Both mana shards and beacons got some new tricks to help make the game more varied.
First of all, as you already know, both shards and beacons can appear in the middle of the battle, you can get shards via the Unearthed Shard spark if you’re fortunate, or meet some new beacons if you enrage a monster wave with lots of gems.
Shards can have a shell that you have to penetrate before you can start harvesting the mana contained. Shells act like hit points for the shard, some shards will have no shell at all, others might have a very thick shell hiding a great load of mana to be harvested.
After a shard is depleted, you can build anything in its place.
Beacons can have armor now (giving more versatility for the armor tearing gem), as well as varying range and speed (delay between two blasts); this, especially during early waves when building your defenses is critical, can make you face some tough decisions, for example slowly recharging beacons with a large radius might be less of a trouble than constantly activating beacons that reach over the path they sit next to, just enough range to boost all the monsters passing by; beacons with few hit points might be an easy target, but might force you to build a tower where you otherwise wouldn’t (or use gems as bombs to take care of the beacons); heavily armored beacons are probably better to be left alone until you have the firepower or weaken their armor over time with a few purple gems, and so on.
The current list of beacon types, with some of the veterans from previous chapters and some newcomers:
- Healer Beacon: heals all nearby monsters – Watch out for the monsters coming nearby, either finish them before they get healed or build your defenses so that they pass the healer unhurt and nothing to heal.
- Shield Beacon: Gives all nearby monsters extra one-shot shields – Shields can take one shot, no matter how small or large damage, making those nasty swarmlings (which could otherwise be taken out with one shot) extra tough. Some monsters appear shielded (it’s one of the various monster abilities), most of them don’t, but this beacon can help them out and give you a really hard time.
- Invulnerability Beacon: Prevents affected monsters from taking any damage for a short time – either take this out quickly, or place your defenses far enough from this beacon so that the invulnerability wears off by the time the monsters reach your buildings.
- Static Beacon: Prevents buildings to be built in its square shaped vicinity – the only beacon type to have a square area (to make it more clear whether an area is buildable or not).
- Discharging Beacon: Emits pulses that prevent nearby gems from firing for a short time – one of this dropped in the heat of the battle can spell a quick defeat on you, have some mana reserved for gem bombs to stay safe.
- Hollow Beacon: Affected monsters do not give mana nor XP when killed – not an immediate threat, but the small missing mana packets can make all the difference in the long run, and it can prevent you from breaking your XP record for the field as well.
- Speed Beacon: Gives all nearby monsters a permanent, stackable speed bonus – if you played GCL, you know how dangerous this one can be.
- Beacon Protector: a special kind of beacon, gives all neighboring beacons invulnerability. Can’t be made invulnerable by an other protector of course, but still, it’s a powerful evil instrument building beacon fortifications tough as nails.
And finally, about GCL, it still needs to get further fixes, I’ll release v. 1.22 as soon as it’s ready.
(update: the monster shadows are turned off, I’m in the middle of modifying the monster rendering system, they won’t be such camouflaged in the final version. Their look will still change a lot, much wider variety of limbs, monster ability-specific body parts and more).
Coming up next:
20th of August:
Monster nests, tombs
3rd of September:
Revisiting previous topics again
