Here there be Tower Defense discussion

Look interesting. Here is a decent let’s play that shows that this has base building, upgrades and you need to be pretty active moving towers / reloading during play.

That game looks like loads of fun. I think I have my weekend choice squared away.

well, I’m a TD nut. I bought it & played for about an hour.

It’s huge, tons of stuff going on besides the single tower. You have an entire base with all these buildings, you have spies you send on missions, you can buy / upgrade towers.

Every 10-15 minutes you get “attacked” where you have to do a certain mission, so there is time pressure to crank out a few other missions to get $$ and components to upgrade your existing guns.

You can grow / upgrade your buildings to increase your taxes and your research. Each set of buildings has a green bar that slowly fills and then you click it to collect the taxes.

The background music is nice and the sound design is good. There are characters that come onto the screen and introduce new things, or ask for help or a number of things. I think I’ve seen 6 or 7 so far.

The TD part of it is pretty intense. You have to balance reloading your guns by pulling them into the middle of the tower - they can’t shoot and they can block another tower from moving. You will find yourself moving towers quite a bit to focus on certain enemies or take advantage of a barrage type of shot that builds up over time. A gun will glow, indicating that ability is ready and you can use them when you are getting overwhelmed.

Tons of stuff going on. So far, looking good.

Oh cool, a sequel! I remember playing the original on iOS and having fun with it. Thanks for the info!

So I played a bit more tonight. So much going on, and I sat down and composed a long post of questions & feedback. If anyone else is playing this, and have answers let me know!

My post on steam forums

— text follows so you don’t have to click through –

Hey, so far loving this game, but there are a few things that either I have questions or feedback on and was hoping someone would shed some light on this:

  1. On the colors of the towers on the map (are they even called towers??) and if they have a dashed circle underneath: first off, am color blind, so what I might call them & what you may call them may be two different things, but in general, I’m not sure which towers I’m supposed to go after. Ones that I’ve already done are way too easy to go again, but they sometimes disappear off the map and sometimes they hang around. Dashed circles around these I read as “go here now”.

  2. When I capture a port (the one with the steam piston for upgrading cannons to level 2), it wasn’t immediately obvious that I had to “claim” the piston to get it shipped to me. I could tell there is some sort of shading there, and I clicked on it more or less accidentally to get me a new piston.

  3. Not sure how a captured port / area goes from being mine to the cultists. I’ll admit there is so much going on in the map that I’m overwhelmed, but I had a port and then I didn’t. I’m not sure how it got recaptured, but a few turns later I could no longer claim a piston and it said the cultists owned it.

  4. What the heck are all the components / parts that you use to get a turret upgraded? Is there any difference of these, or can I just treat all of them the same as “widgets needed to move the upgrade level a bit”??

  5. It wasn’t at all clear how to obtain etherium or how to send spies on missions and after running so low on etherium, I happened to click on one of the ! symbols on the map and lo and behold I could send a spy there. And when they returned, I got etherium! Ok, send all my spies out. Whoops, now out of all the money. (I’m learning, but after maxing out $$ it sure went away fast!)

  6. I think having to click on $ symbol to collect money from a tax area is tedious and serves absolutely no purpose. It’s just turning this game into a clicker game and that bores me. Recommend taking this out & just having them generate income is fine. If you want to have it automagically deposit funds when the green bar is full, then give me a sound or something, but don’t make me click it.

  7. I was at machine gun level 2 and went to buy a new turret and no amount of anything was working. It wasn’t until I noticed “level 2” and then scrolled back to the left by grabbing the bar did I see that I had to first buy the level 1 and choose the upgrade before anything would occur on the default level 2. You need to display the level 1 & let me choose and not just display the level 2 machine gun.

  8. The shotgun challenge level. Ugh. too hard - particularly since all the missions I’m pretty much breezing through.

  9. Not clear if I get bonuses for not getting my tower damaged. It doesn’t appear to be so, but might be nice bonus to hand out if you win w/out any damage at all.

  10. It wasn’t clear that I could move a turret to the bottom until I accidentally did this. It’s a bit obscured and for a brief moment, it looked like it was wrecked & I had lost it somehow. It wasn’t until I clicked on it & moved it that I had a sigh of relief. Suggest making it a bit more obvious that a turret CAN go there, and when it’s there, make it more obvious.

  11. How do you cancel a super charge? Once I activate it, I sometimes want to cancel. Not sure I can.

A few answers based on my experience.

#2 They should really mark the factories differently. There are a couple things you can do to make them stand out. On the bottom right, there is a “More Info” button. That will put an icon of the part near the factory that produces them. What I ended up doing mostly was in the upgrade screen, there is a little “eye” icon near the part. If you click that, it will focus the map on the factory that produces it.

#3 The cultists are always attacking sections of the map. You can see a countdown on any section. No real way to stop them (as far as I found), you just have to retake it. Auto battle makes this pretty painless.

#4 If you are talking about the “Details” that you use to level up your turrets and base. The only difference in them is the value.

#5 Yeah, that’s a $ for Etherium trade.

#6 There are a lot of “mobile” game influences in this game. I completely agree with you.

#8 They get a lot harder… These are puzzles, with some pretty tight timing requirements.

#9 Sometimes you see a couple stars on the tower health bar. Each of those represents a chest. If the health falls below the star, you don’t get that chest. Story and challenge missions don’t have the stars. Of course, you also don’t have to pay for repairs, so that’s a bonus.

#11 If you drag the mouse back to the tower and release, it will cancel it.

Well it’s a factory, for starters. the graphic is different from the towns. The icon on the map has 3 huge smoke stacks sticking up, to help set it off. One nice feature in the game is that when it comes time to upgrade a turret to the next tier, it will show the part you need. There’s a little “eye” icon and if you click it, it will go to the map and show you which factory has that part.

I don’t mind needing to buy the parts for etherium (in fact, that’s a good mechanic to gate it). Waiting for delivery seems. . . pointless? Same for the missions you send your dudes and dudettes on. It feels like a leftover mechanic from when a different design was intended on the game. Sure, you can just go do any old random mission and by the time you are done everything will have arrived. But it’s weird.

Unfortunately, I think colorblindness might be killing you here. Different sections of the map will get zoned off with a darker reddish/brownish border. The zones will have dark stripes of the same color running through them, alternating with the map background. And there will be a little graphic with a countdown timer indicating when the cultits will take the region over.

FWIW there are per-turret parts but they self-filter so you don’t need to worry about using something on the wrong turret or anything. Also, I think the per-turret ones are purple. They just give you the greatest increase is all.

The cost to spend people on missions increases based on something but I’m not sure what. Overall town upgrade level maybe?

The gating in how you unlock upgrades is a bit too arbitrary for my tastes.

Agreed. Another mechanic that feels like it was from an earlier, different design for the game. One where more stuff was time-bound, and where clicking to collect stuff was probably more pervasive (a la a lot of mobile games).

Thanks for the info - someone on the steam thread explained the towers.

I like the game, but hard for me to admit, but I can’t do any of the challenge levels…

I’ve tried the shotgun one 40-50 times. It just is not happening.

The thing is the rest of the game is too easy…I even beat the huge boss to open up england.

But a lot of grinding to get xp to level up and I’m flush with coins and crystals. I’ve ugpraded my warehouse so much just to hold the horde. I am doing too much grinding to get up to 11 / 13 or next level. It seems kind of mindless because all these levels / cities / wharehouses are so easy to take over.

The autobattle is broken. It tells me I’ll lose the entire tower and I can do the level in my sleep with fast-forward on. I don’t get that.

But I can’t touch the challenge levels. Ugh.

I did the first after a couple of tries. I got waxed in one try on the second. They’re odd. I think you have to move your towers back and forth a lot to win the first but I don’t remember clearly.

I didn’t realize at first you could move turrets out of the way of his shock attacks. Once I did, yeah.

The rest of the game isn’t simply easy IMO, but the actual gameplay is slightly tedious. I just don’t find moving towers back to speed up reloads that interesting. I rarely need the special abilities of each tower, or the super abilities. Now I usually just turn on high just to get through battles more quickly. With no in-battle upgrades or anything like that, and battles rarely making me shuffle how towers I deployed (I run cannon, mg, sawblade, electric and only once or twice have I shuffled cannons of the same type to one side for a wave). . . mindless is a good way to describe it.

The strategic layer is interesting except for the weird scaling costs and grind.

that’s weird. I’ve never had autobattle tell me I will lose an entire tower. I’ve opened up Britain and part of Italy but haven’t done any auto battles in the latter region yet. I do know that it forces you to take damage, and of course you get a reduced reward. I find myself sometimes doing potentially auto-able battles simply because I’m bored waiting on my next round of income.

Overall, the game is ok. I love the graphical style; the enemies are largely silhouettes with some detail but they’re wonderfully steampunk. The idea that I’m fighting a war by flying around in my steampunk airship and literally firing defensive towers down into the earth to check advancing hordes is terrific. I just wish the gameplay was more engaging.

I felt lucky to get through the challenge levels. They are puzzles, but even when I completed them, I didn’t really feel confident that I could do it again. I went back and did the first one again to see if I could give you some pointers, and it took me 3 tries to get it again. Here are some tips:

Some of these might be obvious, but…

  • Move the towers from side to side to help. The shotgun can take out all the vehicles in a couple shots.

  • When they aren’t shooting, put them in the middle to reload.

  • You only need to use the one special ability (the tutorial) before the horde of infantry arrives.

  • When the horde starts coming, you should have both towers fully loaded and both with their special ready.

  • Put the machine gun on one side and the shotgun on the other.

  • Have the machine gun on the bottom level, and use its special ability early, as soon as maybe 10 infantry are on the map. This gives it a good trajectory and it should tear through a lot of the first wave.

  • Use the shotgun special ability on the large group in formation on the machine gun side and then switch it back to the other side.

  • When you get to the last 3 armored guys on each side, the machine gun will take out 1 guy and the shotgun will take out two. As soon as they do that, switch sides. The machine gun should take out the remaining guy from the shotgun side, and the shotgun can take out the two from the machine gun side. The machine gun special might be back up by then too, so you can use it to get the final armored guy.

Hope that helps…

Hi everybody! I released my own tower defense game on Steam a few months ago called Defend the Cake. With Defend the Cake, we focused on the strategy of mazing and resource management, with the goal to make each level a unique puzzle with multiple solutions. Your mazing strategy starts with your first decision, as you get to choose where to place your Cake.

Don’t let the cute art style fool you, beating all the levels without any bugs touching the cake can be quite a challenge, and reaching the top of the leaderboard is an even greater challenge!

Here’s our Steam page, I’d love to hear what you think!

Looks fun, if a little too pricey for my blood… (j/k)

Ooo, I don’t think I’ve heard of a TD do that before. That opens up your options straight away.

The cake is a lie!

I like pie.

image

Hmmm $3 on sale, tempting me… Its sorta RTS meets Tower Defense.

Warstone TD just came out of early access (not sure how you do those links to steam). It is pretty neat. Lots of different game modes including coop & PVP. You place your “towers” (soldiers) on stones, but different maps treat stones differently. Sometime you get stones as drops and can place them where you want.

Here are a couple modes that I’ve done so far (there are others too):

  • Traditional fixed placement maps.
  • Maps that allow you to create pathing with stone placement. Not overly complex so far.
  • Maps with two paths, one that you defend and one that you send your soldiers and the opponent is defending. This is also the PVP format.
  • Coop allows two players to defend the same path at the same time.

Additionally, there is this city building/upgrade mechanic. You gain resources by completing maps and quests and then spend those on various upgrades. Warrior (improves your units), Sorcerer (improves your spells) and Treasurer (increases money). I’m not entirely sure about the city building aspect. They throw a lot at you frequently. There is an option to just have the city auto-build, but I haven’t turned that on as I’m still trying to see what they put in here.

There are coop and pvp quests (I assume they are optional). If you pick it up and you want to coop or pvp, I’m happy to help.

Got you covered, just paste the steam url for that page.

Thanks lordkosc, good to know.

If any of you are thinking of getting Warstone and just want single player, that is coming. They are apparently going to add complete offline support (apparently right now, even the normal maps need the server). The developers have been releasing little patches constantly. I haven’t hit any serious issues, but there are certainly bugs. I did lose a little progress (about 20 minutes), that’s about the worst thing I’ve hit.

You could probably hold off a couple weeks and let it stabilize if you want. I completed the campaign and am now trying to get more completion. Fun TD game…