The most intense part of Defend the Basement will occur during the activated levels. The first few levels will be relatively simple, where small groups of bad guys will teleport in at the portals to the north of your base and charge mindlessly toward your well organized defense.  But as the game progresses, be prepared for a variety of special circumstances during the creep wave phases.  Generally, there will be one variety of standard, relatively weak bad guys that spawn continuously throughout each level, and a handful of ‘elite’ bad guys with special abilities or more powerful attributes to which you must pay special attention.

It is very difficult to complete this part of the game without full cooperation from each party member. It might take some thought and strategy to overcome some of the creep wave challenges, especially depending on the variety of heroes in your group.

If you fail at any point during the level, your master player may type -retry and all the bad guys will die, yielding your team no experience but a chance to type -go again and try the level again from the beginning. The -retry trigger is disabled during some boss-fight phases to avoid problems and exploits.  Using a -retry will reset your cumulative gold bonus to zero, and the number of times you can -retry can be limited by the game mode you chose.

To keep track of important information throughout the game, you can expand the Infoboard in the upper right corner of your screen (observe the image to the right).  This panel displays the total damage done by each player, the number of killing blows for each player, hero statuses, how many -retry‘s you have remaining, your current Cumulative Gold Bonus (CGB), and the current level you are on.  Above the Infoboard is the Level Timer, which keeps track of how much time is remaining in the Creep Wave Level you are currently on.

As you progress through creep wave levels, you will earn a small amount of gold for each killing blow on an enemy unit.  Keep in mind that this bonus is relatively small in comparison to the distributed gold bonuses you will be receiving for completing levels and killing neutral bosses later on.