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[Tower Defense] Random Walk TD

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UPDATE 0.32b

- increased scaling difficulty of veteran and insane
- fixed some tooltips
- fixed infinite mode creeps having incorrect HP
- removed Slow from Altar of Darkness
- added ability to show towers' ranges
- improved goblin gold mine efficiency
- you can now see the first wave with -n

I should have some time this week to add more content and such. Please keep the suggestions coming!

EDIT: 0.32b - fixed range being shown when any ability is used

EDIT2: Made new icons for auto micro, needs criticism:
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I really like the new auto micro icons.

One thing I've experienced since the first version, and that bugs me a bit some times, the arrows showing the direction of creep movement seem to be a bit off, especially on crossings or corners. IMO they should be exactly there where the creeps will change their direction, and not a bit before. Also you maybe could add a path-test function where players can send out a invunerable path-tester to clarify how the creeps will walk, not that it's very hard to get the path atm, but it could be a nice addition.

As bhusta already mentioned, it's very un-intuitive that the Soul Chiller loses it's collected souls after the update, and can't geather them anymore. If you think that a slowing and becoming stronger tower is too OP just base them both on a basic tower and the palyers have to choose which one they want.

If I'm not totally wrong the Altar of Darkness DOES in fact auto-cast his slow. Only thing is, it's not applied by it's attacks but by casting. I myself really like it the way it is at the moment, as in boss waves it comes in very handy to keep the bosses away from each other so you always procc the desolate damage for them being alone. This still needs a bit of manual buff placing, but that's ok IMO.

Another thing that might be interesting, if it's possible to do without much loss in performance, would be something like a 'health-stats' in the multiboard for the current wave. It could look like : [Current HP of all living creeps added together] / [Total HP of all creeps of the Wave]. I hope you get what I mean.
 
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the arrows showing the direction of creep movement seem to be a bit off, especially on crossings or corners. IMO they should be exactly there where the creeps will change their direction, and not a bit before.

That's how it was originally, but the problem was that at crossings two arrows would overlap each other and you would have no way of knowing which way the path turns. I suppose I could move them a bit closer, but they'll never be at the exact spot.

Another thing that might be interesting, if it's possible to do without much loss in performance, would be something like a 'health-stats' in the multiboard for the current wave. It could look like : [Current HP of all living creeps added together] / [Total HP of all creeps of the Wave]. I hope you get what I mean.

Will do.
 
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I just got an idea.
How about something like random special positions on the map where one can build towers on. If one builds a tower on these positions the build tower gets a bonus.

For example one can see a special effect like endurance aura somewhere on the ground.
If one builds a tower on it, the build tower attacks faster.
 
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Or maybe as loot from bosses.
Natures Call TD had bosses who dropped specific towers.
Those towers were items which one could build like the human item towers.
Instead of fitting aura/ground towers to a race, you could fit them to the bosses.

Edit: BTW, why don't you make mixed waves? I mean 1 boss and a half creep wave.
 
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Edit: BTW, why don't you make mixed waves? I mean 1 boss and a half creep wave.

Would be difficult to balance.

For example: if you have some fast creeps and some swarm creeps in the same waves and your towers are far enough from the entrance, you can kill the entire fast portion of the wave before the swarm portion even reaches your towers. It's hard to put a number on this.

The game is balanced around:
- the wave structure (as opposed to continuous spawns you see in circle TDs)
- the "creep train", its length and how long towers can hit it
- creep speed
- creep spawn rate (different for each creep type)

Mixing swarm and normal waves doesn't have this problem since they go at the same speed, but if I'm going to mix waves I'll want to have all waves mixable.
One idea I had for getting around the speed difference problem would be for the creeps to all move at the same speed until the encounter your towers, at which point they go at their proper speed, but this is easily countered by just building a few cheap towers at the spawn point.

EDIT: Made a few more auto micro icons and replaced one.
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Update 0.33
- added new icons for auto micro
- simplified path indicator arrow, moved arrows closer to the turn points
- added ability for knife juggler
- Soul Collector/Chiller now keeps damage after upgrade
- changed a few icons
- removed abilites from creep types, each wave now has a chance to have a random ability
- fixed shadow gold mines getting souls even if the unit was killed by a Soul Collector
- added Fortress race (made by Kino)

New race still needs to be balanced, and there will probably be some bugs.
 
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gonna test the changes tomorrow :)

I've had a chat with bhusta recently and we both are of the opinion, that the ballista of the city race is somewhat weak. While I still get it's purpose, I think the gold for it can be invested better in any other of the city-towers. That being said, I also think it does not really fit to the rest of the towers theme-wise. An idea I had was to replace the ballista by something like a 'bus-stop' tower (or carrige station).

Carrige Station
Every Carrige Station has the ability to set a 'destination point', for balance those could only be
other Carrige Sations (so you need at least two of them or you need an ally to work with you).

The Carrige Stations, as the name says, send out 'Carriges' moving at set speed to the
destination point in a straight line (they have no collision and move through towers,
still you want them to move over the path as much as you like, so the positioning would be quite
similar to the Ballista's atm). Once the destination point is reached the Carrige moves back to the
Carrige Station it came from. Only once the Carrige returns to it's starting point, a new one is sent
out after some delay. This fact makes it, so the theoretically infinite range is coupled with dps
anti-proportionally (long travel-distance --> low dps).
While moving, the Carriges deal damage to creeps they pass through.
What do you think about this idea?
 
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Thanks for the suggestion (and the honesty!)

I have two similar things planned already:
- A tower with an attack that follows the path. Version 1: goes along the path on one of the 4 directions until it reaches non-path terrain. Version 2: goes along the path a set distance, following the waypoints.
- A race based on the game OpenTTD, which will have buses and planes and such. More of a joke race, not sure if I'll ever get around to making it.

The ballista is with the city race since the race is heavily influenced by games like Stronghold, where it fits perfectly. But now that I think about it some more, the city race should be more about both structured and improvised defenses, as opposed to regular military gear.

Some options I might use to replace it:
- Sewage system. Built on path, noxious fumes deal damage to ground units.
- Fruit Stand/Granary/something that throws food.

While I probably won't be using the carriage tower, I'm still open to suggestions!

EDIT: Regarding the Ballista's balance, how do you usually use it? If you use it to attack ground along a line, it can be very valuable. The problem I've always had when using it is that the ideal spots are usually taken up by other towers, so perhaps a simple range buff would be good.
 
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Update 0.35
- Creeps won't receive strong abilities early on in the game, e.g. Stun only becomes available at level 9
- Fixed Garrison's Fortified passive (no longer gets stunned)
- Fixed some creeps incorrectly having base armour
- Added Speed bonus ability to creeps
- Reworked Auto Micro into a menu button, still functions as before, added a few more auto micro options
- New Shadow tower: Orb of Desecration
- New Shadow tower: Sentry Ward
- New Goblin tower: Airshipyard
- New Goblin tower: Chemical Retailer
- New City tower: The Nice Pavement
- New City tower: Granary
 
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- New Shadow tower: Sentry Ward
--> gives a lot of gold if you sell it

- New Goblin tower: Chemical Retailer
--> doesn't autocast (I don't know if it is intended)

- New City tower: The Nice Pavement
--> doesn't work with upgraded towers

- I encountered a problem with the new blink ability
--> in some waves units doesn't teleport to the right path and run to the entrance again.
 
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Also is it supposed to be that the upgraded Fortress 'recruit' - Tower (I'm nor sure but it's called 'veteran' I think) does not have the promotions? (neither keeps them nor can you upgrade them again.

Also it would be nice to somehow visualize the damage bonus the 'warlord' - Tower gets from all the Promotions.

'The Nice Pavement' apperently does not work for gates, even when I plat the Pavement under the whole gate. I'd suggest to not use the ground texture change, as sometimes it looks really ugly. I'd rather would either use a custom model or a WallEnd - doodad model, resized so it fits the grid and with negative height so only the tip shows up on the ground. Also I think it would be better to adjust the Nice Pavement to be buildable on the normal size grid. As it is now it's simply not practicable as often half of the Pavement just ends up on the creep path, unused.
 
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Sentry ward - fixed
Chemical retailer - need to fix
Pavement - fixed
Blink - fixed

Recruit - need to fix
Warlord - will change
Pavement for gates - fixed

The terrain change is there to make it look more like a city. A custom model IMO would look worse and might interfere badly with the path arrows. Normal size would be way too... "meh". Difficult placement adds to the decision making when you place it, small size would just be an auto-include for most towers instead of forcing you to play around its size with your base construction.

I think I'm going to go with your idea for the carriage (replacement for ballista). This will interact with the pavement change - it will have better distance or speed while travelling over pavement. Theme-wise, it will be a Marketplace that spawns a horse + cart. Not sure how exactly I want to do the movement yet. Maybe something like it goes to the closest path node, and goes a random direction from there, travelling for X seconds and then disappears.

Another point on the pavement size: I plan to change the terrain path generator shape a bit to make this more practical. The plan is to have rows and columns alternate between 1 space between paths (as it currently is) and 2 spaces. Heck, maybe even 3 spaces at some areas.

As always, thanks for the feedback and keep it coming!
 
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ok thats reasonable, nice plans you have there.

One thing to note would be, that when the Nice Pavement is build on the creep path partially, you don't see it (the path stays the same, or in some cases disappears). If possible you could make it so, when partially built on path the gorund texture changes to a different ground tile, a 'different' Nice Pavement for the creeps.

Well, you could even have some kind of synergy between Marketplace and Granaries... like supplying them with food, ehm I mean ammunition.
 
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Update 0.36
- Added end cinematic with game statistics
- Fixed creeps' blink ability
- Fixed several towers not having correct data - range, sell value
- Chemical Retailer now has an additional anti-air attack
- Changed Warlord's command damage bonus to show on its infocard
- Replaced Ballista with Marketplace

I'm rather pleased with the Ballista's replacement, it might just be more hilarious than the gate :D
 
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Now the blink ability is extremly bugged :D
Especially bosses tend to teleport to random locations the center of the map and are walking weird routes after that.

Atm I have no idea how to play the fortress race. The towers are too weak and there is no good interaction between the towers from my point of view.

I don't really get why the garnison is spell immune. Because of that this tower does not benefit from any buff. And the veteran tower is just redundant because the recruit tower seems to be stronger with promotions.

Also there are often waves which have the banished ability additionally to the announced ability and some spawns are banished multiple times which make them impossible to kill for races like fortress which don't have that much magic power.
 
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Could you please send me a replay/video of those blink bugs? I just checked again, works perfectly on my side.

I don't really get why the garnison is spell immune. Because of that this tower does not benefit from any buff.

Whoops, didn't catch that. Will fix.

Also there are often waves which have the banished ability additionally to the announced ability

Please send a video/screenshot/replay, I haven't been able to reproduce this.

some spawns are banished multiple times which make them impossible to kill for races like fortress which don't have that much magic power.

Many creeps will get their ability off multiple times as it has a cooldown.

A useful strategy is to put a tier 1 tower a few seconds before your main defense to trigger off the ability early so that it's expired by the time it reaches your other towers.

Atm I have no idea how to play the fortress race. The towers are too weak and there is no good interaction between the towers from my point of view.

It has a very strong income mechanic, mercenary is very good for its cost as a stop-gap defense, very long ranges on some towers give them great value. In my test run on the hard difficulty, I finished with ~25k value, more than twice I've achieved with any of the other races.

However the race is still a work-in-progress, need to add some more abilities and flesh out the synergies a bit.

EDIT: Found one bug with blink in that if you attack a creep with blink at the point where one player's path merges with another, it will go to the start of the other player's path.
 
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Well fortress is pretty easy once you figure it out:

build a early recruit and a fire camp --> upgrade the fire camp (it's cheaper than you think) --> build more recruits --> start to upgrade the attack speed Promotion --> build a optional quarter master --> once you are rather stable start to upgrade the gold generating Promotion --> profit + win
 
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I attached a replay.

The buggyness starts at level 20 and continues in level 22 and 29.

Level 20 is a boss blink level and 29 a swarm blink level.
Level 22 is a banished level. What I meant with multiple usage of the ability is that some units have no cooldown on it.
 

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one single haunted mine has a maximum on 20. The second Mine you build adds 20 to the maximum, and so on.
 
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Update 0.37
- Camera bounds now shrink to the size of the maze
- Fixed Fortified ability preventing positive buffs
- Fixed various bugs related to creep abilities
- Marketplace's cart now aims for a creep instead of picking a random direction
- Call to Arms now has a militia limit
- End-game stats now shown on defeat as well
- New creep ability: Growing Plate
- Reduced max maze size slightly
- When a player leaves, their resources are divided among remaining players and they no longer drain income
- When upgrading a barracks, footmen are now removed
- New tileset: Ashenvale


Haven't reworked the fortress race yet, still trying to decide how exactly to do it.
 

Ardenian

A

Ardenian

Could you add a shared control to left players, please ?

As you can see in the infinite replay I sent you, a player built a treasury at an important tile and ruined a bit our build, but he did not listen to the other players.
Some time later he left and there was this little treasury, blocking our build.
I would be glad if you think about it.
 

Ardenian

A

Ardenian

Here is a replay of v037, it is available on MakeMeHost now.

One thing I can remember is that one of the abilities of Fire Pit or Banner ( Fortress Builder) states to give bonus to allied buildings, whereas it actually does to player-owned only.
 
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I must say, I really love this.

We need more time in the beginning to see what our builders do and examine the path. Give us an extra 30 seconds.

Air on wave 1 is not cool. Players who start with ground-only towers are then useless. This is artificial difficulty; something that anyone who's played enough will easily counter simply by starting with towers that hit air. Difficulty that affects only new players and not experienced players is not what you want. It's also lame that air waves on round 1 are usually spread out so much that the city builder is completely defenseless against them; its cheapest tower is 30g, hits ground only, and its next tower, 95g with anti-air, is still useless against them because they are spread out more than its splash radius so that it still hits only one enemy (and leaves them with 1-15% health).

I like that the builder moves instantly to build sites or wherever you order him to. I wish every TD would use that, and I don't know why I never thought of it myself. I'll be doing that in my TD as well, thank you.

The Soul Catcher stops gaining damage after you upgrade it. Is this intentional? This is very disappointing. You should make it colored in the tooltip that it stops gaining damage, if that's what you want it to do.

It might be a good idea to change the soul catcher into a tower hero; instead of automatically gaining X amount of damage, it could gain points to spend on bonuses for the owner to choose, such as damage, slow (increasing slow and duration slightly with each point), attack speed, etc.

It seems like, with shared income, you get the income shared by the rest of your team excluding yourself. This is kind of lame, because it essentially means that the people who are producing the most income receive the least amount of shared income, making it so that expensive builders like the city builders aren't actually getting the extra income they're focusing on because while other players are getting half of their high income, they're getting half of the minuscule income generated by other players.

It would be cool if players could still vote for infinite mode during the game.

For some more terrain variety, you could use doodads with replaceable textures to really enhance the randomly generated terrain. You could either do this completely randomly, or you could have the textures they use be dependent on the dominant tileset.

In case you aren't familiar with replaceable textures, here's a tutorial on it:

http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/...odad-without-importing-several-models-222212/

I suppose if the destructibles have pathing, like trees, you'd want to have it check for the distance to the path before placing them so they don't get in players' way.

Edit: I opened up your map. Your 5-second imported audio is 900 KB. You should really compress it and use a different format. You could easily get it to under 100 KB and still sound great. It's also way too loud.
 
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Air on wave 1 is not cool. Players who start with ground-only towers are then useless. This is artificial difficulty; something that anyone who's played enough will easily counter simply by starting with towers that hit air. Difficulty that affects only new players and not experienced players is not what you want. It's also lame that air waves on round 1 are usually spread out so much that the city builder is completely defenseless against them; its cheapest tower is 30g, hits ground only, and its next tower, 95g with anti-air, is still useless against them because they are spread out more than its splash radius so that it still hits only one enemy.

Fair point, I'll change it.

The Soul Catcher stops gaining damage after you upgrade it. Is this intentional? This is very disappointing. You should make it colored in the tooltip that it stops gaining damage, if that's what you want it to do.

It's intentional.

Balance-wise, Soul Catchers are not valuable if they don't get at least a certain amount of kills. The upgrade was added to give some purpose to Soul Catchers built late game. I don't really mind either way, you're not the first to request this so I think I'll just add the ability for the upgrade as well.

It might be a good idea to change the soul catcher into a tower hero; instead of automatically gaining X amount of damage, it could gain points to spend on bonuses for the owner to choose, such as damage, slow (increasing slow and duration slightly with each point), attack speed, etc.

I'll be adding a hero race, and I want to avoid race redundancy. I might add an upgrade for the Soul Catcher or Shadow Gold Mine that can use souls as currency for various things, but not as a hero tower.

It seems like, with shared income, you get the income shared by the rest of your team excluding yourself. This is kind of lame, because it essentially means that the people who are producing the most income receive the least amount of shared income, making it so that expensive builders like the city builders aren't actually getting the extra income they're focusing on because while other players are getting half of their high income, they're getting half of the minuscule income generated by other players.

To be honest I haven't played in multiplayer enough to have much of an opinion on this. It's shared because too often I've played TDs where it's rewarding for one player to just spam gold mines all throughout the game and have 10x more gold than everyone else by the end, any vast discrepancy in value like that is pretty lame. Many TDs often also devolve into one player at the goal getting all the kills and everyone else thinking it's lame.

Currently, the breakdown is:
50% to self
remaining 50% is divided among all players, including yourself

As it is you get more out of it than your team. If other players aren't building any gold mines at all, the problem is not so much the mechanic but rather their lack of teamwork.

If you have another solution, please advise.

It would be cool if players could still vote for infinite mode during the game.

Excellent idea, I'll add this.

For some more terrain variety, you could use doodads with replaceable textures to really enhance the randomly generated terrain. You could either do this completely randomly, or you could have the textures they use be dependent on the dominant tileset.

In case you aren't familiar with replaceable textures, here's a tutorial on it:

How To Change Textures on a Tree or other Doodad (Without importing several models)

I've been meaning to look for that tutorial in order to add trees, thanks for the link :)

Edit: I opened up your map. Your 5-second imported audio is 900 KB. You should really compress it and use a different format. You could easily get it to under 100 KB and still sound great. It's also way too loud.

Hehe, that's one of those spur-of-the-moment things that skipped the QC filter :p (will fix)
 
I've been meaning to look for that tutorial in order to add trees, thanks for the link :)

You mean you'd already known of that tutorial before and needed to find it again? Cool! That makes me happy because I actually wrote that tutorial.:ogre_love:
I didn't realize anyone had even read it.:grin:

To be honest I haven't played in multiplayer enough to have much of an opinion on this. It's shared because too often I've played TDs where it's rewarding for one player to just spam gold mines all throughout the game and have 10x more gold than everyone else by the end, any vast discrepancy in value like that is pretty lame. Many TDs often also devolve into one player at the goal getting all the kills and everyone else thinking it's lame.

If a player wants to spam gold mines, what's the harm in that? That's their decision, and they pay for it by not having the gold they'd spent on the mines for immediate use on towers. You could also fix this by changing it into an upgrade that does the same thing, with the same cost, only with the cost increasing by 5 gold per level. This isn't much of a difference, but it's enough that players who spam gold mines won't be getting absurd profit and players who make a few gold mines won't really be penalized. You could still add 30% of the income to the shared pool, but keep 70% of it for the player. The problem with sharing the gold 50/50 is that it cuts the payment received by the creating player in half. This means that it will take 20 levels just to get their money back, so while they're helping the team, they're really leaving themselves too broke to get their gold's worth for defense. After 20 painstaking levels, they finally get their money back that they'd spent (200 spent, 20 per level, receiving 50% of that), and then make a short profit before the game ends (unless playing infinite levels). Unless they build their banks on round 1, they're not even making profit. You could also help players get their money back faster without making the profit OP by, rather than giving 20 per level as the base, giving 25 until the player has received the cost back for that bank and then giving only 15 for each level afterwards. This would help with both the early-game uselessness of banks and the late-game OPness of banks.

You could also split the gold from kills based on the total damage dealt by each player at the end of each wave. Sure, this doesn't take into account people who help with slows and buffs, but neither do kill rewards; at least this would fix the issue of one person weakening everything and getting no gold because it's all finished off by the person at the back.
 
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Yep, it caught my eye when you posted it. Seemed like something I'd have a use for one day, but this day is much later than anticipated!

Btw, formatting error:
Implementing the New Model

Import the new model into your map by opening up the World Editor, opening your map, clicking Module => Import Manager, right clicking in the empty box, clicking Import File, and finding your tree.

Once you've imported the model, you will need to save your map and restart the editor because imported content needs to be loaded upon the initiation of the editor.

Now that you've done this, simply copy and paste a barrel. I use them just in case, since they are not set up with multiple variations, and other reasons. Variations can be changed on any destructible.

Change the model of the barrel to your imported tree. Your imported model will not be in the normal list of models. To the left of the massive list of models, you will see three words with click bubbles next to them: Preset, Import and Custom. Be sure to click the box next to Import, and find your tree model.

( at the end)
 
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Here is a replay of v037, it is available on MakeMeHost now.

One thing I can remember is that one of the abilities of Fire Pit or Banner ( Fortress Builder) states to give bonus to allied buildings, whereas it actually does to player-owned only.

Finally had a look at this, thanks for providing it as always :)

Put another 5-10 bugs on the list from watching.

By the way, the Fortress builder will be mostly reworked.
 
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