Large Grunt gaggles
Posted April 19th 2007
By a 'gaggle' of Grunts I mean a group with common flocking behaviour, moving around as a coherent whole. Where can you get the biggest gaggles to have fun with? Not surprisingly, the megabattles offer the best situations. If you care to go in pursuit of maximum grunty satisfaction, here's what you can achieve.
Twin bridges megabattle
In the twin bridges megabattle you can get a gaggle of 37 on Legendary, 35 on Heroic, and 33 on Normal or Easy. Actually the total number of Grunts available is two greater, but if you had them all, four would be territorial (from the second squad in the twin bridges area), thus not a part of the gaggle.
Dustbowl megabattle
In the dustbowl megabattle you can get a gaggle of 36 on Legendary, at least in theory. But because of how vicious the little critters get, I have my doubts over whether it's achievable in practice. Maybe I'll give it a try one day. On Heroic or lower you can get 32. Getting them all would take serious effort, but it would be relatively easy to get close to 30 on the easier difficulties.
Spiral path megabattle
If you use the method of horde boosting in the spiral path megabattle so all the Grunts get the same movement behaviour, you can get a gaggle of 24 on Legendary, 23 on Heroic, and 22 on Normal or Easy. Relating to this, you can get them in an especially concentrated group by setting up the sort of situation described in Ice horde carnage.
Rockslide megabattle
In the rockslide megabattle you can get a gaggle of 18. They won't be as concentrated as with that ice horde situation in the spiral path area of level 5, but they look pretty impressive in the top pass defence plan when they try to rush you in a highly amusing attack which repeatedly degenerates into mass panic and screaming.
Grunt-Jackal spawning trick
Level 3's remarkable Grunt-Jackal spawning trick can be used to get far more Grunts than in any of the megabattles, though initially a lot of them would be packed together immobile in the spawning area, so you wouldn't exactly have a gaggle in the normal sense. They can subsequently be made to unjumble and move to the upper level of the muster bay, and at that point they're perhaps more gaggle-like, but the territory is rather cramped, so it's not like you can see them flocking around as a whole really. It's more a case of them filling out most of the area and gravitating your way when there's room. Still, whether you call them a gaggle or not, the trick surely provides the biggest possible collection of Grunts in the game, so it needed mentioning here.
Elsewhere
Outside of the megabattles and the Grunt-Jackal spawning trick, I'd say the best gaggle is the very close-knit one you can arrange at the start of level 4; see Grunt gaggle fun for details. Those guys stick together in one spot, so you won't get any serious combat from them, but they're great for humorous fun.