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:
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.
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.
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.
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%).
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.
There’s special goals on maps that, if completed, yield rewards.
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.
I haven’t played 2 at all, but the levels in the first game were pretty easy unless you cranked up the difficulty with runes.
I haven’t seen 50 items in a map yet. The most was 8 or 9. But I haven’t really pushed using runes that much. And I started massively upgrading them whenever I get the chance (same with items). At least it’s quick to fill up the transmogriphication thingy. Although I think permanent runes would be better than making them consumable (maybe have rare runes that are 1-time use, but the basic runes are all like the first game).
That said, I would prefer to get some resource I could in turn spend rolling for new items/runes at my leisure. Because as soon as the items start pouring in seriously it will get more tedious. Also, the blue background on magic tier items isn’t different enough from the black.
As for difficulty I found the first idk, maybe 8-9, maps easy and I think I only missed one goal. But they started to get a little more interesting after that I thought. The random maps that drop can be really weird. Apparently we will be able to download user maps at some point. I do think the traps are much more powerful now, between the items and skill trees and the more varied upgrade paths. Harpoon traps make good killers now (although it’s pricey to get the first proper upgrade for that: 398 or so base gold).
I’ve completed the DW2 (@ level 146) and got all but 2 achievements (Technically Legal, which I think is bugged, and the one for killing 1 million enemies). I think the traps are just too powerful, possibly as a result of item and skill combinations, but I barely experimented with traps after the first 12 levels or so. Darts, lightning, and barrier is enough to take out pretty much everything. I’m pretty sure I remember respec’ing in the original for different maps. I never respec’d a single time in this one.
Inventory management is a real pain. I actually got >100 items in a couple maps. Rushing all the waves results in insane +drop rates. I finally just gave up managing inventory and let the items just disappear (if your inventory is full they just disappear).
A lot of the rune combinations I tried ended up with a lot +enemy weight gain, which makes harpoons, push trap, spring trap, etc almost worthless. I very much prefer the way the first game handled runes.
Would be hard for me to recommend this one, certainly not over the first, but I’m not sure I’d say this is even worth playing.
re-post from bargain thread:
Anomaly on sale at gamersgate. All the games for 3.75$ or anomaly 2 for 1.34$
Reviews on steam are pretty good. At that price, I couldn’t resist.
They are patching DW2 with balance changes (already 4 patches). So it might be better to wait a bit before playing. I’m 100% already (1 achievement fixed and they reduced number of kills needed to 100k from 1 million) and have uninstalled, but if they keep it up it might be worth me starting over when they’ve got it all balanced and the inventory stuff has had some time to get reworked.
Ok, you guys brought this on yourselves. I’ve pointed Kael over here to see about making the ultimate tower defense game.
A pretty Gemcraft with an improved gem creation tool?
And the ability to have lots and lots of baduns on the screen without slowing down the screen like the last Gemcraft Chasing Shadows.