Here there be Tower Defense discussion

You definitely unlock more upgrade points to use in other levels - I skipped a level because I found it too hard and found that I had more upgrade points to spend when I went back to it later.

I have such a horrible memory on this stuff, glad Ex-SWoo knew the answer. @Tman, if it is anything like all the other games we have scores in, you’ll beat my score once you get into it a bit.

Here is something new:

Trying it out!

So we’ve been looking at making a tower defense game with the Ashes of the Singularity engine so that we can have tens of thousands of enemies coming at you by late game.

My questions to you guys are:

  1. Do you think people would be interested in a tower defense style game like this? I.e. is mass carnage a sufficient differentiator from all the other games out there? (this would be like a $10 game).

  2. Which style of TD do you guys like the most? For example, some TD games only let you place towers in certain places while others let you build them pretty much anywhere. What is the consensus here?

Something like Defense Grid 1/2, with some pre-set areas for building, but also being able to channel enemies where you want them using towers or walls, or towers with walls. Also many types of towers and making sure there are different levels of upgrades for each tower are very important.

I pretty much want you to make Defense Grid 3 with thousands of enemies. :)

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Defense grid also had the enemies stealing cores mechanic that I really liked, as you could reclaim them if you killed the enemy who stole it.

Brad, have you played the Defense Grid games? X-Morph Defnse? Creeper World Series?

I love TD games!

I agree with @lordkosc and like a bit of both preset places and being able to sculpt out the path. Both are fun.

I also prefer pure TD game (I like to kill everything with my towers and setup rather than having to use extra commander powers - like death ray attacks - I do not mind different type of commanders giving different perks to my towers).

Research new towers and would love to see the ability to combine different tower types.

Endless mode to see how far you test your setup (and maybe a blueprint ability so I can save some setups on a map so if I return 6 months later I can test things rather than trying to remember the last setup I was using).

Good map maker.

The ability to pause and very important speed up the attacks (with about 4 speeds with the max really fast to test out different setups). A lot of TD games only have two modes or the fastest in never fast enough.

So DG3 or Gemcraft (that would run smoothly). :)

The market would gobble up a quality TD game at $10, I mean look at the posts over the last year in this thread. There has been a severe drought of good TD games.

I’ve played Some. @Kael (Fall from Heaven, Legendary Heroes) would be the one leading this and he’s a big fan of of DG.

My personal background is more of the pure TD games where you can basically place stuff anywhere. Whereas, most of my colleagues here prefer the TD games where the map itself has “stuff” on it and you can only build in certain areas.

It does seem that the genre has moved to having lots of custom maps that help set the stage (as opposed to a largely blank map).

I stumbled across Yorg last night, and it’s a pretty interesting mix of tower defense and resource management, with a touch of logistics (which is itself reminiscent of Harvest: Massive Encounter, a game that you should play if you haven’t). Also after a long while I began to suspect that I was really playing an incremental game. But I was playing on Easy mode, and I didn’t play long enough to get to where things get really hairy (level 75, so I’ve read).

What a cool find. I’d pay $$ to make this a client app instead of a web app which plays ads in the middle of play.

I’m not too fond of web apps these days. I like my apps self contained.

I got to about level 18 and decided I really don’t know some of the mechanics - it seems like the transport nodes are not global - they really only work for locally connecting resources / factories. And with such a limited number available, you have to destroy / rebuild to move further out. Am I getting this right?

The transport nodes are local, but you can build an arbitrarily large network with them as long as each node is in range of another. Upgrading nodes increases throughput but not, sadly, range.

You can feed all the cannons in your base from a single factory, though redundant factories keep you alive if one gets destroyed.

You’ll eventually find yourself destroying and rebuilding a lot, especially since you want arrow towers firing at enemies for as long as possible and your layout is always expanding.

The number of buildings you can have scales up with the base level.

I had problems with this - I created a cannonball factory, but cannons outside of it’s range weren’t getting any cannonballs. It felt like I had to have a cannonball factory within range of each of the cannons. I must be doing something wrong.

I’m doing something wrong - will need to play with this after work ;-)

here is a video that shows a complete map takeover. Warning Spoilers!

ok, yea I saw my problem. I thought lines from factories meant that they could transport. You need to ignore those & create an independent transport network, and hook the factories up to them.

This game is so good that I’m debating whether it needs its own thread.

I would say this reminds me of They are Billions, in the sense that you have the calm before the storm, you are gathering resources and then it’s a mad rush to defend, but in this case, you have a timer and countdown which tells you when they will be attacking.

My only complaint is when the attack comes, it sure seems like they are moving fast and it’s hard to juggle your attention on multiple fronts. Doing it on normal difficulty - I have progressed making it to level 14, then 30 and now I’m on 35 (and still going).

This game reinforces a turtle / expansion / reinforce / turtle phase for me.

Really great find @robertrossney. Thanks!

I have been playing Defense Task Force for about 10 hours. It is a typical TD game but has some frustrating points:

  1. No pause button
  2. To upgrade a tower you have to select the tower you want to upgrade and then move your mouse to the lower right of the screen to hit the upgrade button (I do not see a keyboard command in settings to use). This is extremely annoying.
  3. You are committed to using one game profile, set to one particular difficulty level at a time. The game does not allow you to try a map on a lower difficulty and then switch to higher on the same profile. I rather you be able to try each map on each difficulty setting as an accomplishment like other games do.
  4. The game is very grindy, which I usually like in my TD games however it never feels that you are able to get to that satisfying point that you are killing creatures more efficiently. The game sends an almost continual stream and I find myself building more and more towers rather than being able to create some killing zones.
  5. You have to build an individual basestand and than build the a tower on top of it. At this point there does not seem to be any use for the base (a la DG2). The bases do act as a wall for mazing purposes but really, I rather have a wall unit than have to build a base every single time I want to place a tower. Maybe they are planning on additional base types but I do not see it in the research tree at this point in the game.

I am still playing in between other games to see if it improves once I get some towers researched enough to see if killing zones become possible.

Available now. I’ll likely try it this weekend.

This is very good so far. It’s Dungeon Warfare, but with moar stuff.

  1. 3 skill trees. They are shallow but there is interesting stuff here. Boosts to gold generation, bonuses to adjacent or “solo” traps (as in, you just have one on the map), and the like.

  2. Items you equip. They can be crafted. they provide bonuses to. . . stuff. Traps, to killing specific types of enemies, to starting gold, to xp gained per kill.

  3. The familiar gems to upgrade traps mechanic is back. And 5/10/15 give special upgrades to traps. I’ve only seen one level 5 one so farm, but when you upgrade you get 3 choices (Dart Trap: 20% reload speed, 50% damage, or “soul collector” which gives1% damage per kill up to 400%).

  4. There’s now a large grid that the maps appear on. One of the items that can drop is a special map you can place on the grid. I have one, but have not yet explored.

  5. There’s special goals on maps that, if completed, yield rewards.

  6. Maps have a number of new features. I’ve seen moving walls/blocks (traps can be placed on them). I’ve seen “vaults” (one yielded treasure, the other strong monsters a la Gemcraft so I avoided it). I saw a chest that generated extra gold (but I was warned enemies would attack it if given the chance). The vaults can bde stroyed by placing traps in place to do so (e.g. dart traps to shoot at them). Traps will target the vault if they can and there’s no enemy to shoot instead.

Saw this on Steam, perhaps too much neon?

Not sure I like the new Dungeon Warfare as much as the first.

Inventory management is a chore (I’m getting really tired of inventory management in games in general). To give you an idea of how bad this gets, you’ve got enough inventory to hold 108 equipment and 108 runes. I just finished a map that gave me >50 items. I assume that when the inventory is full you just lose the stuff. You can combine items to get one more powerful item, which is how you reduce your inventory of equipment. You can do that with runes too, but runes are one time use (they make levels harder in exchange for more xp).

The levels feel less balanced than the first and I’m just plowing through these with very little thought. Maybe I’m not remembering the first well enough, but I thought you needed to think a bit in the first. No?

I’ll keep going and see if it grabs me more. So far, it seems mediocre.