it impossible to mount a defense in a room with major or minor modules. Expect 4-6 Bulldozers and Zoners per wave, per room. Even with 4 lv.4 LAN Modules, a room with 3 teslas and 1 tear gas cannot dependably clear a single wave of Zoners and survive. This creates a situation where it is no longer to turn a profit on floors. You must have heroes that can stand up to 5 waves of the worst the game can throw at you while defending an EMPTY ROOM... just the AOE from Zoners will clear a room.



- Heroes no longer spawn.



Can't switch to more robust heroes that can hold their own vs a wave with no support. This really becomes an issue once wit heroes become completely lackluster. This happens due to the fact that there simply isn't enough dust to mount a module defense, coupled with the fact that every floor spawns Silic Zoners and Dozers that will eat all your modules for lunch and keep on trucking. Thus your wit heroes will be delegated to preventing spawns (standing in unpowered rooms) rather than defeating spawns, making you wish you could pick up some offensive heroes late in the game, but you can't. You're locked in.



- Research stones no longer spawn.



Not as big of a deal since you can knock out what you need early on but I did wanna try some new strategies but wasn't able to pick up what I left behind in the research tree.



- Expect 2 - 5 Chimera Keepers every wave.



This is a SERIOUS quality of life issue. You will spend 2-5 minutes every wave cleaning these scumbags up, making aftershave a MUST-HAVE item. I honestly don't see the point of these guys other than make you hate the game. The door opening bulls are a good way of making you leave the protection of your minor modules. Why also make these idiots? They are IMPOSSIBLE to kill before you have to fully deal with a wave. Why not just make them die 10s after their last transformation? Really? Really? You're making us kill them after a wave too? I don't see how this got past QA.





Until these A-holes get changed I'm done with this game and do not recommend it to friends.





- Laugh at EMP events because you don't use modules anymore anyway.



Self explanatory...



- Finding the exit becomes a struggle



Basically all of the above boils down to efficiently consuming your stock of resources during your survival for the exit. By floor 20 I was using 3-6 emergency modules because it was the best use of my industry to open the next door. A wave prevented is a wave defeated. The final floor 23 trolled the heck out of me and was the last door I had to open. I had put the Neurostun module in every lit room and just rushed rooms until I found the exit and blitzd the crystal over while my impending doom killed the Neurostun. Gotta say the last floor was an epic finish to an epic run.





Things needed for a successful run:



- Aftershave. I swear I would slap the dev that thought Chimera Keeper was a good idea.



- Taunt. For a while, you can mount defenses in rooms with modules, but in order to do so you need to keep everything off your mods. Taunt works great for that.



- Heroes that can stand on their own in an empty room vs 3-5 waves all at once. In my run I had Mizi she can pwn entire swaths of waves on her own. Had I known that heroes would stop spawning I would have traded a Wit hero for Skroig when I saw him.



- By floor 20, I had over 1,000 Industry and 700 food in the bank. If I ever do this again, I will shoot for twice that. I had none left of both when i got to floor 24.



- Max is OP, start with him.



Overall, I enjoyed the run but it really sucked the fun out of the game for me. Maybe I'll give it another shot in a week or so and take some of my lessons learned to heart and see if I can sail past floor 24. I know there are a ton more points to learn and optimizations to be made and OP hero combinations that exist, but this is my first run with Drill Pod and I'm sharing the knowledge I gained from the run.



AMPLITUDE: CHANGE CHIMERA KEEPERS!



Good luck out there!

I admit you have a point with several of your opinions.

But I did meet the occasional merchant, and found a few research stones after level 18.

though two of my heroes died on level 18 or 19, so I didn't really have the manpower to spend on powering stations with wit. (aka operating - sorry)

how I ever managed to reach 24:th floor is a mystery.



I wonder if the heroes stop spawning, or if there simply aren't any heroes left to spawn.

I just got to floor 24 of Drill. My experience differs from yours in some ways.





Merchants no longer spawn.

Merchants do still spawn. But they will be very rare. It's true you can no longer rely on operating a shop to get dust. If you do happen to find one early, you probably just easily won the floor.



Dust rooms become scarce.

Dust rooms will become scarce but by the end of the floor, you will have similar amount of dust as early floors mainly due to the huge number of waves coming at you. You will have to blind open a couple of rooms, and farm monsters for dust to get a second room powered.



Every floor spawns Silic Zoner and Silic Bulldozers.

Every floor is still randomized. I was lucky and actually have had no Zoners for the past 10 or so floors. However, they did toss a lot of suicides and wizards at me. Everything is a threat as waves get bigger and dust comes slowly.



Research stones no longer spawn.

Research stones still spawn. They are more rare but I managed to max all my tech with the occasional research stone. But most likely you would have maxed your important tech before stones start to become scarce.



Expect 2 - 5 Chimera Keepers every wave.

This is a point I definitely agree with. Chimera Keepers are a PITA. Not because they are hard. Only because they take so long to kill. The game forces you to have either aftershave and slowly chip at the keepers or have a room full of autodocs to rest between keepers. Chimera Keepers as of now do NOTHING but take up time.





My advice would go along the lines of:



Maximize your income

1. I recommend at least one operator. I like Josh because he has the highest wit as well as beneficial passives and actives. From the start of a level, you can be farming 30+ industry with just one resource module. Which is by far the most important resource later on. It's a lot cheaper to build a rebuild modules than to spam science to rest or food to heal.

2. Stockpile resources every floor. Never take the early exit unless you really know you cannot make a profit from the floor. Remember resource modules pay for themselves by 5-10 or so doors. If you can defend them, keep planting them until around door 20. Even if you only profit by 1 resource from the module at the end, it is worth it =). Pals are great due to the limited amount of space early on. They take 12 turns to turn a profit.



I have 5k Industry, 1.5k Science, and 3k Food at the end of floor 23. I profited on every floor except 2 floors. One which I left early because I lost too much dust due to a mistake while opening a room and the other one being floor 23 due to poor positioning.



Know how each and every monster behaves

I honestly did not know every monster in the game before the drill. You have plenty of time to find out. My run to 24 took 8 hours.

1. Each floor has a set unit composition. They will not toss every single monster type at you in a single floor.

2. Depending on the monsters on the floor, you may be building your defenses differently from the previous floor in order to maximize your defenses and income.



Keep utility items

Items like Aftershave, Arhhmani/Hipster Scarf, and Third Eye are a necessity. You do not have to have them equipped at all times. Just swap them in when you need them.



Other than that. Mechanics are important! DoTE is primarily a rogue-like strategic tower defense game. However, you have essences of micro found in games like RTS. That's why I love this game.

My own experience - currently Level 26 Drill, Easy:

(Max / Josh / Elise / Nanor)



Heroes: I haven't seen any in several levels, although I imagine if I was opening the Cryo Capsules that it might be a different story.



Merchants, Artifacts: Slight reduction in frequency since floor 12, but I am still seeing them, I would guess 2 merchants every 3 floors, and 3 artifacts every 2 floors.



Dust Rooms: Scarce yes, but it doesn't feel unfair. I find managing the dust a fun challenging. I quite like throwing down an Emergency Generator in the first couple of rooms of a floor while it's still affordable.



Silics: I have been encountering Bulldozers regularly, but only Zoners on the occasional floor, this does seem to come down to luck (and you have my sympathy!). Personally I find the Bulldozers fun and fair. They present a challenge, and there are reasonable counters to them, E.g. forcing attention to your heroes using items, or laying down teslas in outer rooms. The Zoners do not really seem fair to me though. As you mentioned, the LAN / Telsa combo is not at all adequate and honestly, where are you going to fit 4 LAN modules anyway? On later floors, you are at a high risk of losing EVERY minor module you place down to zoners, EVERY time a wave comes which is pretty frustrating (then it's terrified heroes standing alone, spamming abilities). On earlier floors, and easier difficulties you can use the famous method of feeding them Prisoner Prods, but it simply doesnt work later on. They die, then your valuable modules die a few seconds later.



Chimera Keepers: I agree, it's just dull cleaning them all up. One time a Rider broke open a few doors causing a megawave. Having cleaned that up, I was left with the task of knocking over 10 Keepers consecutively, I counted them. It seems odd having a few spawn every wave, surely they should be rare and scary, rather than just dungeon litter.



General thoughts: Most floors have been fairly managable (Zoners excluded), I haven't lost a hero yet, and while I have left floors prior to full clears, it's generally been a conscious decision rather than things going awfully and forcing the issue. Overall it's been a really fun run, better than I anticipated. Because the Drill is impossibly deep (and I now have a dungeon rather than a life), I experimented far more than I had in other pods, and it was fun trying out new combinations of modules and techniques



Continued...

(L.28) Nanor has fallen, let the tears flow~

(L.29) Fin.

synra wrote:
Dust Rooms: Scarce yes, but it doesn't feel unfair. I find managing the dust a fun challenging. I quite like throwing down an Emergency Generator in the first couple of rooms of a floor while it's still affordable.

I already have issues with that from Floor 15, not consistently, but the amount of Dust I get per floor just varies so much it's ridiculous. Like floor 16 I get so damn much Dust I can power almost the entire floor. Floor 17? I find literally no dust in no room and despite emergency generator, hand vacuum and third eye I have 20 rooms open, and enough Dust to power 4. Then I get an epic shitton of silic zoners and dozers at the same time. Through pausing and using a lot of abilities and resources I survived, but if that repeats a few times too often the resources are gone.



I kinda like the game but the Drill Pod? It could be awesome but... it really just feels like chore. The silics smack up all modules into dust (unfortunately not Dust) in seconds, and while the RNG is what makes it fun RNGeesus is WAY too moody (switching back and forth between floors that are too easy and too hard to be fun). The balance is just not there. I could encounter a totally impossible run, or it could be too easy. Without abusing the pause button for heals you'd have people dying in seconds, it's just... It just doesn't feel like a game is supposed to feel like. That's not an issue with the other pods so far.



The issue is the openness of the RNG. Instead of saying you find an average of this and that much Dust per floor to make sure it stays reasonable the amount is completely up to RNG. That means that while many floors while have a good balance, those with too much or not enough Dust will also appear and they chip away at the fun.



And Chimera Keepers. I have to concur they add absolutely nothing to the game except making it feel even more like a chore. At time I spent 3 minutes alt+tabbing with one of my heroes+aftershave taking them out one after another.

kssyu wrote:
Every floor spawns Silic Zoner and Silic Bulldozers.

Every floor is still randomized. I was lucky and actually have had no Zoners for the past 10 or so floors. However, they did toss a lot of suicides and wizards at me. Everything is a threat as waves get bigger and dust comes slowly.

I've played two Drill pod games past floor seventy, and there's clearly something odd going on. In my first game, I got Silic Zoners and Silic Bulldozers in literally every wave past floor thirty. And my current game? Not a single wave of Silic Zoners yet. I always laugh when people come to the forum to complain about the random number generator, but I have to admit there is something suspicious going on here. I'm not complaining though - everything is a lot easier when there are no Silic Zoners around



By the way, I get a lot of shamans and suiciders in my current game too. Is it possible that you and I got the same "monster seed", and that Kssyu was assigned the same "monster seed" that I had in my first game?