Finishing off Fieldrunners earns you points (and $), but if you’re chasing after the top spot on the international leaderboard of high scores, then you’ll need to do a little bit more than that. Follow us as we talk you through the tricks you need to know to reach the top.
It's all About the Combos¶
Don’t forget that destroying key units will also trigger off the all-important combos if any other Fieldrunners are in the blast radius.
Removing units one at a time will keep your score in the lower end of the leaderboard, but taking out multiple units at the same time will trigger off a combo. The more units you wipe out in a single attack, the bigger your combo and the bigger your combo score bonus.
This means you need to not only focus on trying to bunch as many units together as possible, but also hit them with single hit impact towers that have a wide area of effect (such as the Pyro or Gas Towers). Dropping Slow Towers beside a Pyro Tower (for example), will keep the units in place as the next heat wave rushes across them, hopefully taking them all out in a single blast.
Another key place to look for combos is on any looping pathways (the map ‘Tangled Turnpike’ is a perfect example), as placing a Gas or Pyro Tower in the middle of the loop is a guaranteed way to rack up some easy combos (and therefor, points).
Don’t forget that you can often deploy single use items on a tightly packed bunch of Fieldrunners to get an easy combo points boost. Also, each combo you get will raise your Airstrike special item by 1 point, the same as completing a round, (so 40 combos will get you a full Airstrike).
Speaking of the Airstrike…¶
Each Airstrike will clear a map of almost all units (Elite Units at full health tend to continue to live, albeit, with very little health left) and knowing how to fill it up fast will help you boost that all-important score even higher.
It takes a total of 40 points to completely fill the Airstrike item, so here’s how those points are calculated:
- You get one point for a ‘perfect’ round (no enemies escape)
- You get one point for each combo (regardless of its size)
- You get three ‘pity’ points for each enemy that manages to escape.
If we bust out our scientific calculator, we can work out that for every 14 enemies who escape, you’ll be awarded with an Airstrike (nothing wrong with wanting to make you feel better). And 40 combos of any size will also have the same affect.
Feeling Heroic?¶
You’re not going to get anywhere on that international leaderboard if you’re playing on any difficulty other than Heroic, as the maximum (non-combo) score on Casual is around three times smaller than the maximum (non-combo) score on Heroic.
And thanks to the ever-helpful Steven Serafino (thanks Steve!), designer on Fieldrunners 2, we’re not only going to show you just how imperative it is to play the game on Heroic difficulty, but we’ll also reveal the max (non-combo) score you can get in each survival map, allowing you to set this as your absolute minimum score.
Maximum Non-Combo Score Possible on Each Map¶
| **Map Name** | **Casual Difficulty** | **Tough Difficulty** | **Heroic Difficulty** |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tutorial | 31,100 | 62,220 | 93,330 |
| Twist of Fate | 163,530 | 327,060 | 490,590 |
| Broken Branch | 125,890 | 251,780 | 377,670 |
| Home on Derange | 425,640 | 851,280 | 1,276,920 |
| Tangled Turnpike | 295,380 | 590,760 | 886,140 |
| Bizarre Bazaar | 359,230 | 718,460 | 1,077,690 |
| Dryer Straits | 335,930 | 671,860 | 1,007,790 |
| Cardio Canyon | 176,530 | 353,060 | 529,590 |
| Curious Gorge | 355,860 | 711,720 | 1,067,580 |
| The Frying Pan | 380,590 | 761,180 | 1,141,770 |
| Ring of Fire | 227,800 | 455,600 | 683,400 |
| End of Doom | 318,790 | 637,580 | 956,370 |
Endless Mode Strategy (aka: Big Points)¶
‘The Frying Pan’ is a great level for endless mode due to its small size, allowing the Nuke Towers to get to work far more efficiently.
After successfully finishing a survival map, you’ll be given the chance to keep playing it in ‘Endless mode’. Which is exactly how it sounds: the game keeps going, and going (and going) until enough Fieldrunners make it through to the exit.
It’s during this mode that any exceptionally effective tower mazes will allow you to keep going for much longer (so you’ll definitely need no unit ‘leaks’ when starting this mode). More and more units will spew forth from the entrance(s), so there’ll be more chances to score massive combos.
Guaranteed 5 Million + Points Heroic Endless Strategy¶
Follow our Heroic Endless Mode strategy below to be certain of getting over 5 million points, and over 200 rounds in without a single enemy leak! It’s very easy to replicate and we stopped just after round 200 and 5 million points as we could easily have got to round 400+ (which would be a lot of video to sit through).
Rounds 1 - 80¶
Make sure you select the mission ‘The Frying Pan’ and you’ll need to have unlocked the following towers for this strategy to work properly: ‘Gatling Gun’, ‘Polymorph/Ice’, ‘Spark Tower’ and finally the ‘Nuke Tower’.
– For the first few rounds focus on using Gatling Guns (Level three) to block off the route to the exit then upgrade them to Level three Spark Towers.
– Loop the runners over the bridge as per the usual tower layout for this level and by Round 40 you should have enough to swap out a Spark Tower for your first Nuke Tower.
– It’s now a case of swapping out all Spark Towers for Nuke Towers that you upgrade to Level three. This will hold them off for quite a long time.
– By Round 76 you’ll want to have dropped enough Gatling Guns to complete the ‘maze’, even though hardly enemies will reach near the exit. You should also have around four Level three Nuke Towers covering their entrance too.
Rounds 80 - 201¶
Nuke Towers will rack up tons of combo kills, meaning you can let off multiple Airstikes. The only time you should really use them though is when you see multiple Momma Tanks. Wait for the last Momma Tank to show before you drop it.
– With the maze already built, it’s now just a matter of converting all towers around the first bridge to Level three Nuke Towers.
– Place a few Polymorph Towers near the bridge to maximize the damage from those Nuke Towers.
– Work your Nuke Tower placement so the central area is littered with them, this will prevent the vast majority of units from even making it to the first fire walkway.
– We used a few items purely in the name of speeding things up, but by Round 201 we had used only a few and we still had zero enemy leaks.
– The video below is a whopping 57 minutes long (we manually stopped after round 201), but it shows you this strategy working in real-time and it proves you could keep going for a lot longer (we’ve managed over 450 rounds and over 11 million points).
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