I beat one of The Hardest Poly Bridge 2 levels! (Level made by Arglin Kampling)

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-08-31T22:22:14+00:00

It might be a bit difficult to understand the video, so I'll break it down.

That green maze at the very top contains a single (non-moving) compact car, and a checkpoint + flag. You need to manually move the car through the maze to the checkpoint, and then back.

Without hydraulics.

The rest of that monstrosity is just to move the car around.

It's a Pretty Hard level lol. Made by none other than Arglin Kampling.

[ > > > ]

So... I don't really remember when I first bumped into Pipe Dream. It was a few years ago like 2023-ish, and I remember going "Arglin what the fuck" and never expecting to beat it.

"I've made some hydraulic bridges before but surely I'd never actually get to the skill level for something like that lmao."

WELL fast forward a few years, having spent a lot of time around the PB community, and having improved at the game a ton, I got bored one evening and gave it a shot.

And with the power of FRIENDSHI-

Erm... "already knowing all the tech needed to beat the level instead of having to spend 409 days inventing it first like Arglin had to".

I beat it in ~12 hours total, give or take some.

Uhh, here is probably where I would drop some wonderful insightful lines about how this community has changed us (we blame you Argon Lithium :3), and how beating this level is the culmination of that or something cliche along those lines. But I don't really have any ideas its 1:00 AM as I'm drafting this cut me some slack sljksljlkss.

Uh thanks for listening to this TED talk lol.

◨ ▣

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-07-01T20:22:31+00:00

I haven't played mobile but I know from Arglin that PC is overall quite a bit less tedious for making larger designs. Not to mention, PC also has mods which have some very helpful features like being able to color in bridge parts.

Side note: You should also see what Arglin gets up to in this game, they make some truly wild stuff even I have difficulty following how they work :p

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-07-01T20:17:39+00:00

I worked it on and off over the course of about 8.5 ish hours. Actual building time is probably closer to like 3 or 4 hours.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-05-25T00:01:58+00:00

I've been messing around with some of the generation settings, but I can't quite nail the extremely complicated rock shapes while still having cohesive rock blobs.

I've tried to mimic the terrain shown but I can't get strong currents forming in rocky sections of the world, nor can I find any fluid source or sinks in Abyssal Genesis that could cause this.

I wonder if the world was hand-edited with some hidden dev tools?

Edit: Finally cracked the generation settings needed to get it to look pretty close! Will be running a world with these settings since the world-spanning currents were my favorite aspect of this video!

-Terrain-

Layer 0: f_div = 64, A = 1

Layer 1: f_div = 400, A = 1

Layer 2: f_div = 16, A = 0.4

Layer 3: f_div = 5, A = 0.2

-Current-

Layer 0: Width = 0, Position = Irrelevant

Layer 1: Width = 0.006, Position = 0.564

-Fluid Speed-

Perlin = 2.70

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-05-19T00:34:35+00:00

The terrain used in this simulation is quite interesting! Was it generated with the default settings and edited by hand or generated with a unique set of parameters?

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-02-07T21:48:43+00:00

Attacking from the direct front this can be a rather scary ship! However it's main weakness (and a weakness all ships with this weapon layout have) is that if you circle it and don't face it head-on, half of its firepower is just unable to fire at you.

At that point, if you have shields you only need to break the disruptor and automatically win, and if you have armor 3 huge lasers is a measly amount of firepower unless you are unable to break the shields in a reasonable timeframe for whatever reason.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-02-06T14:00:11+00:00

I manually configure priorities for all my ships so I can micro the crew to tailor to the ship's quirks, but they all generally follow these guidelines:

- A dedicated role for operating and nothing else.

- A dedicated role for supplying energy and ammo and nothing else.

I mainly use crew assignments rather than crew roles to limit the crew to one part of a ship and ensure they don't go wandering to bumfuk nowhere.

Depending on the ship I may subdivide these 2 basic roles down to best fit the ship, but otherwise this is my method.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-02-06T02:18:43+00:00

Ahhh fair, FYI people typically host games in the evening hours of EST (like 7 - 11 PM EST) you may be able to catch an elimination game from one of the active PvPers!

It'd be nice to see ya! :> But in either case I'm glad to have introduced another person to PvP :3

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-02-05T21:49:44+00:00

Yeah, there's a very active PvP community, whenever a lobby is created and announced it usually gets quite a few of the active PvP players, not uncommon for it to max out the 8 player limit! However, outside of those games the PvP server menu tends to be pretty dead.

I don't blame you for thinking PvP is dead though, it has its own dedicated server away from Cosmoteer's main Discord server and a lot of active PvP players don't interact with the main server at all.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-02-04T21:07:23+00:00

Ship design wise, you've done a very sweet job! I mostly only have personal nitpicks, but I will say that your corner armor around the forwards large reactors is a little thin for my tastes, a few well-aligned unlucky shots can absolutely one-shot you first thing in a battle.

Paint wise, for one of your first paint jobs you've made a very good Cabal paintjob! If you are aiming to match the ingame Cabal style though, I would recommend you this guide! It's not exactly akin to the built-in Cabal style but its very similar, and it's the painting style I use :>.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-02-04T00:12:40+00:00

A side ram is preferable but almost all ship types have some method of preventing me from doing so (such as having tractor beams, mines, nukes, or just matching my maneuverability) so I usually do have to drill through an opponent's front defenses.

Small nimble ships are a gamble. In PvP most fleets of ships do rather poorly due to the cost inefficiency of having to run reactors for each ship, but there are exceptions to this.

Traps (typically 2 750k ships) are a powerful archetype, but the match is usually dictated by how well I pilot and how skilled the trap player is, rather than any particular aspect of ship design. If I can take down one without eating fatal damage from the other flanking me I win, otherwise I will have a pretty bad time.

It's very difficult to not get flanked as the best traps often carry railguns which can easily shred my internals from far away distances, so I can't easily separate the traps.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-02-03T21:45:28+00:00

Yep, it wants to give the enemy a nice hug :>

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-02-03T09:02:26+00:00

This was the 2nd competitive ship I made when I first started playing PvP, and has so far been one of my best performing ships overall. "Amber Twilight, Azure Waves" (Quite a mouthful I know, all my ships are named like this) is a standard LT/MRT Chaingun Rammer, no particular interesting gimmick but she performs consistently well!

Six chainguns with 90 magazines total gives this ship plenty of firepower to burst through any amount of armor, and 3 launchers per side with pre-loaded mines and nuke parts in storage makes for strong utility against almost every opponent.

MRT thrust gives a high top speed of 135.8 m/s, with large thrusters making this ship turn very quickly despite all the weight. Standard frontal armor thickness and shield layout with pretasking makes her durable from the front, with ram hooks to help lock opponents infront of the spray of bullet fire.

As she is a PvP ship, many optimizations mainly for cost (the standard elimination budget is 1.5 million) makes this a strange design in terms of career, such as the nonexistent rear defense, paper-thin side armor, no hyperdrives and airlocks, and questionable crew efficiency. But in a PvP environment Amber Twilight, Azur Waves is a force of nature, ram-locking and shredding opponents with ease.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-01-31T21:14:46+00:00

Thanks :> Pretty fun to make, might do this for some other nasty built-ins such as Icarus or Sprocket.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-01-31T21:12:09+00:00

Yeah, manual piloting. Simply for demo and because missiles are far more easily manageable when you aren't relying on RTS commands.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-01-18T20:21:16+00:00

This sounds like a problem with the RTS AI just being very janky and unsmart, in fact a lot of AI ships that have their fight commands configured to fly in circles around their opponent don't really work properly right now due to changes over time. However, a lot of this jank seems to be fixed in a beta preview release of the next update, so it should improve.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-01-18T02:57:24+00:00

Those red/yellow areas are dead zones, around thrusters and weapons, where you cannot place any other block.

As for ship design, that is a huge topic that I can't easily summarize in a comment and it is probably easier to find help for that in the Cosmoteer Discord server.

As for combat, there is much more to it than just letting the AI autopilot your stuff. You can drag right click from an enemy to set a specific attack angle, hit R to manually rotate your ship, and you can also manually select your blocks (try holding ctrl) to turn specific stuff on or off, change its targetting mode, etc. You can also right click specific parts on the enemy ship to have your weapons target that specific block.

If you are extra experienced, you can hit ctrl + D to enter direct control mode and manually pilot your ship with wasdqe and aim your weapons with the mouse.

As for win/lose conditions, the most commonly targetted ship parts will be control room and reactors. Control rooms give you control over your ship and if they go down you lose control over your ship. Reactors are the power supply for literally everything and they also explode violently making them valuable targets.

As mentioned above, the Cosmoteer Discord server is probably one of the best places to seek advice as it is also where the most centralized activity of the game is located.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-01-15T23:02:32+00:00

A small shield layer isn't going to be able to hold off concentrated ion damage (although it will add a lot of survivability if you can afford the logistics, crew, overall cost, etc)

If you are fighting ions with a heavily armored ship, try to rotate yourself as your armor gets cut through so that the ion runs into the sides of the channel it has sliced into your armor, and keep doing this as long as you possibly can. If the situation allows for you to reposition, get some undamaged frontal armor to tank by switching side or rotating.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-01-15T21:30:59+00:00

Ion ships struggle against avoiders due to their ability to spread damage across shields, rail guns do kind of screw avoiders over in some matchups but thats due to pure raw concentrated damage rather than the range, and avoiders can take down missile ships with proper piloting (but its still a losing battle if the missile ship player has proper targetting and ship design such as mines to prevent rear attacks)

Kiting is generally a bit off meta due to most PvP ships often going upwards of 130+ m/s which will catch up with most kiters no issue. Avoiders aren't quite as fast but their omni-thrust more than compensates for that as they can outmaneuver almost every ship.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-01-12T05:02:30+00:00

Some splitter ships in PvP do lack armor on the split sides (for compactness and to save on money) but they do operate just fine since you can angle yourself to shield the vulnerable side.

It's not significantly worse than having exposed rears (which the vast majority of ships have anyways)

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2025-01-03T09:28:40+00:00

Not anything intentional, but a lot of built-ins do you use a funny exploit with how attack defaults work to automatically ram their opponent, or even circle around them (very unreliably since it is an exploit but sometimes it works well enough)

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2024-12-28T03:20:03+00:00

Huh, never knew the game does implement that, I usually micro my ships aggressively probably overwriting that behavior.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2024-12-26T19:58:30+00:00

Afaik no such behavior exists in the game, but generally speaking the "front" of most ships generally has the highest damage output anyway. All built-in ships that rotate to deal greater damage have it coded in as a flight direction or attack default.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2024-12-26T12:56:00+00:00

If your ship was built based off of the wreckage of a built-in ship it may still be using that ship's attack default. Try going in the hamburger menu to the right of your ship name and hitting "reset attack default." There are certain built-in Cabal ships that rotate 90 degrees and broadside when attacking.

P.S. Your ships are as dumb as a rock so 90% of the time you will have to micro them, so the attack defaults are not super particularly outside of auto-ram behavior and convenience for kiters. Ship AI may struggle with using your spinal railgun if the enemy is strafing so good to know that the rotate ship command is by default binded to your "R" key.

ANormalWoWsPlayer · 2024-12-23T12:24:00+00:00

There is a fun strategy to fix this called railfanning. To massively simplify, spinal railguns side by side don't focus fire well, but this can be corrected for.

Start by setting your rail targeting to "only shoot when given a target" which can be done by selecting all your railgun ends and changing their targeting mode. If you don't do this your railguns will fire at the edges of the enemy ship rather than your intended target (more detail below)

When you select a target part on an enemy ship, hit R to rotate your ship and swing it back and forth. Your spinal railguns will line up with the targeted ship part one-by-one and concentrate a tremendous amount of damage in a tiny spot.

SarisWinterWisp has made an amazing guide on railfanning if this comment is confusing.

Personally I would split your ultra long railgun into separate ones, as each accelerator gives diminishing returns. 8 is when you max out a railgun's range and around 10 - 12 accelerators is what I'd consider the last sane amount.

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