Gem Tower Defense

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WGW - 2022-06-25 10:16:01.497708

@216: That's interesting, that the Star Yellow Sapphire is even more bugged than I was aware of.  At some point soon, I think I'm going to try to put together a comprehensive list of the bugs that we're aware of and send it to Peter- there's no way he'd ever have time to read through all the comments here, and if he ever has the time to do another update, it would be great if these bugs got addressed.  Some of them may be very tough to diagnose and fix, like the high score text bug, but things like the combine special bug, the multiple gem combine bug, the problems with the SYS, those are all VERY easily fixable.  If I get around to this, I'll post it here before sending it to Peter so you or anyone else can add to it.

@s: I didn't think that you had suggested that Black Opal buffs should stack, I was just clarifying for my own comment that I didn't think that would be a good idea, because I was otherwise saying that the SYS buff SHOULD stack with the Black Opal buff.  So I was just trying to be clear that I was only saying that these two diffeent gems' buffs should stack with each other, but not trying o suggest that the attack buffs should all stack upon each for every new tower you build withbuff properties.

I alsomeant to clarify, but forgot to, that when I said that I estimate about an 80% of being able to get past level 150 in any run that you don't have to restart very early, I didn't mean that this would be true of everyone-- I mean that if you know the game very well, you can develop a sound strategy that will "win" you 80% of your runs.  But as I keep saying, I consider this a difficut game-- especially for newcomers who are missing key information about the game that isn't documented anywhere (e.g., that Jades earn gold).  For a brand new player, your odds of getting past level 150 are approximately zero.  :)  The more you play and the better you get, the higher the odds get-- but there's a limit, because very bad luck can still sometimes ruin even very strong runs.

s - 2022-06-25 3:08:45.642333

216 - 2022-06-24 13:15:21.661544

WGW - 2022-06-24 4:23:59.022491

Reposting the tips from my earlier comment because I inadvertently buried them under a bunch of gibberish at the top. So, repeating:

1) Do NOT repick gems early game.  I almost never repick gems until I've fully upgraded gem chances and have at least one jade built to earn gold.  Maybe I'll repick ONCE early game, but only if I have an otherwise very strong start going.  If you get a turn with lousy gems, just consider it a wasted turn.  When I get more than one turn with lousy gems early game, I just restart.  You can't afford to blow gold on repicks early on. Eventually, you'll have so much gold that repicks become trivial, but not at the start of the game.

2) EXPLOIT THE COMBINE SPECIAL BUG!  I can't emphasize this enough.  The way to do this earlyu game is to NEVER place a gem that's part of a tower recipe until you FIRST have the perfect gem needed placed on the board.  If the first gem of any recipe that's on the board is the perfect gem, then you can keep creating towers off of it forever without consuming it.  But this will only work if the perfect gem is FIRST placed.  I can't imagine how many more attempts it would require for me to do as well as I do if I had to pick a perfect gem for every tower I build!

3) Avoid wasting early turns on towers that become dead weight by level 30-- namely, silver towers, malachites (beyond the first one or two, which you do need), star rubies (always useless), uranium (almost useless)

4) Never, ever, EVER build a Star Yellow Ruby-- while the description accurately says that they provide a 5% damage buff to gems in range, what is DOESN'T say is that this buff will OVERRIDE THE BUFF FROM BLACK OPALS, which is 40%.  Bad enough that the buffs don't stack, but if you place a Star Yellow Ruby AFTER a Black Opal, you'll actually LOSE 35% of your existing attack buff.  You can get the 40$ back by building another Black Opal, but that means you've wasted 6 full turns to get right back where you started.  It's easily to worst tower in the whole game, because it not only doesn't help, it actually HURTS your existing layout.

Hope this is at least somewhat helpful-- and sorry for the repost, but if it were me reading, I'd have just skimmed right past that comment I left because all you can see without scrolling down is nonsense I didn't mean to paste!

WGW - 2022-06-24 4:18:08.326685

s - 2022-06-24 3:24:05.601814

s - 2022-06-24 3:17:17.437600

yea you are probably right but with the way i bont know the way i will chose because the last run had i think 3 blood stones and i probably upgraded them way to early or some thing and i had other combinations like the dark emerald mabby 2, the black opal, and other good combinations , and i use to repick so i would get one of each gem which i now relize is not a good idea, and my last run i had two malachiets and it kinda carried me through while i was geting the other combinations and i try to get them full upgraded before anything else , and thanks for the yellow star information not making that probably also helped me and since the black opal buff dose not stack it will be beter if i have one on a half of the map and i asuming that will work but i could be completly rong , and the debuf could be redone depending on the player had a extra combination but did not combind it at the time they made the star but otherwise you are probably right  , and the odds of geting past the level i think will be significantly lower then the odds you have in your commit cause you can predict what gems you get and also depends on how much time the player has on this game because if they have never played before and dont check the other tabs they will be in the dark of how to play the game but that is my thoughts and have a good run next time.

WGW - 2022-06-24 2:35:17.318278

WGW - 2022-06-24 2:26:41.484448

WGW - 2022-06-24 2:25:41.997659

6/28 12:45

prfcisionpharacy 516-833-6262

5300
10600
14000

5300
5300
3400

A couple more tips that I don't recall having come up in comments before, which may help folks struggling to get past level 50:

Hope this is at least somewhat helpful!

WGW - 2022-06-24 1:27:55.479107

@s: If you keep at it, I'm sure you'll continue to improve. . . but I expect that repeatedly playing (and losing early) a game like GTD only appeals a very specific type of game player (which obviously includes me!)  It's not a very exciting game.  But it does have a lot of depth to it beyond the surface, and good playing can drastically reduce how much bad luck can screw you.  You can't completely prevent bad luck from ruining a run, but you can come pretty close-- I'd say about an 80% chance of getting past level 150 for any run that you don't have to end really early (before level 10).

I'm still in the middle of a run which I thought would get above level 1200, but again, around level 600 I started losing so much gold that I had to build some more towers other than paraibas, which cost a turn every time you build one, so I'm only going to be able to get up to level 1180 or so.  Level 1200 is definitely possible, but I'm finding it very challenging.  Even if you manage a run that will make it that high, you still have to endure the absolute tedium of playing it out for two weeks!

I've been recording the run since level 475 and will post it to YouTube when it's done.  But I can't imagine why I'm doing this, since there's absolutely nothing remotely interesting about the gameplay-- I'm basically just building one paraiba after another, except for the brief period around level 600 where I built some other towers.  It's just 80 hours of deadly boring gameplay.

But if my high score for this run ends up blank again, at least I'll have a way of proving that the high score is really my run! :)

s - 2022-06-22 2:21:53.991893

fluff - 2022-06-21 19:45:23.642374

DR JM NIPOPK - 2022-06-16 0:10:25.110550

WGW - 2022-06-15 22:36:33.365547

@DR JM NIPOK: Sorry to say, but that's exactly what happens when you run out of room, the game just soft locks and you can't post a high score.  I suspected that this is what would happen, but made sure I had ways of leaking enemies late game to avoid it. It was only just confirmed, in the past day or so, that what I suspected was accurate-- that the game soft locks when you run out of room with no way to end it and post a high score-- by @NeoVIP_MD, who commented JUST before you.  Check out the comment at 2022-06-13 8:22:09.334369.

So yes, you have to make sure you have a way of leaking enemies late game.  You can always end on a "no stun" level, but you have to be aware of how many moves you have left or you might go past your last chance at ending on a "no stun" level.

Otherwise, there are ways to be able to leak enemies late game.  The main way, I think, is to make sure you have removable rocks that will alter the maze and massively shorten the ground enemy's path.  My maze can be converted from a seven pass maze to a one pass with the removal of a single rock.  With all the attack/stun power in place, most of the ground troops still get killed off even with the shortened maze, but a few do get through, and that's all you need.

Sorry you weren't able to post a high score.  It's really not fair, since there's no warning about it anywhere but here in the thousands of words of comments!

DR JM NIPOK - 2022-06-15 22:08:20.225318

DR JM NIPOK - 2022-06-15 22:05:05.012464

NeoVIP_MD - 2022-06-15 7:32:52.126626

fluff - 2022-06-14 15:02:30.470618

sYa - 2022-06-14 13:48:10.830950

sYa - 2022-06-14 12:52:04.891940

WGW - 2022-06-14 10:32:25.787771

WGW - 2022-06-14 10:20:36.071225

@fluff: I overstated-- the first malachite should get most of the kills, not all.  It's not really possible to let it get ALL the kills.  But it's definitely something to take into account in the earliest levels, to avoid letting other pieces (particularly gems rather than special towers) leach kills from the malachite.

I started a run today where I was thinking, eh, I'll just play casually for once and not worry about leaving space for maximum turns, which would sure make it a lot easier to get past level 150 (there's a lot of self-imposed limitations that prevent building towers where you want to, if you're planning for max turns/space).

And then lo and behold, I got a great opal on LEVEL TWENTY ONE.  I'd just done the final upgrade to gem chances that turn, and boom, a great opal.  So now I'm going for level 1200 again-- though I already built a couple of towers in spaces that will cost me about 20 turns.  But I can still make it, easily, if I endure the tedium.  Which I will.

I clearly need mental help.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/tb7w85p

s - 2022-06-14 3:07:14.730113

fluff - 2022-06-13 23:01:15.281442

NeoVIP_MD - 2022-06-13 8:22:09.334369

SCGmeister - 2022-06-13 5:20:16.871021

s - 2022-06-13 2:29:30.428908

i thought it was a example my bad and the link kinda worked but kinda did not because of some thing in my computer that is installed in mine and it is the same thing on imager if it was not instaed the link might of worked , i would also be able to get on integer , or give you a video of my run but since of the thing that is instaled there is nothing i can do to present the screen shot , and i am not trying to be rude to anyone at all i do agree that i need to lose the habit of making a lot of small and usless comitss that is not about gtd and i also agree that i am geting to personal with my commits and @scgminster i got to the same point as you did but i thought you would be able to get past it my bad so i guess this conversation is over now cause there is nothing i can do about the software that is instaled , @wgw all of the links worked on my side but that aparently dose not matter unless some one else can axxis it , and the only person who would care would be the person playing the game to get to that level, @scgminster if you dont have patience i sugest just walking away for a few moments because you dont have to be at what you are playing the game on , @wgw if you actually think my behavior is rude and incosiderate then i adviseyou to NEVER come to piedmont ever . and the black opal is broken now it took two perfect opals , a Aquamarien but did not take the flawless Dimond and good luck to the people that is on a run, and have a good week to all , @ wgw i think i figured out a posiable flaw in my runs it may be that instead of going for one of each combination first i probably should be geting duplicates of each combination that is more help full for mid game to late game and less on imidiate begining waves i think i covered every thing ?

scgmeister - 2022-06-13 0:44:50.144646

SCGmeister - 2022-06-13 0:01:15.636992

scgmeister - 2022-06-12 23:59:44.476853

WGW - 2022-06-12 21:49:50.597558

WGW - 2022-06-12 21:47:22.300803

SCGmeister - 2022-06-12 21:22:07.761147

SCGmeister - 2022-06-12 21:12:33.686562

scgmeister - 2022-06-12 20:36:13.377379

WGW - 2022-06-11 13:55:13.906020

I just ended my current run which should have gotten me above level 1200. . . because I got a dreaded "frozen rock" at level 1060 which robbed me of four turns.  Add this to the potential for a blank text high score as reasons why, if I had any sense at all, I wouldn't play runs out for two weeks trying to get above level 1200.  I mean, honestly, who cares???

This time, the high score text didn't end up blank-- instead it ended up repeating one of my prior high scores, and this time I'm absolutely certain it wasn't because of autocomplete filling in old text, as I used to think was the cause when text repeated.  I was hypercareful.  But it ended up repeating text I used for a failed run weeks ago.  Sigh.  (L1067: "WGW Lame lame lame")

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/BlTJkb8

The rock in the bottom right is the one that's frozen, meaning it can't be removed because the game won't recognize its being clicked on.  This only happens very, very late levels and has only happened a few times to me, but like with the high score text bug, there doesn't seem to be any pattern to it at all.  Completely random when it happens, and this time it made the difference between my being able to get above level 1200 or not, so I just threw in the towel.

WGW - 2022-06-11 13:45:03.557657

SCGmeister - 2022-06-10 5:37:09.257529

Alright, I suppose I may as well post a screenshot of my current game progress so far which is without the use of a great opal (I tend to have pretty bad luck in getting a GO in my games). Anyway this one I believe has the potential to get me up to around level 900 though I'm not sure I have the patience to push it that far as the game starts to slow down considerably after around level 400-level 500, including the movement of the mobs glitching out (vibrating in place) when the browser is in focus. I also have plans to attempt to get a stable run going using a slightly more simple maze which will result in a more precise and cool looking spiral pattern in the middle and raising the potential maximum level Id be able to reach even further, though still not to the extent that WGW is going for. https://imgur.com/qAXXI8V

As a note, I didn't upgrade those bloodstones right away, not untill I got to some of the higher levels where I felt like having more focused damage would be a bit more effective than the aoe damage.

@S, I attempted the link and it just stated I don't have permission to access the file . Better to upload the image to an image hosting site like imgur.com then posting a link to that here instead whatever it is you were trying to do.  I also mirror what WGW stated. Better to keep this comment section gemtd focused. Also, please avoid posting a bunch of small comments in a row, especially if you don't actually have anything useful to say. Not everyone needs to know your every detail in your struggling to try to share a screenshot.

WGW - 2022-06-10 4:44:35.499123

WGW - 2022-06-10 4:42:41.855554

@s: The link doesn't work, with one dash, two dashes or no dashes.  Look, as I said, you can USE a free website-- such as imagur-- to post the image.  I wasn't suggesting that you CREATE a website. I don't know how you could possibly gotten that impression from what I wrote.  Go to www.imagur.com and you can post the image there.  You don't even need to have an account with the website, you can post an image as a guest.  But I'm really not interested in tortuously helping you figure out how to post a screenshot.  If you can't figure it out, I'm sorry.

But please-- as I tried to say gently in a prior comment-- consider how you're posting comments HERE.  You've now posted seven comments in a row that aren't about GTD, but that are you talking to yourself about how you can't figure out how to take or post a screenshot.  And that's not only not useful or interesting commentary to add, but adding it over the course of SEVEN comments pushes all the actually relevant discussion down the page.  I've really tried, very hard, to be as nice as possible to you, but I have to say, we're at a point where I'm finding your behavior disruptive and/or inconsiderate.

I'm sorry, but that's how I feel at this point.  If you can figure out how to post a screenshot-- and please TEST the link before you post it here-- I'm happy to talk about it.  Otherwise, please be more considerate of folks who are actually trying to, you know, discuss the actual GAME.  Thanks.

s - 2022-06-10 3:13:24.242473

s - 2022-06-10 3:01:43.351883

s - 2022-06-10 2:43:25.526703

s - 2022-06-10 2:35:21.330018

s - 2022-06-10 2:28:06.897075

s - 2022-06-10 2:22:56.298230

s - 2022-06-10 2:15:05.973202

fluff - 2022-06-09 22:16:53.644711

s - 2022-06-09 11:10:10.057791

WGW - 2022-06-08 20:25:07.963004

@John Cena: I've thought about doing a video or two to help new players learn the game-- it just always felt like it might be a decent amount of work to put in for videos on a game that, for all I know, there are only 12 people still playing. . . :)  But the high score list does keep growing, and people do keep leaving comments, and you did ask, so I'll try to do something soon.  (I was surprised to see the YouTube video I posted, which is only linked in onew comment way down below and is otherwise totally unlisted on YouTube, has gotten almost 50 views-- imagine if I *listed* a GTD video! It'll be instantly viral!  I'll be the Future King of YouTube!!!)

It'll be a while, though, since I have to at least first finish playing out this run, which I'm masochistically intending to play out to level 1200.  Currently at 971 and it takes upwards of 8 minutes a level to advance at this point.

It's amusing to me how many times people commented here about the game being far too easy.  I maintained that the game is not easy at all-- it's simply *learnable*.  But it takes a whole lot of experimentation and/or reading comments on other people's strategies to make any headway.  And for the folks who've posted high scores saying, e.g., "There's no challenge to this after level 100", well, I'm not going to argue that anyone else should waste their time playing runs to level 1200 like I'm doing, but that said. . . Being able to play the game to this high a level requires very specific strategies that are very counter-productive otherwise.  Even in this run, I started being in danger of losing all my gold around level SIX HUNDRED, long past the point when the run should have completely "stabilized".  I had to scramble and build a handful more EGs, EEs and even a few more jades before going to back to building nothing but paraibas.

There's also every possibility that someone has a lucky run or two of GTD-- luck can go in streaks, after all-- and then decide the game is a cakewalk, when it's really, really not.  Look at how specific the strategy recommendations are just to get past level 50.  @216 thinks I do certain things in less than ideal way-- and I'm kinda clearly pretty good at this game. . .   :)

All of which is just to say, I think this is a hard game and always has been, except for maybe the initial javascript version where jades truly were overpowered in gold production.

Will try to work up some sort of a video soonish.  In the meantime, I'm still happy to comment on screenshots!

@s,m,g: Look up how to take a screenshot, it's not hard to at all.  Then you can post it to a free site and put the link here-- I use imagur, but there are a ton of them.  Otherwise, really, it's impossible to help any more specifically than what's already been said here, mainly: (1) Always build a malachite first and let it get all kills for the first 20 levels, (2) build a central rose quartz by level 32, (3) build a bloodstone in the middle of the maze as soon as possible and don't upgrade it.

There's never a need to leak ground enemies until level 150.

s,m,g - 2022-06-08 20:08:56.308568

JC - John Cena - 2022-06-08 17:31:04.825339

fluff - 2022-06-08 13:50:52.457940

WGW - 2022-06-08 10:48:21.738268

s,m,g - 2022-06-07 22:52:06.640885

fluff - 2022-06-07 15:43:54.817015

WGW - 2022-06-06 23:41:42.043561

@John Cena: You probably haven't read my earlier comments about this (there are a LOT of comments here after all), but building so many paraibas isn't good strategy for any reason EXCEPT to maximum the number of turns you can make before running out of room on the board.  It actually slows the game down in late levels that already way too slow to begin with-- both because the frost attack animation causes a progressive memory leak, and because you're not building any of the other towers which help kill enemies faster (primarily Egyptian Golds and Bloodstones).  You're actually best off having only one, maybe two paraibas for the first 100+ levels of the game.  I only start building them like a madman when I get a very early great opal, because that opens up the possibility of playing for maximum turns and not really paying much attention to overall attack strength.

By level 800 or so, enemy movement is so glitched out that you really can't leak any enemies anymore no matter how good/bad your attack power and maze is.

So basically, attack power and killing enemies quickly and efficiently just isn't what I'm focused on in runs like this.  You shouldn't consider building endless paraibas to be a good strategy.  :)

The only way to earn gold in this game is through enemy kills and Jades-- and I still think it's absolutely terrible that the documentation for the game no longer even mentions that Jades earn gold at all.  I don't know how new players ever figure it out, unless they're looking at the game code.  Otherwise it would take, I think, a ton of experimentation to figure out that Jades have a low chance of earning gold.  And this is so absolutely key to being able to play this game, I don't know how new players ever figure out how to play well enough before giving up in frustration, just because they're not given access to basic info like this (unless, I guess, you spend hours reading the comments page!)

One ongoing difference between how @216 and I play GTD is that I build a lot of Jades, which gives me a cushion to leak more enemies than I'd like to.  But it's a real tradeoff, because every turn you spend building a Jade is one you're NOT building an actual attack tower (golds, bloodstones, paraibas) or an Enchanted Emerald-- so you're sacrificing attack/stun power for a tower that's only real use is earning gold (Jades kill enemies in very early levels, but they're very weak on attack power and their stun effect is basically trivial).

It amazes me this game still attracts new players at this point-- how did all you find it?

John Cena - 2022-06-06 21:52:24.988889

fluff - 2022-06-06 19:59:45.782144

fluff - 2022-06-06 15:01:39.156928

John Cena - 2022-06-06 8:56:47.572416

WGW - 2022-06-06 5:20:30.719004

WGW - 2022-06-06 5:14:29.793787

WGW - 2022-06-06 4:43:52.212776

@John Cena: @216 answered 100^ correctly, but if you're having trouble completely following (due to abbreviations and such) I can always offer a more long winded explanation.  :)

An early UNUPGRADED bloodstone is hugely important, imo.  I've played out successful runs without getting one (and again, by "early", I mean getting one before around level 35), but they're just hugely powerful early game.

It might have gotten lost, due to the way comments work here, how important it is (and I think @216 would agree with this) to have your first gem be a malachite that racks up nearly all the kills for the early game.  That's due to its "aoe" (area of effect) attack, which attacks all enemies in range.  Same with an UNGRADED bloodstone, except it's a lot stronger than a malachite initially is-- but of course it takes a little while in the game before you'll even possibly be able to build one.

So for the first, say, 20 levels, I want the initial malachite getting all the kills, and as soon as possible after that, I want an unupgraded bloodstone in the middle of the layout.  Sometimes I build more than one, usually not (not when I'm going for macimum possible turns and building as many paraibas as I can), but having an early bloogstone in the middle of the maze is hugely important.  I usually don't upgrade that central bloodstone until I'm getting near level 100.

I have a run going now that should finally break level 1200. . . if I play it all the way out.  There's every possibility that if I do play it out, my high score text will end up being blank.  I'm. . . conflicted.

@216: I have to say again how impressed I am at that "one jade" challenge run you did.  It's kinda inconceivable to me to leak so little for so many levels (particularly leaking air enemies on normal levels from 48 up).  It feels like alchemy to me.  :)  I'd love to see the progression in your very early game, understanding that (as you've acknowledged) a lot of things have to fall into place by RNG luck for it to work.  But still, you did it.  Well done, indeed.

216 - 2022-06-04 11:13:26.976027

John Cena - 2022-06-04 8:22:11.849415

John Cena - 2022-06-04 8:15:54.890829

s - 2022-06-03 20:43:20.579576

fluff - 2022-06-03 18:53:18.904795

fluff - 2022-06-03 17:26:45.119566

f - 2022-06-03 14:43:03.840397

216 - 2022-06-03 13:02:10.810728

WGW - 2022-06-03 2:44:47.176430

WGW - 2022-06-03 2:42:02.932303

WGW - 2022-06-03 2:36:00.107002

@f: You really should never be leaking ground enemies at any point.  The way the math works with buying lives, the cost starts to skyrocket pretty quickly.  You might be able to muddle through if you don't leak more than, oh, about 10 ground troops, tops, for the whole game-- but you'll be behind the eight ball the whole run.  So I'd say as a general strategy tip, to focus for now on making sure you kill all the ground troops.

You can't really extend your maze-- it actually looks pretty good to me, nice and long.  But I'd suggest:
(a) Build the Rose Quartz closer to the center horizontally, and up at least a few rows.  And seriously consider building a second one-- I usually have two by level 45, which covers the entire air enemy path for armor reduction.  This isn't going to help you kill ground enemies, but it's super important.

(b) An early-ish bloodstone (before, say, level 35) is very powerful and will mow down both ground and air enemies for quite a while.  I see you have a perfect ruby and a flawless aquamarine in your screenshot, but no bloodstone-- if the game just didn't give you a perfect ruby until level 51, well, you had no choice, but otherwise, I think you would have done substantially better if you'd built a bloodstone near the center of the maze (and leave it unupgraded-- it's unupgraded "all enemy attack" is more powerful early game than the upgraded bloodstone)

Hope this is helpful!

216 - 2022-06-03 2:02:39.289702

f - 2022-06-02 21:38:57.497433

WGW - 2022-06-02 17:48:28.038791

f - 2022-05-31 22:13:07.362658

s - 2022-05-28 19:47:07.292785

s - 2022-05-28 19:09:22.997221

s - 2022-05-28 19:07:14.437915

WGW - 2022-05-28 17:13:54.518671

@f: Not so on the high score text bug-- I've posted two high scores this week, one ended up blank (just now), the other didn't.  It's been an intermittent and (as far as I can tell) totally random bug since I first saw it happening-- and it still is.  :(

I had two runs going which would have broken my highest score, one of which I accidentally lost at level 460-- I really am a bit relieved, because I will not be happy if I play for two weeks to get a higher level score than before only for the text to end up blank.  And at this point, it seems to be a total crapshoot whether the text shows up or not.

@Bepis, great job getting to level 200 for the first time!  I'm curious, if you see this comment, how long it took you playing GTD to get to this point?

@s: Just my opinion-- not like I'm in charge of the comments or anything, just saying what I think-- I really think it's best for the comments here to be about GTD.  I don't think this page was intended for general "community discussion".  It's understandable if you start to find the discussion boring after a while since it's only about this one game-- there are really only two of us (me and @216) who have consistently been commenting here for years and years.  When other people have had their fill of playing and/or discussing GTD, they just move on to other things.

@216: There's a whole lot else I'd like to respond to from your recent comment, but for now I at least wanted to say what I forgot to say before: I'm pretty much blown away by your "one jade" challenge run.  I'd never be able to do that without some sort of major change to my approach to the game.  Really impressive.  :)

s - 2022-05-25 22:26:59.093522

s - 2022-05-25 21:56:00.178576

f - 2022-05-24 17:19:02.887037

f - 2022-05-24 14:14:28.905902

216 - 2022-05-24 12:49:29.156171

bepis - 2022-05-24 7:31:27.232300

s - 2022-05-24 2:29:42.898720

216 - 2022-05-23 2:10:04.513134

It's true that extra malachite can help in lvls 12/16, where i often fail (leak before 44 = reset usually). But i wouldn't waste 3 turns + good place for it, since its useless after (spitting kills -> ~same dmg as one malachite).

1-turn silver is not mistake at all.
Becasue bug, slowing effect is minor, but still is.

Accepting bad starts would make sense, but that case is a not clear for me: 
You made 2nd malachite intentionally form parts, then you got next chipped? it would be after 4 lvls at least, lvl 5 = chances upgraded twice - bad luck, but happens.
But the thing i asking myself - what is reason to waste another 2 turns to finish 3rd malachite? (Getting 3x olny chipped seems too unlikely).

I rather dont use repicks in early wawes - need max chances asap.

Agree that stun RNG definitelly matters - in longer games it should average out, but still matter. If i got 2 leaks more (in 44 to 200) i would fail mine 1JC.

I restart a lot, but after 20 it rarely happens. But i dont get any any EG untill 44 (~20 repicks possible) rather i do ( unless got GO or something). typically restart reasons:
- no lvl 1 malachite (quick restart)
- leak in 12/16 (rarely happens in other wawe)
- forced chipped ( in lvl 2 often, rarely later)
- many kills stolen from malachite (by not carrefully placed gem early)

I often run 2 games untill lvl 20-40 in case of bad luck, restaring 5 times in row (becasue leak in 12, most often) is frustrating.

WGW - 2022-05-21 2:02:08.227198

I didn't phrase it very clearly, but I didn't mean that EGs aren't necessary until late game-- I just meant that I built MORE EGs than I needed to, when if I had built Jades instead, I wouldn't have lost that run at level 116.  I think I'd built 7 or 8 EGs-- in my experience, the way I play GTD, I only really need 2 or 3 EGs early game, even without a great opal. But when I got the early GO, I figured, eh, what the heck, build a ton of EGs, I shouldn't need as many Jades with such an early GO.  And usually that's true-- but that run, again, I had terrible RNG luck with respect to air troops getting stunned.

I'm thinking now that one of the key differences in our experiences is your willingness to restart runs that aren't going well.  I will restart runs many times before, say, level 10, if I'm getting really crappy picks, but beyond that point, I try to make it work.  I almost NEVER quit a game after level 20.  Whatever real challenge is left for me in GTD is in trying to make a stable run out of less than ideal starts.  If I have what I think is a promising layout, but get hit with really bad RNG with respect to air troops not getting stunned and leaking excessively, I'll still keep playing trying to make it work, where you (probably a lot more sensibly) just say, "to hell with this" and restart.  :)

As for the malachites, I do find it helpful-- though definitely NOT necessary-- to have two, the primary one being on the left side.  Very early game, having another malachite on the right side of the maze helps a lot with air troops.  I never intentionally build more than two, and I never intentionally build ANY silver towers, but that run I lost at level 116, I had three malachites and a silver tower, simply because I got picks in very early levels of nothing but chipped gems and didn't have enough gold to repick.  If you had the same pattern of picks, from what you've said, you would have just abandoned the game (probably the sensible thing to do), but I try to make it work, and I have had successful GTD runs with one or more low level gems in addition to the two malachites I actually WANT to build.  It's not a "fatal" error to build more of those low level towers in the beginning of the game.  It's not ideal strategy, it's not something I ever intentionally seek out, but the only two options when you get lousy picks early in the game when you can't afford repicks are (a) treat these as wasted turns but try to make the run anyway (which it can), or (b) just restart.  :)

But I would never argue that it's helpful, at all, to build more than two malachites, or to build ANY silver towers.  I just won't automatically end a run because I'm forced into building a couple of these towers that I don't want.

I think, also (though these runs all sort of blur together), that at least one of those unnecessary low level gems was a single turn gem, where the other two gems picked that turn were completely, totally useless.  Like, I picked all three gems to make a silver tower, and the other two gems that pick were a chipped ruby and a chipped amethyst, which are REALLY useless.  So I took the low level gem as the best of bad options.

It's never helpful to build anything beyond two malachites in my experience.  But I won't end a run just because the game forces an extra malachite or silver tower on me.

I hope that makes sense!

216 - 2022-05-20 16:54:16.011278

@WGW: Mostly agree, need keep rocks (extented mid maze) to lvl 150, Which limits mid space much. So, olny most important gems (like GO) should be there  + top dmg gems (EG, (A)BS, GAq). EGs within 100-110 range form crossroad can be considered as "mid", ABSs should be a bit closer (BS -very close).

Too bad RNG early = restart for me.

The thing i dont agree: EGs cant wait untill late game, the point is to have high dmg (much kill) mid EGs, then they outdamage any other gem, even ABS (uber dont count).
Also late game is getting more stun-based. So if you dont build them untill late game, they arent really needed( ABSs may be better).
Unless you meant only armor reduction EG, yes they can wait.

First few close mid EG should be build before lvl 50.

Jade gold gen. increase much around 60-80, so dont need hurry with jade as much.
In fact, if you started to build jades 10-15 lvls eariel, you would not lose, because (IMO) jade gold generation is really too high.

Probably you can just start builing only jades after lvl 50 and you never lose (if no ground leaks), but i think its not way that we should play (also you agree that its boring).

Basicly i just trying to reduce leaks as much as possble.

Meanwhile im doing quite succesfull One Jade Challenge, very early GO: https://imgur.com/AKAV0FR

Leaking 10 in lvls 44-200 = 400 leaks. If 1 jade allows to buy 90 lives untill lvl 200, it would need 87 jades for 400, but having less dmg and more jades also increase lvl time, so probably less, which is possible to build.

You didnt anwser about malachites, im just curious how you start with so much. :)

WGW - 2022-05-20 11:58:50.027676

@216: One more thing I should have pointed out is that maximizing attack power in the middle of the maze is something I can't do, even if I wanted to, because I'm always planning from the earliest levels for maximizing number of turns.  This means I can't fill in the majority of the center of the maze because I will eventually need to remove the rocks that make the ground enemy path long enough to reliably kill them early on.  I've experimented with this, and shortening the maze in the middle too early leads to leaked ground enemies, which you can't afford at all.

The old Flash GTD had some elements, too, which meant that making the best moves short term would mess up your late game.  Needing to maximize the number of turns you can make is something brand new to this version of GTD, and if you're playing with the goal in mind of getting the highest level high score possible, you can't fill in the middle of the maze without making the ground enemy path too short.  The last screenshot I saw of your maze layout, quite a while back, the maze was good but wouldn't have allowed you to get anywhere near level 1200.  Which isn't important to you, as you've stated, so of course you're going to look at my layout and wonder why I have so few attack gems in the center.  :)

WGW - 2022-05-20 11:25:24.292241

@216:  I wasn't really looking for a dissection of my playing style/strategy when I posted that video-- just wanted to see if you observed any differences in game performance, which you've said you haven't.  Thanks for checking.

Remember that there's RNG in this game beyond your luck in what gems you pick.  There's RNG in the critical hits (not important), and in how enemies get stunned (very important).  I had several levels that run where, even with a very strong layout (which is in no way different from COUNTLESS runs that I didn't lose), 7 or 8 air enemies were leaking.  Sometimes as few as 4 enemies would escape, sometimes, 7 or 8.  You can't withstand that level of leaking unless. . .

You build a ton of Jades.

We have different approaches (you like to concentrate attack power, where I like to have it spread across the map, e.g.), but neither is "wrong".  Especially given my track record, I think my playing strategy is perfectly sound.  I don't enjoy building a ton of jades, but guess what?  It works.

I have a run going now where I sailed past level 150 without a great opal, and with a layout essentially the same as that run I lost WITH a great opal.  Because the stun pattern, due to RNG, was more favorable early on.  All RNG factors become less important to the point of irrelevancy late in the game.  But losing that run so early, with a great opal, wasn't due to anything but bad luck, which I could have insured against by building maybe 5 more jades (instead of EG towers-- those can wait till later game, if I end up needing them at all.)

Again, it's fine that you wouldn't have played it that way, and that you see other ways to do well without resorting to building a lot of jades.  But I'm 100% correct when I say that I would never have lost that run if I'd built 5 more jades in exchange for 5 of the Golds I built.

But I appreciate your suggestions, which I'll think about for future runs.

Right now, I'm most concerned with the high score text bug getting fixed, because it's utterly pointless to play long runs of GTD if I'm going to end up posting a blank text high score at the end.  But I'm not expecting it to get fixed anytime soon.  We haven't heard anything from Peter in quite a while (which, I always try to emphasize, is NOT a complaint-- this is a free game!)

Cheers!

WGW - 2022-05-20 11:13:53.247882

WGW - 2022-05-20 11:09:35.308223

s - 2022-05-19 2:41:54.714073

f - 2022-05-18 20:44:54.330862

f - 2022-05-18 20:44:00.203244

216 - 2022-05-18 1:14:23.152605

@WGW: Looks like game runs identical for me.
Why (and how?) you always have as much malachites?
Also i wonder how you lost 56 lives in lvls 44, 48, (50?) 52, 56, 60, 64, 68, 72, 76 (avg 6.22 leak) with early GO. 
4-5 leaks after - not as bad.

Amount of jades wasnt biggest problem this run, there is lack of dmg in the mid zone. Wawes 44-96 are more dmg-based than stun-based. I can see only 2 EG in mid zone.

Sometimes i get 2nd malachite and take it, becasue only chipped to choose, but getting 4 chipped special is pointless and unlikely... unless you build them in 3 turns ( incredible waste of moves).

3 paraibas 1 PAq at lvl 96 - rip 13 mo.. ok 1 paraiba may be needed, so  9 moves - you would make 3 extra EEs/EGs instead (or jades at least).

Other possible moves lost (unless you got 1-turn):
a) 2 BOs - 1 should be enough ( try to affect all EGs)
b) 2 RCs - also 1 enough, at this point worth ingore some upper or lower part of path for 3 moves in most cases.
c) strange located PO, but not sure how game looked like before.

Good position of EEs (only quite few of them). But EG positions... looks like you try to range all path as fast as possible. but its not nessesary (in late game rather it is). No point to place EGs where is no stunners. Also your leftmost EGs dont range flyers after start of wawe - quite wasted potential dmg.

Becsue early leaks cause life cost going to absurd values, need focus to reduce them, someimtes i was leaking 0 in 44 without GO (4EG + 2-3EG or 3 EE +3-4 EG may be enough, with towers like RC, BO, ofc).

Just idea about blank scores, mb typing email adress cause bug? idk if you type it always.

WGW - 2022-05-17 21:10:14.469246

f - 2022-05-17 21:03:25.098236

WGW - 2022-05-17 16:59:29.927112

@216: As requested, here's a video of my last run, levels 77 to 116, posted to YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwZKd71lrys

Infuriating loss for a run where I got a great opal around level 53.  I blame not building enough jades, and exceptionally bad luck with how the air enemies got stunned (or rather, how they didn't get stunned) in several levels.

I'm very interested to hear from you whether you would have had the same degree of air troop leaks with comparable gem attack/stun power.  Or whatever comparisons you can make against this video, re enemy movement speed or whatever.

Meanwhile, I also posted the prior video to YouTube so I could remove it from my dropbox account, so on the low chance anyone wants to see it (a video to show how enemy movement is glitched late game), here the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY4_SwWm68U

The high score for the run I just lost did NOT end up with blank name text (level 116, "WGW Will this be blank?"-- it's there).  So that's great, that my level 116 run has the text there, but my prior level ***1051*** game doesn't.  (<--- sarcasm)  It only took, oh, 8 or 9 days for the level 1051 high score. . . who would mind it ending up with blank text after only 8 or 9 days to get there? (<--- more sarcasm)

My working theory at this point is, because I actually TYPED text into the name box last time (text ended up not blank), but last time I PASTED the text into the name box (text ended up blank), that maybe you have to type at least one character in.  That is, you can still paste text (which you have to do if you want to use the letter R), but have have to also type at least one character too or the game doesn't recognize there's anything there.

Or not.

But it's at least something to test out in the future.

s - 2022-05-16 23:26:08.167032

s - 2022-05-16 20:57:42.113440

f - 2022-05-16 16:15:47.607400

WGW - 2022-05-16 3:28:51.546232

216 - 2022-05-16 1:28:49.839690

s - 2022-05-15 21:58:24.522560

s - 2022-05-15 17:17:52.096349

s - 2022-05-15 17:14:08.984327

s - 2022-05-15 17:12:36.645771

WGW - 2022-05-15 0:12:56.394712

Video capture of levels 1050 & 1051 with glitched enemy movement:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ytijfbll7bu21yu/WGW%20GTD%20run%2C%202022-05-14%20level%201050%20%26%201051.mkv?dl=0
---------------------------------
(Warning: Ungodly long comment follows. . . )

I finally figured out a way to do video capture (not that it's difficult or anything, but I just never knew how to do it), so I thought this might be of some interest. . .  to someone.  Maybe.  :)

This is the run I just ended on purpose, last couple of levels (1050 & 1051) to show how glitched enemy movement becomes and just how slow the game gets. . . and also, sadly, to show the "blank high score" bug in action, which happened AGAIN.

Note that even though level 1050 is a "no stun effect" level, I can keep the enemies frozen in place anyway just by keeping the browser window in active focus.  You'll see me click off the window a couple of times to show what happens:  When the browser window loses active focus, the game slows to a crawl (including the in-game timer), but the enemy movement "unglitches", meaning the enemies "unfreeze".  Without doing this (making the window lose active focus), no enemies will ever escape.  I even froze all 10 enemies in level 1050 when they were all *right* at the exit, just to show how you can freeze them pretty much anywhere at will.  This starts happening, for me, around level 800.

Most of these two levels are with the window NOT having focus, so that the enemies would (very, very slowly) actually escape and I could end the game.  You can tell when the window has focus by the change in color of the title bar (top of screen): darker blue with focus (glitched movement), lighter blue without focus (slow speed but unglitched).  There's a delay of a few seconds when you return the window focus before the game speeds back up to normal and the movement glitches out again.  But when you click off the window to take away active focus, the game slows down *immediately*.

Once again, I'm VERY sad to see that this run's high score text got blanked out.  The score at level 1051 with no text was this run, and in this video you can SEE me typing in the text at the end. . . so here's the evidence it definitely wasn't anything I messed up!  (The text was supposed to have been "WGW Could have gone higher. . . but sanity prevailed").

It's not exactly riveting video (no commentary, just video), but if you want to see what happens when you're insane enough to play the game this long, here you are.  And it might be useful for Peter H. sometime, too, if this is something that can be fixed someday.

I'll keep this video on Dropbox for a while, but since I only have a free account and very limited space, eventually I am going to have to remove the file.  Enjoy (?) while the link's still good!

WGW - 2022-05-14 13:06:49.045206

s - 2022-05-14 2:36:12.000879

WGW - 2022-05-13 12:45:46.808469

f - 2022-05-11 21:41:14.105554

f - 2022-05-11 21:38:48.151872

s - 2022-05-10 21:28:25.091457

s - 2022-05-10 21:24:27.045278

s - 2022-05-10 21:20:40.320969

i have a equasion that sombody could help me with and it is a diffrent game but i know the phisicks well like ive plaed it for years there is no right or rong answers as long as you can prove your work and gose along with the physicks and there is no point in trying to look it up because i have a old ish version of it and dose not have all the same physicks as the new versions . You have infinate materials for this equasion now since i said all the basicks you need for this equasion set by me so i gues i give the part that actualy needs solving oh i forgot to mention the game is mine craft ,redsone works the same as new versions and if you dont know there is two options for this 1 dont get involved in this conversation if you know nothingor very litle  or dont want to play, or option 2 look up basicks of redston then goto more profesinal tutorials or machines your choice for the beter redstone players i would personaly recomend mumbo jumbo but rember we bont have the same physicks and you dont have to play the game all i want is just a basic idea on how twwo fix the problem and i will test the idea to make sure it works anyways back to the problem the is multipal fuel sources lava, wood items, leaves,wool coal, charcoal kelp ,and blaze rods.now the advantages and disadvanteges. Lava it lasts a long time but you can hold on to one times how many slot you have in your inventory the max amount is 36 slots, wood items infinate but takes a long time to harvest but you get four planks per log but it takes 1 1/2 to cook a item or you could make diffrent wood items but it gives less fuel time before it runs out,leave worse then wood items takes two iron to make shears to be able to harvest but you could put mending on it witch take xp to mend it if it has this inchant, char coal made from burning logs but it gives a beter burn time then wood items but would still have a colection problem ,coal it can cook 8 items t a time but it will runout in the begining world then you would have to go to the nether every time you run out and it will be more dangerious and there is only one mobe that drops it and it is usely not that much and they dont have a great spawn rate and usely spawn in one area , kelp first you have to be luky enough to be able to find it then you would be beter off building a auto harvester witch requires redstone and redstone knoledge of course and iron ,wood,glass as well depending on land scape tools to clear  the area to make the proper space storage system wich requires wood and iron and a crafting table to convert the dried kelp into blocks. if you think i mised some thing or need to clear the phisicks or something  i will do my best to help in that mater and this is to help me and outher players to become beter any help is welcomed even from wgw but if you dont want to help it is fineit is your choice no presaure at all.

216 - 2022-05-09 21:54:54.751188

s - 2022-05-09 21:42:41.771224

s - 2022-05-09 21:15:04.839999

Jaxrud - 2022-05-09 14:11:08.885436

s - 2022-05-09 1:55:07.680868

s - 2022-05-07 22:15:16.777177

s - 2022-05-07 21:59:33.072328

s - 2022-05-07 21:58:57.421717

WGW - 2022-05-07 3:35:28.750742

s - 2022-05-07 2:04:40.304673

s - 2022-05-06 21:25:30.547439

s - 2022-05-06 21:14:08.662809

1 - 2022-05-06 21:11:59.021453

216 - 2022-05-06 13:07:03.116315

WGW - 2022-05-06 5:41:04.839337

s - 2022-05-06 2:47:49.188851

s - 2022-05-06 2:34:55.721913

WGW - 2022-05-05 9:41:05.168377

Sorry, but there's no way whatsoever, no possibility at all, that the game is programmed to intentionally leave high score names blank to "save memory".  It wouldn't make any sense-- text is TINY in terms of memory usage.  Miniscule.  We're talking about a few BYTES here.  A game designer worrying about the memory usage of high score text would like  a multi-billionaire worrying about dropping a penny.

Besides which, I know that I absolutely wasn't repeating prior text in any of the high scores where the name ended up blank.  Even further, I already do have 3 high scores posted that DO have the exact same text-- "WGW Double phooey" (the repeated text was a mistake on my part).  Obviously, if the game was intentionally blanking out text if it's repeated, there wouldn't be three separate high scores from me that have the same text repeated.  Not to mention the many, many, many scores from other folks who just post a name or their initials and which are repeated many times.

No, something else is going on here.  It's clearly a BUG, not something that Peter programmed into the game's code to "save memory".

s - 2022-05-04 2:30:38.414957

WGW - 2022-05-03 3:29:54.351411

WGW - 2022-05-03 3:24:14.851169

s - 2022-05-03 2:07:58.808309

WGW - 2022-05-02 5:26:00.605984

s - 2022-05-02 0:55:10.532393

WGW - 2022-05-01 8:42:07.727916

WGW - 2022-05-01 8:39:16.568271

s - 2022-05-01 2:41:16.265950

Ebonyekinshade - 2022-04-30 18:42:54.571197

WGW - 2022-04-30 0:26:14.750811

Ebonyekinshade - 2022-04-28 4:17:54.995093

pat - 2022-04-27 8:55:02.884338

s - 2022-04-26 22:54:04.287180

Ebonyekinshade - 2022-04-25 5:44:52.181038

s - 2022-04-07 23:53:53.166816

s - 2022-04-06 2:24:22.401998

WGW - 2022-04-04 11:40:48.107836

I've been trying to understand why, for more than a decade now, i keep playing GTD, even though figuring out a working strategy means that the game holds no surprises anymore.  It's not like GTD is viscerally thrilling to play.  Other than the pride involved in posting high scores (however dubious that pride may be), it's not as if I have actual "fun" playing it.

So I've come to the conclusion that for my particular set of mental quirks, GTD has become a sort of a digital fidget spinner for me.  I'm basically always on the PC when I'm awake, so I basically always have a GTD run going, requiring attention only every few minutes.  It's like an interactive aquarium of sorts, where you get to post a high score at the end.  :)  My mind drifts when (especially when I'm watching TV), and GTD adds JUST the right amount of calming background "noise" for me.

So I'm probably going to keep playing regardless of whether the game is updated again, cause it's oddly soothing to me.  Even if GTD never changes, and thus can never really become "interesting" to me again.

But the thing is. . . the core of the game is so good, I'd really love to see the game re-jiggered in any of a million different ways, some I've suggested, some others have suggested (@216 and @s, e.g.), or whatever ideas Peter Holko may have in mind (just. . . don't ONLY nerf jades, it doesn't help ANYTHING! But I've said that a million times by now, haven't I?)

I believe GTD can evolve from the game it's been all these years, a great game to be sure, but one that can be "figured out" to reliably achieve a definable "win state", and at that point it becomes dull.  There are so many possible changes that could make this a game that's enduringly ENGAGING TO PLAY in survival mode.  (If Peter finds has time/interest to do it.)

But even if not, I'll continue to enjoy my digital fidget spinner.

And I still contend that survival mode GTD remains a very, very hard game for newcomers-- steep learning curve.

RGEN - 2022-04-02 22:00:50.715006

s - 2022-04-02 14:37:46.153032

WGW - 2022-04-02 9:00:51.013463

s - 2022-04-02 2:57:32.060239

s - 2022-04-02 2:55:32.449693

s - 2022-03-25 2:35:06.389977

s - 2022-03-22 22:37:08.905711

WGW - 2022-03-22 20:40:04.150570

s - 2022-03-20 16:51:00.337276

thank you 216 - 2022-03-20 15:59:10.368098

216 - 2022-03-20 14:26:17.201284

tell me why - 2022-03-20 13:29:52.440380

dollars - 2022-03-20 12:29:13.806118

s - 2022-03-20 1:58:18.929202

s - 2022-03-19 2:39:11.266131

s - 2022-03-19 2:22:14.322487

s - 2022-03-19 2:19:37.778393

no it dose not you only need 5 people for reguler batels 4 to progres through the chapters and maby 3 at the very end i am on chapter 2 fyi and the are people though out the story the first betrayel batel is in chapter 1 the second is basicaly in the beging progresion of chapter 2 and once a guy of yors is down you have 3 turns to resurect people  wich a priest or chemist can help you there is three diffrent types of magic ,white black ,time , and you can have people with atributes that the class they are on for example you can have a wizzerd witch uses black or magic with chackra wich is under the catogor of monk and since it sound like you dont know much of the game i can help you get the basicks of characters you want immidetly  witch you can change throught the game , start with priest or chemist they are kind of the same but chemist uses healin items in your inventory priest has about the same radious but i think requires more points to get every thing, you also want a monk because he has a ability to heal when he moves , a knight because he can reduce enemy damig by breaking there weapon stat  and you can see you weapon thig in formation wich gose for every character and pay atation to faith and bravery wich is also for each individual person and can also find in formation, archer because they have a beter attaking radious to kill enemy�s at a distance

WGW - 2022-03-18 14:54:27.168246

WGW - 2022-03-18 14:34:14.335986

WGW - 2022-03-18 14:31:13.952164

Re: leaking enemies on normal levels late game, it's a combination of a few things:

(1) EEs won't stun forever no matter how many you build (and besides, I wasn't trying to build endless EEs, I was trying to build as few towers other than paraibas as possible)

(2) As the enemy hitpoints keep going up, and it takes longer to kill them even while their stun-locked, this leads to other enemies not being targetted by the EEs that are already stun-locking something else.  E.g. (making up hypothetical numbers), if it takes only a few seconds to kill a stun-locked enemy, then multiple enemies are going to get stun-locked by the same EEs on the pass through the maze.  If it takes 45 seconds to kill a stun-locked enemy, then every other enemy will pass right by all the EEs targetting the first one.  The most number of maze passes you can force ground troops to take in GTD is 7-- there are 10 enemies.  Slower kills means more enemies advancing past areas where an enemy is getting (very slowly) killed.

(3) My end game maze is not just substantially shorter than what I start with (as @216 suggested), but also the path modified so that what started out as a 7 pass maze is essentially a ONE pass maze at the end, all for the sake of maximizing space.

(4) Building only paraibas, while necessary to maximize how many turns you can make before running out of space, is not in any other way a good strategy.  :)  You ONLY do this to maximize turns, not because it's good play.

I'd imagine (though have no plans on testing it) that if I kept the original 8 pass maze layout and built lots more EEs and EGs, rather than literally nothing but paraibas for 800 levels, that no enemies would be escaping late game.

WGW - 2022-03-18 14:30:38.884413

mikis - 2022-03-18 13:05:47.352916

216 - 2022-03-18 12:38:21.542402

mikis - 2022-03-18 12:25:07.878315

s - 2022-03-18 2:02:30.258584

s - 2022-03-17 22:15:44.650533

WGW - 2022-03-17 6:03:35.521771

s - 2022-03-16 2:25:10.115282

s - 2022-03-16 2:16:47.411246

WGW - 2022-03-15 23:18:30.256906

Really no need for any apology, @mikis, but I appreciate your offering one!

I totally agree that's it's crazy for it to even be possible to play the game out until there are literally no more spaces left.  Who wants to do that?  Not even me.  :)

I just think that there are so many more interesting ways to change the game to prevent survival mode from going on forever rather than just tweaking a couple of stats to (a) force more enemy leaks (by nerfing EEs) and (b) overly restrict your ability to work around bad luck (by nerfing jade's gold earnings.)  It is certainly true that nerfing jaes and EEs will severely limit how high a level you can play GTD to (which in itself is a good thing), but I don't think it will make the game even one teeny tiny bit more interesting to play-- instead, the same old boring runs will just END a lot sooner.  But they'll still be boring runs to play.

Just throwing out another idea (I've got a dozen of them), it might be interesting if the number of enemy troops increases periodically, maybe every 50 levels-- and then we can also get rid of the kinda silly "no stun" levels.  No matter how many EEs you have on the board, if there are an ever-increasing number of enemies marching around rather than always 10, an increasing number are going to end up escaping no matter what you do.

What I'd really like to see is a version of survival mode where it becomes increasing difficult to get to a higher level, but without creating a sort of "gate" where basically every run, at its best, is going to end on the same level (e.g., in the Flash version, it was close to impossible to ever get past level 196, and doing so meant using a very specific "emerald strategy" that required really amazing luck-- but which also nearly always ended up with your losing runs well BEFORE level 196).  Unless there's some wiggle room to always do just a little better in your next run, there's not much motivation to keep playing once you've figured the game out.

And it would lead to everyone who has a good idea how to play GTD getting to the same level.

mikis - 2022-03-15 20:56:37.124615

WGW - 2022-03-15 14:41:09.203502

Glad to know at least you read the comments, @216.  :)

You actually mentioned the main reason why I hated the ultra-nerfed jades version 0.61-- the fact that if you got lucky enough to get a great opal, you could still go on forever, but without one, you'd almost always lose by level 100.  That's just way too much of an effect on how well you can do that's dependent on the pure luck factor of whether you get a great opal.

I'm more okay with a survival mode that's designed to be impossible to beat past level X (say, 200) even WITH a great opal, than one where you're either stopped at level 100 without a GO, or can go to level 1,400 with a GO.  It was exactly the "roll a 6 and you win, but it'll take you HOURS of playing to find out if you roll a six" problem, for a great opal to mean the difference between getting to level 100 or level 1,000.

But even if v0.61 were rebalanced so that great opals weren't so completely all-critical and so drastic in effect, I still think there a million more interesting possibilities for changing the game than this never-ending debate of "to nerf or not to nerf" the jades.

I mean, anyone should feel free to tell me why any of my ideas for changing the game are a mistake, but that's not really my point in the suggestions.  My point is to demonstrate that making GTD a genuinely more interesting game would require thinking a lot more outside of the box than just deciding a gem needs to be nerfed.  I think you and I, at least, agree on that!

216 - 2022-03-15 13:45:19.896533

WGW - 2022-03-15 13:34:16.229928

WGW - 2022-03-15 13:14:28.460657

My current thinking on an interesting way to change the game would be:
(1) Decouple gold from lives. Part of what makes balance GTS as it stands so impossible is that gold serves two purposes, to allow for repicks and to buy lives.  So. . .

(2) Make jades work like they used to in the old flash GTD (earning way less gold, but enough to afford reasonable amounts of repicking)

(3) Remove the cap of 50 lives maximum, and make one of the useless special towers (e.g., the sapphire) have a low chance of earning lives.  This would add an interesting new mechanic (building towers to earn lives), while also addressing the issue that most of the special towers are completely useless-- at least we'd have one more tower to play around with.

I'll spare everyone a long explanation, but I think if anyone interested gives this a little thought, you'll at least see the possibilities for much more interesting ways to change the game than just "let's make it artificially harder and more dependent on luck" (which is what nerfing both jades and EEs without changing anything else would do.)

WGW - 2022-03-15 12:46:02.524268

WGW - 2022-03-15 12:36:51.906144

Everyone's entitled to their own opinions, of course, but it does feel as if you've ignored absolutely everything I tried to say below, or didn't read it.  Which is fine, really, but I tried to lay out actual lines of reasoning-- particularly with respect to why simply nerfing jades is a bad idea. Nerfing the jades AND the enchanted emeralds would be even worse. . .  .

We had a version of the game where basically everything else was the same except jades were heavily nerfed, v0.61). I personally hated it.

There are a million other ways to change the game.  You've suggested the exactly one way I tried to argue at length is the only way the game should NOT be changed, but offered no reason for disagreeing.  Totally fine, but doesn't lave much room for further discussion.

Which also is fine. . . If you just want to state an opinion.

But for what it's worth, I'd personally be very interested in reading the thoughts of anyone who wants to take the time to try actually show me why I'm wrong.

mikis - 2022-03-15 10:15:03.572794

s - 2022-03-14 2:58:42.008584

WGW - 2022-03-14 1:15:08.740304

WGW - 2022-03-14 0:52:09.100335

I think folks have to bear in mind that if you've already put in many hours into playing a "winnable" game to learn how to win it, that doesn't mean the game is easy in any objective sense-- it means it's consistently "winnable" for experienced players using sound strategies.  If it takes 20 hours of playing a game to get good enough at it to nearly always win, that doesn't mean the game is "easy".

A great comparison is, I think, to the game I've played the most over the years second only to GTD-- FTL (Faster Than Light).  FTL has a VERY strong RNG elements, much more so than GTD, and which to new players, feels "unfair" in that they think the game is constantly throwing them into no-win scenarios.  But if you stick with it long enough, you begin to learn that there's almost never really a "no win" scenario in FTL (at least at easy and normal difficulty levels), you just didn't know the game mechanics well enough.

But the RNG element in FTL is used more to vary the SCENARIOS the player faces, which call for very different responses, than to turn the game into an elaborate dice toss (roll a six and you win! Only it'll take you two hours of gameplay to find out whether you rolled that six!  Yay! Fun!)

FTL is also game that's several orders of magnitude more complex than GTD in its game mechanics.  There just isn't any simple tweaking that would make GTD "harder" for experienced players who understand the game mechnics well, without simply bumping up the importance of RNG so that simple bad luck itself will ruin runs that you've already invested hours of playing into. (YAY! Fun!)

Just figuring out a good maze layout is a challenge for a new player.  Understanding all the different gems and how to use them in concert with each other and how many of each to build is a challenge.  Striking a balance (early game at least) between saving gold for leaked enemies and using it for repicks is a challenge.  It's not so much of a challenge when you've already learned all this stuff-- that doesn't make it "easy".  :)

Even for me, after playing GTD for well over ten years, my latest high scores required a hell of a lot of planning and forethought to maximize for available spaces to move.  Maze layout wasn't about efficient kills but about not wasting board space, and I had to limit as much as I possibly could building any towers other than paraibas when the game would have gone SO MUCH FASTER if I could've just built the towers I really wanted to build.  (I could only start to go after building paraibas exclusively after playing 200 levels in preparation for it, otherwise I sure as heck would have built a lot more egyptian golds than just 9 or 10 for the whole game!  Playing this way turned a lot of the most basic strategies for playing GTD upside down.)

But yeah, for anyone who's played hours of this game over years of their lives, nothing has changed so much that you can't pretty "easily" get a stable run going where, say, after level 200 you know you pretty much can't possibly lose.  That's how GTD has always played.  Just bear in mind how many hours os playing and how much learning was required to get to that level of understanding the game.

I'm in favor of potential changes to the game in any manner EXCEPT to simply make RNG override player control.

E.g., if folks prefer a survival mode GTD that doesn't just go on indefinitely until you just run out of space on the board for more moves (or, more likely and much earlier, you run out of patience/sanity to keep playing), then a more fundamental change has to made to the game than just "nerf the jades", or "increase the damage done by certain gems".

As an example, imagine GTD basically as it is, but where you're given a finite number of lives at the start of the game (50?) and can't buy more.  Ever.  Gold is used only for repicking purposes.  This would mean the game is always going end when X number of enemies has leaked, no matter how good your maze/layout is, no matter how much gold you're earning.  Especially if the "no stuns" are still part of the game, 50 lives isn't going to last you all that long, certainly it won't get you to level 1,000.

This could create a survival mode where with the right stats/formulas in the game design, even the best players using the best strategies could have a lot more difficulty getting to level 100, and where, say, getting past level 200 is close-to, but not entirely, impossible.

But that would be a FUNDAMENTAL change in game mechanics (and of course this is just one of many possibilities).  GTD has only been tweaked, not fundamentally changed, over the years.  And it's always been a game where good playing with good strategy nearly always "wins" the game.

I'm all for changing the game so that losing at level 200 feels like "I won!", rather than having to play for TWO WEEKS and fill the entire damned board to get the highest score possible!  :)

Phaedraz - 2022-03-13 16:55:05.613061

216 - 2022-03-13 12:41:05.914154

Phaedraz - 2022-03-13 10:42:29.824871

s - 2022-03-12 5:11:08.799226

s - 2022-03-12 4:59:40.788893

216 - 2022-03-11 13:06:39.514153

WGW - 2022-03-11 4:51:37.004545

@216: I hope you do post a screenshot at some point of a "maximum space" end game layout-- I'm very interested in seeing your take.

In the meantime, I'll just say: (a) Thanks for clarifying that there's no relationship between the two "combine special" bugs.  (b) You might find that if you play GTD intentionally exploiting the "combine special out of order" bug (the bug allowing you to never consume a perfect gem), that it has a lot more impact on the game than it might seem otherwise.  Especially in early levels (25 to 60).

It is true, though, that in any sustainable run you'll eventually have enough spare gold to repick endlessly, which makes getting needed perfect gems is more a matter of tediously picking and repicking and repicking until you get what you need, rather than strategy (in the sense that you would still be able to pick as many perfects as you need-- very tediously.)

So I'm torn on this-- on one hand, fixing the "combine special out of order" bug will make the early levels more challenging (speaking as a player who has been exploiting this bug shamelessly), but it would also make the UNBELIEVABLY tedious late levels even more unbelievably tedious if you did need to pick a perfect gem for each special tower.

The "combine special 4x merge" bug, though-- that just needs to get FIXED, no debate about it.  You've already pointed out here exactly what part of the game code needs to be changed-- one line!  Meanwhile, until it's fixed, we can forget about anyone getting an uberstone ever again.

WGW - 2022-03-11 4:47:19.315957

s - 2022-03-11 3:36:21.234025

s - 2022-03-11 3:33:09.632250

mikis - 2022-03-10 9:47:02.170033

mikis - 2022-03-10 9:44:39.219388

s - 2022-03-09 23:06:06.334327

216 - 2022-03-07 23:45:45.113436

WGW - 2022-03-06 0:58:58.389956

@216: One more thing. . . (Doing my best Peter Falk impression-- you may not get that reference in Poland!)

I wanted to ask you-- how do you feel about the way "combine special" works now, with respect to the fact that as the game stands now, you only ever need to get one single perfect gem of any type, and can keep building special towers off of that one perfect forever without consuming it?  I doubt this was intentional on Peter's part-- and from your prior comments, I'm guessing the programming logic for "combine special" that causes the game to allow you to never consume a perfect gem is related to the outright bug you've written about which makes combining four identical gems NOT produce a 2x upgrade as it should.  They could be unrelated, too.

But as for never needing to draw more than one perfect gem of any type. . . I just can't believe that this was an intentional design.  We've gone back forth as to how much gold jades should earn for ideal game balance, but if there's any single element of the current version of GTD that, imo, makes it far too easy compared to the Flash version, it's the fact that you only need to ever get one perfect gem of any type for each entire game now.

If you agree that this is a bug rather an intentional game design change, would you also agree that this is much more important to change in a future version of GTD than rebalancing any other element?  If Peter meant the game to operate this way, that's one thing, but if not, this "bug" (if it's a bug) truly and deeply and fundamentally changes the entire game.  I'm interested in your thoughts on this.

WGW - 2022-03-06 0:41:50.699949

WGW - 2022-03-06 0:36:43.882759

@SC: I have a feeling that the game getting paused is a function of the javascript platform itself, not anything that can be affected by the game's programming code-- unless there was a specific command in the GTD program to pause the game when the window is minimized, which I really doubt is the case.  It's most likely a byproduct of the platform itself.

Also, just to clear up the technical terms here, because I made a lot of references in recent comments to whether the browser has the focus or not-- minimized means that the browser window isn't visible at all; not having focus just means that even with the game browser window still *visible*, you've clicked on something else (another window or on the desktop), so the GTD window isn't the currently active window.  If a window is minimized it can't have active focus, but a visible (non-minimized) window can either have the active focus or not.

It's an important distinction, because the game only pauses completely when it's minimized.  Losing active focus doesn't pause it.  But at very, very late levels in the game, the game's running speed and the enemy's movement end up getting affected by whether the window has the focus or not.  It remains the case at these late levels that the game pauses completely if minimized.

It would be nice if the game didn't pause when minimized, I agree, but I kinda doubt it's changeable, at least not by changing the game's programming code.  But yes, totally, I agree it would be great if this could be changed!

SC - 2022-03-05 20:47:46.900137

216 - 2022-03-04 15:22:32.620024

mikis - 2022-03-04 13:23:54.778598

WGW - 2022-03-03 23:41:26.023655

@216: To be more clear, I had actually already factored in the need to leave spaces open for the very end of the game when I said 318 gems/rocks could be placed-- that's with five empty spaces reserved for the final turn.

Bur. . . I also made a little mistake, in that I left a couple of additional spaces empty when I was figuring this out by accident, just silly oversight-- so the total number of gems spaces, in my layout, and with five extra empty spaces held in reserve for a final turn, is actually 320, not 318.  I do think, as I said, that could possibly be bumped up a few more with an alternative layout, but only trivially, maybe another 3 or 4 additional spaces.  I'm not saying I see a clear and obvious way to squeeze a few more spaces out of an alternate layout, but it certainly seems possible due to all places in my layout where there are tiny gaps of less than a full block that can't be filled.

I played around with this in MS Excel of all things, if you're curious about the layout.  I'd be interested to see if you can up with an alt layout that allows for a few more gems (if you're interested in spending the time on it!).  Here's what I've got:
https://imgur.com/a/xv0DSS4

(The five spaces on the lower left are for the final turn)

I think there's also a pragmatic limitation in the sense that you can't completely ignore every other element of the game just to come up with a end game layout that completely mazimizes space, because along the way to getting there, you need to have a workable maze, too.  But I'd be unsurprised if a few more gems than 320 can be squeezed in, in THEORY.

Re: the movement glitches, what you described is exactly what happens for me at high levels (800+).  Air enemies are, for some reason, much less glitched out than ground enemies.  Air enemies still get stuck, but not completely stuck the way ground enemies do.  At a certain point, the ground enemy movement glitch is so bad that if you don't click somewhere off the browser so that its window loses focus, all 10 ground enemies will get completely stuck at the very, very start of the maze, kind of virbating in place, but never advancing.

The only workaround is making the browser lose focus temporarily, which "unglitches" the enemy movement, but GLOBALLY slows the entire game down to a crawl-- across the board, enemy movement, tower fire rates, and the in-game timer all slowed.

So you have a choice between letting the enemies all get bunched up in one place, which makes the levels take even LONGER, because most of your tower firepower on the whole rest of layhout goes unused; or having normal enemy movement but with the game slowed to 1/10th of its normal speed.  Either way takes FOREVER, but I find that if I let the levels start off without active window focus, and I let the enemies advance (very slowly) far enough so that they're spaced out throughout the maze, then I can allow the game to have the active focus again and even though the enemies are mostly paralyzed, they get killed more quickly because (a) the game isn't slowed down anymore, and (b) at least they're getting hit more towers overall.  I don't know if I explained any of that very well.  I tried.  :)

Bottom line is, it's an absolutely agonozing slog to get through.  I'm at level 924 now, and it will still probably take three more days before I get to 1150.  If I don't just shoot myself first to end the tedium.   (Also, there's another snow storm coming here tomorrow, and the power could very easily go out again.)

Good to see you're still around, @216, at least looking in on comments-- I thought everyone else who used to comment had disappeared.  And thanks for confirming that the frost animations are another source of leaking memory.  :)

216 - 2022-03-03 14:51:31.277548

WGW - 2022-03-03 2:08:21.527200

@216: I had 3 lives at the point I lost, intentionally keeping it low because I was going to have no choice but end the game at level 1100.  I see from the game I've got going now that it's still possible to leak as many 3 or 4 ground levels very very late game, IF the GTD browser window doesn't have the active focus.  So I'm pretty sure now that this is how I lost that last run unexpectedly at level 1063.  At least there was no power failure and I got to post something!

Having done some playing around with late game maze layouts, I find that the theoretical maximum number of rocks/gems you can  place before running out of space for new moves is 318.  I can see the possibility of bumping that up a few more with an alternate layout but not much more-- you always have to leave a valid path for ground enemies, of course.

If you built literally nothing but paraibas (which is pragmatically impossible), you could get to level 1272-- but that would mean no single turn gems and no great opal.  I think with very, very careful playing, and the luck of getting a great opal pretty early, it SHOULD be possible to make it level 1200-- I think that provides just enough wiggle room to build just enough of other necessary gems (gold, quartz, jade, dark emerald). In theory.

But the game also slows down massively around level 800 and only gets worse and worse, not just because of the increasing enemy hit points, but because of the glitched enemy movement.  I'm at level 904 in my current run, with more than anough space to get to level 1150, but it's taking 10 minutes per ground level in real time now.  I have to toggle back and forth between the browser window having the focus or not, because if I don't, the enemies either get completely stuck in place (with focus), or (without focus) the game is so slowed down, it's running at about 1/10th real time (meaning each second ticked on the game timer is taking ten real time seconds).  So I don't even know that I'll be willing to play out my current run all the way to 1150-- it's just too tortuously slow.  I really doubt I'm ever going to want to go any higher than 1150.

Also worth noting that there actually IS still a memory leak-- which probably is causing the movement glitches/slowdown in late levels-- but of course it's much *better* now than it used to be, and doesn't grow fast enough to cause a crash before I have to end the game anyway.  The browser was using 2.5 gigabytes of RAM by the end of my last run (the level 1063 one).

My guess, based on your determination earlier that the critical hit text was causing the prior version's much worse leak, is that the remaining leak probably has to do with the animation of frost and fire attacks-- and probably the reason the leak is getting so much worse for me so late game is that I've been building nothing but paraibas for hundreds of levels, which obviously means a lot more onscreen frost attacks.

Nothing about runs like this is even interesting or fun after the first few hours of a run. . . I honestly don't know why I'm still doing this except that I can play GTD while I'm watching TV.

216 - 2022-03-01 23:49:11.331604

G - 2022-03-01 17:26:53.792091

WGW - 2022-02-19 2:23:35.394201

WGW - 2022-02-18 5:56:44.079061

WGW - 2022-02-18 5:52:29.188676

@mm5: Congrats on the new top score, demonstrating that I'm not the only person in the world insane enough to endure the tedium of playing GTD to so high a level.  I'm sorry to tell you, though, that I already had a game in progress which is going to get me to level 1100, assuming there isn't a power failure or unexpected crash.  Currently at level 1027, with plenty of room for more gems to reach level 1100:

https://imgur.com/a/5dM75iC

But who knows, I've lost so many games at high levels due to things like power failures, I may not get to post a high score for this run.  Which will tick me off to no end.  But I *should* have this score posted in a few hours (I started it five days ago. . . )

If you do see this comment, I'm curious-- since you're perhaps the only other person who has played the game past level 1000-- if you've experienced the late-level bugs I have.  For one thing, enemy movement is glitched completely for me after level 800 or so.  Enemies only move properly when the game window doesn't have the active focus, which makes the game slow to about 1/5 its normal speed (the timer counter slows down, too), but enables normal (though slowed) enemy movement.  Otherwise, they get stuck in place, not due to stun effects, but due to glitched behavior.  Basically, if I play with the GTD window not having the active focus, it's impossible for me to leak enemies after level 800-- even on the "no stun" levels.

Also, I've had some rocks get frozen (become non-removable) in very late levels, post level 700 or so.  This has only happened a few times, and I can't yet identify what may be triggering it.  One of the two games I posted high scores for already, at level 950 and 1000, had two frozen rocks, the other had none (can't remember which was which).  My current run, at level 1027, has one frozen rock.

By virtue of optimizing play for building as many paraibas as possible, this game is going ridiculously slowly, ground levels now taking almost 7 minutes each.  I've only been able to optimize for "space", so to speak (virtually ignoring overall attack power), because I got a very early great opal at level 55.  My feeling is that 1100 is the highest level you can get to without running out of room for moves; there just isn't enough wiggle room to make it another 50 levels to level 1150.

In any event, good show on the new (temporary) top score.  :)

Lurpack - 2022-01-24 20:40:28.549958

s - 2022-01-07 3:27:32.652258

WGW - 2021-12-31 22:37:31.716672

WGW - 2021-12-31 22:35:34.558053

scgmeister - 2021-12-30 17:07:09.531943

RaTG13 - 2021-12-25 11:39:45.905305

216 - 2021-12-22 12:58:41.864085

Themidnightpanda - 2021-12-22 2:29:12.431629

216 - 2021-12-21 12:05:13.246399

Themidnightpanda - 2021-12-21 5:16:05.137310

216 - 2021-12-19 2:54:11.465669

216 - 2021-12-19 1:06:16.950740

RaTG13 - 2021-12-18 20:58:51.129364

216 - 2021-12-16 19:05:38.682381

scgmeister - 2021-12-16 18:12:04.416679

scgmeister - 2021-12-16 13:32:55.331669

216 - 2021-12-15 23:03:58.460545

216 - 2021-12-15 17:05:08.580239

scgmeister - 2021-12-15 14:44:38.331296

I agree with WGW in that there is no need to nerf the jade. being able to reach level 100 is already really tough for the average player, especially when one isn't lucky enough to get a GO early on in the game. However, there are other options that could make the mid-late game more challenging without having to nerf the jade.

a few potential options to make higher levels tougher:

1: You could bring back the leaking of enemies costing more lives the further you get into the game. Aka, each leaked enemy could cost 1 additional life every 50 levels resulting in the possibility that one could potentially lose all 50 lives in 1 round between levels 201 and 250 (like the original flash game but not as costly).

2: I do like 216's idea of adding additional enemies the further you get into the game. As in have 1 additional enemy every 20 levels. If pulled of correctly, I could see this becoming crazy fun later on seeing your towers trying to take down 20+ enemies, though I could see how performance could become more of a concern though.

3: There's also the option of upping the cost of each subsequent life purchased on a more exponential basis based on the level you're on (as in for every 100 levels  the price increase per life bought doubles potentially resulting in it getting extremely expensive late game as a sort of counter measure against jade spam). Personally I like the first 2 options over this one and, implementing the first, second, or both of them to some extent would result in it becoming unnecessary to increase the cost of purchasing more lives.

Also, fixing the speed bugs as 216 mentioned would also be big. Anyway, I'm up to 5 over 530 and will likely throw the game soon due to my patience running low and my needing to restart my browser in order to update it. (was going for only PTF for the last 50 rounds but probably won't continue if I'm not going to stick with it much longer anyway.) https://imgur.com/a2mIjME

216 - 2021-12-15 12:10:19.673831

216 - 2021-12-15 11:47:28.279485

WGW - 2021-12-15 7:45:26.042987

WGW - 2021-12-15 7:37:14.819807

@Peter H: You're asking how to rebalance the game to the one guy in the entire world, @216, who thinks jades are overpowered and that great opals aren't all that important (which is a pure luck factor that shouldn't be as important as it is-- getting a great opal is still very nearly non-optional to get past level 150.)  I respect @216's skill at the game and such, and certainly his having identified the cause of the memory leak, but he also has adamantly refused to accept my repeated assertion that the game plays differently on different systems based on specs.  Rebalancing the game based on his suggestions is going to make it all but unplayable for literally everyone else, myself included.   He's going to tell you to nerf the jades further, no doubt (as this has been a consistent theme in his recent comments)-- that would be a deeply misguided mistake for the reasons I've outlined to you previously.

Before worrying about rebalancing any further, it seems to me that it's much, much, MUCH more important to ensure that the game plays the same way across all platforms, which it absolutely does not (@216 has never agreed to this, but he's just simply wrong-- the game plays drastically differently on faster systems, with enemies moving faster and far less damage being dealt to them.)  You just can't properly reblanace a game that doesn't play consistently for players using more or less powerful PCs.

I made a suggestion a while back that jades be scaled more to level, so that they start out earning less gold but eventually-- by level 100 or so--- would earn a lot more.  This would make the early game more challenging while preventing the need to build nothing but jades for 50, 100, 150 turns.  Or you can simply globally nerf them back to the way they were before the last update, as @216 would probably suggest, and completely ruin the game for everyone else.  But of course it's your game to do with as you please.

WGW - 2021-12-15 7:32:03.865797

Well, I think I've just about maxed out how high a level you can get to in this game without running out of room for additional gems-- level 950.  There was still a bit more room, but if I hadn't ended the game at level 950, I would have run out of spaces for moves before the next opportunity to leak enemies, at level 1,000.  With a bit more optimization, It's probabluy possible to (very carefully) make it to level 1,000 before running out of room, but this would require planning for it from the early levels onwards (prioritizing paraibas and rejecting all single-turn special gems), and then continuing to play for another 50 hours. . . So I'm not expecting that anyone else will be obsessive enough to accomplish this anytime soon.  In any event, I won't be at all surprised if Peter H. decides to modify the game again in a way which calls for archiving these high scores again, so I don't expect to be repeating this mind-numbingly dull, tedious, and time-wasting feat anytime soon.  I wanted to see what happen if I filled in just about every space, I did it, and now I don't expect to ever do it again. . .

Screenshot:
https://imgur.com/a/g97R0i4
It's worth noting, I think, that the game started running in a very glitchy manner around level 800 or so, with enemy movement pretty messed up.  The game also slows down considerably at very high levels when its window doesn't have the active focus, which also seems to smooth out the bizarre enemy movement glitches at very high levels.  No idea what could be causing this, but it's probably not worth debugging for Peter since so few people will be insane enough to play the game to this high a level.  There are other bugs much more worth investigating.

I'm sure I'll keep playing (because I can't seem to stop), but having gotten to level 950, I can now die happy.  Well, happier, anyway.

Peter Holko - 2021-12-15 5:29:10.634871

216 - 2021-12-13 17:02:46.958207

scgmeister - 2021-12-13 12:53:33.236847

rightstuff - 2021-12-13 7:49:46.302403

216 - 2021-12-13 1:32:56.108442

216 - 2021-12-13 1:01:01.820120

WGW - 2021-12-13 0:15:23.560289

216 - 2021-12-12 23:19:44.034967

WGW - 2021-12-12 23:06:07.964240

WGW - 2021-12-12 23:05:08.280655

scgmeister - 2021-12-12 19:09:22.669475

G - 2021-12-10 15:07:13.226643

WGW - 2021-12-09 23:59:37.248263

SAM - 2021-12-09 20:52:17.086749

WGW - 2021-12-08 21:55:14.018845

216 - 2021-12-08 15:08:55.501549

I think that game no longer runs diffently on slower systems, when i open some things on mine PC to slow game, towers slow down equally ,giving same results, but slower. Also i saw delta time in code, unlike in 0.5.4, where enemies could be bunched up at start of the wawe.
@WGW : can you check again on your old PC if enemies are still bunched up? (make sure to load 0.6.2).

Finished another stable run, used malachite strat, first time since long time. RNG was horrible at start - only 1 EE and 1 EG in lvl 44. But i didnt restart, wanted to see if op jades will save me, and they did. Again no GO. 11 jades, 150 repicks and 198 leaks, including:
9 in 100
4 in 150 
10 in 200

Only lucky thing in this run was getting 2 GAs near lvl 80.

I wont say that difference between out gamas in "GIGANTIC" - we both can survive without a GO. 
30 jades instead of 11 allows to leak x1.4 more, but also casue to have less EE/EG amount.

I need to know how your game look like around lvl 44, 60 ,80, 100 to see if you doing sometihng wrong/ not optimal.

But surely  5% is too op for jades, 3-4 would be more balanced.

216 - 2021-12-08 3:52:26.477606

WGW - 2021-12-08 3:06:12.879585

@216: Well, I finally got a great opal at level 310, so that ended the Great No Great Opal Experiment.  I suppose I could have just discarded as you've done in past games, but I couldn't bear to do it. . . I want to see how high a level I can get to before running out room for new gems, and with a great opal, it won't take nearly as long.  I'm already fairly satisfied that it's possible to continue the game indefinitely without a great opal after having gotten to level 310 without one.  That said, building an obscene amount of jades to make up for the lack of a great opal appears to be non-optional, at least on my system.

I still believe wholeheartedly that GTD is playing hugely differently for you on a much older PC.  I'm STILL leaking air enemies, at a point where no new gems placed mean much of anything because so much of the layout is already filled up.  I can never get anywhere NEAR not leaking air enemies at level 150.

So if I had to guess what's going on here-- and it's just a guess-- I think it might have to do with what you've referred to as the minimum speed bug.  But I confess I don't really know what you've meant by this, so if you could explain it further, I'd appreciate it.  But since you've said that you think this bug affects the damage taken by air enemies, it would seem an obvious explanation for the gigantic-- and I mean truly gigantic-- disparity between your experience and mine with respect to killing air enemies.  I can't think what else could possibly explain it-- maze layout is basically irrelevant to air enemy levels, and at level 150, there just hasn't been enough time in the game yet for differences in which special gems you build to make all that much of a difference.

Also, the problem with air enemies continuing to escape for me, much later in the game, isn't at all about attack power-- air enemies simply glide through the checkpoints while other air enemies are stun-locked.  With the whole layout covered by dark emeralds (and jades, whose stun effect is minor but not irrelevant).  It wouldn't matter how much attack power was in play if 2 to 3 air enemies glide through all the checkpoints without ever getting stunned, and there's absolutely no part of their path which isn't generously peppered with multiple stun gems.

Maybe with your explaining what you mean by the minimum speed bug I'll understand better where this gigantic-- again, GIGANTIC-- difference in results comes from.  Otherwise, it's completely baffling to me.

216 - 2021-12-06 14:32:16.652611

@WGW: sometimes i leak 0 in 150 (even without GO), if i extend maze. Not upgraded BSs hels, rest do EGs ( I have more EG since i dont need 30 jades).

v0.6.1 was hard, i didnt get over 100 without GO, but wasn't giving up, it could be possible.

I liked it, because game lasted only 2-3 hors and i could push mine no-GO record. Mb to ~120, idk if 200(no-GO) was possible, but it was challengig (and some fun) at least and not forgiving mistakes.

Now, game is too easy, we can go as far as we want even without GO, so it's boring. The only thing that can be fun is getting better lvl 200 times. 
But for that need early GO... which is matter of luck and need many attepts.

I dont like fact that not so experienced players can get very high lvl with some luck (GO + spam jades + randomly located EEs/other towers+ absurd long maze possibly can work).

Also, this game really needs speed up buton ( i suggest x2, x8 speed)
- - - -
In mine last (that ended in 201) run i even got 4 leaks before 44 (1 in 12 and 3 16). normally i reset game i, but now i wanted check 5% jades ( i had maxed 1 jade already at 12 - still leaked 1...). But untill lvl 120 i got FIVE 1-turn EGs(~0,0003% chance!, more likely to get 1 Uber Stone assuming fixed 4-merge bug). However that run was safe enough to guess that luck wasn't needed, with just 9 jades.

I got very missplaced GO after lvl 140 ( becasue rushing with gems)

Anyway, gold gengeration was high enough to have no doubt i can make stable no-GO run without that luck.
- - - -
1 more thing: there are ways that increase gold generation, but they affect horrible on time. So even with 2% jades stable no-GO might be possible( by very skilled and patient player)

Imagine making very long maze, no paraiba and low dmg stun zone with many jades + few EEs. enemies would struck here for long time making jades to generate more gold than ussual. i didn't try it, v0.6.1 existed too short.

WGW - 2021-12-06 7:09:23.223625

@216: Yes, the no-leak level at level 150 is what ultimately killed the run.  But I also wasn't getting very good picks along the way (and of course, no great opal).  I have another run going now with no great opal which is going much better, now at level 225, and *probably* sustainable even if I never get a great opal.  Probably.  This is only working because I've built a truly ungodly number of jades (more than 30) and made the maze very, very long (to prevent ground enemies from leaking).

It's more of an experiment on no-great-opal runs than anything else, which so far indicates that a great opal is not absolutely necessary to get a sustainable run going, which is great.  But I'll probably never want to do an extended no-great-opal run after this-- building almost nothing but jades for 100 turns is neither challenging nor interesting, and it's taking FOREVER. I'm only on level 225 and more than 48,000 seconds have elapsed already.

It's a playable game again for me now, which makes me very happy.  I really wasn't going to keep playing if the game remained so dependent on luck.

216 - 2021-12-05 21:27:54.333130

RaTG13 - 2021-12-05 20:35:10.811477

WGW - 2021-12-05 18:26:02.951621

@Peter: I think the game is much, much better balanced now.  I just finished a run without a great opal and got to level 152.  With a little bit of better luck, I'd have been able to get further even continuing without a great opal.  This wasn't really possible in the last version with the nerfed jades.  And even if a great opal is still hugely important, now having the wiggle room to play 150 levels while trying to draw a great opal is a LOT better than having only 70 to 80 levels to get one before losing before this change.  Thank you very much for listening to the feedback and making the change.

For some reason the text for my high score at level 152 is blank, though I did submit text, of course.  Not sure why that happened, since I see plenty of other high scores with text.  Is there any sort of a hard limit to the text length that perhaps causes text to be rejected?  The text I submitted wasn't overly long, just 43 characters, but I can't think of any other reason why the text wasn't accepted.

@216: Great job testing for the memory leak-- now that Peter has disabled the display of critical hits over level 100, the memory leak does seem to be a lot more under control.  My PC was using about 275MB when I lost at level 152, which is a lot lower than it used to be (the game was using about twice as much RAM at this point before the last update.)

Peter Holko - 2021-12-04 16:11:15.427855

216 - 2021-12-04 15:25:36.680206

216 - 2021-12-04 14:18:28.697499

RaTG13 - 2021-12-04 13:35:15.479358

Peter Holko - 2021-12-04 6:28:56.930522

SAM - 2021-11-29 23:55:36.175359

216 - 2021-11-29 20:43:17.298907

@Peter: Gold texts casue memory leak as well.

Its even more visible, because jades shots fast ( i set jade gold chance to 97%)
- - - - - - - - - -
btw, @WGW emerald stratey in flash verion was way more luck-based, i think nobody liked flyers stacking mechanic, which was only real way to lose in ~50-192

Need to admit, Your strat wasn't luck based at all (no mistake = 196, mb except extreme cases), but 196 was hard limit of this.
- - - - - - - - - 
@WGW:
just wanted to post commet, but noticed your new comment. . .

1. Jades scales with lvl quite well, because later wawes last longer in addition to normal jade formula lvl/2 +5. But it could be interesting if jades scales also with their lvl.

Also faster jades scaling will broke late game repicks balance.

I think the main reason of "skyrocket" live cost is absurb amount of leaks in 48, 52, 56... (how many you leak there?) , caused bu way too fast movemet speed of flyers , i wish that minimum speed was fixed

2. Huge gap between PO and GO makes it really hard to balance. Mb need game mechanic that allow you to force GO before lvl 100 or POs must be buffed a bit, to make game less luck based

3. Acces to code: press F12, click on sources, find game.js file.

WGW - 2021-11-29 20:20:11.768996

@216: Just an initial thought. . . Maybe a possible solution here would be to have the gold earned by jades start low, but scale up with level a lot more, so that they're not so overpowered in the beginning (as they were before they were nerfed), but earn a lot more gold later in the game when cost of lives starts to skyrocket.  I don't know the formulas here, because I still don't know how to access the game code, and probably wouldn't be able to interpret it anyway, so I can't offer any specific suggestions on the math.  But I think the general principle of having jades start low in gold earned but scale up a lot more with level could lessen the absolute need for a great opal-- eventually, jades will earn you enough gold to make up for the extra leaked enemies when you don't have a great opal, but in the earlier levels, jades aren't earning so much as to make the cost of maxing out gem chances and repicks meaningless.

This is really a matter of Peter trying to address game balance, and I'm all for that, I just think that nerfing jades and forcing leaked enemies every 50 levels is a ham-fisted way at going about it, and that it only makes the game "harder" in that luck is so huge a factor now.

216 - 2021-11-29 19:10:43.524072

WGW - 2021-11-29 18:20:38.819624

@Peter: All I can say, again, is how misguided it is to make changes to a longstanding strategy-based game which make luck MORE of a factor than it has ever been.  The mechanics of this game could already be more than a bit frustrating before now, but by balancing gems for attack power with gems to earn back gold, you could generally overcome even terrible luck.  That's what made this so good a game to me.  Take that away, and I just have no interest left, none.  Why would I want to play a game where I used to have control over how well I did, but which has now been changed so that good luck (and not just good, but *really* good luck) is indispensible to get past even level 100?  As I said, it feels a complete waste of my time.  The game is now a test of how lucky you can get, or of how willing you are to play run after run until get really lucky.  That's not how GTD has played, in any version, after all these years, until now.

I'm not suggesting, to be clear, that you or anyone else should care whether *I* want to keep playing the game! :) I'm just stating my very, very strong an very, very negative personal reaction.  It takes a couple of hours to get far enough in survival mode to know if you've got a decent chance at a stable layout.  Spending that time, over and over again, just to find that you haven't gotten lucky enough to, e.g., draw a great opal, is just no fun for me, at all.

Regardless, I appreciate all the effort you've put in recently (including re-doing the game in the first place after Flash ended), and I've gotten more hours out of this game than any other I've ever played, no contest, so I'll always be grateful for what you've done.  I'm just not interested in playing further if GTD remains this dominated by pure luck.

@216: You throw out so many points to respond to in any given comment that if I replied to them all, my comments would be even longer than they already generally are.  So I'll limit myself to one point:  It doesn't matter, at all, how much gold is being earned by jades now versus in the Flash game, or in prior versions of the javascript game, what matters is how they function now, within THIS version of the game. And in this version of the game, yes, they're nerfed to the point of uselessness.  If the cost of buying lives followed the same formula as the Flash version, then obviously jades wouldn't need to earn as much gold.  If the formula for the cost of repicking scaled the way buying lives does, then they'd need to earn a lot more gold.

Repeating my point ad nauseum, cause it's the only important point I'm trying to make here: You cannot earn enough gold now with jades to overcome RNG/luck.  And there's no other, alternative way to be able to overcome RNG.  Play enough runs, you'll eventually get lucky.  That's not the game I've been playing all these years.

Heads up that I'm going to be tied up with other things this week, so I probably won't be able to comment further for a while.

216 - 2021-11-29 17:52:22.880499

Peter Holko - 2021-11-29 17:41:21.478923

216 - 2021-11-29 13:23:39.321772

Peter Holko - 2021-11-29 5:04:29.926595

216 - 2021-11-29 2:29:46.114383

How hard survival should be depends of Peter's vision of this game. Mb he wants lvl 200 to be near impossible to get?  (no, i won't say that its now (on GO runs), i got it with some mistakes)
- - - - - - 
Jades gold gain its ok imo, if everyone else thinks game it's too hard, better way is to make flyers easier. . . fixing speed bug will helps much.
- - - - - -
Beating 196 in flash GTD, took me 3-4 months* , with much analizing flying wawes (how to effective stun flyers). I WAS expecting it need very lucky RNG(something like <1%) to do that, but i was wrong, needed GO and a bit luck... at this point i was thinking that beating 196 without GO is "extremelly unlikely", but with more experience i managed to do it twice.
Also Lement had a real chance to do this (only if he had better stun RNG in wawe 196, i was SIMULATING this, if you don't know). 
However, system specs was afecting GTD (in different way than now) that lowered his chances singificantly.

With experience i was able to beat 196 every 2-3 run ( not counting resets/fails in early lvls), so saying it was near impossible not right.

*I know this game since 2007 or 2008, but i had breaks and i wasn't trying emerald strat before 2019 (i didnt even know about scores/comments sections before 2019)

---------
More about jades:

They still make more gold than in flash version. I know lives are getting expesive after some leaks...but i fell you aren't supposed to leak 5+ every air wawe and not lose.

It was ridiculous that i could upgrade jade early and get max chances before 19 ( mine record was max chances in 15). Also amount of repicks that i could make before lvl 30 was high ( and that just with 1-2 jades).
It was a bit funny, but it didnt seems to be "serious", so completly disagre of nerf being "useless" (tbh i was suprised when i noticed 2% chance (expected 3-5), but 2% was value that i was thinking in january to be ok. No ,i didnt tell that value to Peter/anyone)

ofc, it's only mine opinion.

WGW - 2021-11-29 0:05:26.618381

@216:  How "hard" survival mode "should" be is of course a subjective thing.  In the Flash GTD, it was near-impossible to get past level 196 (I never did, and only you and 2 or 3 other players managed it).  But this was due to a quirk in the mathematics of buying lives, not an intentional game design decision.  And I was resigned to the face that level 196 was the natural limit for the way I played the game.  It still took a good amount of thought, and a bit of luck, to get to level 196.

But these latest changes are completely intentional-- the intent here, very clearly, is to make your gold drain much, much harder (if not impossible) to earn back.  There's no alternate strategy I can imagine to make up for the fact that you'll never (or almost never) have enough gold to overcome bad RNG.  The result?  A game in which good RNG is basically a requirement to do well--  including, as in your case, getting an early great opal (already a semi-requirement before the latest change, but now quite probably absolutely necessary).

Intentional gameplay changes that make RNG ***MORE*** of a factor than before are, imo, the absolute worst possible gameplay changes to make in what is basically a pure strategy game.

If jades remain nerfed (made useless) this way, I hope you're right that other changes will lessen the impact.  As it stands now, it feels like I'm wasting my time if my "success" in any given run is now so completely at the mercy of factors I no longer have any real control over.  Fingers crossed this is changed soon. . . I can't overstate how much I despise this change.  I wasn't enthusiastic about The "no-stun" levels change, but this?  I really hate it.  :(

216 - 2021-11-28 23:14:59.886017

WGW - 2021-11-28 22:59:15.209330

I hate to say, but gotta say, I absolutely hate the latest gameplay change.  Jades are not just "nerfed" now, they're basically nullified.  This, combined with the last major gameplay change (the no-stun levels every 50 levels) make getting past even level 100 without a great opal feel almost impossible.  I don't know how much a great opal will even help get past, say, level 200, now without great luck. No offense intended to Peter, but I really, really, really hate it.  RNG was always a factor in this game, but with good playing, you could almost always overcome bad RNG.  The game now seems, to me, to require good RNG.  That's not a good change at all.

I really hope that this latest change to make jades all but useless is undone, or at the very least, that Peter decides to split the difference between how much gold they used to earn vs the pittance they earn now.  (Also, the jade description really, really needs to incude text explaining that they earn gold-- I don't know how long it takes new players to figure this out without the explanation, but I'd guess a lot of new players just give up on the game entirely before ever figuring it out!)

WGW - 2021-11-28 22:58:01.341943

SAM - 2021-11-28 16:31:39.225692

216 - 2021-11-27 19:30:42.331357

216 - 2021-11-27 17:09:56.005652

216 - 2021-11-27 2:54:02.656781

Peter Holko - 2021-11-26 22:25:21.221542

216 - 2021-11-26 0:09:27.994960

Peter Holko - 2021-11-25 23:22:43.074939

216 - 2021-11-25 16:52:38.095913

WGW - 2021-11-25 15:38:25.385505

WGW - 2021-11-25 15:32:49.206202

@216: Did you just post a new high score just below my most recent one, with same text complaining about not having a great opal? ("Without a great opal. . . Never again.")  Pretty funny, that we both got that new high score, without a great opal, at just around the same time, and had the same reaction-- "never again"! :)

More later, but for now I'll just say that I 100% agree with you that my row of dark emeralds at the bottom should be a half row higher, it's (in my view) the weakest part of the layout.  But shifting it up will require a major revamp of the WHOLE rest of the maze.  There's probably a better solution than what I've been using, maybe a 50/50 compromise so that I don't have to lose a whole row of gems in the middle of the maze.  But I completely agree, that half step too far down for the dark emeralds is a weakness of my layout.

Peter has updated sandbox mode, which I'll probably be trying at some point later today.  In the meantime, happy thanksgiving, @216, and to anyone else who actually reads these ridiculously long comments.  :)

216 - 2021-11-25 1:27:08.460012

WGW - 2021-11-24 18:17:54.748881

I finally got a high level high score without a great opal-- a thoroughly unpleasant, tedious affair that required building a truly obscene number of jades to compensate.  Gold levels didn't start to really stabilize until level 200 or so, and this was only by building 25 or so jades.  And I ended up needing to build even more jades later.

Most of my other "requirements" for a good layout-- other than having a great opal-- were in place (complete coverage by golds, paraibas, and blood stones, with everything boosted by black opals, and sub-ideally by perfect opals).  But all I could really do to prevent running out of gold was to keep building and building jades.  It was boring, and slightly stressful, since I was on the edge of losing until well past level 200.  Here's a screenshot about 10 levels before I gave up (I could have kept going another 20 or so levels, but it was getting SO boring):
https://imgur.com/a/tMGEyFU

Note that this end-game screenshot really doesn't represent the weird things I had to do along the way, particularly in levels 50-150.  E.g., I ended up extending the maze to insure killing all ground troops, a path that I eventually was able to remove only very late-game.  Also, I had far, far fewer dark emeralds-- particularly near the exit-- because I was focusing on gold by building jades (I maintain that this was a *necessary* strategy in a run without a great opal-- and I'll maintain that opinion until someone else can post a high score for an equally high level game without a great opal and without a truly absurd number of jades to make up for it!)

I did this, basically, for experimental purposes.  In the future (until, at least, the game is updated again), I don't expect I'll ever bother pursuing a GTD run without getting a great opal by level 100, latest.  It's slow, it's boring, and it's no fun.  I've proven (to myself, at least) that it's technically possible to get a very, very high score without a great opal, but man, oh, man, is it a DRAG doing so.  But at least I've done it once, and in the words of the immortal Marge Simpson, "Now let's never speak of it again."

216 - 2021-11-22 1:07:57.065018

216 - 2021-11-21 14:48:30.474303

WGW - 2021-11-21 7:39:05.538344

@216: I did try your layout a few times, and saw only a slight improvement in leaks.  Once again, I'm thoroughly convinced, via the evidence of my eyes seeing the game on two PCs years apart, that what's different between your experience and mine is the difference in how GTD plays on different systems, not your maze layout vs mine or any slight improvements/tweaks to strategy.

Regardless, as I've said before, I have my own way of playing, which has been mostly the same for many years now, and I'm not interested in changing it, nor explaining in tedious detail why I do things the way I do.  I also don't want to bury my comment for Peter below with a lot of comments that are irrelevant to what he's trying to fix (the memory leak).

I don't see any reason why your solution to fixing sandbox mode (though yours would also work) is in any way "better" than mine.  My suggestion would require changing ONE line of code, and will prevent losses.  Your solution would work too, but I don't see how, on any level, it's "better".  But I really don't want to get into another back and forth on this.  If Peter wants me (or anyone else) to do a test run without special towers or gems with auras, then he has to make sandbox unlosable.  He could also just turn off the trigger for the game ending, just remove it completely from the code.  I don't really care how he does it. I was merely trying to suggest what I thought would be a very, very easy means of accomplishing the goal, which shouldn't require changing more than one line of code.  But thanks.

216 - 2021-11-21 3:27:52.156942

There is better solution for sandbox- 10000 lives.
@WGW:
1) Notice that if you are building jades instead EEs then you will leak more flyers, so wil need even more jades... so reducing leaks in early (44+) lvls is most critical.
In mine last game starting from lvl 44 i had 4,4,5,6,6 leaks ( which wasnt very good, possible to get 0 in 44 even without GO, but hard, don't forget to make BO before 44).

2) Since when paraiba is "powerfull attack tower"? don't make more than 1-2 before stabilizing game. Its important gem for ground armor reduction, thats all.

3) you realized in lvl 150 that in lvl 180 you will have gold problems, so decided to spam jades? Strange choice, in 30 lvls possible to add 10 EEs that would reduce leaks enough (if you place them well). Don't regret gold for repicks. 
I know that adding jade just before flying wawe that would be lose its too late, but i play way more risky or "agressive".

4) Anyway main problem is amount of leaks. 4-7 near 150 seems way much, even without GO. How many EES did you had at this point? but probably enoguh ot make structures that neraly guarante at least 4-5 kills by stun lock.

5) I meant also comparision between ours PCs by making pic after 10th enemy appear.

6) Another reasons why i dont have 500+ score is lack of motivation (still far from v1.0, so scores will removed) and shutting down PC instaed hibertaning. Yes, that last lvl 200 no GO run was also closed by that.

Maybe you should just try mine layout , i can make some screenshots every few lvls, if needed

WGW - 2021-11-20 23:46:04.825320

@Peter H: Longer explanation below if you're interested, but the tl;dr:  Sandbox mode does work-- thanks-- but for the kind of test run you want, it will need to be adjusted.  So rather than it just providing 100 million gold at the start, is it possible for you change the formula for buying lives so that it stays at just 1 gold?  Otherwise, the price escalates so quickly that I end up "losing" around level 80 to 100, nowhere near high enough a level to monitor the memory leak (which, as @216 reiterated, doesn't start to really show itself until after level 100, and the game is not really leaking excessively until level 150 or so.)  I'm more than happy to do this kind of testing, but I just can't do it in the current sandbox with the only change being the amount of gold at the start.

A bit more explanation, if you're interested: I tried to do a sandbox run without building any special towers, and without any opals (because they have auras), as you asked, but under these playing restrictions, every enemy was escaping by level 40 or so.  That means buying 10 lives per level, which means that the cost of buying lives escalates VERY quickly, eating up the 100 million gold entirely by level 80-ish.

I figured I'd try bending the conditions just a bit, to build an Ancient Jade, put down one perfect Opal, and a cluster of Dark Emeralds in the center of the board, hoping to earn back at least a little gold (ends up not mattering with how much lives cost pretty soon), and at least stunlock and kill 1 or 2 enemies a level.  But even this wasn't close to sustainable, and got me only to level 98 before I ran out of gold.  Lives were costing almost 500,000 gold each at this point, so you can see how the 100 million gold isn't enough to create a true sandbox, i.e., where losing isn't possible.  Losing is not only possible, it happens very quickly under these restrictions!

Of course, if I were playing sandbox mode in a manner anywhere NEAR the way I play a normal run, the 100 million gold provided would be way, way, WAY more than enough to keep the game going forever, but since you're asking for a test run under strategically terrible play conditions, it's not enough close to enough gold.

But rather than, say, bump the gold up to a billion-- which will still run out pretty quickly if every enemy is escaping-- I think the better solution for sandbox mode, if you can do this easily (and I would imagine it's an easy change), would be to change the formula for cost of buying lives so that it just stays forever at 1 gold.  That, combined with the 100 million starting gold, would make escaped enemies meaningless, and let me continue the kind of test run you want without "losing".  As it stands now, having only gotten to level 98, and only that high by "cheating" the play conditions, I can't offer any useful observations about the memory leak yet.

But I remain more than happy to try it, if you can change sandbox mode to make it possible to do.  Thanks!

WGW - 2021-11-20 23:44:09.833932

@216: I'm sorry to say I can't do any comparisons anymore looking at how GTD runs on my older computer, because-- you probably recall from comments I left a while back-- the game doesn't run properly at ALL on my PC anymore.  I have no idea why, but it doesn't just run slower, it runs so slowly as to be totally unplayable.  I posted a screenshot a while back of how bunched up the enemies are now on level one when I try to play GTD on my old PC.  Same problem across three browsers, with a fourth browser exhibiting a completely different problem, where the game speed is noremal, but but the enemy movement is glitched, such that they all get stuck at the first checkpoint on the first level.

I have no idea why this is happening, nor why the game is bugged differently on one specific browser (I think it was Firefox), but it's been this way for about a month-- starting well before the latest GTD update.  Of course I've tried rebooting, and it had no effect.  I guess I should try to clear the browser cache at some point, but I haven't gotten around to it.  If GTD starts running "properly" on my old PC again, I'd be happy to compare notes with you, but I can't at the moment.

I will say, though, about whether a great Opal is needed or not to get to the upper levels (>200), and about how many Jades are necessary:  I've done at least another 15 runs without a great Opal on my new PC, all of which failed spectacularly as early as level 70, and none making it past level 140.  The first run with a great Opal, I didn't get it until level 150 or so, and was about to lose otherwise, but the great Opal turned the whole game around and I ended up with another high score near level 500.  I've had another couple of runs where I got a great Opal early-- between levels 50 and 70-- and each of those was incredibly easy to get high level high scores on, too.  More to the point, though, is how much gold I was spending and how many Jades I had to build.

In the run where I didn't get the great Opal until level 150, I was already building nothing but Jades for several dozen levels just to try to survive, so I already had at least 20. Once I got the great Opal, gold became an non-issue almost instantly because I already had more Jades than I would have wanted.

In the two runs where I got a great Opal early, I tried to limit myself to just 5 or 6 Jades, and focus on Dark Emeralds and powerful attack towers (Blood Stones, Egyptian Golds, and Paraibas). Things seemed to be going well until around level 150. No ground enemies were escaping, ever, but I was still leaking anywhere from 4 to 7 air enemies.  With the very fast increase in the cost of buying lives, even with a powerful layout with an early great Opal and no ground troops ever leaking, I would have run out of gold by level 180 or so had I not started furiously, and almost exclusively, building more Jades.  I'm not sure yet how many I *really* need for my play style, but I estimate-- and again this is for a game WITH a great Opal-- around 17.  Above 20 seems to be overkill.

We may never be able to nail down specifically how GTD plays differently on your system versus mine versus @G's, or whoever's.  And you may be right-- I think you probably are-- that your maze layout/strategy is a bit better, or more efficient, than mine.  I'm also quite certain that the only reason you don't have a level 500+ high score is because you'd need a PC with a lot more RAM to get that far without a memory crash.

But all that said, even if your layout/strategy is a bit better than mine, I just don't think it can even possibly account for the WILD, gigantic disparity in our experiences, both in terms of how many Jades are needed, and whether you need a great Opal to get to high levels.  It's not as if you're saying, "you only need to build 6 or 7 Jades" and I'm saying I need to build 9 or 10.  I'm saying I need to build THREE TIMES AS MANY, even when I have a great Opal (and a layout already boosted by a Black Opal, with Paraibas and Golds covering most of the maze, and at least a couple of Blood Stones).  Since the last update, I can't get past level 150 without a great Opal no matter how good the layout is, nor how many Jades I build.

In any event, I appreciate the discussion, as always. . . cheers!

216 - 2021-11-13 22:03:34.448021

@Peter: At lvl 120 there is already ~120MB :

https://imgur.com/a/BYnAml5
lvl 162: ~270 MB . I can add more images if needed

@WGW: I have an another idea for comparing game speed (look at 2nd pic from link above), at start of wawe enemies appear every 1s, right? So if game runs faster, the distance between enemies should be bigger.
But i remember from flash, the speed of wawe 41+ is 6.92 half-tiles/s, so 3.46 rocks/s, it seems to be correct for me. Looking at your eariel pic from wawe 150, distance between enemies is same as for me (due to some speed bugs, slowing effects nearly no work).

I can see enough mistakes in your games that would cause no-GO run to fail. I agree, no-GO runs aren't easy now, ~15 more total leaks would make me lose (using 5-6 jades).

I was afraid lvl 150, but i made mine maze longer before it and i got 0 leaks ( was close to leak 1). 10 leaks in lvl 100, 1 enemy had 1% hp...

I observing flyers carefully if there is any slowdown. i think i noticed that few times, but temporary and very little (like 5-10%) - they was too short to affect leaks amount.

If your game runs faster, upload pic or something, but for now i would say that GO is no needed in 0.6.0, but requied a lot experience and decent RNG (yes, i would lose is enoguh bad RNG, no doubt)

now im in 162, leaking 3-5 flyers, rather i dont afraid losing ( ready for -10 lives in lvl 200)

216 - 2021-11-12 20:00:58.076556

Peter HOlko - 2021-11-12 19:44:38.097661

Peter Holko - 2021-11-12 18:13:14.415374

Lucia - 2021-11-12 15:43:41.462801

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-12 6:00:19.113512

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-12 5:41:19.468738

WGW - 2021-11-12 1:00:10.859767

216 - 2021-11-11 22:43:52.547691

@WGW: I thought there is a point where getting faster PC doesn't matter - where enemies are running at "normal" speed (same speed as in flash version).
If i'm wrong, then i agree, no reson to compare our games.

There are reasons why i think that mine PC is fast enough and i would get(on any fast PC) lvl 200 without GO and so much jades - but ok, i'm not sure

You said that diffence is visible in wawe 1. Is possible to measure somehow that game is going faster on your PC? For example if build malachite (no gems on path) in c6+[1,1] position, im getting 41 time(41 real second too) after wawe 1. To make that position more clear:

|
 #M
###-----  (exit)
(too lazy to upload pic)
Tested it on laptop, also 41

I was suggesting that time affect memory leak - because from many obsvervations it seems to be true - less time in lave lvl give less memory in most cases. I never said its only factor. 
tbh i've never though that time affect leak directly - but by more projectiles shoted, longer ground walk or sometihng else.

Ofc performace difference is major bug that make highscore list rather worthless. 
I observered many times slowdown, it even saved me from few leaks few times, but most often game runs in "normal" speed. that slowdown was often unexplainable, sometimes game was running so slow, then after some time (in same game) it got fixed. Hiberanting PC many times could be a reason.

i often call that slowdon as lag too.

I can imagine that happen at wawe 1 on slower PC, but i thought (i still think actually) mine game runs at "normal" speed. I know that even little slowdonw is helpfull, so i though i know what you are talking about (I read every your comment at least twice).

When i was looking at your screenshots, i saw some things that could be done better. 
But since im not sure, ok, no reason to dicsuss about it

WGW - 2021-11-11 19:44:03.595089

@Peter H: I'll see what I can do testing-wise with the new sandbox mode-- thanks for putting that together.  :)

@216: I've tried to explain this before-- when I refer to performance differences in playing GTD on different PCs, I'm NOT talking about "lag", I'm talking about the entire game speed being GLOBALLY affected from level one.  You couldn't know what this type of slowdown even looks like until you've seen how the game runs on a much faster system than yours.  But you still generalize out your experience of playing the game without taking this into account, seemingly ever, not even as a possibility.

I've seen the performance difference with my eyes, due to having upgraded PCs.  I'm not lying. I'm not making it up.  I know how to play the game very well.  I was able to scrape by in runs without a great Opal when playing on my old PC, and I can't ever manage it on the new one.  It's not due to bad RNG.  It's not because I'm building too many Jades. What I wrote was that I start building tons of Jades **BECAUSE** I'm starting to lose ground every level on gold-- it's a REACTION to the game slipping away, not a DESIRE to build 20 Jades.  I'm also not the only high-scoring player in these comments who has noted the exact same thing (@G, for one), that we're *forced* into building many more Jades than we would want to.  It's actually no fun at all playing this way.

I mean, I saw your level 300-something screenshot where you built-- what?-- three Jades total, but you were leaking basically nothing for hundreds of levels.  Even when I have a great Opal, I still need to build at least 7 or 8 Jades.  The game DOES NOT play this way on my PC.  It just doesn't.  Full stop.  It's not even close.

You've helped me understand a bunch of gameplay elements (most recently, what "aura" means) which I appreciate a lot.  And you've corrected me on a number of things I've been outright wrong about-- I greatly appreciate that, too.  So no hostility on my side, really.  None at all.  But it does feel rather pointless to keep going in circles about our different experiences playing the game, if you're going to reject completely that this could be due to playing on different systems.  What's the alternative?  Do you just think you're THAT much better at playing this game than I am?

Along those lines, remember that I was proposing that the memory leak was probably mostly affected by the number of towers quite a while back (as opposed to your attributing the memory leak to how fast your run is going.) We went back on forth on this how many times?  Glad you agree now.

So maybe. . . just give me a little credit here for having some idea what I'm talking about.  Sometimes I actually can be correct on these things, even despite all the things I mistype.  ;)  Best regards.

216 - 2021-11-11 17:02:36.753141

Peter Holko - 2021-11-11 16:26:57.402440

216 - 2021-11-11 16:21:14.199420

WGW - 2021-11-11 7:35:50.343471

The memory leak is of course the most critical problem, but it also only really affects the few players who play the game above level 200, 300, etc.  Almost as critical, and this effects EVERYONE, is that the game plays entirely differently on different systems, as I've written about before many times.  I don't mean that the more memory your computer has the more the game can leak memory before crashing-- I mean system specs affect the speed of enemy movement, tower fire, and amount of enemy damage, and this drastically changes how you have to play the game on faster PCs.

Additionally, on the actual gameplay side (and again this is something that affects EVERYONE who plays this game, not just the ones playing to level 200+), I'm now of the mind that the bug with respect to combining gems "out of order" REALLY needs to get fixed at some point, too, because if you know how to exploit the bug, it COMPLETELY warps the game.  Essentially, you never have to draw more than one perfect gem of any type per GAME, and can just keep creating special towers endlessly without ever consuming the perfect gem.

Needless to say, having to only get one perfect gem of each type for an entire run fundamentally changes the game.

@216: In my experience, a Great Opal is a necessity to get past, say, level 150-ish now.  If I don't get a great Opal my runs are usually over by level 120 or so.  Part of this, as I keep saying, may be due to the game playing very differently on your computer than it does on my new one.  But I sure as heck know this game and know how to play it, and I sure as heck play enough runs (I pretty much always have one going), and I can no longer get past the low 100s unless I get a great Opal.

Bear in mind, too, that you will now lose anywhere from 6 to 10 lives due to escaped enemies on "no stun" levels every 50 levels.  This is a total non-issue in any run with a great Opal, but otherwise (at least on this computer) if I have no great Opal, then I'm forever scrambling to stay ahead of the increasing cost of buying lives and end up building nothing but Jades for 50, 60 70 straight levels because it's the only way to keep ahead. .. unless I have a great Opal.  I'd prefer it if the great Opal gave you an advantage (e.g., faster levels), without it being a requirement to cross certain thresholds.  Yeah, they're not all THAT uncommon, but you can easily play a half dozen runs in a row without getting one.  This would like not being to kill any air enemies after level 150-- I mean none--- unles you had a great Amethyst.  It places too way too much weight, with far too great a reward, on a completely random chance event that you can't count on happening in any individual run.  Meanwhile, you get runs where the game keeps throwing great Opals at you left and right-- I had one run recently where I had FIVE of them by the end, and that's not counting the ones I didn't even keep.

Great Opals are just way too important in the game-- even if you are able to work around not getting one. Again, it's one thing if getting a great Opal can cut down your time score; it's quite another thing for it to be next-to-impossible to get past level 150 without one.  (This was never the case in the Flash version.)

Bottom line for me is, we're not all really playing the same game if it doesn't play out the same way on different systems, so direct comparisons (such as, "No, you don't need a great Opal" just because GTD plays that way for you) may be truly impossible.

When I see that @216 is able to stop ALL leaking air enemies very early in the game, whereas for me, in successful GTD runs with a great Opal and 10 other great gems, I'm still leaking 1 to 3 air enemies at level FIVE HUNDRED, at a point where there is literally nowhere left on the board to put a new gem where the new gem could even theoretically do anything useful. . . well, again, we're just not really playing the same game here.

These three top issues (the memory leak, the variability in how the games plays depending on system specs, and the "combine special out of order" bug) are all conspiring together at this point to make virtually meaningless any distinction between a high score at level 200 versus one at 500.

And bear in mind, I say this as the guy with the current highest score (both before and after this last update), and as one of only two people who got above level 500.  If anyone should have a motive for the game staying unchanged, it's the guy with the top score.  :)  But I would much rather have some real competition with folks who also play the game well, rather than having the top score mainly because (a) I have a higher end PC now, and (b) I'm an obsessive compulsive lunatic who will play a game like this for 4 days straight just to get to a little bit higher.

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-11 2:13:55.964668

216 - 2021-11-11 0:58:45.450696

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-11 0:55:18.669376

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-10 20:59:01.583560

216 - 2021-11-10 20:37:16.508154

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-10 20:21:25.112378

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-10 19:01:36.438601

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-10 18:13:43.372008

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-10 17:58:19.315120

SAM - 2021-11-10 16:03:37.906252

SAM - 2021-11-10 16:00:53.004192

biggiemac42 - 2021-11-08 20:43:05.979252

WGW - 2021-11-06 11:55:00.306066

WGW - 2021-11-06 11:52:09.452570

WGW - 2021-11-06 11:50:22.815068

216 - 2021-11-06 11:04:14.910541

WGW - 2021-11-06 4:29:57.804033

WGW - 2021-11-06 4:27:45.106763

216 - 2021-11-06 0:27:13.073215

WGW - 2021-11-06 0:02:25.755196

Peter Holko - 2021-11-05 5:54:42.735770

WGW - 2021-11-01 1:28:19.478757

Just ended a game post level 500, which would have crashed due to the (still unfixed) memory leak in another dozen levels or so.  The game as using just over 4GB of memory, which is on par with the memory leak in the prior version of GTD, ao it sweems clear that the leak isn't plugged yet.

I would have liked to keep playing to the point of a crash to better judge when it's necessary to quit the game, but I just couldn't bear sacrificing a high score after four+ days of playing.  Also, I know that the high scores will all be wiped (archived) if and when the game is updated again, so why push the limits. . . Suffice it to say, the game still needs to be fixed regarding the memory leak; and I'd add that the recent change to disable all stun effects every 50 levels is pretty pointless and unnecessary.

But again, I don't want any of my comments to come off as complaining about a game that is 100% free and can only be updated when the developer, Peter H., has the time to look at it.  I just hope to be able to give pointers to future updates, if and when they happen.

WGW - 2021-10-30 18:40:52.187034

WGW - 2021-10-30 18:40:08.584973

I was just about to post another comment confirming that this "no stun" thing is happening every 60 waves exactly.  I suppose, @216, you've figured this out by looking at the game code, which I still don't know how to do no would I probably be able to interpret the code if I saw it.  I don't know Javascript.

It's an odd mechanic to introduce, especially without anyone having any indication that it exists from any game instructions/documentation.  And because it barely has any actual effect on the game-- the worst it will do is to screw up someone's run who's not expecting a "no stun" round and  loses either because they don't have enough lives bought, or because their "gold budget", so to speak, didn't allow for an extra 6-8 enemies to escape unexpectedly.

It doesn't change one's strategy in any discernible I can see, other than to make sure you always have at least 11 lives bought (which is trivial), and enough Jades to earn a gold cushion for the extra leaked troops (also pretty trivial).

Really a very odd game design choice.  I don't really mind it, but I don't see what the point is.  And it sure confused the heck out of me for the last 12-15 hours or so.

216 - 2021-10-30 17:29:11.926446

WGW - 2021-10-30 2:07:30.595989

WGW - 2021-10-30 2:05:51.523950

@Peter H: I've observed a new, and VERY strange bug, in which occasional levels (both air and ground levels) unfold without any stun effects working.  I first noticed something strange somewhere around level 200, when a ground level leaked 7 enemies, well past the point in the game when there were no ground enemies leaking, ever.  But I wasn't actually looking at the screen when it happened.

It happened a couple more times, say every 50 levels or so-- once on air enemy level where I actually was looking at the screen, and saw that not a single enemy got stunned even for a moment, not even once.  I just saw it happen again, on level 250, where I just leaked 6 ground enemies because not a single one got stunned.  Ordinarily, almost all the ground troops are killed by the fourth, or maybe fifth checkpoint.  When the stun effect of gems is working properly.

I have no idea what could possibly be causing this, but it's sure happening.  It doesn't greatly affect the game given how much gold is saved up already-- I can afford to leak extra enemies every 50 levels or so.  But something is wrong, and this is not a bug I ever saw before the latest update.  Very weird.

Don't mean to pester with bug reports, but wanted to at least let you know!

WGW - 2021-10-30 0:59:20.106936

WGW - 2021-10-30 0:55:10.502190

WGW - 2021-10-27 17:53:45.534268

216 - 2021-10-27 10:39:38.622238

WGW - 2021-10-26 23:54:36.915817

At level 150 now, memory used is 363MB, so it seems pretty clear that the memory leak hasn't yet been plugged. Screenshot:
https://imgur.com/a/3mox8eJ

@216: I'm not really clear on what you mean here.  It is absolutely the case that making a special gem can sometimes consume an extra gem, depending on the order you combine them-- you're the very person who alerted me to this bug in the first place, which I hadn't even observed on my own.  It seems like you're saying now that this doesn't happen? Huh?

Or, if I interpret correctly, maybe you're talking about some other, separate very weird edge-case where combining two Perfect Amethysts and a Flawless Amethyst will create an Egyptian Gold?  If that's the case, well, OK, news to me, but it's also completely new info and totally, totally, totally unrelated to anything I wrote about in the list of bugs I observed.  I mean, TOTALLY unrelated. So how is this, even if true, a "correction" to anything I said?

I'm very, very confused by your comment on this.

216 - 2021-10-26 20:28:23.706744

WGW - 2021-10-26 19:31:29.078232

WGW - 2021-10-26 19:23:18.598021

For what it's worth, here's a list of game bugs I'm aware of.  This is only a list of bugs, with no requests for gameplay changes or new features.  The memory leak is clearly the single most important thing, so I don't mean to bombard Peter with requests for changes.  Just hoping this might be of some help, because keeping track of what's been discussed in the comments is. . . challenging.

Minor:
- "Upgrade Gem" button doesn't reset upon reseting or losing a game. If you've done all "Upgrade Chances", the button changes to "Gem Chances" and remains "Gem Chances" upon a new game, meaning you can't upgrade chances at all.  A browser refresh resolves it.  No real gameplay impact.
- The gem recipes no longer have pop-up text.  For veteran players, not an issue, but for folks new to the game, this will increase their learning curve a lot, since they can't see gem properties until they place them in an actual game.
- Some pretty important info is missing from gem descriptions, most notably, there's no mention of Lucky Asian Jades earning gold, which new players really need to know.
- No more multi-select of rocks possible as in prior version when holding down "shift". Useful feature from Flash version that would be nice to have back if possible.
- "R" keystrokes are seemingly ignored out when entering high score text, presumably because the game is intercepting "R"s as if they were in-game keystrokes to remove rocks.  Pasting text from elsewhere works around the issue.

Major:
- The game plays differently on different systems, and it's not related to display refresh rate.  Per comments I've already left, the slower your system, the slower the enemy movement and tower fire.  The in-game timer is unaffected.  Even though everything seems globally slowed, enemies wind up receiving much more damage when the game is slowed.  This is a separate issue from when the game is lagging momentarily in levels;  this is a global phenomenon that starts on level one.  This also is unrelated to display refresh rate, because in the comparisons I'm making between a new gaming PC (Win 10) versus a 6 to 7 year old one (Win 7), both systems are using a 60mHz refresh rate.
- I love the new feature which allows more flexibility in creating special gems "out of order", so to speak, but there's something wrong with the code logic in that you will lose an extra gem under some circumstances.  I think I understand what triggers it, but it would require a very long explanation and you're probably already aware, so I'll skip explaining.
- As @216 has pointed out, combining four gems doesn't work properly-- you only get one level of upgrade when you should be getting two.  (e.g., four normal gems combined gives you a perfect gem, when you should be getting a flawless.)

I hope this is helpful, and if not, just ignore it.  :)

WGW - 2021-10-26 18:53:48.110502

Peter Holko - 2021-10-26 18:36:15.797803

WGW - 2021-10-26 4:14:48.894113

WGW - 2021-10-25 22:21:54.540461

Peter Holko - 2021-10-25 21:32:14.738825

216 - 2021-10-25 21:27:57.852093

WGW - 2021-10-25 21:14:23.116402

216 - 2021-10-25 20:17:02.936494

Peter Holko - 2021-10-25 16:22:35.645253

WGW - 2021-10-24 19:04:52.480205

@216: Yeah, I'm probably going to take a break for a while, too.  It just takes too long and is too tedious to play games out to higher than level 500.  It takes DAYS.  And it's completely and totally boring after level 200.

Maybe it'll be worth playing again when/if the memory leak is fixed, in which case the end-game state won't be averting a game crash, but running out of room for new gems.  But even if that happens, it's only going to be MORE tedious and slow to play to the "end".

It does seem surprising you're considering a break largely because of a broken mouse, though.  A broken mouse would be a huge pain in more ways than just in screwing up GTD, right?  They only cost a few bucks, but I mean no offense if money is so tight for you that you can't afford to replace a broken mouse.  If not, though, just buy a new mouse, darnit.  :)

I'm not sure who else might have commented on uranium/star ruby, but I know I talked about it in an earlier comment-- I wanted to see if the display of the tower fire was part of the memory leak, and since uranium has no animation, I did a run building around 25 uranium, all in the lower left corner where they also weren't doing damage.  Didn't help a bit.

What does help (a bit)-- but makes the game even MORE tedious-- is keeping an eye on the cycling memory usage and when it hits the peak of the cycle, immediately minimize the browser.  The memory jumps down to the lowest point in the cycle (say, 50MB lower than the peak), and if you leave the browser minimized for several minutes-- yes, MINUTES-- the memory usage will drop another 20MB or so.

But as soon as you run the game again, of course, the memory usage resumes the cycle.  I find that if you do this over and over again, you're more likely to end a level with the memory usage being nearer the low end than the high, and this seems to slow the rate of leak over time.  Or, alternatively, I've just been wasting even more time doing this "minimizing" thing on some runs for no reason at all.

If it really does work, it also makes an already too long game take FOREVER, and the benefit is marginal at best (possibly entirely imaginary, but I think it's a real effect).

Anyhow, hope to see you back if you take a break.  I'll at least be keeping an eye on comments even if I'm not playing for a while.  Again, I really appreciate your suggestions and observations over the years.

Cheers!

216 - 2021-10-24 18:33:13.758772

WGW - 2021-10-24 16:09:18.050060

WGW - 2021-10-24 14:44:09.200162

@216: Having played a few more long runs (several of which I lost to stupid things like power failures and Windows rebooting itself for an update), I can say the following with some confidence:

(1) The memory leak is not as simple as time elapsed, nor time elapsed compared to what level you're on.  It just isn't that straightfoward.  My last run (level 509) I was consistently progressing faster than my best run (the current high score), but the memory leak-- which started out slower-- was still worse than the top scoring run starting around level 240 or so.

That's around the point in the game that I started drawing lots of great opals.  In keeping with other runs, I think the sourcce of the leak may be the number of gems placed on the board.  Number of gems is of course going to increase as levels progress, but not in a 1 to 1 fashion, depending on how many great gems you get (saving two turns to build a special), special gems you can build in one turn (again saving two turns), and how many tourmelines you build (which take an extra turn).

Initial observations would naturally point at elapsed time as the cause od the memory leak, but there's far too much variation in the runs I've played.  I have not (yet) specifically kept track of how many gems I have on the board of these runs, and I think it would be exceptionally tedious to do so.  (The game itself is tedious enough after level 200. . . )  But I think it's a pretty good guess.  The more gems the game has to keep track of, the worse the memory leak gets.  Again, that's closely aligned with elapsed time, but it's definitely not precisely the same thing.

(2) The difference in how the game plays on older versus newer systems is actually quite huge.  I have never had a run on the newer PC where I wasn't leaking air enemies all the way through the end of the game.  There are ocassional levels where none leak, but usually I'm leaking at least one air enemy, sometimes as many as 3, all the way up to level 500 and higher, at which point there is simply no place left on the voard to place any meaningful gems, meaning you really can't strengthen your layout's attack power to any significant extent.  Based on one your earlier posted screenshots, @216, you're not leaking air enemies at all.

In almost all the runs I've played on my older PC, I was able to get the layout to point of killing all air enemies, too, though not as early in the game as you seem to manage.  But on the new PC?  It's just impossible.  Because the game plays that differently.  The enemies move faster, and take less damage.

(3) I still can't play the game on my older PC anymore due to the bizarre total game slowdown that started only a little while for me.  I'm guessing there must have been some sort of javascript update that's affecting how the game runs.  Certainly the game itself hasn't been changed.

But whatever the cause, the game remains unplayable for me except on the new PC.  Which is just as well, since when playing on the old PC I can't get to anywhere near as high a level as on the new one, so why bother.  But the game is substantially "easier" on the older system.

216 - 2021-10-12 9:40:59.512360

Mine PC is also 6 years old, but i dont observe more slowdown than it was always. It happens quite randomly, sometimes slows at lvl 50( but not as much as on pic), sometimes lvl 300+ is smooth.

But as i noticed fire rate of towers is LESS afected by it.
Timer aslo slows, but not much ( sometimes 1s last 1.5s, once i checked it counted 70s in 73s while enemies were like 3x slower).
Less slowing fire rate of towers surely makes game easier, also aoe towers befinit much. That screenshot remind me v0.5.0 , where lag was extreme near lvl 100 and ABS was way overpowered aoe gem.

Strange that game sometimes lags, while using only 2% of CPU.

@WGW: I'm not suprised at all that same time on higher lvl has more memory leak. Surely lvl is main factor, then time.

I tried to make similar statistic as you, finally i got a GO (in lvl 68), but because that lags, i was losing some time, also i was forgetting to write downs some values. Anyway i can paste it here if you are interested:

lvl	leaks	EEs	MB	time
128	1	10	254	10083
132	1	10	287	10497
136	3	10	299	10917
140	2	10	310	11330
144	3	11
148	2	11		12160
152	4	11	363	12571
156	2	11	386	12993
160	2	11	422	13401
164	2	12
168	2	13	455	14265
172	1	13	467	14722
176	3	13	509	15145
180	3	13	529	15627
184	3	13
188	4 	13	555	16553
192	3	13	580	16977
196	3	13	613	17440
200	2	14
204	3	14		18338
208	3	14	670	18851
212	3	14	720	19360
216	3	15		
220	2	16
224	2	17	839	20802
228	2	17	855	21283
232	3	17	873	21791
236	2	17	
240	1	17	905	22909
244	3	17	935	23421
248	2	17	
252	2	17		24392
256	2	17
260	1	17	1120	25429
264	2	17	1104	25889
268	1	18	1180	26431
272	3	18	1181	26927
276	0	18		
280	1	18
284	2	18	1258	28403
288	3	18	1316	28899
292	3	19	1333	29364
296	1	19	1403	29860
300	1	19	
304	1	19	1481	30823

320	2	19	1602	32774
340	1	19	1894	35169

352 accidentaly closed game
(values after flying lvl)

i didnt make screenshot, it was new maze with a lot of space for EGs, i had over 50 of them. Anyway time wasn't best, about 2k slower at lvl 100, then lost some on lags. I think hibernating PC many times wasn't so good.

WGW - 2021-10-12 3:12:45.329450

WGW - 2021-10-12 2:58:56.872797

AIG - 2021-10-11 22:34:22.363967

TP - 2021-10-11 11:34:07.186843

WGW - 2021-10-06 4:11:15.443150

JINGLES - 2021-10-05 2:52:40.294545

WGW - 2021-09-30 10:54:36.847280

I've uploaded a spreadsheet tracking the memory leak across 4 games for the very few who'd be interested:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L-lZDQvIvHmsPV1EukQRsIMzu5jIrwP1xQq2gmY8ydo/edit?usp=sharing

The first 4 tabs are just the data for the 4 runs.  The last 2 tabs are an attempt at a simple analysis, may or not be easily decipherable (or sensible).

The only consistent, noticeable trends I see across 4 games with a pretty wide range of time scores (1 run on the old Win7 PC, the other 3 on the new Win10 PC):

(1) Not only is the memory leak cumulative, but the RATE of the leak slowly but continuously grows.

(2) The rate of leak is tied to more than just elapsed time.

The one game here with the slowest memory leak, by far, was the Win7 run (labeled "Win7 Old Layout, L344"), which was also the single SLOWEST run of the 4.  I ended that run at level 344 at ~60,000 seconds, with the memory leak at ~2GB.  The memory leaks for every other run at 60,000 seconds were all WELL above 2GB.  In fact, my top scoring, fastest run so far (labeled "Win10, top score"), was already leaking over 3GB at 60,000 seconds.  That's a full 50% higher than the Win 7 run's 2GB leak at the same elapsed time.  Yet I was only at level 344 at 60,000 seconds in the Win 7 run, versus level ***440*** in my top scoring Win10 run.

So the leak clearly is affected by more than time score. One of the variables would seem to be your OS/PC specs.

Now, all that said, I think faster times DO slow down the leak compared to other runs *ON THE SAME SYSTEM*, but there's more than that going on here.

I have more I could blather on about, but I'm sure this already 10 times too long!

WGW - 2021-09-26 22:03:19.513308

@216: I honestly on't remember ever having had the top score, even for a short while-- I guess that was right after Peter scrubbed the high score list of spammed fake scores; as I (vaguely) recall, it wasn't long after that when folks like a/aznist, you, etc, beat level 196 (which, for those who don't know, was a VERY difficult thing to do in the prior version of GTD).  I really appreciate your tips, which have been very helpful.

I'm in the process of compiling a bunch of info on around 5 runs of GTD (both on my old Win7 system and my new Win10 system), which I'll share soon.  I'm not able to answer your question previously about the level of memory leak in an earlier run, because I wasn't keeping track.  I now have a spreadsheet with data on 5 "successful" runs.

I also want to point out-- and might make a separate comment about this because it's so important-- that GTD DOES, in fact, run very differently on PCs with different specs.  The timer is not affected (until very late in the game)-- it ticks off secondes in real time.  But the movement of enemies, and the rate of tower firing, can get significantly slowed depending on system resources, which actually makes the game much easier.  You'd think that if that the whole game is getting slowed down-- both enemy speed and tower firing rate-- that you wouldn't have any actual ADVANTAGE, but just that levels would take longer (in real time, not according to the game timer).  But no, it appears, just as in the Flash version of GTD, that different system specs greatly affect how the game plays out.

Basically, from what I can discern so far, it's much easier to play GTD on an older system to the point of "sustainability", where you're earning enough gold to not have any concern about running out.  But getting the fastest timer score possible is greatly aided by having a higher-end system.

Just a preliminary analysis-- will post more soon.  I want to finish another couple of runs first, which are already in-progress.

216 - 2021-09-26 12:07:29.408629

WGW - 2021-09-26 3:10:14.179882

WGW - 2021-09-26 2:51:16.850526

@G: I completely agree-- keep that in mind when you see that I've just (finally) snagged the top high score.  Even in the prior version of GTD, even before a few folks had managed to crack level 196, I never, ever, ever had the top high score because of jerks spamming the high score list (the stats for those runs were very obvious signs that the scores were fake).

But I only got this far due to playing on a massively overpowered PC for what a game like GTD should ever require.  The game should really be rewarding skill, not how powerful your PC is (nor how high your tolerance for boring gameplay, after level 200 or so, is).

All that said, I'm going to enjoy the brief moment in time where I have the top score, until someone with a better PC decides to beat me.  :)

I will post some more info soon-- I've been keeping track of the memory leak and elapsed time of two games (one still running).

I should also note that the "exploit" I mentioned in an earlier comment, where running two instances of GTD will slow the game down to the point that you can kill a lot more air troops (levels 40-100 or so), does NOT work on my new PC.  It would seem that this only works when you're somewhat straining resources (even though a game like GTD shouldn't strain the resources of a 10 year old PC).

None of this meant to be interpreted as complaining about a free game. I just don't feel great about having the top score largely because I just spent $1500 on a new gaming PC. . .  :)

G - 2021-09-21 18:34:01.947899

WGW - 2021-09-21 13:22:09.725629

@216: I think I hae a good idea why the high score text boxes ignore "R" keystrokes-- "R" is the only shortcut keystroke Im aware of in GTD, to "remove" rocks.  If there are any other keyboard shortcuts, I don't know what they are (none of this is documented as far as I can tell).  So what's probably happening is that the GTD program is "intercepting" "R" keystrokes in the high score text boxes and registering them as requiests to remove rocks, whereas if you paste text from elsewhere that has an "R" in it, there's no problem because there's no actual "R" keystroke involved (within GTD).

More soon-- working on re-creating my prior high score (currently at level 270).  Thanks for all the tips.  As I've said previously, being ble to get to higher levels is a product (in some combination) of your systemm's RAM, processor, etc, rather than my really deserving any credit.  For what it's worth, I did not upgrade my PC just to get a higher score in GTD, but because of a a few other games I've wanted to play for a while which require Win10 and much better specs than my old machine.  :)

Here's hoping I quit my current run before the game crashes.

Martijn - 2021-09-21 9:51:30.349362

216 - 2021-09-20 20:19:43.039674

@G: I can understand that need more jades if bad start, but you built 30(!) of them.. it takes 90 turns (-2 per each 1-turn jade). Also i reseting game if start is bad.

@WGW: Do you remember memory usage near lvl 400?
I think you should keep reducing times of your runs, in case of over 500 run, optimizing can save DAYS ( for me it took 2 days or less to get lvl 400). You made 50 EEs, while i had 21 ( at lvl 400). In fact i was leaking 0-3 flyers, but since it don't casue game over i accepted that. Making not too much EEs is a key to get better times.

The places that you should NOT make an EE:
- left side of map (that doesn't range c5-c6 road)
- mid zone (exception for 1-2 of them)
- left/mid part of "old" downline - that was great place in flash version, but here it no range c2-c3 road(right part can role as post c6 stunzone)
- outside of GO range (but its obvious)

Other notes on your 516 pic:
-nice placed 4 GAq
-good placed RCs and BOs out of mid zone( ussually i make them on mid to boosts lvl 100 time, i make 2nd BO in late game)
- however, extra space on/near mid was used mostly for EEs , jades and 2nd malachite (what is for, 1-turn in lvl 2?)... wait there is even 3rd one. It's better to make an uranium than extra malachite.
-lack of EGs near mid, which is great place for 100+ kills EGs (ABSs also not bad here, but kills should goes for EGs)

You can try to optimize maze for more space near mid (i know, its not so easy)

The importang thing for time score is getting GO quite early, do you remember when you got 1st GO?

Anyway, congrats of getting higher lvl than i actually have even gotten!

##############
Good that old comments are not removing as it was before. here is already over 100 comments (IMO 100 comment limit was too low).

WGW - 2021-09-20 17:26:18.254522

Well, I had the highest score game ever going on my new PC, level 541-- no major change in strategy, just getting further due to having a lot more RAM.  Game was running smoothly until ultimately it crashed on level 541, using around 4GB of RAM (on a system with 32GB of RAM total).  So I lost the best scoring game ever after playing for around 3 DAYS.  At least I took a screenshot about 20 levels before the crash: https://imgur.com/a/bAo88kp

The memory leak behaves the same on a much better PC running Win10. Having more RAM does, in fact, let you play the game longer before the memory leak causes a crash, but no matter how much RAM you have, the browser is going to crash long before you've gotten even close actually running out of memory.  Most unfortunately, that there's no sign in-game that a crash is going to happen soon.  The game was running smooth as silk for 540 levels, then it just choked.  If I'd at least seen some slowdown happening, I might have ended the game on purpose, but no such warning.

Congrats to Jason Sill, the guy who just posted a level 528 score-- the very same day I was about to post a 500+ level high score.  But then the damned browser crashed!!!  Is it really worth my spending another 3 or 4 days trying to get above level 500 again?  No, it's not.  But I'm sure I'll try anyway. . .

WGW - 2021-09-18 12:25:08.148276

@216: Yes, that is very weird about the game stripping out out the "r" character for high scores-- I noticed that myself when I was posting my first few high scores in the new version, that the website/game was just simply ignoring any keystrokes for "r"-- but at least there's a workaround-- pasting the text back to the GTD website from somewhere (anywhere) else.  You can see that "r"'s are being stripped as you try to post a new high score-- the stripped "r"'s are all visibly stripped from the onscreen text before you hit the final "Submit" button (or whatever it's called now).

Definitely a problem to be addressed, but issues #1 and #2 as far as I've seen are: (1) Plug the memory leak, and (2) make sure the game runs the same across all system specs.  Better that GTD crashes "early" for users with very outdated systems than that the game would give an EDGE to people (like me, now), who have high-powered gaming PCs.  This just ain't that kind of game-- which is part of why I love it so much.

WGW - 2021-09-18 12:06:06.220363

@G: First of all, I want the Uberstone BAD, too. So bad.   :)

I've had much the same experiences playing the new GTD as you-- most particularly with respect to the need for lots of Lucky Ancient Jades.  It's true that the game is overall more "forgiving" than it was in the Flash version, but not with respect to the need for gold.  You need a lot more gold to perservere now, but you're also a lot more able to earn it if you build lots of Lucky Asian Jades.

And all the above said, I believe I've now observed a couple of instances (so far) of the game playing very differently depending on your system specs (at least within a Windows environment).  This parallels some effects I was aware of in the prior Flash version, but is most certainly not analagous.

E.g. In the Flash version, your processor speed (and maybe, secondarily, other system specs like total RAM) directly affected how GTD ran, to the extent that (as I've previously noted), when I upgraded my PC around 2015, I was able to shave the elapsed time for the same GTD runs I'd been doing for years at that point, by about 25%, with no change in strategy or maze whatsoever.

Well, I just upgraded PCs after many years of resistance, this time to a fairly over-powered game machine, and i find (so far) that GTD doesn't run much differently on this new machine 10000x more powerful than the last PC on which I used to play this game, BUT-- I should (conceivably) have enough RAM to allow playing the game out well beyond where it crashed on my last PC.  We'll see (at level 169 now).  I'd be pretty surprised if the new PC crashes GTD at the same memory leak level-- around 2.3GB-- when this PC has 4 times the RAM.  But we'll see! (and I will update).

One other effect I've noticed, which is actually quite significant, I think, is that you can sort of "handicap" yourself by having the game run much slower if you run more than one instance of it-- at least in MY case, running the game on Chrome on Win 7, with one of two games I was playing simultaneously already at least advanced to around the 100 level before I observed the exploit.

What this does-- at least on "slow enough" systems, is to allow you to slow the progression of a game to a crawl just by having two instances of GTD running (in Chrome, at least, in Win 7 at least, and with low enough system specs, at least), with the result that you can avoid leaking literally DOZENS of air enemies from levels, say, around 44 to 92 that would have otherwise leaked and cost a lot of gold (cumulatively).

So I have more to say on this (not that I'd expect anyone to want to read more on this), but I think the tl;dr is, "System specs still affect how GTD plays, though not the same way as they used in the old Flash version".  And I think that that the wildly varying experience between the experiences (so far) of an undebatedly very experienced/serious/successful player like @216 and my own (and @G's, and perhaps others') is more down to our varying system specs/platforms than anything else.

I don't mean this, truly, to be be dismissive or condescending; I just happen to have had the rare "opportunity" to have done a major PC upgrade in the midst of both the development of the new GTD, and the last one (a few years back).

This new PC is a (supposedly) gamer's PC, , so I expect to at least squeeze a few more dozen levels out of my vurrent run than I have so far.  We'll see.  :)

G - 2021-09-16 18:13:59.995190

216 - 2021-09-16 15:11:08.052292

G - 2021-09-15 18:00:56.509217

216 - 2021-09-15 14:02:34.459500

G - 2021-09-15 2:26:09.187193

216 - 2021-09-13 16:04:17.993344

@WGW: 1. Aparently there was many things that you are missing form mine comments(espec from 2020). That "wall of EEs" was called a downline, which was mine first idea how i should play emeralds runs - the problems was how to force EEs to hit different targets, so i wanted to place them as away as possible(from c2-c3 road) to reduce their range. In this version downline needs to be placed 0.5 gems higher that in flash version.

2. ABS vs EG comparision:
Its not so easy to compare them, because flamestrikes and kills change their balance. Assuming 0 kills, GO+BO (x2.8), pink weakness and 5 armor ther (average)shoot DPS is:
EG: 180*1.3/0.75*2.8*1.75*0.769 = 1175.6
ABS: 200*1.3/0.8*2.8*1*0.769 = 699.8

Assuming target is stunlocked and ABS will cast flamestrike every 10 hits(4s), there will be 2.5 flamestrike avg active(1250 DPS), so 1950 DPS total from ABS
But flamestrike dont benefit from kills, assuming 100 kills:
EG 2351 DPS
ABS 2650 DPS
with 200 kills:
EG 3527 DPS
ABS 3349 DPS

So ABS shouldn't take kills. Also it take some time to proc flamestrikes - ABS do less dmg in first few s. I tend to make them after lvl ~150

3. I'm thinking what you meant by "gems with a lot more dmg",
lets compare DPS of some others with same assumptions:

ABS: 1950
GAq: 1723
GA:  1413*
EG:  1176
GPD: 1126
GD:  1009
PAq: 676
EE:  669
PTF: 592 + nova DPS (50 because mana?)
U238:560
PA:  546*
GT:  538
RQC: 529*
GE:  484 (+25 from posion)
GS:  431
GR:  402
LAJ: 389
GO:  388
MM:  277
YS:  215
MBO: 77

so only 3 gems can have better dmg than EG.. wait 4, Uber Stone 19789 DPS, but we can forget about it with 4-merge bug. Chance for 5 same perfects is 1:409600000

dmg of some gems is a joke in this version , GR,GE really sucks.

* Flyers can have 4 armor, bt for comparision used 5

WGW - 2021-09-10 6:05:12.706888

WGW - 2021-09-10 5:39:19.124737

@216: Thanks for reposting the link to the screenshot-- I must have missed it in the earlier comment.  Very interesting how you created a wall of Dark Emeralds on the bottom, which must create a nearly impenetrable barrier without having to completely flood the map with DE's like I do.  And I'm surprised how many Egyptian Golds you build, too; I've been of the mind that they're mostly important for armor reduction, since there are gems that deal a lot more hitpoint damage.  As soon as I've got enough EG's to consistently keep enemy armor down, I generally don't prioritize them.

I think the upgraded Blood Stone is the most powerful now?  It's hard for me to make these comparisons since the stats are only visible while you're playing and I'm too lazy to make a list of it all.)

Maybe my current maze would work faster if I tried prioritizing the special gems differently, without having to change the layout.  I'll give it a try.

Regarding leaking enemies, I wasn't suggesting that you could leak every enemy on every level.  That's obviously going to end the game eventually.  And once you've got a strong enough layout to kill all air enemies, you CAN'T leak them, no matter what you do.  You can only leak the ground enemies.

In the old GTD, I would do an easy calculation of how much gold I needed to start leaking enemies at what level, so that I would basically end every run leaking everything for the last 30-50 levels.  It shaved a good 25% off the time.  But that was with my playing only to get to level 196, knowing I'd always lose at that point.

In the new game, I just have the maze set up so that it only takes a switch in 3 rocks to flip from leaking ground enemies to killing them all.  When gold starts to run low, I just close the maze up for a while to build gold back up.

I also meant to mention, regarding my earlier comment that Jades seemed to earn gold even when upgraded only once, I must have been drunk when I saw that happening, cause you're right, it doesn't.  I'm guessing what happened is that I had an only-once-upgraded Jade in that game, and saw my gold going up without seeing enemies dying, but that I was only not seeing the enemies die because some of them were doubled up (overlapping).  My mistake!

216 - 2021-09-10 0:25:23.639993

@WGW: No way to leaking grounds every wawe (X^2+10 life cost) ... but mb it's not as bad idea to leak in some lvls after 300.

In that run i surely didnt leak for purpose. Well, no posted score, but i made a screenshot at 324:
https://imgur.com/zFP34ZH (link is also in mine comment from 19-07). I think the cost of life is enough proof.

It wasnt ultra-fast run, i posted lvl 201 with 21k time(with very late GO) and 5,6k time lvl 100 NJC (this was VERY fast run, but stil possible to do better)

Surely high amount of EGs(with kills) near mid is important. Early GO also helped here. Notice i made only 3 jades and still 2M gold. 29 EE were enough to leak 0 flyers in ~90% cases.

In late game ABS have better dmg on stunlocked enemy. 
GAq overdmg EG singificantly (since its cd is now 350 instead 500), but getting great gems is question of luck.

Note that dmg from EE is much lower than it was, cause green x1.5 multiplier(as well as others colors) is not implemented yet (while pink x1.75 is, idk why).
Generally having too many EEs have bad impact on time scores, havning low-dmg hard stunzones is one of reasons.
- - - - - - -
About mazes/layout - yes, its important(but hard) to find better and better. But it have less impact in very late game.
- - - - - - -
HP of enemies is growing linear 4500*(lvl-30), x0.3333 on flying.

But yes, it's fast, ground wawes in late game takes at least 150-200s, no matter how good start was (from 300 to 324 it took me ~3400s, assuming that 18 ground wawes lasted 3000s its 166s/lvl ) Seems like only way to reduce it would be Uber Stone, but 4-merge bug dont giwe me hope for that.

to kill 10 enemies at lvl ~300 in 200s, while they have over 1000000 HP, need about 50k DPS in burst zone.. or at least total PDS from towers.

lvl 0 EG buffed by BO+GO have 1175 DPS on 5 armor amethyst weak enemy.
but having 30+ EGs with some kills at this point is not hard at all( in addition to other dmg gems) - resulting less than 200s. i think i saw an enemy losing near 50k hp per second, but not sure it it was in this run.

So Its possible to get enough attack power to even better time, problems is towers cant waste their attack time.

In mid game(100-150) wawes goes MUCH faster , near 100s or less , while first 50 wawes can be done in less than 3k s thanks to BS(s)

#######
About Windowns and RAM i think i need to read more, but @SMS said that its more likely reason than browser( comment from 23-03)

#######
Recently i noticed interesting bug: while i have all EE part i can click comine special on.. malachite. Accidentally clicked once and  tranformed it into EE(with all malachite kills, but rather no worth anyway).

WGW - 2021-09-09 21:50:00.373931

@216: There's really no possibility whatsoever that Windows is limiting the RAM usage of processes when there's plenty of RAM free.  GTD crashes for me when it gets to around 2.3GB of RAM usage-- just look at the minimum requirements for any semi-modern game.  Newer games often REQUIRE 8GB or more to run.  So no, it's not Windows itself dictating that the browser can only use 2.3GB of RAM, or no modern game with real graphics would ever run on Windows.

Back in the olden days when RAM was much more limited, Windows would offload memory usage onto your system hard drive if usage exceeded capacity.  That feature still exists (at least in Windows 7, which I'm still using), and it would make no sense for it to have been created in the first place if Windows was just globally limiting all processes to a fraction of available RAM.

Regardless, there's obviously something wrong with GTD as it currently exists-- there's no reason whatsoever for a game like this to be using 2GB of RAM, of course.  So we could go back and forth on whether elapsed time affects the memory leak, or what platforms folks are using, but the bottom line is, the memory leak just needs to get fixed (whenever Peter H. has the time to do it-- I'm not complaining. The game is free, after all.)

As for comparing our respective time scores, well, obviously I couldn't compare to yours since it's not a posted high score. . . Not that I'm doubting you, but obviously, I couldn't compare my scores to a score that isn't there.  :)

As I said earlier, I think I could probably shave a bit more time off my runs with some really good luck and some minor tweaks to playing style E.g., making sure to leave a cleaner path for leaking ground enemies mostly outside the range of dark emeralds, so that leaking enemies makes a level go quicker.  Otherwise, the ones that get stunlocked take FOREVER to kill and the levels where you leak can actually take even longer than not leaking.

But I'd expect to maybe at best shave off another 10-15% in time score.  Doing any better than that would, I think, require me to entirely change my maze layout, which I'm not too interested in doing at this point.  It would require a lot of frustrating experimentation just to get to the point where I'd be doing about as well as with my current layout, let alone doing any better.  That's not to say there aren't better layouts (yours, apparently), but I like mine.  It works.  And it's faster than (just about) anyone else's, which is good enough for me.  :)

I'm assuming that in the run you mentioned with that ultra-fast time score you were also leaking ground enemies intentionally?  I can't see how you could possibly build enough attack power for a run that fast if you were killing all enemies on every level.  Their hitpoints just get too high as the game goes on.

216 - 2021-09-08 13:12:17.315143

WGW - 2021-09-08 8:25:21.474967

WGW - 2021-09-08 8:19:15.845880

Doing pretty well now-- though it is frustrating to have to  watch out for the memory leak and make sure to end the game before the browser crashes.  In my case, it seems to crash when the leak gets to around 2.3GB (frustratingly, that's with 3GB more RAM still completely free).  The last few levels end up really nail-biting, not because of anything actually happening IN the game, but because of the increasing risk of a memory leak-related crash the longer you play.

There was some earlier speculation here (by @216, I think) that the memory leak might be correlated with the elapsed in-game time, and that, therefore, faster run times might allow you to get to higher levels before a browser crash becomes a threat.  My recent experience sorta bears this out, in a very unscientifically, purely anecdotally, teeny sample sort of way.  I've been focusing on reducing elapsed run times, and have been able to get to higher levels accordingly.  My last run I had to finally end (biting my nails) at level 377, with 2.1GB RAM leaking.  Elaped time this run and the times for the other runs I've posted high scores for recently are all far, far below the other high scores.  I might still be able to winnow down the run time a teeny bit more, but not much-- the only motivation to even try being to hopefully squeeze a few more levels out of the game before purposely ending it to head off a crash. . .  Frustrating.

But I'll keep playing.  And I might be buying a new PC soon, if so, presumably that will help work around the memory leak (my current PC is over 6 years old.)

For anyone interested, here's the layout just before I opened a few gaps to end the game on the next level (377):
https://imgur.com/mMNFHT2

Crazy how many great gems I was getting late in the game, when there was nowhere good to place them.  I believe I had 10 great gems and 44 or so dark emeralds (which is too many, really).

216 - 2021-09-08 1:32:16.060613

German - 2021-09-04 10:39:06.189434

German - 2021-09-04 9:30:06.116749

216 - 2021-09-02 1:47:18.956635

Chr3y - 2021-09-01 6:09:48.872486

WGW - 2021-09-01 1:28:31.627238

Crap almighty, I did it AGAIN, pasting a whole bunch of old text along with my comment.  I will try to more careful about this, really.  Here's the actual NEW comment I meant to add:

@216: Since I don't have the knowledge/experience to acess the game code, and I don't have any record of the properties of gems in the old Flash GTD, I can't make the sort of detailed comparisons you've outlined.  I only notice the really huge changes, like the elimination of the opal bug(s), the increased gold earnings of Jades, that sort of thing.  I never even tried to play anything other than survival mode, so I'd also never notice changes in other modes.

But one thing in particular that you pointed out, which I had not noticed but really should have, I think has proved to be KEY to why I was doing so badly for so many runs.  I expect bad RNG every now and then, but not to the extent I was losing, and so badly, and so early, and so often, and I think the reason is the bug you described with respect to combining gems "out of order" (so to speak) sometimes consuming extra gems-- I saw it happen myself after I started looking for it, thanks to your heads-up, and I suspect I was losing a lot of perfect gems in a lot of runs without even noticing it, because once I "discovered" that you could do a "combine special" on any gem in the recipe, I started really abusing that feature. . . and likely lost a lot of gems along the way.

In my current run, which again is without a Great Opal, I'm well into the "safe zone" (currently level 162) where it's clear I'm not going to run out of gold.  I haven't been able to create a single great gem, nor any special gems on a single turn, and yet this run has gone 10 times better than my last 5 or 6.  So I think-- though time will tell-- this is mostly down to not wasting gems through combining them out of order, and possibly also due to having built a Black Opal very early on, around level 40.  I believe my first half dozen very succesful runs also had an early Black Opal, so it seems that building one early is a lot more important now than it was in the old version.  Especially since the damage buff works properly now, rather than only affecting gems already on the board as in the prior version.  You put a single BO down early in the game near the middle, and basically every gem you place after that is 40% more powerful.  It didn't used to work this way!

Thanks for all the additional info, most especially making me aware of the new bug with respect to combining gems out of order.

WGW - 2021-09-01 1:25:42.051398

There is many diffences bettwen flash GTD (list below)

@WGW: 1. i didn't observe any gold gain from Asian Jades. Also checked in code, only maxed has a bonus gold chance.
2. It's possible to lose before 100 with very bad RNG (lack of EGs/EEs). But when builing more jades and not repicking as much it shouldn't happen... especially if you got a GO! How many leaks you had?

I quite like that combinig special on any gem, but it makes game much easier - geting last EE piece in good position was a part of strategy, Now you can put early fT or FS and reserve that place it for EE. Also now worth to place fD early to farm kills, then make EG.

Sometimes merging comsume 2 same gems, as some ppl noticed, so better not cliking combine special on perfect gem.

List of other (than jades/combining) differences bettwen flash version and 0.5.4:
-lives mechanic
-towers/ enemies center point got changed, so towers range diffent positions
-star ruby/ uranium burn dmg doesn't ignore armor now(strange), but possible it benefit from opals (need more testing)
-aqua gems and malachite have now 350 cd (was 500)
-some great gems got nerfed, so they sucks even more
-dmg table doesn't work for other than pink dmg
-gold form kills is not rounded down (also 2 more gold per lvl)
-displayed minimum dmg is 1 less* than actual
-aura rage in now displayed (thanks)
-flamestrike last 2x longer (good idea imo)
-4 more armor on survival
-minimum speed bugs
-wrong speed display
-better displayed hp update
-some display bugs with buttons
-no-survival dificulties have 50 lvls instead 41
-strange disability to place gem near exit than would leave 1 half-tile space bettwen
-less lag (but more memory leak)
-no opal bugs, except SYS aura bugs
-SYS same stats as YS bug ( it cause it really useless)
-some reset game bugs

*2 for EE, which have double dice roll(1-51)

Thanks for all the additional info, most especially making me aware of the new bug with respect to combining gems out of order.

216 - 2021-08-31 15:25:29.122389

216 - 2021-08-30 15:02:44.935531

There is many diffences bettwen flash GTD (list below)

Sometimes merging comsume 2 same gems, as some ppl noticed, so better not cliking combine special on perfect gem.

*2 for EE, which have double dice roll(1-51)

WGW - 2021-08-30 5:51:21.148350

AAARGH!!!! Again I made a very dumb error in copying and pasting the below comment, which included text from a much earlier comment.  Here's all I meant to post (apologies!):
A couple more things I've only just noticed to be different than the Flash version of GTD (I'm sure this is all old news to everyone who's been playing the new version a while, like @216 and @G): 
- You can do a "Combine Special" on ANY individual gem on the board that's part of the recipe.  In the old version, you were 100% restricted to building special gems using component gems in the order they were laid down.  You still don't have 100% control over which gems are used to build a special when there are multiple possibilities on the board, but you have a lot MORE control now than used to be the case.  I like it.  
- Jades upgraded only once now earn gold, too.  Used to be that you had to fully upgrade (2 upgrades for 295 total gold) for Jades to earn any gold (and of course, even the fully upgraded Lucky Asian Jades in the Flash version earned far less gold than they do now). I was so locked in to expecting that I had to fully upgrade (2x) Jades for them to produce gold, that I never even *tried* to upgrade any of them just once-- I had just been waiting for enough gold to upgrade them completely.  I was shocked to see one earning gold-- without kills, of course-- when only upgraded once.

Even more surprising when you consider that nowhere in the official text description for the Jade does it say anything about it earning gold, at ANY level of upgrade.

WGW - 2021-08-30 5:49:42.996651

Well, well, well. . . I'm back to playing GTD, and couldn't be happier about it.  I just posted the (current) highest score for the game, which I had to end intentionally due to system resource drainage, rather than actually "losing".

In finally returning to this game since the original Flash version was involuntarily retired, I have to say I'm very pleased at the changes I see.  I had tried to play the new post-Flash game when Peter first released it, but saw tons of bugs and ended up focusing on other things for a while, figuring plenty of other people would do the job of reporting the errors.

But I just fired up the game again a few days ago, and to my delight, I was able to post the highest score yet.  The main issue with the game at this point seems, to me, to be that advancing into really high levels becomes a huge drain on system resources, so rather than a strategic challenge, after level 200 or so, GTD becomes a "Manage your system resources" game to prevent a crash due to memory requirements, rather than anything IN-GAME limiting your progress.  In my case, I had to shut down basically every program and background service that I didn't absolutely need to be running, in order to keep my PC from running out of RAM due to GTD's increasing requirements as you progress.

Otherwise, I think the changes Peter made with respect to how gold/lives/escaping enemies work are a tremendous benefit to the game-- the original version devolved into "can you click fast enough to regain lives" after level 140 or so, and at level 196, a SINGLE escaping air troop enemy would immediately end a game you'd invested 10-15 hours into playing.  The new system is much, much more forgiving, without breaking the essential game systems otherwise.  It's maybe a BIT too easy now, but I say this as someone who has already invested literally years of my life into this game; I don't think (based on the existing high scores) that too many other people would find that these changes really make the game too easy.

But from my perspective, the game (in survival mode at least) is now a matter of how many Lucky Asian Jades you can build early on (to earn gold), and how many Enchanted Emeralds you can build once your gold levels are consistently increasing.  All other considerations, while not irrelevant, have become at the least *secondary*, to the primary goal of simply keeping your gold level high enough to withstand leaks.

And if you focus on gold levels for the first 50 levels or so, repicks become basically free, making the actual survival mode GTD somewhat akin to the "sandbox" mode, in that you can feel free to repick and repick and repick until you get exactly the result you want.  The original game required extreme care in repicks, which meant actively needing to balance optimal outcomes (ideal gem placement) against recourse cost (skyrocketing repick costs against earned gold levels-- gold accumlation was MUCH slower in the original version).

But the real problem, to me, seems to be a matter of resource usage, in that the game uses more and more memory the further you progress.  Once I hit level 150 or so, my concern was no longer that I would actually lose the game, but that my whole system would crash due to the increased memory demands with every level gained.  The game itself was essentially unloseable by that point, but I had a lot of worries whether my whole PC would cry uncle before I was able to post a high score.  I've also seen comments from others here regarding the game playing very differently depending on what monitor refresh rate you're using (i.e., using 120MHz makes the enemies move 2x as fast and makes the game unplayable).  These issues are  clearly not intended;  no one intentionally designs a game so that losing the game is due more to your system specs than how you're actually playing the game.  But I also expect (due to my own meager programming background) that these are MUCH more difficult issues to sort out than out-and-out bugs are ("bugs" meaning instances where the game is explcitly malfunctioning).

All in all, I'm genuinely thrilled with this new revision of the game.  I've only encountered 2 or 3 bugs at this point, all of which are very minor.  The user interface is, imo, a bit more clunky now than it was in the Flash version.  Otherwise, I think this is a much-improved game, and I heartily commend Peter Holko for re-releasing, re-developing, and re-thinking it.

There's been a real hole in my life due to not playing GTD in the background literally ALL the time, as I had for a decade before the end of Flash.  That hole is now filled.  :)

I still say, though, the fact that a few people had managed to beat level 196 in the original version continues to leave me humbled, since I was never able to come even CLOSE.  I posted dozens and dozens of L195 high scores, but despite countless hours trying the so-called "emerald strategy" to get past L196, I never managed it, even with abundant help from the folks who did.

So while I got past level 196 and way beyond in this revised version of the game, I will never lose my admiration for those who bested my best in the original version.  I'm quite sure that any of you (a/aznst, 216, mmkay) could do just as well or even better assuming your computer specs are good enough to avoid crashes at higher levels.

But that said, it still feels good to have the current highest score again, at least temporarily!  My PC is almost 10 years old and has only 8GB of RAM, so I'm sure someone, somewhere will do better.  But if Peter is ever able to revise the game so that system resources are no longer an issue (without changing any other essential elements of the gameplay). . . I don't think anyone can do better than with my strategy.  :)  It would be very interesting to see what kind of balancing/adjustments are possible to make the current game more challenging for very experienced players.

For those who are interested (and if you weren't, you surely wouldn't have read this far to begin with), here's my maze layout:

A couple more things I've only just notived to be different than the Flash version of GTD (I'm sure this is all old news to everyone who's been playing the new version a while, like @216 and @G): 
- You can do a "Combine Special" on ANY individual gem on the board that's part of the recipe.  In the old version, you were 100% restricted to building special gems using component gems in the order they were laid down.  You still don't have 100% control over which gems are used to build a special when there are multiple possibilities on the board, but you have a lot MORE control now than used to be the case.  I like it.  
- Jades upgraded only once now earn gold, too.  Used to be that you had to fully upgrade (2 upgrades for 295 total gold) for Jades to earn any gold (and of course, even the fully upgraded Lucky Asian Jades in the Flash version earned far less gold than they do now). I was so locked in to expecting that I had to fully upgrade (2x) Jades for them to produce gold, that I never even *tried* to upgrade any of them just once-- I had just been waiting for enough gold to upgrade them completely.  I was shocked to see one earning gold-- without kills, of course-- when only upgraded once.

Even more surprising when you consider that nowhere in the official text description for the Jade does it say anything about it earning gold, at ANY level of upgrade.

WGW - 2021-08-30 5:25:33.406736

216 - 2021-08-29 22:10:30.828310

G - 2021-08-29 16:24:47.551548

216 - 2021-08-26 21:55:39.986215

G - 2021-08-26 14:43:58.992345

216 - 2021-08-26 0:23:45.299676

G - 2021-08-25 13:19:46.127397

216 - 2021-08-24 23:17:57.869525

G - 2021-08-24 20:45:51.558468

216 - 2021-08-21 18:12:40.325040

Game got frustrating for me, because mine broken mouse often makes a double click - downgrade after combining...

@WGW: 1) Nerfing Jades is not only thing to fix, late game when you can stun all flyers will be endless anyway, SYS is broken*, some great gems are not so great( GR, GE, GS imo sucks), someting is wrong with minimum speed in lvls 30+

2) Maybe you can't get way better times, but mine times were x1.5 better (and probably possible to get better), so you can improve a lot. some important things:
-Maze shouldn't be too long
-worth to build more EGs, BSs/ABSs ( best dmg towers, maybe besides GAq)
-dmg towers should target something most of time
-try to avoid low-dmg stun zones (but sometiems they help for killing flyers)
-in early game(60-) worth to optimize maze around BS(s) for good aoe (later it matter less)
-kills on EGs/BS also matter

3) Chance for getting uberstone was also motivating me to play. I saw in code, it exist and have REALLY OP stats ( only minimum dmg is lower than in flash version).
But it's ~1500x harder to get than GO...

* upgraded version have same dmg as not upgraded, it overwrite 40% BO aura when gem was placed later than BO gem (gem that you click combine special counts)

WGW - 2021-08-21 5:06:25.920469

@216:  It's hard for me to imagine doing much better in "time score", so to speak, than I've been doing (still only on about my 5th run)-- Maybe just a bit faster with truly exceptional luck, but I know my current time scores are pretty fast compared to posted high scores (even for the runs which I've lost due to crashes), and compared to my time scores in the Flash version.  Without having to work around the restrictions of the prior version of GTD, levels go by much faster than in the old version, at least until you get to the really high levels, above 200 or so.  I mean, you could VERY easily be correct that elapsed time is related to the amount of memory leak, it's just not something that, even if true, can really be taken advantage of in a major way.  The memory leak just needs to get fixed (and, I would hope, the game mechanics rebalanced a bit).  I'm in the midst of a game now at level 259 that's only taken (in seconds) 38,756-- which would have been one of my better (not all time best) time scores in prior GTD for all the games I lost at level 196, and this one has already gone 65 levels further.

We'll see if Peter H has the time and energy to address this stuff in a future update, but regardless, for now, I'm just enjoying being able to again play GTD again in the background while I do other things. . . it sure would be great, though, if the memory leak were fixed and the game rebalanced (which might just not require anything more than nerfing the gold earned from Lucky Asian Jades).

Meanwhile, I remembered one reason to keep me motivated to play even in the absence of updates:  Maybe one day, MAYBE, I'll finally get an uberstone (assuming they still exist in this version of GTD)!  It won't change anything, game-wise, even if I do, if the game is already constricted by the memory leak problem.  An uberstone isn't going to stop the game from crashing.  But it would feel good, after all these years, to finally, FINALLY get one!

Oh, and one more thing-- without getting into the math on the probability of getting a great opal, at this point I accept that you're correct that they're a lot more common than I'd perceived in the past.  Every run I've done in the new GTD, except that first one, got me at least one GO, and usually several. I've gotten FOUR GO's in this run just so far.  :)

216 - 2021-08-16 23:27:07.380638

WGW - 2021-08-16 22:17:27.000537

@G: I'm with you in finding the memory leak problem to be enough to almost-- almost-- kill my long-term interest in this game.  It seems to me that without this extra-game limitation, there are probably at LEAST a dozen of us who would be able to play the survival mode out until the point where there are no places left to put new gems/rocks, which means: (a) The game is too easy in current form, mostly because of overpowered Jades, and (b) If the memory leak is fixed without any other tweaks to the game, there will be no meaningful distinction between high scores over, say, level 200, since any decently compentent player will be able to easily get to that level.

I found some interesting (though not potent) effects experimenting around along the lines that you summarized, and perhaps more, including reducing towers-- my last build, the one where I finally posted a high score (at level 301) involved my building 20+ Uranium in the lower left corner of the map, to see if that would slow down the memory leak-- but I found that, as you noted, there's really no effective way (that I've discovered) to limit the memory leak.  I also tried things like minimizing the browser tab, which apparently halted the game completely, where in the prior Flash version, minimized tabs massively slowed but didn't HALT the game.

Putting the PC into suspend mode would temporarily reduce memory usage to minimal levels, but as soon as you let the game run again, it would reach the same level of RAM leaks within 20-30 seconds.

So it seems to me that the game is currently permanently limited by the memory leak problem, which may be very, very, very difficult to solve from a programming perspective.  Or not.  But I can certainly see how it might be quite difficult to resolve.

In any event, good to see people (like you, and @216) still engaged in the game after all these years.  I think it's a testament, more than anything, to how great the basic design of this game is, that we remain interested and committed even when it's not really working as it should be.  :)

G - 2021-08-16 18:48:46.174611

WGW - 2021-08-13 2:23:34.476710

So it's the long high score text that has messed up the formatting of the high score page?  That's a real shame.  Seems to me that there's a gigantic area of compromise between allowing high score text to be so long that it messes up the whole page, and limiting high score to just 32 characters (as in the prior Flash version of the game).  I haven't posted a single new high score yet, but that's exclusively a result of browser crashes due to the memory leak. . .

Speaking of which, @G: I'm curious, since you're one of the few who has posted high scores above level 400, what your system specs are?  Does having more memory than I do even help?  I ask because every game I've played has crashed due to an "out of memory" error from the browser even though I had around 3GB of RAM still free.  So I'm wondering if it even matters to have more RAM, since I never really even came close to actually running out of RAM, or whether there's some sort of browser-specific memory limit that will crash the page even if you have plenty of RAM left (as I have had at each crash so far).

@216:  The "No Jade" challenge sounds pretty damned challenging, all right. . . As you noted, I think it would take some pretty good RNG luck to make much progress without upgraded Jades.  Now that I've played 4-5 runs of the new version of the game, I'm convinced that (in keeping with my prior comments) building and upgrading as many Jades as possible early on essentially makes survival mode a cakewalk-- I'd go as far as to say it breaks the game.  I haven't "lost" a run of the new version for any reason other than a browser crash (due to the memory leak).  Other than restarting if I don't get a malachite on the first turn, every run I've played has been "winnable" (meaning, self-sustaining, increasing gold levels until the browser crashes), which was not the case with the Flash version.  So yeah, I see now how much easier the game has gotten, at least if you exploit how overpowered the Jades are now!

G - 2021-08-12 22:04:00.031004

216 - 2021-08-09 11:06:33.030738

No reason to have 11+ lives, limiting them (to 50) in this version is also pointless. I think that late wawes enemies should cost more lives, even when life cost depend of lives bought (10+x^2 ,if someone didn't notice)

I like idea with "end game" button, but balancing late game sounds better.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I found idea to keep current game interesting: "No Jade Challenge" ( you can actually build jade, but not upgrade it). I did 2 attempt so far, lvl 68 and 76, both with huge mistakes( removing rock and leaking some grounds for example), GOless, but quite good luck with EE/EG.

it will be very hard to get far in "NJC", because very limited repick and leaks. But i believe 200+ is possible with some luck.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Folowing GO chance discussion i made table with chances for specific amount of GOs ( or other specyfic Great gem) in longer runs:

\   lvls + repicks:
GOs \  200     500    1000   1500   2000
0      73,6%   46,4%  21,5%  10,0%  4,6%
1      22,6%   35,7%  33,1%  23%    14,3%
2      3,5%    13,7%  25,3%  26,5%  21,9%
3      0,35%   3,5%   13%    20,4%  22,4%
4      0,03%   0,6%   5%     11,7%  17,2%
5      0,002%  0,1%   1,5%   5,4%   10,5%

####################

Correction to last mine comment: i was near 360 not 260. 
RAM usage was ~1,6GB

####################

About score text limit: well it should be limited...now score page looks destroyed by 1 long "name".

WGW - 2021-08-09 6:01:55.094133

Here's another ridiculously LONG comment for the very few, the comparably obsessed, who would have any possible interest in reading.  ;)

So. . . on what was exactly my second runthrough of GTD since the Flash version ended, I did far better than last time but AGAIN did not manage to get on the high score list due to the broswer crashing (at level 340).

Here's the maze layout just before the crash:
https://imgur.com/a/g2lVI9Z

A few items of possible note for anyoe with the interest and patience to read these absurdly long ass comments:
(1) I now realize that there's absolutely no reason to ever have more than 11 lives stored up (you're allowed to bank up to 50).  You always lose only one life per escaping enemy now, and with 10 enemies per level, as long as you have 11 lives banked, even if every enemy escapes you'll still have one life left, and can simply replenish lives on the next turn.

(2) It's now an actual consideration to make sure to leave yourself a way to end the game by leaking enemies.  Otherwise, the inevitable outcome, once your layout is so fleshed out that no enemy, ground or air, ever escapes, is that eventually you run out of spaces on the board to place new gems, and the game will (presumably) simply become deadlocked.

I planned ahead to make sure I would be able to self-destructevenutally, ensuring the maze would still have removable rocks to provide an escape path for enemies even with the board overstuffed with Enchanted Emeralds.  Here's the "base" maze with 4 key rocks removed to allow for ground troop leaking: 
https://imgur.com/a/dpBzgg1

Curiously, by level 275 or so, intentionally allowing ground troops to leak per the above modified maze actually made the levels take LONGER than they did normally, defeating the whole purpose aside from being able to end a game intentionally.  (In the Flash version I used to leak enemies on purpose late-game in order to shave down the time the late levels took.)

A suggestion to Peter to address this, which should be very easy to implement on a programming level: Let's have a new option to explicitly END a game-- as distinct from the existing "Reset Game" option-- which will allow players to claim their earned score thus far for a place on the high score list, without our being forced to find a way to intentionally preserve an "escape valve" so as to allow for eventually self-destructing a game.  Maybe call it something like "Resign", or "Retire"?

(3) I played this latest game in MS Edge rather than Chrome, but found that Edge handled the game about the same overallthough it did somewhat outlast Chrome in terms of when the memory leak became unsustainable.  Chrome ended my first game at level 330  when i still had 3GB of RAM free, popping up an error saying, "Oh Snap! You ran out of memory" (or something close to that), when in fact I was nowhere near having yet run out of memory.  Using Edge for this second runthrough, the memory leak increased at apparently the same rate, but Edge didn't "prematurely" crash the tab for running out memory until level 341 this time, though that may have had more to do with the specific maze layout than the browser.  In any event, once again (as with Chrome), Edge crashed the game with an "out of memory" error when I still had almost 3GB of RAM free (which I don't understand), but the game was still running smoothly until the very level, so there was really no sign of a crash in sight when the crash happened (Chrome had been running the game sluggishly for a few levels before the crash).  Strangely, Edge used consistently les processor time (30-50% in Chrome vs 5-15% in Edge).

Bottom line, I think the memory leak issue here is very clearly the most serious drawback of this otherwise brilliantly revised game.  I can imagine this being potentially very, very difficult to fix, but it would be wonderful if it could be.

In the meantime, based on my limited experience so far, I'd recommend that anyone on a PC try playing the game on MS Edge rather than Chrome.

(4) I love the high score text's longer character limit (what is the limit now, anyhow???), and that it now accepts punctuation.  :)

(5) I also want to specifically commend Peter for fixing the longstanding "Opal bugs" from the prior Flash version.  :) I'm still getting used to not having to worry about the opal bugs in the current version, as it's become so automatic to me by this point from the Flash version to be careful with Opals!

(6) Following up prior discussion with @216, where in the last game I could not get a Great Opal no matter how many times I repicked for one, in this run I ended up getting THREE of them!

(7) Some elements of the maze may understandably look very strange or counter-productive to eagle-eyed folks like 216.  There are reasons for everything, but I think it's already an epic-length enough comment as it is, so I'll defer preemptively explaining, e.g., why there are so many Black Opals and Quartz gems.  But there ARE reasons.  :)

MASSIVE SLOWDOWN at level 340, 2.3 GB RAM used with 2.8 GB still free (of 8GB).

WGW - 2021-08-07 22:52:09.485488

@216: By "gold level" I just meant the amount of gold you have banked.  As for how many Jades to build, and how early, well, bear in mind I've only played exactly one run of the new game so far, so I haven't played around with it nearly enough to make a solid judgment on this, but I personally find that having tons of excess gold is so important-- mainly in freeing up the ability to repick at will-- that it's worth building a ton of them.  With a more refined strategy, I can see that it might not be strictly necessary to build so many, but it sure didn't hurt.

And yes, it was extremely frsutrating not to have picked a great opal after all that time-- starting around the mid 200s level I was repicking a dozen times each turn in the hopes of getting a great opal, but it never happened.  That's why I still had some spaces left open in the middle of the maze, so there would be someplace to put the great opal if I got one.  (Also perhaps worth noting: the Uranium and the Star Ruby gems were not there by my choice, but rather due to bad picks early on of chipped gems that I just wanted to clear off the board.)

I've never found Great Opals to be as common to get as you have, as we've discussed before.  I can't do the probability calc, it's too complicated for me, but I know that I consider it a huge stroke of luck to ever get one, whereas you seem to find it not all that rare at all.  All I can tell you is I wanted one, was trying to get one, and repicked hundreds of times in hope of getting one, but it never happened.  I guess it wouldn't have mattered in the end since the browser would have crashed anyhow!

I'm currently trying the game out in MS Edge rather than Chrome, and so far no apparent memory leaks-- but I'm only at level 60.  We'll see!

Good to see you're still around.  :)

216 - 2021-08-07 21:47:18.306422

WGW - 2021-08-07 18:58:55.434989

WGW - 2021-08-07 18:56:14.284555

Well, well, well. . . I'm back to playing GTD, and couldn't be happier about it.  I SHOULD have been able to post the (current) highest score for the game, but Chrome crashed due to memory overusage around level 330, at which poit I sactiely tryig to lose lives to give myself an escae hatch, because otherwise the game was never going to end until I just ran out of spaces to place new gems.  Oh well.  It was satisfying doing so well, even if there's no record of it for posterity. . .

But the real problem, to me, seems to be resource usage, in that the game uses more and more memory the further you progress.  Once I hit level 150 or so, my concern was no longer that I would actually lose the game, but that my whole system would crash due to the increased memory demands with every level gained.  The game itself was essentially unloseable by that point, but I had a lot of worries whether my whole PC would cry uncle before I was able to post a high score.  I've also seen comments from others here regarding the game playing very differently depending on what monitor refresh rate you're using (i.e., using 120MHz makes the enemies move 2x as fast and makes the game unplayable).  These issues are  clearly not intended;  no one intentionally designs a game so that losing the game is due more to your system specs than how you're actually playing the game.  But I also expect (due to my own meager programming background) that these are MUCH more difficult issues to sort out than out-and-out bugs are ("bugs" meaning instances where the game is explcitly malfunctioning).

There's been a real hole in my life due to not playing GTD in the background literally ALL the time, as I had for a decade before the end of Flash.  That hole is now filled.  :)

But that said, it still feels good to know I can still play this game well, even with some pretty major changes.  :)  It would be very interesting to see what kind of balancing/adjustments are possible to make the current game more challenging for very experienced players.

For those who are interested (and if you weren't, you surely wouldn't have read this far to begin with), here's my maze layout, which ended up crashing the game about 20 levels later:
https://imgur.com/a/POOMgJA

216 - 2021-07-19 21:39:50.548253

kira - 2021-07-19 21:21:37.725369

216 - 2021-07-19 12:39:04.008345

kira - 2021-07-18 22:46:03.757891

frowny face - 2021-07-15 22:20:20.866516

216 - 2021-07-15 18:28:09.369999

Are you challenging me? :)
I got past 500 twice in flash version ( where leaking 1 unit at lvl 196+ was instant lose)
Currently(0.5.4 version) is no point of going playing after ~200, since you get enough EE to stunlock enemies and even if something leak, you have much gold for lives from overpowered jades (10x more gold procs than in flash verion).

The only difficulty is running out of space, which can happen before wawe 600 with longest mazes and no paraiba. The map is 40x40 half-tiles (20x20 gems), but its not possble to fill full map, lets say 300 gems is possible with medium maze. Most specials are from 3 gems, but paraiba is from 4( takes 4 lvls to build), so lvl 900-1200 should be possible.

Anyway, congrats of patience to getting 500.

The problems are possible chrome crashes( at lvl 200 it wasn't using so much RAM for me, but someone said on lvl 500 it take 6 GB) and no option to speed up game, so getting to 500 take days :(

I haven't play this game since months, i'm waiting for updates.

btw, (temporary) old website still exist, here are mine scores: http://45.55.255.26/highscore/
(it's also on web archieve)
On web archieve you can also find mine comment with lvl 500 pic.

frowny face - 2021-07-15 16:31:00.240822

216 - 2021-07-15 11:08:28.055163

frowny face - 2021-07-15 1:24:30.696124

frowny face - 2021-07-15 1:18:50.926663

Themidnightpanda - 2021-07-11 20:41:10.231511

what - 2021-07-02 21:02:34.037875

Peter Holko - 2021-06-07 23:45:00.039316

G - 2021-04-27 16:08:56.466045

malacus - 2021-04-23 1:03:07.632746

G - 2021-04-02 21:51:08.306837

N N W - 2021-03-31 1:00:58.923268

SMS - 2021-03-23 12:21:17.551737

Peter Holko - 2021-03-19 23:23:47.605271

G - 2021-03-19 19:41:04.228508

SMS - 2021-03-18 19:23:28.386561

N N W - 2021-03-18 11:19:44.146697

elf - 2021-03-12 11:01:07.012990

elf - 2021-03-12 10:04:17.610977

G - 2021-02-20 0:35:17.910765

mikis - 2021-02-14 21:08:09.084885

216 - 2021-02-07 18:28:38.116165

G - 2021-02-07 15:40:36.953979

Speedhack bug - 2021-02-06 20:23:01.827084

G - 2021-02-05 19:05:47.130860

216 - 2021-01-29 15:16:22.702763

Big Lighthouse - 2021-01-29 14:45:10.548477

216 - 2021-01-29 14:13:52.540013

Big Lighthouse - 2021-01-29 9:23:59.839530

216 - 2021-01-28 18:30:32.749115

G - 2021-01-28 17:51:15.745725

Big Lighthouse - 2021-01-26 13:07:07.800063

Themidnightpanda - 2021-01-26 3:51:39.317063

wactical - 2021-01-25 23:05:57.631014

216 - 2021-01-25 21:55:13.561578

wactical - 2021-01-25 20:32:52.826357

wactical - 2021-01-24 18:47:04.836132

Peter Holko - 2021-01-23 6:10:19.559496

Peter Holko - 2021-01-23 0:42:01.556411

216 - 2021-01-21 21:52:57.109361

Peter Holko - 2021-01-21 20:22:25.725475

malacus - 2021-01-21 17:45:49.313974

YeWay - 2021-01-20 4:36:35.890126

malacus - 2021-01-20 0:27:47.249223

216 - 2021-01-19 23:09:30.307270

malacus - 2021-01-19 22:12:56.706955

216 - 2021-01-19 22:10:21.948478

malacus - 2021-01-19 21:51:31.153678

216 - 2021-01-19 11:51:27.380624

ruby - 2021-01-19 6:45:31.925544

Themidnightpanda - 2021-01-19 3:15:58.314598

216 - 2021-01-18 23:04:31.942751

malacus - 2021-01-18 21:40:46.157100

aratogep - 2021-01-17 19:33:32.921015

robert - 2021-01-17 7:36:01.532267

G - 2021-01-17 2:50:48.767906

216 - 2021-01-17 1:18:20.346108

G - 2021-01-16 23:40:46.600313

malacus - 2021-01-14 3:28:38.231672

Peter Holko - 2021-01-14 0:35:18.158980

216 - 2021-01-13 22:34:18.204200

malacus - 2021-01-13 2:17:40.086205

216 - 2021-01-13 2:05:31.308406

malacus - 2021-01-13 1:35:38.134786

216 - 2021-01-13 1:27:36.030217

malacus - 2021-01-13 0:45:45.914666

216 - 2021-01-13 0:02:27.608741

I noticed that base repick cost in 25 now.
Lags are probably related to heavy RAM usage (was over 2GB in 128). I didn't have a GO in 128 game so i don't think it matters(as well as console longs)

All types of higher difficulties are welcome (or making existing harded), I like survival idea(no max lvl) the most, sometimes i make speed run on other diff.
Buffing sub-100 survival wawes is rather no needed , hp of enemies just after 40 is growing up linear, but fast. I always have been leaking some flyers before 100, because not enough towers.
But completly other no-max lvl difficutly that makes also sub-100 ground wawes much harded may be interesting. But for that "speed" button is rather very needed (very long mazes).

Ofc, late survival wawes (200+) needs some balance, because with property located stunners(and enough of them) game was unloseable. It can be done in many ways:

-faster enemies (but enemies are quite fast)

-more enemies (11th flyer could kill me in many games, adding few more definitelly will force leaks).

-partial stun resistance (based of stun time for example).

But before talking about balance, lags needs to be fixed (I'm really curious what cause that lags!) 
Idk how hard is to kill all flyers now(4 more armor and min. speed bugged), so maybe is too early for talking about game balance.

malacus - 2021-01-12 22:29:24.001124

malacus - 2021-01-12 21:58:55.422743

Peter Holko - 2021-01-12 21:38:57.220447

216 - 2021-01-12 17:34:28.757095

Peter Holko - 2021-01-12 17:05:24.811044

216 - 2021-01-12 16:16:44.713941

Tonic - 2021-01-12 16:02:53.505989

216 - 2021-01-12 15:35:31.212564

Peter Holko - 2021-01-12 0:54:29.882999