Wikia

There are many different kinds of Mazes possible in Sanctum. Each with benefits and drawbacks depending on what mob is passing through the maze. This page is where people can show off their maze designs and get ideas for new mazes of their own.

The mazes shown here have the number of squares a mob has to walk over before exiting (path), the cost of building the basic blocks to make the maze ($), and a brief summary of the maze {work in progress}.

Zig Zag StylesEdit

These designs are made primarily to keep enemies moving in a logical progression, while they work decently for other tower defense games, Sanctum's unique FPS engine makes them less efficient than others.

path61:$112 - A basic "Zig Zag" maze found in most TD games, not recommended for Sanctum.
Bridge (This design basically plays itself)
path61:$112 - A "Zig-Zag" type maze with a few turns to slow down runners.
path61:$112
Gives use with Holo towers in the beginning
effective once accomplished, lightning towers on corners, penetrators looking up and down coridoors, anti-air at rear, violators at sides and front, scatters lasers throughout the middle, slowfields on the path and televators in line with each other and the core for convenient, fast, and safe travel through maze. Caters against most enemies, though weak aginst chargers and maze legnth is sacrificed.
Best Use for the Holo tower i can think of with the added slowfields and dosen't require the players to move as much.

Snaking StylesEdit

Snaking style mazes work to increase the amount of exposure (time a tower may fire on an enemy) and often form an illogical path.

path61:$112 - vulnerable to Runners
path61:$102 - vulnerable to Runners
path60:$110 - Note the AA towers at the start and end of this maze
path59:$108 - Note the missing blocks to cut-costs
path64:$90-104 - Note that the (7) blocks with an x are optional
path65:$100-104
path62:$94-110 - Note how 8 blocks could be eliminated from this design.

Mirror StylesEdit

Mirror style mazes try to make a symmetrical maze. While these mazes are often just snaking mazes, these have their own gallery to highlight how they differ.

Path61:$112 - Snaking:Note the placement of Televators on this maze
Path61:$112 - Zig Zag:An optimal design for Gatling towers

WaveEdit

Wave style mazes are designed to have a lot of turns, in other TD games this wouldn't do as much but thanks to the "90 degree turn" program of the game's engine this is quite effective in Sanctum.

path61:$80 - Note the missing blocks to save on costs, they increases line of sight!
path60:$78 - The most turns I have seen. Again creating vast lines of sight.

Hub StylesEdit

A hub style maze tries to maximize the amount of time the enemies spend circling around a hub-like structure, allowing the player to stand in the middle, able to very quickly change what part of the mob she engages. The tradeoff is that better accuracy is often required, and some weak spots will be hard or impossible to hit, compared to a straight section of maze. A flexible maze design will thus have some straight and/or diagonal sections to use when necessary. A good hub design will also usually have maximum turret coverage around the hub, allowing efficient use of upgraded towers (especially lightning towers) and slowfields.

Path63:$102 - Note that this design has no less than 5 squares which are exposed on all 4 sides and 3 diagonals, where enemies are forced to walk on all 7 of the surrounding squares. 4 of them also have overlapping fields of fire. Very efficient with lightning towers and slowfields.

Optimal Mazes Edit

This section lists the optimal mazes for each level. 'Optimal' is, of course a subjective notion, highly dependant on playstyle. For instance, some players may prefer maze styles that are easy for them to navigate, or have ideal layouts for certain turret configurations. Here we discuss mazes that are optimal in an objective sense: maximizing the number of turns and the total length of the maze.

These mazes are first scored based on how many 90-degree turns they have. If two mazes have the same number of turns, then the ties are resolved by considering the path length of the mazes.

Since this section lists optimal mazes, any mazes posted should be accompanied with a guarantee (and not just a claim) of their optimality. Ideally, these mazes would be identified through an exhaustive search.

Exhaustive Search Tool Edit

The exhaustive search tool can be found at[1] in a Windows 64-bit compiled EXE (Windows users will need the Visual C++ redistributable package[2]). If you want to compile it yourself (for another platform, for example), you can find the source code at [3]. You can download an archive of the head of the repo, or check it out over HTTP using Mercurial by issuing

hg clone https://www.riebart.ca/hg/mikemisc/smazer

If anyone has any problems, questions, or bugs to report, contact the author listed on the repo's main page[4].

Bridge Edit

This wave-type maze was found after an exhaustive search that terminated with the following message:

135,933,713,038 total paths and 1,038,569,143,549 total steps in 41,167.6 seconds across 2 threads.

Path 62, 50 turns, 16 blocks are adjacent to the path on all four faces. 78$ to build.

Layout Design ToolEdit

The follow image can be dropped into an image editing program and used to design / plan layouts for block and tower placement. All white squares with black borders are spots that blocks can be placed, any blocks that have boarders of 1 pixel rather then 2 are raised and so cannot be crossed by land based creatures. Grey blocks with grey borders are paths creatures can walk on.