My tactic? Run round the orange ring, ignoring all blast balls until at least half the lobby is eliminated. People seem to ignore the lunatic out for a jog. Then go on the attack and hope for a lucky win.

I’m not diving to throw a blast ball. Way too risky. You have so much more control with a jump. Dive is unnecessary. You can already place the ball anywhere you want with just a jump

This game seems so random on how much the blast effect. Sometimes I’ll be right next to it and barely move then sometimes I been a decent ways from it and get yeeted into the water…

You hold a blast ball as it goes off. You will barely move, but you can send an opponent next to you flying

I play defensively at first, even throwing balls off the edge. That way I can focus just on incoming shots. I can even use this as a fake out for my later aggression.

Grab and toss away blast balls about to go off. You can get them away from you sometimes. 

It seems like the knockback from the blast balls goes up the further away you are until they don't affect you at all. I often dive onto one to keep myself from going to far. It's counterintuitive for sure.

I have RFD now and i want to fill it up for up to 10 players. Im thinking about to buy partypack to fill cat cards. Also im thinking about those dlc like zombie kittens, good versus evil and striking (to get curse of the cat butt and another streaking just in case). I think its easier to add expansions for partypack than RFD, but RFD have those recipes, which can add alot more variety to the game. I dont know yet what to do myself. It would make more sense to have more same cat cards than many more different ones in those bigger games imo. I might be overthinking. Anyway i like those recipes alot, because its multiple different games in one.

Ps. I might even buy 2nd pack of RFD

The key thing is that you need enough exploding kitten cards for the amount of cards to be equal to the number of players minus one and enough defuse cards to be equal to the number of players.

Both options achieve this. Now it really depends on what exactly you want.

Do you just want more cards from the normal game? Then party pack is what you want as that's mostly an OG deck multiplied by two.

Do you want a wider variety of special cards? Then RfD and Zombies is what you want, RfD has cards from the Streaking, Barking and Imploding expansions and Zombies comes with a few new cards as well. Can also pick up Good vs Evil as that has some new cards too.

As for how to distribute the deck, most likely you'd be combining the Zombies cards with the RfD cards, you can separate them after you're done playing or just leave them together. Or you could pick and choose which cards you want to play with instead of playing with every single card, just need the right amount of exploding kittens and defuse cards.

Alternatively, just buy them all and play with whatever cards you want. Keep a notebook and pencil to write down your own custom decks for the number of players you're playing with.

Option 2 will give you a larger variety of cards so now options and to add chaos. If you really want all the options get a good vs evil deck too since it comes with I think 3 or 5 new cards.

If you want it a lil more simple and less thinking about set up go option 1

nah see it's easy just shoot the armpits between the armour! Don't worry that they're constantly moving and being covered up and so close that the OTS aiming is starting to fuck up your shots and also there are 4 of them and your arm is broken and there are bile spewers shooting you and the Hive Lord is Slowing you and you're out of stims...

Light pen is fine for bugs but not the new ennemies, they should be weaker then regular bugs because they have other defensive abilities (they go underground)

It also wouldn't be such an issue if they didn't instantly attack you when they emerge

If you run gas grenades, it's worth noting that gas will also knock burrowers out of the ground.

I'm not sure if it's only the initial detonation or if the lingering gas can too, but I've definitely done it before.

Honestly though, I'd probably save that for chargers or bile spewers. Chargers is obvious and bile spewers, IMO, are the most annoying rupture strain enemies. They stay underground for so long, only to peek their heads out for maybe 2 seconds. If they decide to spew at you, you're probably gonna have to trade damage with them. If you ignore them, they'll just spam spew and those AOE bile mortars if you're far away enough.

Pretty much the only time you can hit them is right as they're about to launch some big damage out at you, or if they're not targeting you.

I never liked this implication anyways. I’m one of those dweebs that grinds Kovaaks. I can aim. That’s why I love playing Bots with light pen. Yet I still think (and have thought, even before this new subfaction came out) that light pen’s design is really screwy on bugs.

Instead of bots where the weakpoints are light pen and the rest tends to be medium (thus rewarding light and medium pen players alike for their precision, but being more forgiving of medium players for imprecision and/or off-angles), the bug front likes to make the weakpoints medium-pen. As a result, you get brood commander heads that are hurt more by medium pen, hive guard heads that are unreachable by light pen, and bile spewer heads that are unreachable by light pen (so light pen has to absolutely mag-dump the big green butt).

So I genuinely believe medium pen is the wiser choice on the bug front, even if you’re a crack-shot. And to me, that feels antithetical to the philosophy of light penetration weapons.

"bro it's easy bro just shoot their tails bro I do it all the time"

"what? oh yes I use hover pack pretty much constantly why do you ask bro?"

Main reason I posted this was because I literally could not see the tail on the ones close to me (which is where the become tangible in the first place after nuking half your HP)

Personal energy shield or ballistic? I found the energy shield to help a lot but I still got my butt kicked.

Running away is my most effective weapon against the bugs to be honest.

it's like back when incendiary devastators could one shot you from across the map and people would say "just get behind them lol"

Cool. I'd love one about resetting strats, as I always forget what's best, then put it off, then stop playing for a while

So, a more serious reply now. First, it is really hard to make an incremental game interesting to watch, and I appreciate your attempt to do so. I also appreciate that you're fairly good at the game. Nearly every 'tuber I've seen play incremental games and make videos for YouTube are painfully incompetent at the game. You're good at both playing and making the videos, and gratz, you're the first such 'tuber I've seen! (This would include me; I tried to do unique stuff, and at the time, no one had made a Swarm Simulator video, so I did so. Is that why YouTube banned me? I have no idea. But I had a house fan cooling a laptop with a dead fan, a dollar store microphone and Audacity doing the noise filtering, so it was one of my worst videos from a technical standpoint. Also one of my worst performers in the metrics.)

Factorio vids are a dime a dozen, and it is interesting to watch. So if there's a niche modpack or strange way of playing that interests you, that could be a way to get some people coming to the channel to check out the Kittens stuff. Sorry, I'm not going to watch much of it because not only do I bore of watching Kittens, I tend to bore of playing Kittens eventually, usually take several months off, the inevitable purring craving returns, and I blow the old game flat because something new like policies has appeared, and I want to have a fresh experience. Now, if you do the burner thing, split down to yellow belts with the individual machines, or this happens. I've noticed even vanilla speed runners using red belts have a tendency to split down to yellow for the machines and inserters because it's cheaper. Ah, the simplicity of Kittens...

I've played quite the variety of incremental games, "idle" games, exponential games... I still don't know what "the point" of them is, haha. Entertainment I suppose :)

All fun and games until it jumps from phase 1 to EX then straight up ult only to finish then ult again 😔

whats ur enoki setup?

My biggest issue with this fight is purely the AI's performance during its gold tree laser phase. The AI sometimes dodges the beams perfectly, but it's also just as likely to eat every beam despite dodging and die.

As someone with about 24 resets in 2-3 months on this playthrough, I find some of the points questionable, but the difference in our worldview is engaging.

Main tip early on is just push science. Keep building libraries and then keep building observatories when you can. It’s easy to get sidetracked and want to build up your oil industry or whatever but just keep focusing on science until you reset

You don’t even really need to focus on building habitats or workshops too much just when you find it necessary because you really won’t need to do too much crafting overall

• Build that first workshop. It does far more than provide the listed 6% crafting bonus :-)
• Do craft some megaliths once you can afford to. It will unlock a new building and use for unicorns.
• "You don't need to have all that culture at once"
• Metaphysics are not at all useless, even though their description says so :-). In particular, get the price reduction ones ASAP.

Essentially just balance out what you do. Pay attention to cause and effect. Identify what you need to build or invest in to keep progress moving along steadily. Keep in mind that 'steadily' does not mean quickly. Start with a crawl, seeing what's most affordable in terms of research or buildings vs what's most useful at the time. Build in stages, and make just enough to push progress forward. Max only when you can afford to with minimal side effects. Leaping too heavily into one area may slow you down and limit your growth or progess in another area. So find and maintain balance.

I undervalued Workshops and Smelters for my first few runs.

The relative balance of oil and titanium is hard for me before space. I put too much emphasis on having oil available for space. Right now, I think breaking even on oil to support as many Magnetos as possible makes more sense. Get past the titanium bottleneck before really worrying about oil/space. Note: Since deciding that, I haven't gotten back into space.

Trying to win the “return to war map” I just can’t seem to get an advantage. Any suggestions it seems your tips might be good on larger maps maybe I’m wrong.

In my experience AI doesn't always seem to be constrained by exotics. I've seen them basically continuously feed cap ships even fairly early. However generally this idea makes sense because they have a wild eco advantage but exotics require additional infrastructure and time.

Having “played” a 4v4 with impossibles trying to grab the “No civilian research” achieve, I can confirm it takes the AI multiple hours to start accumulating excess exotics.

Umm..i am pretty sure AI builds refinery and produces exotics for caps and Titans.... only thing I saw is they don't put ship items which costs exotics Unless you donate some..

Yea I’ve done a few large map ffa on nightmare it’s actually easier than the smaller maps

2-0-4 mermonkey is a very good support for the ddts, so try that. Could also go for a moab glue or a snowstorm. Also, you can just exit to the main menu if it looks like you're about to die instead of wasting your money on retries.

Pretty sure black bloons are immune to moab elim and assassin. DDT have black properties

Idk i would try using bloon crush

Sell p mentor for mib

Moab glue maybe

My usual weapon slot layout:

A: weapon for self-defense / its ammo

B: rocket launcher / either rockets or no ammo

C: no weapon / atomic bombs

Turns out real-life firearm safety training carries over to games when it makes sense.

Last time this happened to me, a friend was passing some building materials to me and accidentally pressed space while I was close to him. I just yelled his name in anger, he franticly apologized, and our other friends (who were away from the factory doing colonialism) were confused for a few seconds, then laughed. It was pretty funny. The explosion bit part of our mall, but the bots instantly put everything back and none of destroyed boxes held anything too valuable.

Me: accidentally leaves a spidertron with a nuke AND automatic targeting enabled while working in a biter-prone area

Or try to delete stuff with grenades in your hand it's ruuuuufff

I’ve never done that though. Nope.