Here there be Tower Defense discussion

So, the next hour has been more interesting, relatively speaking. But not interesting enough.

You will quickly run into a situation where you are short yellow or red and need it to keep building stuff. I can’t really give any sort of “yellow is used more in X buildings” guidance as I haven’t really noticed a pattern. I just know that running out of one or the other immediately shuts down whatever it is you wanted to do. Yes, the existing nodes will regrow but it takes awhile - 25-30m+ it looks like (these are 4 figure nodes, typically 1200- idk maybe 1800 not sure whast all the sizes I have seen; Green has typically been 350-500 in size so far).

So either you wait (booooooooring), try to re-position to make something work, or you can recycle stuff. If you have researched, and built, the recycler. You only get back 50% materials and. . . yeah that’s a lot of work and truthfully I would rather just re-position. Which is kind of a hassle. You can only fly 4 buildings at once, which is relevant when you have a bunch of turrets, 1-2 relays, 1-2purifiers, and possibly support buildings to move. As it so happens I found what I needed - a red, and then later a yellow, even later another red and a green - and was able to sort of shift my efforts in another direction to go get the resources I badly needed. I managed to get a Lair Slayer built and blow up the first lair that was troubling me. Sure enough when you attack it, the lair goes aggro and starts sending alot more creeps at you. I had to cluster a bunch of turrets to deal with it, but was able to do so comfortably. I also build a building to do repairs (it’s a bit funky; it repairs everything in radius but the time to repair is fixed and then split between all buildings you are healing with no way to prioritize short of positioning the building, which has a sizable radius). I ran out of pop growth room but have finally solved that problem and am slowly growing again (well, I will be once I get to that last red node I just freed up by killing Lair #2).

I found some “ruins” I could click on and they gave me a bit of each resource. I built a sort of “early warning” radar building (after researching it; always after researching it excepting a handful of starter buildings) and a later upgrade allowed it to sense resource nodes in it’s radius. That’s a nice improvement over hunting for them manually. I started to get actively annoyed by the lack of main map zoom when I was hunting for resources, actually. but that problem is solved.

So, yeah, the game is sort of progressing as expected but it’s still rather slow and easy. It really needs t way to speed up time. I’m a ways away from being able to properly expand again, which in turn is going to allow me to finish building more pop room (including another round of buildings to upgrade this particular cluster of pop buildings; having to drop this stuff everywhere is mildly annoying) as well as begin preparations for the next round of expansion. Which will include a large flat area to put more permanent structures in.

I wish the waves from lairs were more interesting, or there were other mechanics driving you forward. OTOH, it’s possible to screw yourself and be forced to wait a long time to begin properly growing again (unless you restart). Speeding the game up is only a partial fix for it’s problems. The lairs need to be a little more involved and I wish there was a reward for taking them out beyond “well, expansion is not blocked in that area” or “no more trouble from that area”.

LOLWUT?

Heh, the last two games you linked to were “charming” and “scrumptious”.

In other news I finally got around to playing Defense Grid 2. Mostly more of the same from DG1, but instead of flying aliens this one has cheesy lunar modules with tons of hitpoints that land and dump aliens right on your core facility. Nice. Also, there’s a great guide on Steam written by our own @Tman!

I have been playing Grow Castle on an Android Emulator using BlueStacks. It is a ftp game and you can earn extra gold if you watch a game video every so often if you want. Looks like there were a bunch of these type of games created at one time.

It is fun but I can see how the addictive factor is built in. You are defending a Castle that you build up and place heroes on. The heroes come in many flavors and can use mana to trigger special attacks. There is a lot of things to juggle from building up the castle to be stronger and have more heroes spaces available, to different type of towers spaces that can either be weapons or add percentages to mana, gold production, etc.

I will take it as far as I can go until i get tired of it. Want to see if there is a point one would have to spend money to keep enjoying it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raongames.growcastle

Hi everyone!

Unleash is a fast-paced online, multiplayer Line Tower Wars game, inspired by the classic Warcraft 3 mod “Line Tower Wars”.

The indie game is currently in Open Beta, so anyone can get a beta Steam key for free right now for a limited time period. If you like Tower Defense (TD)/Tower Wars (TW) games, why not try out Unleash while it is free? Check it out at:

http://UnleashGame.com

DISCLAIMER: I am a developer on Unleash, but I am also a fan of the genre (perhaps obviously) and have enjoyed playing TD and especially TW since the early Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne days. My team and I felt like there are too few good standalone Tower Wars games out there, so we made this game in the hopes that the TD/TW crowd would enjoy it.

We are interested in making the best TD/TW game that we can, a vision that can only be achieved through community/player feedback. So we really hope that some of you dedicated fans of the genre would help us out, and hopefully enjoy yourselves in the process :-)

PS: I hope I’m not violating any (unwritten) rules with this post - if so, please excuse me! I’m new to Q3.


(In game screenshot of Unleash Beta, September 2017)

Hey thanks for the heads up. I’ll download it & give it a whirl. I wasn’t too interested at first as I’m not much into MP, but you say you have a good AI for Single Player, so I’ll let you know what I think.

Thanks! That would be awesome. We always appreciate any feedback given!

Looks like an interesting game, so far. I’m a single player-only kind of guy, but I love the genre and hope it does well.

re: rules - I think the main one to keep in mind is this place is treated like Tom’s living room. We don’t hang favorite pieces of art on the wall without asking if it’s okay, but we’ll talk about anybody’s game with them until everyone’s blue in the face or moves on to another topic.

Thank you for your kind words and the tip!

We are actually working on bringing a ‘Classic Tower Defense’ (singleplayer) mode into the game as we speak, so we may have that very soon in the game. As always, any feedback or opinions in regards to what you would like to see are greatly appreciated :-)

That’s great news! I’ll give it a spin once the SP is in.

Cool! I will make sure to let you know when that happens.

So I played a few rounds with Unleashed, and left a feedback post up on Steam with a few questions / recommendations.

I’m not sure why you say it doesn’t have SP as you can fire up any game & load up all empty positions with bots - so maybe you call this Skirmish mode instead of a single player campaign?

Anyway, I did a few rounds and you can read the feedback on your steam forum. It will be interesting to see how this evolves. Definitely a lot more going on than in your typical TD game.

Thanks a lot for the feedback @Tman! We really appreciate it.

By ‘singleplayer’ I was (apparently falsely) assuming that you meant more like a normal Tower Defense experience, which we don’t have yet (but very soon will!). You can of course play alone against bots/AI in the current ‘Tower Wars’ game mode, but that game mode is (in my opinion) most fun in multiplayer with humans.

I’m really happy with your feedback, and have discussed your points with the team. We have provided you with a response for each of your points.

Hey!

I just wanted to add that Unleash now features a ‘Classic Tower Defense’ experience. Although the amount of playable scenarios is very low right now (3), we are working on expanding them. Additionally, we plan to release a “TD Scenario Editor” that would enable players to be able to create their own TD scenarios and share them with the world through Steam Workshop.

I promised @Tman that I would mention when the TD game mode was added - so that promise is now fulfilled :-)

I played Soulcaster and its sequel, thanks to @Vesper’s generosity.
They are sort of pseudo-action tower defense games, where you run around the level dynamically summoning one of three “tower” types and using them in combination to annihilate or merely survive a stage. They are MagicalTimeBean’s (of Escape Goat fame) early works.
I enjoyed my time with them: the nice thing is that these games give a tower defense fix, while being really, really fast paced. That being said, the first game felt underdevelopped, and I got stuck because of balance issues in the sequel. Nevertheless, I like the overall ambiance, aesthetics and writing of this developer. Escape Goat is a very superior game, though.
There was a third game in the work last year, but I don’t know if that project is still alive.

I am playing this one (XMorph) on the PS4. Is pretty and intense. Maybe too intense for me.

I play on easy because on normal you are supposed to be some shot-en-up fan and I am not into that.

I hope to play the splitscreen coop thing in the future, looks like could be fun (splitscreen local coop is just too rare).

On the negatives, some parts of the menus sometimes remember me of phone games. If they tricked me to play a phone game in my PS4 the trick is very good because I still not noticed it.

Dungeon Warfare is getting a sequel, although no date is set as of this time it sounds like “soonish”. I am very excited about this.

Has anyone tried Defense Zone 3? I cannot get past the Easy mode on maps 16 - 19. I can get through Hard mode on most of the other maps.

I cannot even find a video on it for a hint since every one else states it is too hard too.

Tip:
Maps follow a progression and you cannot advance to the next without beating the one before it (difficulty does not matter as long as you beat it). There is cheat if you want to try a map. hit: 1,2,3,4 at same time and you can play any map you choose.

Yeah DZ3 was ridiculous if you hadn’t already played 1 & 2. I did that. If you find them on sale, or if you’re interested enough, DZ1 and DZ2 are actually fun if you know the “tricks”, which are really not hard. You MUST use “Hellfire” when necessary, and strategically using this ability seems at least to me to be the way to win. I’ve finished all on Easy dificulty using this strategy, and am now nearly done with them all on “medium” difficulty.

Hope that helps.

I played DZ2, making it to level 13 before bailing. It was just a bit repetitive and came down to only a few strategies, and the levels just got so long, with so many waves that it simply wore me out.

That, and @tomchick came by and laid down Alien TD Shooter, which I played all the way through and enjoyed immensely!