Defense Grid - The Awakening

Yessss! finally I beat the end level of Defense Grid: The Awakening, a 3D tower defence game. I love those games and I've played a lot of them. Starting with very basic tower defence games written as Java Applets and ending with this really beautiful 3D version of the game. The concept is pretty easy: you've got enemies walking from point A to point B and you have to build weapon towers to kill them before they reach point B.

Defense Grid gave me a total of approx. 8hrs of pleasure so far. Most of the maps are not that hard and after a few trials, usually one is able to get the strategy working and finish them up. However, I was kind of stuck in the last level. After a few trials, I gave up and draw the map in OpenOffice, so I could lay out my strategy better and visualize the paths i want the enemies (aliens that is) to take.

Read on to see how to beat the final level of Defense Grid.

First, I draw the map as-is from a top-down perspective, not isometric as it is in the game. As there are two different height levels, i colored the paths separately which were hidden below over paths:



You can see the entry points there (marked with arrows) and what the enemies are targeting: the power core (the star in the upper right corner). The enemies will start walking at the entry points, go to the power core, take a core and walk all the way back to the exit point. In this case, the exit point is the same as the entry point.

Then, I moved the shapes around a little bit, so I had no crossings of paths. Luckily, it was possible with this map:



The yellow dots indicate places where weapon towers can be built. The blue rectangular areas are platforms, which are connected by bridges (green color). The gray areas within platforms actually are holes - enemies are not able to walk there. The entry points where the enemies originate from are marked with the letter "E".

The last step in the procedure is the fun part: find the longest possible path in this labyrinth with limited resources (you only have a couple of bucks to buy weapon towers and you will earn more over time). I came up with the following solution, which worked pretty well:



There is an orange path and a red path, indicating both enemy streams of the two entry points. Note the black dots, which are the locations where I put the towers. I start of using Gun Towers for everything, until I've set the path. Then, I add one or two Meteroit Towers, some Temporal Towers and some Cannons. Updating the towers as the resources flow in. I also tried to put two Tesla Towers in the center platform (not marked in the picture) and that also worked very well.

Hope it helps - good luck!


Update: Jared from Facebook came to a different solution:

I think it's a better solution (just from looking at the paths) because the overlapping path for both trails is longer and thus the same towers are reused for more enemies.

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