Gem Tower Defense

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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