Overview
This guide is aimed at providing a clear overview of what is required to earn all achievements on Anomaly Defenders, as well as providing general hints and tips along the way that may be of some use when attempting to go achievement hunting. Hope it helps!
Introduction
This is not a guide on how to complete missions on certain difficulties, but rather a tool as to how to unlock certain achievements that require a nudge in the right direction and also to explain the fundamental basics that will support you in your quest.
There are a total of 20 achievements with various tasks and objectives at hand, and a total of 24 missions to complete – 72 missions if you aim to unlock the ‘Alien Nolife Form’ achievement.
If you have ever played previous Anomaly games, you will have noticed that playing on an easy difficulty setting and increasing this to hard has a significant difference. The higher the difficulty, the greater the number of alien towers. On Anomaly Defenders that rule is the complete opposite. The higher the difficulty, the less spawning zones you have to play around with and the greater the enemy unit levels and frequencies. Familiarising yourself with the advantages and disadvantages of towers and enemy units based on their armour, damage, range and any additional bonus benefits will help you immensely. The below screenshots demonstrate the difference in map layout on easy (left) and hard (right) difficulty settings. You will notice certain cover placements are eliminated and tower spawning zones are reduced.
In order to get the best out of every map on every difficulty setting, you must understand the strengths and weaknesses of individual towers. Every tower packs a punch, but equally shares a great downfall making it a delicate tool in your inventory. Take the Predator tower as an example. Very effective against units with shields, but cannot sustain too much damage as it has a weak armour. Blaster towers are effective against almost all enemy unit types, but they cannot withstand heavy cannon fire nor flamethrowers. The Enforcer tower relies heavily on its outer rings as an actual form of defence. Once those are gone, it is just as weak as a Predator tower. However, a cluster of Enforcer towers can be very deadly in dealing great damage. Understanding this balance will help you in strategic tower placement.
Understanding how function abilities work will help you in accelerating the speed of a mission. Repair, Sniper, Shield, Rage, EM Pulse and Explode abilities will boost your chances of success dramatically. Each tower will benefit a certain way from each function, and knowing these benefits will help link certain functions to certain tower types, i.e. Sniper on Scorcher tower will extend its range. Another example is that Behemoth towers tend to have the slowest fire rate of any tower type, but deals a lot of splash damage. Adding the Rage ability will greatly increase its rate of fire allowing you to relieve some pressure.
Basic Hints & Tips
Below is a list of basic hints and tips to help optimise your chances of success during the campaign at various difficulty settings.
- Wall Cover: Use wall cover to your advantage. Certain units, such as the Panzer Cannon, are restricted in their ability to turn thereby taking shelter behind a wall is an effective way of reducing your chances of becoming a sitting duck at range. The first two towers are automatically guaranteed protection; the third tower is not so lucky though.
Take extra caution at later stages as even Panzer Cannons will harness the ability to turn their cannons. Units behind cover will pay the price for not landing damage early on.
- Repair, Sniper & Rage Functions: The more upgrades you put on the repair ability, the more towers it will heal within the vicinity of the tower you wish to heal. This can be very helpful when multiple towers taking cover behind a wall start taking heavy fire, and you are short on energy to cater to each one.
The Sniper function allows you to extend the range of a tower greatly. Use this to your advantage when vast enemy unit clusters threaten your front line. Call upon your secondary line of defence to support your primary line.
Rage function can be extremely useful when level 4 tanks with shields make short work of your level 3 towers. Using three Rage abilities on i.e. three Behemoth towers, can turn the tide of a battle in your favour.
- Spend Wisely: The amount of technology points you earn will increase the further you progress in the campaign. However, it is important to spend these wisely and not aimlessly distribute them on upgrades you may not need. All tower types have three upgrades each, whereas each function and perk ability has 2 upgrades respectively – these exclude the ability/tower itself.
- Sell Technology For Points: You can revert any tower or ability purchases you’ve made to accomodate your needs for a particular mission. If, say, the Scorcher towers are impractical on a map, then abort the mission and undo any purchases you’ve made for this tower. Then allocate those points to an ability or tower type which you would benefit most from.
If you feel your entire upgrade layout needs restructuring, select the central launchpad and click ‘sell all technologies‘.
- Easy Difficulty: I would strongly advice you to start the game on easy difficulty, regardless of how good your tower defence background may be. This way you can play through the 24 missions and collect enough points to earn some decent upgrades for towers, perks and functions. You can only go so far on pure hard difficulty setting without having to take a step back and re-evaluating the scenario. It is pivotal to earn as many technology points as you can and using those points effectively.
- Phantom Is Effective: Phantom towers can easily be overlooked as you get carried away with all the other tower types, perks and function abilities. The purpose of Phantom towers is to buff your other towers by increasing either: health, DPS (damage per second), or range. Once you unlock the level three upgrade the tower will become pretty much self sufficient. This means that if you set it to restore health, it will generate health restoration at almost the same rate as your function ability. Be sure to place the Phantom in the middle of a tower cluster to avoid losing it to enemy units, and also to connect as many towers to it as possible.
- Environmental Damage Control: Sporadic environmental factors will influence the way you traditionally place towers and also the way in which you spend energy. Factors beyond your control include electromagnetic storms and meteorite showers.
Electromagnetic storms will disable your towers for a certain time if they are placed next to one another, or within close proximity of that particular spot – two small towers and one build block spacing seems to work just fine; or one large tower and one build block spacing.
The second is meteorite showers. These will fall randomly on the map inflicting damage on both enemy units and your towers. Be sure to repair towers, and keep your ears peeled for warning messages as it will save you having to scout the map for drop sites every 5 seconds.
Basic Achievements
Description: Accomplish 5 missions.
Complete the first five missions. No further prerequisites or bonus objectives.
I started the game on hard difficulty setting and for some reason this achievement did not unlock, so I went back and worked my way through the easy difficulty setting. Not sure if this is a common problem across all.
Description: Accomplish 10 missions.
See ‘Defender of the Vacuum’ achievement for details.
Description: Accomplish 15 missions.
See ‘Defender of the Vacuum’ achievement for details.
Tech Tree Achievements
Upgrades in the tech tree are unlocked the further you progress in the campaign. As an example, the Blaster tower is the very first unit you acquire in the game. However, upgrades for this tower do not become available immediately and requires some effort in later missions. Only then will you be able to reap the benefits of all that hard work.
Description: Acquire technology of Energy Management 3
Purchase the three Energy upgrades in the technology tree once it becomes available.
Description: Acquire technology of Enforcers top level upgrade.
Purchase the Sniper ability and upgrade it to level 3 in the technology tree once it becomes available.
Description: Acquire technology of Harvesters top level upgrade.
Purchase the Harvester unit and upgrade it to level 3 in the technology tree once the upgrades become available.
Description: Acquire technology of Rage 3rd level.
Purchase the Rage ability and upgrade it to level 3 in the technology tree once the upgrades become available.
Challenge Achievements
Description: Do not lose any tower in 2 consecutive missions.
Do not lose any of your placed towers in 2 consecutive missions. This achievement is much easier to unlock on the easy difficulty setting, and mission replays also contribute towards this achievement.
I managed to reach mission 20 before I lost my first tower on easy difficulty, so it is possible to reach 12 consecutive missions without replaying past missions.
Description: Do not lose any tower in 6 consecutive missions.
See ‘Anomanager’ achievement for details.
Description: Do not lose any tower in 12 consecutive missions.
See ‘Anomanager’ achievement for details.
Description: Build 20 Blasters in one mission.
Every tower you place regardless of whether its still standing by wave 7/7 contributes towards this achievement. So long as you manage to place a total of 20 Blaster towers during that particular mission you will unlock this achievement.
Description: Build 10 Scorchers in one mission.
Build 10 Scorcher towers in a single mission. An idea would be to sell off your towers towards the very end (preferably the final wave) to generate enough Carusaurum to spend on 10 Scorcher towers.
Description: Build 10 Stormers in one mission.
See ‘Fire Walk With Me’ achievement for details.
Description: Use Rage function on Behemoth 30 times.
Use the Rage ability on Behemoth towers 30 times in order to unlock this achievement. This can be done over a stretch of missions and is not exclusive to a single mission.
Description: Use Explode function on Blaster 10 times.
See ‘Alien of Prety’ achievement for details.
Description: Use Sniper function on Scorcher 20 times.
See ‘Alien of Prety’ achievement for details.
Completion Achievements
Description: Accomplish all missions.
Complete the campaign on any difficulty setting.
Description: Accomplish all missions in hard difficulty setting.
Complete the campaign on hard difficulty setting.
Description: Earn 225 technology points.
Earn 225 technology points. You will find that once you have completed the game on all three difficulty settings, you will not have enough tech points for all the upgrades. This is supposed to be the case, so do not be alarmed. There are a total of 293 overall points in the tech tree, but only 225 of these are obtainable through the campaign. The remaining 68 is probably left out in order to get players to experiment with different tech advances.
Tech points are rewarded solely based on the integrity of your escape pod – the final mission is the only exception to this rule. You will not be penalised for losing towers or using an exorbitant amount of energy.
Description: Accomplish all missions in all difficulty settings.
Complete the campaign on all three difficulty settings: Easy, normal and hard.
I would strongly recommend running through the campaign on easy difficulty first so that you unlock all the perks and their respective upgrades, as you will need the added armour, increased chance of critical hit, cheaper towers, and increased pool of energy to spend on tower functions during missions.
Thank You & End of Guide
That should wrap everything up. If you have any further questions feel free to ask.
- Great big thank you to Tentyz for pointing out a grave mistake I made with the Alien Nolife Form & Technology Freak achievements.
Thank you for reading and happy gaming!