Overview
This guide aims to provide an easy to understand explanation for how to get all achievements and a general strategy for completing all the levels. Took roughly 12 hours to 100%
Detailed Description Of Achievements
The majority of the achievements are self explanatory, such as beating all the levels, preventing the enemy from reaching a waypoint on level 5, .etc .etc However, a few of them are vague or are difficult if not prepared. Listed below are the achievements that deserve more detail.
Sniper: Go to level 1 and let the first 3 mobs through until they reach the ‘End’ hexagon. Fire your snipe skill a second before they reach the end Hexagon and you’re done with it. Most players will earn this through playing normally anyways. This advice is just for those who somehow were too pro to let any get near the end.
Beat Level 1 No Towers: Activate a skill to start the waves instead of a building a tower. Reset your Keeper’s skills and focus them all on the right side of the tree. Increase Attack Speed, Attack Damage, and Snipe+Mana Regen. It’s easier to do at higher levels, so don’t worry about getting the achievement until you beat the game, but it can be done around level 16 for the Keeper.
Beat All Levels On Normal/Hard: This achievement is slightly bugged. I beat 13 out of the 21 levels on Hard difficulty and got them both.
Keeper Has Reached Max Level: Get Keeper to level 25. Requires about 73k exp. Expect to grind the last level about 30-40 times and note you do not get that much extra exp for beating levels on a higher difficulty.
Kill 100 Bots With Your Keeper In A Level: You do not need to beat the mission to get the achievement, so pick a level with a ton of spiders and allow them to hatch their eggs for your Keeper to target the weak ones.
Turret Strategy
In the upper right corner of the mission select map is a city icon to build global upgrades for your turrets. Inside that icon is an additional two menus to customize individual turrets as well as your hero.
The biggest hassle in this game is grinding to correct mistakes. It costs about 120 ‘Cores’ to fully upgrade a slot (20 for the building, 40 for level 2, 60 for level 3). This currency called Cores is gained as you play and on average, you’ll get 20 cores per mission. At 14 Global Slots and 13 Turret Slots, spending nearly 3300 cores is a lot of mission grinding. More so when selling buildings that weren’t as useful as once thought. Below in screenshot format is my layout used throughout the campaign while beating all the missions on Hard.
As you see, all 14 Global Buildings were spent on Range upgrades. The reason why is the damage is good enough for all the turrets, the majority of the time. The fire rate and threat range of the turrets is the problem. Since the Global upgrades provide no fire rate, I devoted all of those resources to giving turrets a 49% range increase (3.5% is max per building. 3.5*14 = 49)
For Turret specific upgrades, I choose the Piston Cannon. It has decent piercing damage (around 3 at level 1 and most enemies have 3-7 at max), fire rate and actual damage. It suffers a bit in threat range, making those global upgrades very useful. You can use other turrets, but I found this to work and I didn’t want to spend more time seeing what the exact best tower is to build around.
I used 4 Range Upgrades, 8 Speed Upgrades, and 1 Armor Piercing Upgrade. More than likely, another Speed Upgrade instead of the Armor Piercing would have been better, especially since everything is increased at a percentage. 0.20 extra armor pierce is probably not that important.
General Map Plan
Spam Piston Cannons. Remember that each turret has their own preference at who to attack, so manually select a few towers and have the ones in the flight path of air units target air units first.
After building about 5-6 Pistons, upgrade their attack, their overall upgrade, then their attack speed. Choose the Range upgrade only with outlying turrets so they can pepper what your main cannons are attacking. The game punishes players greatly for not killing specialty enemies quickly and the extra range might allow the needed concentrated fire to kill those undesired foes. The reason for the upgrade pathing is math. If you choose attack damage over speed, you’ll do 30 damage less per second when upgrading the tower to level 6.
And don’t forget! Use your Keeper’s Snipe ability. The other skills are nice, but damage is what you need the most and focused power due to that Snipe skill will help a lot. Make sure to upgrade your keeper to have increased Turret Auras first, then Snipe, and finally Mana Regen. That will take until level 18 to accomplish, but it’s a good guideline for where to advance. Plus you can reset those skills at any time to assist certain goals like the achievement for beating level 1 without towers
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.