New Laser Chain Construction Guide, Updated guide

New LASER CHAIN construction guide!
Improved and condensed Update pending with info on how to use directional targeting and Targeter turret

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This is a guide for easy, medium and extreme.
If you want to build a chain in hard read Gewalt's guide

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I will use a Laser Rocket combo in this guide.
Another combo used in front of laser chains, is Shockwave. (How to build for shockwave is explained in the next post in this thread.)

If you wish to use a laser chain without a combo in front, remember to upgrade the rate of fire (RoF) of the assisting turrets. The assisting lasers need to have at least 10 more RoF than the firing laser. This is to make sure that the whole chain fires every time the firing laser does.


First build a Red turret (Keyboard shortcut 3). Wait for it to kill 5 creeps. Then build a Green turret (Keyboard shortcut 2)next to it. While you build more green turrets leave the red turret selected. This makes it possible to just press Q to upgrade the damage for the Red turret while you continue to build green turrets. If you hold down Shift you can build the current selected build item several times without selecting it again.


When you get to Area 51, there is room for a turret behind it. To make it easier to place, zoom in twice (Right click -select zoom in) Warning:Zooming uses a lot of memory(RAM). No need, ever, to zoom more than two times.
For this turret to "reach" the next one you need to upgrade the range three times.


The way the lasers link is that once they can fire they will immediately ask all other lasers within its range for assisting fire. As you can see here, the laser on the left really can't fire at the one on the right. The reason why it still fires is that the right turret has asked it for link/assisting fire.


Once you get to where the next turret will be in range of the road, stop building. Now focus on upgrading the damage of the combo and the last turret. (Usually I change the time factor to 200% and select "send next wave immediately") Around wave 60 you should have the combo finished and the last turret fully upgraded on damage.(Remember to set the time factor back to 100%. The Laser Rockets(LR) seems to crash if the time factor is to high) Now you have enough power to get you well past wave 110, even on extreme. In this case there is no need to build a starting chain that you sell once you get past wave 110.

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Starting Chain
I some cases and maps, you need to build a starting chain to get you past wave 110. To get the most power out of your chain before you can use Damage Exchange Modifier(DmgEx)(Keyboard shortcut 9 or "Shift+3"), you need to place the turrets with some space between them. This prevents the laser from taking a shortcut over some turrets.


I usually build two turrets right next to each other, then I build the third one right outside of the first turrets range. Once you get to wave 110, you sell the whole chain. Now you have enough Laser Rockets in the air to let you start building your tight chain with DmgEx.


As you can see in this image, you get much more power when building the starting chain like this. (In this case it gives almost 9 times more damage)

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When I get to build DmgEx (after 1100 kills, usually wave 110), I start with the one that will also affect the Red turret. The Chain damage gets multiplied in the red turret. With only that first DmgEx I have doubled the damage of the next Laser Rocket(LR) to be produced! (I don't need that much damage now, but the LR will stay in the air for a long time.)


To guide me where to put the next modifier I select Blue turret (Keyboard shortcut 1). This turret has the exact same range as modifiers have when range is upgraded. When I have found the spot I want to place the modifier, I press 9 or "Shift+3" and build the modifier there.


•When I placed and upgraded the range of the second DmgEx, the red turret got to little range. The range has to be upgraded so it "sees" the start of the road. Usually the Red turret can only be affected by two DmgEx. If it get modified by more, it will in most cases/maps, be impossible to get the range needed for it to "see" the start of the road. A "bonus" you get when red turret is affected by two DmgEx is that the RoF will be 20. This means that it will only fire Laser Rockets, and are ready to do so at the same time as the combo itself.
•Affected by two DmgEx the green turret has just the right range. Now the chain can be build tight.


If a green turret is affected by three or more DmgEx, it is necessary to upgrade range six times and rate six times. The LR-combo has RoF 20 so all assisting turrets needs to have RoF higher than that (PS: 21 in RoF is not enough - this due to the linking between the turrets takes some time)


Select the DmgEx that will reveal where the last turret modified by two DmgEx is. The turret sircled in red has only one DmgEx affecting it and needs another to link correctly. There is always going to be turrets that need range/rate upgrade. Always after placing a new DmgEx and upgrading it's range - check for turrets needing upgrades. If you do this, your whole chain will always assist the combo.


Here the red turret has chosen another green to combo with. This is not good, since the chain now has two tails and the damage of the chain now is much lower. To prevent this from happening, sell it and build another which you don't upgrade to max damage. To see which turrets are in combo range press C. The turrets in combo range will get highlighted with a yellow ring around them.


This is how my tutorial-chain turned out. 155 green turrets, 8.56 e+20 in chain-damage and 6.00 e+21 in laser-rocket-damage. This is far from the best or tightest chain there is, but serves to illustrate how to build a chain. I estimate it to get to wave 1950 and that is not bad. End result: wave 1958. Good estimate?

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Nice to know Facts

• The best way to link across a road, is to have only two (or less) DmgEx affect the turret that is suppose to "reach" the other side. (If it is to difficult to do this, you can use rangeup-modifier to get the range you need.)
• If the red turret is placed to close to the start of the road. The LRs will not be able to fire before reaching the creep, -leading to it crashing with the creep.
• To keep the LR's from crashing due to lag - set the quality to medium or even low. And if you are aiming for a high score, I advice you to set the time factor to 50% when you get to wave 1500.(How much RAM the game can use is also important - don't run to many processes while playing at high wave numbers)
• Spend all the extra money you get - Build a blue turret, upgrade damage and rate four times. Now you can spend all your money on Freakouts. (Score = Kills*Money Spent)
• In a straight line there is no need for more than one DmgEx affecting each turret. This is especially useful to know when building chains in the map Incoming. Here is a good example. By Rhanedear
• It is possible to "force" the LR-combo to produce more rockets. This is done by sending in several waves at once. (PS: sending in more than five waves can be risky) Remember also that the Laser Rockets produced early on (with less damage) will not be useful later in the game. Therefore I don't recommend doing this before you have your whole chain finished.
• The laser can cross over itself if mods and range-upgrades are used right. Just an example of what can be done
• If three or more DmgEx affect the green turret, it is possible to link with only five range-upgrades. But it will only link to other turrets that are perfectly horizontal or vertical to it. This can be used to create super-tight chains. (In Lyne it is possible to get at least 212 green turrets in a chain with LR.) My personal best on Lyne
• If the red turret is only affected by one DmgEx, - upgrade the rate three times. Now the rate will be 59.5. It will fire some red turrets, but the main thing is that it will always be ready to fire when the combo is.(If you can avoid upgrading the range three times, you don't get holding pattern for normal rockets, which in time can contribute to lag.)
• It is not possible with Laser Rocket or Shockwave to combonly it and still get assisting damage from a chain.

Having trouble with your build; feel free to ask. There are many people here who gladly will help you. (PS: An image makes it much easier for us to understand, and to give advice)

If you want to know how to build "super-tight"; Advanced Guide

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Guide made by TheMarsVolta. People who also contributed to this Guide: randomguy, Kioyoh, HenKst, Gewalt.Onslaught, RELC, Yeknomssa, Eli

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This post has been edited by TheMarsVolta on Apr 13 2008, 07:10 PM

How to build Shockwave supported by a laser chain.

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If you want to beat those "impossible" time limited challenges: This is the weapon for you!

• The difference between a shockwave build and a laser rocket build is the combo head, and there is no need for any rate-upgrade in the chain. (Shockwave fires every 8 second. 60/8= 7.5 in RoF. The green turrets minimum RoF is 12) So follow the guide above for the actual chain construction, just ignore the rate upgrades.
• The head for a laser rocket build takes 2 turrets, the rocket and the laser turrets, while the shockwave takes SIX. That's TWO tazers, ONE machine gun, and ONE laser, and TWO rate up mods. Technically, the rate up mods aren't part of the combo, but they are still essential to the build working properly.
• For those of your keeping score at home, that means there's room for 4 less turrets in the laser chain. This means that shockwave's will not perform as well as laser rockets. However, they are more fun, and it's quite rewarding to see your chain actually firing every eight seconds. Whereas with laser rockets, you're lucky to see it fire a couple times every five minutes or so. And even a bad shockwave build will outperform the best nuke build.
• Because shockwave's fire the chain every 8 seconds, you have to be more careful when manipulating the chain, as a single misfire could be "game over".
• Although a shockwave "can" be built without creating disposable turrets, it's just easier to do it with disposable turrets, so that's what I'll do here. Also, it's faster cause you can do everything at 200% speed with no wave delay until you've got the combo built and its time to work on the laser chain.

First of all, we're going to use a taser missile combo to fund the startup cash for the shockwave. Place the red missile turret under the road at the point where it just barely covers the creep spawn point. Upgrade its rate twice, then start upgrading its damage until its maxed out.
Next build a tazer (Keyboard shortcut 4) behind it, max out the damage. This is a complete Tazer Rocket combo, and each one of those rockets will put out 2 million in damage. They will stay in the air until well after the shockwave is up and running. After that, they will crash and we won't really miss them.


The next step is to start building the actual shockwave. First place a blue turret in the nook above the road. This is a placeholder turret, and not part of the shockwave. Later we'll replace it with a rateup-mod. Then place a tazer next to it. Max it out in damage, and make sure its range covers the spawn point of the creeps. Also, upgrade its rate to max. Build a laser and max out damage. The next tazer we're gonna steal from the other combo we build. Just select it and press M to move. After relocating it, upgrade its range and rate to max. Now that we've broken the Tazer Rocket combo, we don't need that rocket turret, select it and sell (Keyboard shortcut S) it for the 70% rebate. After that, add the last turret in the combo, the machine gun.

1 2

1. By now you've got a shockwave combo up, and it might even fire every 8 seconds. However, its still not quite complete.
2. With the new directional targeting tool, it is quite easy to have only the two tazers firing at the creeps. Select the green turret and press D. (Make sure the targeting area points away from the road. To change only the angle press "Shift+D", the angle is set towards the cursor) Repeat this with the blue turret.

Start laying out your lasers for the tail, but once you hit wave 91, its time to add a couple of "Rate up" mods (Keyboard shortcut "Shift+1") to make sure the creeps never accidentally walk out of range of the shockwave blast. Place one where the placeholder-turret was and the other across the road, and upgrade their range as necessary. (The additional tazer in this setup is not necessary, but will help to slow the creeps.)
•Once that's done, go back to working on your laser tail. It is highly advisable to reduce the game speed to 100% or 50% now, and leave it there until the game is over.

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The directional targeting tool makes it possible to have the shockwave-combo almost wherever you want it. Just make sure that all lasers in front of the combo has their firing-range pointing away from the road. Linking between lasers are not affected by the directional targeting.

As you can see it is even possible to have the laser firing OVER the creeps. In this setup all ten creeps get hit by the shockwave, with no additional slowing turrets.

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Guide made by Gewalt.Onslaught, edited by TheMarsVolta. Contributors: see post above

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This post has been edited by TheMarsVolta on Apr 14 2008, 09:52 PM

Pinned. Very nice guide.

basically build it the same way only move the head back a bit and it will be bigger too. You should probably add some PGR's and shockwave combonlies for extra slow and max one or both tazers out on everything. I don't recommend building extra tazers, but you can add rate mods on the shockwave tazers if you want. Use the blue turret for freakouts.

I believe that the shockwave PROBABLY multiplies the damage more than the laser rocket combo. However... if you get a whole bunch of LR's up it will be better. NOTE: don't use this for uber-high scores. Use this if you want to spam waves and stuff. (if you spam waves, you might want black hole combonlies for backup. LR's are better for the super high scores for 2 reasons:

1. you get more lasers in the chain.
2. Once you get like 10 rockets up, its PWNAGE (you can last longer)

Nice guide!

I corrected every time you said 'hole'. It's 'whole', not 'hole'. A hole is a gap or opening, while whole means the entire, full, total, etc. Just so you know

omg thanks alot i just played a game and got to wave 300 much quicker-only wave 300 coz i got bored and deleted the laser chain then spammed lots of waves

should i only upgrade the damage of the green turrets? or should i also upgrade the RoF of the green turrets?

edit: nice guide though

When using a combo it mostly is not needed to upgrade the RoF of the chain. Damage has a higher priority in that case.

if you use the LR RoF is pretty important in the end because you don't want the rocket tower to fire allone and mess up the LR

so the chain RoF should be higher than the rocket towers
and the rocket tower should not be higher than 20(2 damage exchangers get it exactly down to20) so you don't get any ugly red rocketys flying around

with shockwave the RoF is not important as it is much slower anyway

Excellent guide TheMArsVolta, and thanks for linking to my guide to hard .

I have nothing to contribute to the chaining part of the guide, or even to the laser rocket part, but I left you another post with the easiest way to get a shockwave build up and running.

Thanks for the contributions, guys

Have anyone tested other methods for slow when building shockwave? A combonlied shockwave as slow maybe is more efficient later in the game?

•Only chain (no combo in front) - assisting lasers need at least 10 RoF more than firing laser.
•Laser Rocket - assisting lasers need at least 24 RoF
•Shockwave - No need for rate upgrades

I've not run into the problem of the creeps getting outside the range of the shockwave blast using just two rate ups on the shockwave head. Since it uses the least amount of turrets, it appears to be the most efficient.

important point I didnt add earlier tho, with that type of build, you must never disable the wave delay. if you do, it winds up taking three shots from the combo to wipe out all creeps, and that's jsut annoying.

Were you experiencing creep leak? Or some other problem that made you dislike that method? I'm open to testing anything if it helps

I think laser rockets may be better than tazer rockets for startup cash (no chain) because they are cheaper.

laser rockets are 700$ more than taser rockets, but it doesn't matter either way, as that turret will wind up being part of the shockwave head anyways.

wow thanks man now i know how to make a perfect lazer chain dude THANK YOU wow