OK, so we DO expect you to be superhuman for future reference, you have proven that you are and if I had a million dollars I would hire you and a few other select people to make video games for my personal enjoyment full time.
Anyways... that fantasy aside.
If you are worried about people not seeing your creeps I had this idea for making a game similar to "simbase" with the units from your game... basically you would have an immobile "tower" as your home-base and it could build factories, defence towers and nano-towers within a limited range... factories can produce creeps... nano-towers can build defence towers... you would basically be tasked to send waves of creeps against the opponents forces... glitch would be you don't get more resources to build anything until you kill the other guys creeps or towers... so the trick would be to use your starting resources to build some facs and some upgrades and some creeps during a LUA implimented "staging period" where the creeps would be unable to leave a certain range from the base-tower...
Tower Defence MOD but Not Tower Defence Discussion
Moderator: Moderators
Problem would be that that would mean you're worse off for attacking since anything you send at the enemy only bolsters his money and if he defends right won't net you much income. If each wave gives you less return than it costs you your enemy can just wait until you run dry and then use all his gained resources to crush you.
Yeah. I have a different idea... I'm not sure how exactly it would work, but here's a vague idea:
You have two kinds of units, creeps and towers. You have two kinds of resources - metal and energy. You get a fixed income of both.
Metal builds turrets, energy builds creep-factories (that build creeps for free). Creeps can't hurt (or even see) other creeps, towers can't hurt other towers. Creeps have a limited lifespan, so you HAVE to attack or they're wasted. Construction-towers, needed to expand the area of your base, take an even-mix of both.
Every building and creep you destroy gets you frag-points (obviously, buildings are worth way more than creeps). Losing creeps to their lifespan costs you frag-points (creeps must die by violence). Wasting energy costs you frag-points. Idle factories cost you frag-points. You must build attackers, and you must attack.
Once you get a set amount of frag-points, the end-game artillery is unlocked, which is basically buying nukes and berthas - they all take an even mix of metal and energy. They kick ass, but take a simply enormous amount of space in your base (GundamComm size), so you must plan for large bases if you want to accommodate them in any defendable way. There is no defense against end-game artillery, not for creeps or turrets.
You make the lines perfectly delineated: anything to do with defense is 100% useless on offense (and costs metal) anything to do with offense is 100% useless on defense (and costs energy). Peeper-creeps can't even see enemy creeps. Force the player to do an even mix, and to output at a fixed rate (no silos).
You're really playing two separate games until the "Endgame" begins - one defense game, and one attack game. The only place they intersect is that your defense is responsible for protecting your creepfacs, and your creeps can help your defense by destroying his creepfacs. Otherwise, offense and defense are utterly disconnected.
Idunno, that's just my weird first-thought. So there is no "porcing" or "rushing" - you just crank out the default amounts of each, trying to mix and layout the best and use the best tactics for ordering them, trying to score more points so you can be the first to unlock the endgame gear.
You have two kinds of units, creeps and towers. You have two kinds of resources - metal and energy. You get a fixed income of both.
Metal builds turrets, energy builds creep-factories (that build creeps for free). Creeps can't hurt (or even see) other creeps, towers can't hurt other towers. Creeps have a limited lifespan, so you HAVE to attack or they're wasted. Construction-towers, needed to expand the area of your base, take an even-mix of both.
Every building and creep you destroy gets you frag-points (obviously, buildings are worth way more than creeps). Losing creeps to their lifespan costs you frag-points (creeps must die by violence). Wasting energy costs you frag-points. Idle factories cost you frag-points. You must build attackers, and you must attack.
Once you get a set amount of frag-points, the end-game artillery is unlocked, which is basically buying nukes and berthas - they all take an even mix of metal and energy. They kick ass, but take a simply enormous amount of space in your base (GundamComm size), so you must plan for large bases if you want to accommodate them in any defendable way. There is no defense against end-game artillery, not for creeps or turrets.
You make the lines perfectly delineated: anything to do with defense is 100% useless on offense (and costs metal) anything to do with offense is 100% useless on defense (and costs energy). Peeper-creeps can't even see enemy creeps. Force the player to do an even mix, and to output at a fixed rate (no silos).
You're really playing two separate games until the "Endgame" begins - one defense game, and one attack game. The only place they intersect is that your defense is responsible for protecting your creepfacs, and your creeps can help your defense by destroying his creepfacs. Otherwise, offense and defense are utterly disconnected.
Idunno, that's just my weird first-thought. So there is no "porcing" or "rushing" - you just crank out the default amounts of each, trying to mix and layout the best and use the best tactics for ordering them, trying to score more points so you can be the first to unlock the endgame gear.
Er... that would just be a slippery-slope speed game. It wouldn't be terribly fun, imo, because between good players, it'd either be pure luck or one mistake, and the game would be over, moreover there's no real point in capturing ground, or even building creeps, once you had enough towers with enough power that you were maximizing your ROI...
I have this vision where two very good players, playing furiously for the first 15 minutes, suddenly realize that neither guy is building more Creeps, because if they do, they're feeding kills to the other guy, faster than they are gaining them... and the towers just sit there, ignoring each other... stalemate.
If the towers could be used to spiderweb and eventually perform a fungal strat, that'd be worth playing, but it'd be basically BA with all of the defenses, no economy, and just some kamakazi bomb-bots... kind've boring, without meaningful manuever of forces, imo.
I have this vision where two very good players, playing furiously for the first 15 minutes, suddenly realize that neither guy is building more Creeps, because if they do, they're feeding kills to the other guy, faster than they are gaining them... and the towers just sit there, ignoring each other... stalemate.
If the towers could be used to spiderweb and eventually perform a fungal strat, that'd be worth playing, but it'd be basically BA with all of the defenses, no economy, and just some kamakazi bomb-bots... kind've boring, without meaningful manuever of forces, imo.
Good point. I was trying to work around it with my thought of forcing players to build creeps... but it's just a workaround for a bad flaw - the fact that you don't WANT to attack.
Okay, plan-B. Ditch the "frags" idea, and the "free creeps" idea. The objective is to build some victory-structures. We'll call them "Nodes". Nodes take metal to build. When you build X "Nodes" (say, 20? 100?) you win (or unlock artillery - same thing, really).
The catch is that Nodes take a lot of space. As in, you'll need a substantial base to defend each one. So it's a race. At the same time, you have a fixed income of energy to build creeps with. You're constantly making more creeps, but he's constantly building more base. To keep the action going, creeps still have a lifespan - they die with time.
Obviously, there's a problem - his defensive firepower is increasing linearly, while your offensive output plateaus once you have enough factories to hit the energy-cap. But the trick is that he also needs to linearly expand his territory. His commander is a nigh-invincible wall of firepower, but he'll rapidly expand out of his commander's defensive range.
If he plays too defensively (spending metal money on turrets instead of nodes) you'll win the race. If he plays to ambitiously (spamming nodes instead of turrets) then you might be able to get some creeps through.
How's that sound?
edit: obviously, you're quite right that leaving Creeps as kamikaze-bombs would be dull. You'd want scout-creeps, repair-creeps, can-creeps, long-ranged-creeps, etc.
Okay, plan-B. Ditch the "frags" idea, and the "free creeps" idea. The objective is to build some victory-structures. We'll call them "Nodes". Nodes take metal to build. When you build X "Nodes" (say, 20? 100?) you win (or unlock artillery - same thing, really).
The catch is that Nodes take a lot of space. As in, you'll need a substantial base to defend each one. So it's a race. At the same time, you have a fixed income of energy to build creeps with. You're constantly making more creeps, but he's constantly building more base. To keep the action going, creeps still have a lifespan - they die with time.
Obviously, there's a problem - his defensive firepower is increasing linearly, while your offensive output plateaus once you have enough factories to hit the energy-cap. But the trick is that he also needs to linearly expand his territory. His commander is a nigh-invincible wall of firepower, but he'll rapidly expand out of his commander's defensive range.
If he plays too defensively (spending metal money on turrets instead of nodes) you'll win the race. If he plays to ambitiously (spamming nodes instead of turrets) then you might be able to get some creeps through.
How's that sound?
edit: obviously, you're quite right that leaving Creeps as kamikaze-bombs would be dull. You'd want scout-creeps, repair-creeps, can-creeps, long-ranged-creeps, etc.
Last edited by Pxtl on 13 Nov 2007, 21:35, edited 1 time in total.
Both players play both. Both players are spamming creeps and defenses - it's just that the creeps never interact.Argh wrote:Might be better. So, how does the creep player win?
edit: thinking it over, this might be interesting for FFA. In a normal FFA TA game, you want to wipe out the weakest player to steal his turf and metal. In this game, harming a weak player is a waste of time - at best, you'll beat him back to his commander, but you probably won't be able to kill it. You might be able to temporarly harm his creepfac capacity, but that's it. On the other hand, you'll be ignoring the player with the most nodes. So smart players would rapidly funnel all their creeps towards the winning players. You could even have alliances formed on the fly, since your creeps don't interfere with each other. Imagine a big counter over each comm, always visible from map-view, showing the node-count for that player.
FFA games would be super-long though, since you'd have to be hyper-defensive in your expansion to handle the risk that, if you take the lead, you'll have a triple or quadruple dosage of creeps coming down your throat. Perhaps you'd even need to adjust the unit-stats depending on the number of players.
Last edited by Pxtl on 13 Nov 2007, 21:43, edited 1 time in total.
Hmm. Might be more fun if the two sides were just one thing, then all the micro could be concentrated for better gameplay- forced-fire turrets, Creeps that need micro to place well, etc.
Also, there's the time factor... the game would be balanced properly on exactly ONE size of map... and then, only with exactly two players, at precise start positions, or four, if they were all in corners.
Looks like you need to flesh this out and put together a basic demo- even without LUA, you can build almost all of it... heck, you could skip LUA entirely, and just make the game-winnah structures take forever to make (use of noAssist tags, etc., to make sure that it never goes OTA-style exponential)...
Hey, and here's a thought... the creep side would have a factory that could build uber-creeps, that cost a lot... if you gave the tower side some towers that could, if in range, destroy creep factories, you'd have both sides able to threaten each other, just different tradeoffs
Also, there's the time factor... the game would be balanced properly on exactly ONE size of map... and then, only with exactly two players, at precise start positions, or four, if they were all in corners.
Looks like you need to flesh this out and put together a basic demo- even without LUA, you can build almost all of it... heck, you could skip LUA entirely, and just make the game-winnah structures take forever to make (use of noAssist tags, etc., to make sure that it never goes OTA-style exponential)...
Hey, and here's a thought... the creep side would have a factory that could build uber-creeps, that cost a lot... if you gave the tower side some towers that could, if in range, destroy creep factories, you'd have both sides able to threaten each other, just different tradeoffs
I'm tempted. I'm wrapping up a mod-tool project (fixing up my old repricer into the all-singing, all-dancing XML-driven mutator-tool, should be done within the month) and starting some modeling stuff.... but I might drop those to try this. Really, though, I'm just idea-smithing here. Bad habit of mine.
If you had only two teams and you wanted to do the asymmetric attacker/defender game, you could go with the UT-AS approach: take turns. Either play for fixed-time (team with most nodes at the end of their defense-round wins) or play for fixed-goal (defender team with the shortest time-to-20-nodes wins).
If you had only two teams and you wanted to do the asymmetric attacker/defender game, you could go with the UT-AS approach: take turns. Either play for fixed-time (team with most nodes at the end of their defense-round wins) or play for fixed-goal (defender team with the shortest time-to-20-nodes wins).
As interesting as this all sounds (and it does sound interesting to be sure), another thread please? Kinda off topic 
And dont worry, Tower Defense is not dead. Just me and smoth have lots of things keeping us busy with Life right now, so its on hold till we get some more time. As I mentioned earlier, Im going to have plenty of spare time in a month or so, and hopefully smoth does as well, so we can get this thing going again.
And dont worry, Tower Defense is not dead. Just me and smoth have lots of things keeping us busy with Life right now, so its on hold till we get some more time. As I mentioned earlier, Im going to have plenty of spare time in a month or so, and hopefully smoth does as well, so we can get this thing going again.
My one idea for balancing was that you get one of the resources by damaging the opponents stuff... this would encourage people to attack instead of just holeing up and waiting for the opponent's attack (leading to the "who will attack first" stalemate)... My idea was, towers can kill creeps, creeps can kill towers but not creeps... killing towers gets metal, killing creeps gets energy, building towers costs metal, building creeps costs energy... one glitch with this is that creeps could just line up and act as a wall... but if we use the "creeps die after a while" idea than basically your wasting your creeps if you use them as walls.
well, feel free to plan all sorts of random things out. After we have tower defense ready for release I will be making CC and GPL releases to make it license compatible for whatever you blokes need.
Honestly, it is the team's perspective to make one release that can serve as a base for many many mutators. As mutators are created and finished we can add them to towerdefense. This would give players the chance to download many game modules in one package.
Honestly, it is the team's perspective to make one release that can serve as a base for many many mutators. As mutators are created and finished we can add them to towerdefense. This would give players the chance to download many game modules in one package.
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Foxomaniac
- Posts: 691
- Joined: 18 Jan 2006, 16:59
what you guys are discussing here is a more complex **** Tower wars.
How it works in wc3 :
You basically start with a set amount of gold and a fixed income of gold every X seconds.
Sending creeps (a simple click-an-icon-and-watch-creep-go / fire and forget interface is used) increases said income while building towers does not give you any income.
Towers are used to obviously, defend - creeps that you kill give around 10% of their cost to you in gold. This creates temporary bursts of income.
The objective is to stick X amount of creeps into the other team's point.
Personally, I dislike the tower wars variant on TD maps for the following reasons :
1. If one person on your team doesn't send creeps or your team simply doesn't spam creep-sending enough you're bound to lose - the rising costs of towers and creeps makes lagging behind even by a mere couple of gold very painful.
2. This variant focuses heavily on creeps and as such, tower advancement / progression is quite neglected - most maps try to solve this by allowing a large choice of "races" but even then, each race mostly have 4 to 6 towers and 2 to 3 upgrades of said tower as well as a few global-upgrades if possible.
3. The temporary income boost barely helps in such maps - it's basically a simon-says in disguise - if you make a mistake or two, you're scrooged.
FOOXEH DEMANDZ MOAR CO-OP TOWER DFENS / MULTIPLAYER SURVIVAL STYLE TD :0.
Do those two kinds first - make them full of nifty features and stuff that wasn't ever done in TDs and you'll have a very long-lasting TD. Don't forget the challenge element of difficulty and choice of said difficulty but at the same time don't make the difficulty ramp up supa-dupa high. A few TDs I played were easy on "easy" but once I tried medium - it felt more like "lolhard" instead of "medium".
Fooxeh out.
How it works in wc3 :
You basically start with a set amount of gold and a fixed income of gold every X seconds.
Sending creeps (a simple click-an-icon-and-watch-creep-go / fire and forget interface is used) increases said income while building towers does not give you any income.
Towers are used to obviously, defend - creeps that you kill give around 10% of their cost to you in gold. This creates temporary bursts of income.
The objective is to stick X amount of creeps into the other team's point.
Personally, I dislike the tower wars variant on TD maps for the following reasons :
1. If one person on your team doesn't send creeps or your team simply doesn't spam creep-sending enough you're bound to lose - the rising costs of towers and creeps makes lagging behind even by a mere couple of gold very painful.
2. This variant focuses heavily on creeps and as such, tower advancement / progression is quite neglected - most maps try to solve this by allowing a large choice of "races" but even then, each race mostly have 4 to 6 towers and 2 to 3 upgrades of said tower as well as a few global-upgrades if possible.
3. The temporary income boost barely helps in such maps - it's basically a simon-says in disguise - if you make a mistake or two, you're scrooged.
FOOXEH DEMANDZ MOAR CO-OP TOWER DFENS / MULTIPLAYER SURVIVAL STYLE TD :0.
Do those two kinds first - make them full of nifty features and stuff that wasn't ever done in TDs and you'll have a very long-lasting TD. Don't forget the challenge element of difficulty and choice of said difficulty but at the same time don't make the difficulty ramp up supa-dupa high. A few TDs I played were easy on "easy" but once I tried medium - it felt more like "lolhard" instead of "medium".
Fooxeh out.
In a normal FFA TA game, I leave the weakest player alone because I know he won't pose me a threat, and that I can always attack him later. Instead I focus on the most developped player, because if I don't reduce his base/army asap, he and not me is gonna win.Pxtl wrote:In a normal FFA TA game, you want to wipe out the weakest player to steal his turf and metal.
Hah, hah hah hah! How funny that is. I remember multiple times in EE and BA when things went awry due to newbishness of killing a weakling.
I almost got myself killed, I didn't know RAI was so badass at my mod. I had been scouting with infantry and doing light probes with my vehicles, till I found an enemy. I slaughtered him fairly easily, in roughly 7 minutes or so. I turn around and notice that my line is being ripped about by... How many was it? I can scarcely remember... 5 or 6 of my heaviest t1 vehicles. They are support artillery, and will wreak havoc on any enemy. They also have the most HP of T1 and a medium speed. He also had several scouts and armored cars rushing past my defences. I barely pulled my force off the crippled newb-bot in time to repel his attack. I, in the end, got around to killing him, but he also had a very strong defensive line, something rarely found in a bot match. His massed army of infantry didn't help much either...
So, no, don't kill the weakest guy first unless you can utterly steamroll him. If you do, your back and flanks will be completely opened to be annihilated.
I almost got myself killed, I didn't know RAI was so badass at my mod. I had been scouting with infantry and doing light probes with my vehicles, till I found an enemy. I slaughtered him fairly easily, in roughly 7 minutes or so. I turn around and notice that my line is being ripped about by... How many was it? I can scarcely remember... 5 or 6 of my heaviest t1 vehicles. They are support artillery, and will wreak havoc on any enemy. They also have the most HP of T1 and a medium speed. He also had several scouts and armored cars rushing past my defences. I barely pulled my force off the crippled newb-bot in time to repel his attack. I, in the end, got around to killing him, but he also had a very strong defensive line, something rarely found in a bot match. His massed army of infantry didn't help much either...
So, no, don't kill the weakest guy first unless you can utterly steamroll him. If you do, your back and flanks will be completely opened to be annihilated.
In a normal FFA I seek to pit the two strongest of the others in play against each other while minimizing my losses and visible strength.zwzsg wrote:In a normal FFA TA game, I leave the weakest player alone because I know he won't pose me a threat, and that I can always attack him later. Instead I focus on the most developped player, because if I don't reduce his base/army asap, he and not me is gonna win.Pxtl wrote:In a normal FFA TA game, you want to wipe out the weakest player to steal his turf and metal.
Don't make me split again plz (Just Kidding)
Anyways, I think that co-op tower defense is much more important then the "FFA" version I suggested... All I was really thinking is smoth has created all these awesome Units and it would be a shame if they were only used in one game-type.
I had another idea based on all the stuff you've been mentioning.
So you have your two players, they start with 1000m and 1000e, towers cost m, creeps cost e. You're unspent e goes down slowly no matter what you do, if you are spending the e faster then it's "going down" you only lose what you are spending (say you loose 10 e a tick, if you spend 1 e a tick you lose 9 a tick due to this rule, if you spend 11 you loose 0 due to this rule)... you GAIN E by doing damage to opponents structures and you gain M by killing opponents creeps.
wait... still doesn't work... will keep thinking.
(Just Kidding)Anyways, I think that co-op tower defense is much more important then the "FFA" version I suggested... All I was really thinking is smoth has created all these awesome Units and it would be a shame if they were only used in one game-type.
I had another idea based on all the stuff you've been mentioning.
So you have your two players, they start with 1000m and 1000e, towers cost m, creeps cost e. You're unspent e goes down slowly no matter what you do, if you are spending the e faster then it's "going down" you only lose what you are spending (say you loose 10 e a tick, if you spend 1 e a tick you lose 9 a tick due to this rule, if you spend 11 you loose 0 due to this rule)... you GAIN E by doing damage to opponents structures and you gain M by killing opponents creeps.
wait... still doesn't work... will keep thinking.