The Cheap N Lazy Guide To "beating" Lyne Hard Mode, Now you too can be cheap and lazy!

EDIT: Alternative Video Guide

Ok, so the only real "hard" part of hard mode is getting your combo up. This is only due to the spawn speed of the creeps, and the fact that you cant afford to slow them with tazers early on. You also can't afford to improve the rate of the weapons either while maintaining power at the same time.

But thats only hard if you try doing it the wrong way. Since I prefer easy, I decided to find an easy way. This is it. It ain't pretty, and it ain't the best. It won't break any records either.

First a few guidelines:

1) Do it with a laser chain ('cause it's easier).
2) If you miss by a few pixels when you are placing a laser, just sell it and replace it. it only costs 4$ to do that, and it's well worth the 4$ investment.
3) Until you have nothing to do except wait on massive funds, leave speed at 50% and keep the wave delay. Once you are doing nothing but waiting for mass fundage, disable wave delay and increase speed to 200%.
4) DO NOT WASTE MONEY ON RATE!
5) DO NOT IMPROVE THE POWER OF ANYTHING UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO BUILD YOUR HEAD (to do so would be a complete waste of funds, which are better used elsewhere).

So how can you do all that with the uber-intense spawn speeds and health points of the creeps on hard?

Easy, just have the "head" of your laser chain have ten heads. Each additional head only costs 15$. Pretty damn cheap if you ask me.

Picture time.


See? There's something like 14 available heads for my laser chain. I built all of the above on 50% speed so I can keep the money spent "almost" as fast as its earned. I use the spacebar when I run out of money to call the next wave sooner. (that doesn't happen often after the first 20 waves) I only do this cause I'm old and slow. You probably don't need to slow it down.


OK, because we cannot let the chain come in range of the street, we have to take a break from making the chain any longer, its time to put speed up to 200%, remove the wave delay, and upgrade power for the very first time. Select the last laser in the chain and max that one first, then select the head and max that one. POWER ONLY!


I used laser rockets, but I hear you can do this with shockwave too. /shrug. Anyways, time to add the rocket to the combo and max it. Power ONLY! After a few creeps, your blue rockets should be soaring around doing all the work for you. You will never again see a creep on the screen. Your laser chain will fire only a couple times every few minutes.


Since the creeps will never again be on the visible street, we can now start putting turrets near it, so we make the chain a little longer, max out the tail again, and twiddle our thumbs while waiting to get to wave 111, and we can start improving efficiency of the chain with the damage exchangers.


Sprinkle with damage exchange mods, to reduce the range of each laser.


And extend the tail a little bit again.


I started to tweak the chain for efficiency, removing extra hops, etc. Then I got bored and just slapped a bunch of big damages and went to do something more fun. I washed some dishes and folded some laundry.


Some time later (while I was writing this post no less) it finally ended. As you can see, I could have done much more, and gone much further, but I was being lazy. And hell, it went past 1000 waves, so thats a good starter for a guide, no?

Here's how to build the chain/head for a shockwave build....

Start with the same chain pattern as above in the laser rocket build, but have the first turret all the way up the road (so the chain starts as high up as possible; in the laser rocket build, I left room for the rocket turret). Again, max the tail end of the chain first. Then max the 5th turret from the head, delete the 4th and place a yellow turret in its stead, and max that. Add the other two (yellow/blue) turrets in combo range. Now you'll have a firing shockwave head, BUT the shockwave wont fire often enough to wipe out all the creeps. You need to add a brake to slow the creeps to a crawl and get them all bunched up into one little lump. That is best done with two rate/damage maxed tazers and a rate mod.


Fifth turret from start is maxxed, creep brake has just been started.


Once the creep brake is established, you can remove the extra turrets between the brake and the firing head of the shockwave. increase the range of the shockwave head until it goes to the middle of the top tazer in the brake. This will cause the shockwave to fire as soon as all ten of the creeps are spawned.


There's a couple of reasons why I use laser rockets normally. First, that creep brake takes up precious room that could be used for more turrets, when the max length of the chain is what determines how far you can get in the game, anything that reduces your green turrets is bad. Second, shockwave fires the laser chain for each and every wave (every ten seconds if range/timing is done right) which means that when you are tweaking your chain, you cant ever make a mistake. Just a single partial chain fire and its game over. There is no recovery.

Also, it takes significantly longer to improve your chain with shockwave builds. When putting down range reducers you have to pause every time you do anything and inspect each and every turret in range of what you did to make sure it can still reach the one behind it.


As usual, my loathing of shockwave builds fortified itself, and as I was laying down the range reducers, I broke the chain, and the game was lost. it only misfired once, but there just is no chance for recovery.

Better luck to you! (I'll be sticking with laser rockets myself!)

Deleted some posts to make this after your first post.

What I do is when making my chain I have two nuke combonlys cleaning the creeps away, so not everything depends on my chain.

...I keep getting bored and accidentally killing myself by sending too many waves at a time. Also, I kinda suck and need this guide to unlock Sandbox mode. *what a noob I am, that I must use a "cheap n lazy guide to 'beating' lyne hard mode" to beat medium...*

--Also, yay, my first official post on the forum

Welcome to the forums.

Just be patient with the game.

wouldn't it be possible to give yourself more room for turrets of you use exchange turrets that take away range( ex: damage exchanger), then build closer together?

Yes, but please see the pinned topic on laser chains for more info on that subject.

thats ALL you have to do??? its not tight at all!!!!

Hard isn't that 'hard', the start is just very extreme.

Extreme is the real hard, and even that starts easy.

I like Extreme. It lulls you, and requires an entirely different strategy than Hard. Has anyone beaten Extreme on any map other than Lyne?

please tell me if you can use a custom map to unlock sandbox mode becasue if you can the =)

Yes.

hey im, new too and same question.HOW DO u get SandBoxMode???

Please. Read about EVERYTHING on the forum before you post.