Buggos – Impossible Difficulty Tips and Tricks

This guide will give a bunch of tips in tricks to anyone struggling to figure out ways to beat certain levels and provide some insight on what I believe some of the best strategies are after having beaten the campaign on impossible difficulty focusing especially on tactics for areas 7-9 which introduce a huge difficulty spike to the game.

Tips and Tricks for Impossible Difficulty

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Introduction

Hello here is my guide to beating buggos on impossible but this guide can still help players who are looking for some guidance on tips and tricks on easier difficulties as well. Everything I put down is just from my personal experience going through the game first on normal and then on impossible. If there are any questions or suggestions I’m happy to hear you out and hopefully this guide can help you murder some humans.

The Early Game

The beginning of the game is pretty straight forward where your base auto builds swarmers for you and you run over the civilians. The first upgrade you want to go for is the Builder and Nutrient Pustules. Builders are going to be the backbone of everything going forward in the game. It takes time for your buggos to move across the map so the general game plan is too take ground and make new hives close to the enemy while turning off further away hives so you can continue to push more effectively. Like any other RTS game an important part is income. In buggos that income comes in the form of nutrients which the builder can help provide by building Nutrient Pustules. Basically your want to build a ton of these so that you can make buggos as quickly as possible.

Important: You will want to turn nutrient goo off since it will do nothing for you early game and slows down your building since builders will just randomly choose to make it. Don’t bother going for the upgrades until later as well. It is not useful until you unlock the Selective Breeding Program.

Dealing with early ranged units

When you first encounter the marine you’ll probably only really have the builder unlocked so the best way to deal with them is to set a flag for your swarmers to huddle in an area and then have them charge once you have a big mass of them. That way they don’t shoot them down as they trickle in but have to deal with a bunch of them at the same time.

Spore Launcher

The Spore Launcher is a fantastic defensive structure that can carry you through normal and is still exceptionally useful for impossible although falling off a bit late game. Without any range upgrades it has 4.5 range which is the same as the marine and it outranges the flamer which is huge. When the humans start producing units it can be pretty difficult to push into their command centers. A good way to do so is to get some hives nearby with Spore Launchers in front and bring the ranged units into the launchers. Then push and try to build launchers and hives further up taking ground in every push. Eventually you will be able to build launchers right by their command centers and take down their production basically freeing up that portion of the map. This can be done for a majority of the early game pretty easily.

Spore Artillery

The Spore Artillery is another extremely useful structure. It has insane range and is able to chip away from enemies without being in range of attacks. It can also go over walls which can be very helpful on the first 6 areas since the humans don’t repair their buildings until area 7. Basically you can take out command centers without even having to push to them sometimes and also soften up enemy units for your buggos to break through more easily. The only time Artillery is not useful is when the enemy is blocked from you by their own wall (and you want to leave the wall their so they can’t hit you from a specific side) or when you have limited building space but that isn’t really an issue until later in the game.

Upgrades to focus on

Basically at the beginning of the game you want to grab the builder right of the bat and Nutrient Pustules. After that grabbing Spore Launchers and then going up the tree grabbing Builder Influence into Efficient Builders. Efficient Builders helps you build everything twice as fast making it easier to push and easier to get your base started. Some other useful upgrades to get once you’ve gotten the previous one’s are More Pus for better economy, Builder Legs, and Spore Launcher Range into Spore Artillery. After that you’ll probably want to make a push towards Titans as the Titan is a very useful tank and gets a huge bonus of not counting towards the swarm limit.

Mid Game

The upgrades that you probably want to focus on the most are the Selective Breeding Program, Speed upgrades, and the Boom Slug.

Selective Breeding Program

The Selective Breeding Program is where the game starts to pick up the pace quite a bit. It allows you to toggle on and off what bugs you want to be produced. When bugs get toggled off the ones still on get produced more frequently but at a higher cost. The most important impact that this gives us is that you can replace the production of Swarmers with Builders. This allows you to construct buildings much faster and spread goo much quicker as well. Once you have this upgrade it is worth investing in Nutrient Gooier to unlock the Goo on Death and Speed Goo upgrades which can help you speed up the rate at which you can push deadlocks.

Boom Slug/Titan

The main units that will help you throughout the mid game are the Boom Slug and the Titan. The Titan gives you a unit which is unaffected by swarm capacity so you can make as many of them as you want. This helps when you are stuck at a deadlock as you can sit back amass a large quantity of Titans and push through the human defenses. The Boom Slug on the other hand is arguably the best unit in the game as it allows you to deal damage without even having to fully get to the enemy. Exploding on death means it will always get value if it gets close enough along with it having massive AoE with upgrades. It also has more health than swarm kind of units allowing it to have slightly better survival.

For the Titan the upgrades aren’t super crucial to make it work at this stage of the game but can help. I’d recommend prioritizing Influence, Legs, and the Regen Aura with everything else being optional. (You will want all the upgrades later). The Boom Slug should get all of the upgrades as they are all very useful. Speed and Influence let the slugs get closer to get more value and explosion radius makes it hit a much larger area. The thicker skin upgrades is also useful to make them more tanky.

Strategy

Most of the mid game is pretty straightforward. You start off kickstarting your economy with Pustules and a couple of hives. Then you push building more hives on the front lines and toggling off the hives in the back until you win. Titans can help break stalemates and boom slugs will help pushing a ton. I’d recommend never really having the swarmer toggled on from this point forward as the builder fills it’s role along with providing much better utility. Swarmers from this point on will only be used when produced from Swarm Mothers as they won’t get in the way of builder production. Once you have all the boom slug and other upgrades you want you should focus on upgrading the swarm mother next.

Note: You will have boom slugs before upgrading Swarm Mothers. You don’t really need to use the Swarm Mothers for these missions but you can if you want.

End Game (Areas 7-9)

Welcome to the end game. This is where the game takes a massive difficulty spike. These levels were released after the initial Six areas as free DLC but the difficulty is no where near the same. Some of these levels can be quite difficult although I don’t believe any level took more than around 45 minutes to complete unoptimized.

Big Changes

The main things that make these levels much more difficult are much smaller starting areas, massive stacks of enemy AoE, Dropships, Repair bots, and enemy deploying units onto your base. The hardest part is getting a economy started without your base being torn apart by their much superior firepower. The humans can now also repair structures that are destroyed if a repair bot gets to the location which can be quite annoying. The Dropships will spawn enemy units and have 9999 HP so once you take one down make sure a repair bot doesn’t make it over or you will have to destroy it again.

How to Econ

Getting an economy going with limited space can be quite difficult. Luckily there are a couple of ways to get around it. The way I was able to get through most levels was using Swarm Mothers to bolster my economy. Now you might be thinking how do Swarm Mothers have anything to do with Nutrients when all they do is spawn Swarmers. Well free Swarmers are Swarmers you don’t have to pay for and the trick is to get enough Swarm Mothers that you almost always have your Swarm Capacity saturated with the free Swarmers. The free Swarmers will help you hold off attackers and will allow you to still build your other units without making you go bankrupt. Ideally this allows you to build up a force of Titans or build up enough Nutrients in the bank to pump out Boom Slugs. Usually once you break out of the initial area you should have more than enough space to improve your economy and keep the push going. Keep in mind that the enemy can and will drop units on to your base so be ready to toggle on older hives or keep defenses ready to prevent the back end of your base from being destroyed.

Option 2

While brute forcing victory with swarm mothers will work for most of the levels there are some levels where it was impossible to build a suitable enough of an economy while defending relying mostly on the Swarm Mothers. I played around with all the different units and finally figured out a way to cheese my way with having to deal with defending myself at all. The solution ended up being the Carnivorous Floor Traps. I originally thought they sucked because the require a unit to walk on top of them to deal damage and then they go on cooldown. This was a problem because they can still be hit by AoE so any time your units are on top of them and get targeted by any AoE the floor traps will die. Having the Burrow Deeper upgrade only makes them untargetable but not invincible. I realized I could counteract this problem but simply not making any units at all.

The way to make this work is to start off building up Pustules in the safe area of your base. Next you need to set up a bunch of Floor Traps where the enemy will come attack you. It needs to be far enough forward that no unit will make it to your Pustules and you have to set up quick before they get AoE around that can destroy your traps. I would say 5 or 6 rows or columns of traps will probably do the trick. You just have to watch out because units with lots of health like the Tank or the Mech require multiple traps to be destroyed. The traps also have to be far enough away from the Pustules or else Flamers and the Missile Launchers will hit your traps and kill them. Once you get the traps set up you just need to make sure none of your units will wonder over there and keep enough around so that you can repel attacks that land on your base. Now you can toggle off production and stack up tons of Nutrients that can go towards Titans or so you can eventually toggle on and build Boom Slugs and Swarm Mothers without running out of Nutrients.

Important: You need to make sure you have the infestation upgrade from Swarm Mothers off if you plan to use Floor Traps. Leaving it on means a Trap could spawn a Swarmer from a kill and get itself killed by AoE.

Other Tips

Walls can be pretty useful for pushing as it only takes a single builder to make and they have a decent amount of health with upgrades.

Be careful on where you put the Swarm Mothers as sometimes they can wonder too close to the front lines and get killed.

When using floor traps another good way to get a push going is to have boom slugs being made and keeping them in a corner. A mass of boom slugs will tear through enemy defenses.

On some missions where you need to defend three or four angles I used Warriors to help hold a line that wasn’t focused too much on pushing. Keep in mind adding more units puts more of a strain on both production and economy.

I don’t recommend using the Wasp or the Defender as they don’t really have enough value when they make your army more expensive.

In the last few levels you might have extra Upgrade Points that are unused which is ok. Certain upgrades like getting more units you wont use are not worth even putting a point into as it becomes detrimental.