#dreamknights

IS3 W16 featuring my 19 Karat Gold Roach

Revisiting IS3 reminds me why I don’t play IS3 anymore. Bottom text. Also I only got a Medic voucher at the end, so throughout the run, #MY GOAT was in charge of keeping me alive:

I am, no, we are

Dublinn!

Theresis fucking dies

9 enemies in.

My first inclination had been to just recreate what I made in RA1 (winding labyrinth with lots of net launchers, gas launchers and a narrow kill lane), but IDK if that will work out and the resource outlay for a properly built up torment nexus IS pretty huge even with all the extra ways to get stuff in RA2

(sent by @the-cornuthaum​)

Recreating an RA1 format base is indeed a good long term goal in my opinion, but as you said, it’s a resource intensive matter, particularly because it takes literal thousands of Stone -- Lighting Ore is really not an issue if you do a lot of Strange Territories -- to make all those ideal Urban Barriers III.

Personally, I would start with making a simple kill lane and building outwards from there, probably with a loop being the next thing after the kill lane. Cover your Campervan with Urbans, then choose a direction and make your lane there, and then stretch to either side of preference and make a basic loop surrounding 3-4 Battlements. This is highly informed by my own preferences and player expression, mind you, because I love radial range units -- Lin, Gnosis, Arturia -- and it tends to be how I start, but, of course, I think you need to adjust your layout to your own preferences.

I know most people don’t share my playstyle -- radial units close up, very long range artillery blasting those tiles while the radials damage/crowd control, like Horn, Firewhistle, Fiammetta, Ray, W -- so instead of a loop, you can do a zigzag funnel with Battlement ‘alcoves’, extending all the way to one of the enemy spawns with a single opening so all enemy spawns have to enter through there. I’m at work so bear with my MS Paint skills here but I think a small visual representation can help:

Basic, low resource kill lane. Greys are Urbans, browns are Battlements. The Battlement directly on the enemy route near the Campervan is intentional because a good kill lane will not have to worry about them reaching there in the first place. You can comfortably put several Battlements on the Battlement side, like rows of 2-3 per line, depending on your needs, and long range bombardment like Fortresses behind them. The straight line Battlement is good for Ifrit/Corroseum, Ray, Fartooth, Schwarz, any straight line killer of your choice. Apply Cursed Mire as needed, but keep in mind a Cursed Mire tile is a tile you don’t get to deploy Melee units on, so leave a gap here and there if you want to put an Ambusher like Manticore here and there. Your straight line Battlement can also be under the entrance, but do mind ranged enemies.

From there, you can extend like this for a funnel, like so,

Do zigzag alcoves like this, 

or make a simple loop like this

Added a red line to show you how the enemy pathing would go; you can add more Battlements to the empty space down there in the loop.

Then, with a few more blocks, you can create this Purple Zone above the loop, which is where I would put all sorts of goodies like Net Launchers or long range artillery Battlements, aimed towards the loop.