I plan this top post to be updated regularly with regions, strats and number of kills for that region to get a generel idea how and where to get to the 5k kill mark.
As this mission takes long anyway you can stick to the normal strats. Just lead a small force to the ork and chaos bases each. Don't kill the bases until you are almost finished with eldar to get some more kills from their periodic attacks.
With space marines: ~300 kills in ~20 minutes -> 14 kills/minute
Defend and tech as usual. Build some defenses and get a first group together. With that you go to the middle part of the map leaving the first base and two banners intact. From there you clear everything in the south part of the map. While doing so get a second group together which deals with the northern part. When the first group is done in the south attack Gorgutz. The second group and fresh recruits can take the first base and two banners you left at the start in the mean time.
With space marines: ~600 kills in ~16 minutes -> 38 kills/minute
Defend and tech as usual. As soon as you are finished defending the first attack go with everything you have either left or right. Get a second group after/while teching and lead them to the other side. Try to clear everything fast and then finally attack the main base from two sides. Get detector units for both groups as the Tau have quite a lot of stealth suits arround.
With space marines: ~650 kills in ~23 minutes -> 28 kills/minute
Defend and tech as usual. If you have enough honour guards devide you force in two groups after defending and attack the left and right paths simultaneously. Do not get in the blood pools when the timer gets low! If enough of your units die Chaos attacks you with a big demon which either kills your base or costs you a lot of time. Gather your troups arround the main base and attack from all angles at once.
With space marines: ~500 kills in ~16 minutes -> 32 kills/minute
This tactic in specifically for space marines: Defend and attack the bottom and left part of the map with everything but your hero, any asm and terminator guards you have. Tech to t2 while building a few extra asm. Get over the river and deep drop the terminators. The termis kill the base in front of the big cannon while your hero and the asm "sneak" by and jump into the enemy base and kill the head quarter.
With space marines: ~250 kills in ~10 minutes -> 25 kills/minute
Now this mission is the kicker for all races but necrons themselves. There is the "beacon of unlife" right in front of your starting area. Put units in front of it immeadiatly but DO NOT kill the beacon! It will revivie necron untis arround every view seconds which you can kill over and over again giving you an endles source of kills. Keep enough units arround that you don't get overwhelmed from the reviving necrons. All the while you can get a second and third group and kill as many necrons on the maps as you need/can.
With space marines: ~2000 kills in ~24 minutes -> 83 kills per minute
When defended by Orks you can get a lot of kills with little resistance. An idea I had for necrons: Get Hyperion Peaks right after pavonis and don't reinforce it and when attacked autodefend it. WIth any luck you loose that defense and can get another round of quick kills.
With space marines: ~300 kills in ~8 minutes -> 37 kills per minute
The strats expained above are feasable for all faction but necrons because they miss out the awesome beacon of unlife. More testing for them would help a lot.
After I got your message this morning. I started to think on that. Where are some lands that have high populations. Most people go for Necrons first. I understand why, they are cool ;) For a speed run they have a lot of advantages. Thinking of Necron runners I thought of 3 lands, strongholds all of them, that seem to have a high population, Ork, Eldar, and Tau stronghold.
Eldar stronghold is easy in the sense that the 3 races there are segmented. Tactics wise this means they are isolated and easier to crush. Orc, is easy for the same reason as the Eldar stronghold. All the Ork groups are isolated. Moving from one to the next would be easy to crush. Tau stronghold might be a bad choice. Even on easy their range unites have the largest ranges of all the races and the Kroot can tie up unites so the range can cut them down.
Oh! I almost forgot. The land that gives Fury. Do the max kills instead of wiping them out. It may be only a few difference in number but wiping them out at 120 kills shorts changes you by 20. Always go for the 140 condition.
As you say, more testing. Fun for sure :)
im uploading my first run and it took too darn long, tho i only learnt at the end of the run i think i found a possible strat , there was a part that when i was going at one of the banners two or three squads of boyz just spawned automatically, if we can figure out the if this is a one off or if its continuous then we might be able to farm it, requires further testing.
The necrons thing im not sure about, since kills dont track on failures its hard to see what kills are in the beacon or just the mission in general. again requires further testing.
The same thing happens at the Eldar Stronghold. As long as some of the buildings remain for the final part of the Eldar squads of Fire Dragons will spawn in at certain times/intervals. I don't know if there is a trigger or if it's timed though.
yes, in tyrea in the main base units spawn if you don't kill the barracks and vehicle producing structures. it seems to be timing based, so I don't know if it is worth to just stand outside and wait. the thing with the orc banners could be promissing.
I just finished a 4 hour stream where I was testing some stuff. Wiping the Ork stronghold and Tau stronghold generated around 800 kills each. I tried another idea of doing a part of a map and quitting, all of you probably know this but I didn't, it grants zero kills if you quit a map even though it counts as a loss.
Not very promising data as of yet. Our cat, and myself need(ed) dinner.
ill do some testing tonight or tommorrow., ill test out "Beacon" and "Banner" strats, also Sara while yea we knew about quit out we still appreciate the help, its not a very big group so its nice to see another face jumping in.
I have been streaming it and uploading my attempts/learning for a little over a month I think. Didn't join until this past Tuesday here and delving into some of the forum stuff. I hope I can contribute some good info.
When I have time I want to do a run to see just what it would take and how long, roughly, it would take to hit 5k by doing IG, Ork, Tau, Eldar and maybe Space Marine strongholds as intended. It's kind of how I started speedrunning. Run it inefficiently and see what I can find that can be done faster and more efficient. It's a slow grind but I kind of like that method. In my mind sometimes it's just as important to find the dead end methods as it is to find the right ones.
Alight i did some testing and have some good news and bad news, first lets breakdown of the orks.
Ork stronghold - So while it seems it only spawns more orks when you first assault one of the banners it dosent keep up so the strat is basically dead when it comes to trying to grind em of the banners but there a smal backupl strat i found to maximise kills.
The small base and two banners if left alone will quasi regularly attack your base while a bit slow to grind kills it eeks out some more kills , i found the best way of doing this is after you have Hyperion Peaks so you can rec four turrets (turning two into missile) and maxed out listening posts next to them, with this set up my base was never being overwhelmed and moved my army around the rest of the ork stronghold, and just send the one tank army that is the landraider to cleanup the base and banners left alone just before moving onto the warboss.
The necron "Beacon strat" - went into the mission with 70 kills with a test and wille ignoring as many enemys as possibe accept the ones that spawn into the base and the beacon and walked out with about at little under 500 extra kills so it seems that beacon respawns DO count for kills so it makes it a very good grind spot, i found a good way of grinding this spot would be leave this stronghold later on the line so you have a idea of how long you need to grind left and so you can immediately send honor guard to the becon, i play space marines so my strat was 3 First compay vets with heavy bolters and one squad of tactical marines with heavy bolters being a small but strong force to farm the beacon.
great! if you leave the necron mission last you can grind for how long you think it takes and save before compleating the mission. if you don't get to the wargear screen after the mission (which means you did it) you can reload and grind a bit more. while not perfect this can save runs. the downside is that one of the most aggressive AIs is in the game until the end. which also could be seen as a good thing as we need defenses for wargear as well.
and its done, could drop a considerable ammount of time with better routing and a better idea of how long you have to farm the beacon but it cut an hour off my test run.
Yesterday I was able to spare some time and taking out Chaos stronghold and IG stronghold and maybe half of the map I was able to get over 2k kill wargear. This was about 2h 30m. I encountered the scar crash when I was finishing off Space Marine stronghold, so couldn't go further.
i was doin a All strongholds run for SM but since its pulled from my stream and my Internet cut for a moment (damn you aussie networks) the video was split into two parts with about a minute missing in the middle, so now i cant really use it as evidence of my run, shame i got a 1.10.48
its a shame when things crash or go wrong but i know how it feels.
I use OBS studio and have it record my streams, so even if something happens with the internet I still have a backup video of that stream.
Edit: The crash did happen at the perfect time though for our cat Sushi. It was time to feed her.
Last night I was able to finally do a full and successful run with all wargear. I basically would do the strongholds mostly as intended to farm to get the 5k kills. Unfortunately it took far longer then I was expecting at 5h 7m. It will take a few days before I can upload it. It feels like it could be dropped to a 3h run in general once things are refined.
Looking forward to the run. I plan to record a run next week :-)
Even with the times as they are this was a dead catagory so reguardless of time im just happy to see life brought into it, i could be a snob and say it only happened cause i dared to traverse new and fertile land but that would be bullcrap, the group is making strides with the category with the discussion of strats and helping each other.
Tho i am curious are you working to smash my time or you guys trying out other factions. I play space marines cause thats what i play on the tabletop its not like their the best to play in DC afterall.
