Suto's Castle TD

[Suto]

Welcome to my first Warcraft 3 mapping project, i started working on this map in the beginning of February 2008, until now there only existed a German review of it. This is a Tower Defense Team Survival for 1-8 players. Every teams consists of a maximum of 4 players which share one Castle. Each team defends one Force Crystal, the crystal power is lowered once an enemy reaches it, in case it drops down to zero the side has lost the game. The map offers a Survival Mode as well a special Multiple Wave Race Mode. At the beginning of a game every player select one out of 9 leaders which will help you defend your own castle or give the other castle a harder time to survive.

This map is finished, of course i will continue working on it, fixing bugs, and doing balancing work if necessary.

Download: Version 1.2

Changes in version 1.2 (July 15th 2010):

- fixed H2I bugs to allow the map beeing played on the latest WC3 version
- fixed a glitch with magic and fog towers not attacking correctly.

Game Modes:

Survival:
In this mode it is your target to just stay alive. The rounds will spawn after each other with a short break between them.

Multiple Wave Race:
This is a very unique mode, recommended for experienced players - In this mode only the attackers of the first round spawn normally, after that you need to kill an attacker of the current round to spawn one of the next round. The boss spawns as soon as 2/3 of the attackers of the previous round are dead, but watch out, because the boss spawns even if your team mates are still fighting their attackers. The winner is who kills all 50 Waves first

Difficulty Levels & Handicap:
This map offers 4 different difficulties, all of them are beatable but the hardest one, really needs some time before you can beat it. In case experienced players want to have an interesting match against newbies they can increase the HP of their creeps before the first round started with the -hc [1-100] command.

Gold and Reputation:
Gold is the main resource in the map, you need it to construct towers, to research, to repair your castle gates or to replenish your crystal power. I implemented a bounty sharing option to prevent strong players from being able to kill everything alone, at the beginning of the game you can choose from the following options: 50% / 50%, 75% / 25%, Fair – The killer of a unit gets a percentage of the bounty, the rest goes to the rightful "owner" of the creep. In case you select fair, the rightful owner will always get 100% of the bounty no matter who killed the creep. The bounty of bosses will always go to its owner.
The second resource is your Reputation, you need it to build more andvanced towers. You gain reputation from killing champion units or bosses. The bounty sharing system does not apply to the reputation and it will always be shared "fair".

Champions:

In each wave (exept the boss waves) spawns one champion, it is an elite units which bestows the creeps around it with special random auras. Killing them will increase your reputation by one.

Tower:
There is a wide array of towers that everyone can build as well as some unique towers which can only be build if you chose the corresponding leader.
There are five damage and armor types, each of it has its strength and weaknesses, here are some examples:

Normal tower – Hammer & Glaive Tower (strong against medium armor)
Piercing tower – Fast Arrow & Crossbow Tower (strong against light armor)
Air Destroyer tower – Ballista & Storm Tower (very potent against air units)
Siege tower – Cannon & Rock tosser Tower(strong against fortified armor)
Magic towers – Chain and Forked Lightning, Fire Demon and Elemental Tower (strong against heavy armor)
Hero towers Headhunter, Bountyhunter, Trapper (strong against Bosses and champions)
Support – Poison, Frost and Fog Tower (slow effect), Buff Tower
Aura – Blood & Wind Aura Tower (increase damage or attack speed of touching, friendly, non magic towers)
Traps – Impaler, Tosser, Roaster, Mega bomb, Blood Altar, Runestone of Wind (special)
Unique(Chaos Damage) – Cursing, Shredder,Magic Aura, Conversion & Teleport Tower (depending on what leader you choose)

All towers expect the traps can be upgraded several times, you can also specialize in one direction (Pierce/Normal/Siege) which will allow you to build very strong ultimate towers of that damage type. Every player can build one trap, they are very efficent devices to stop/kill (or both) your creeps, however their downside is that they can be discovered by the creeps and therefore destroyed.


Headquarter:
Every player has one Castle HQ, its used to research tower upgrades, repair the castle gates, increase his income for reputation, challenge champions (which will give extra reputation when killed) for money, increase the force Crystal power and recruit the 2nd building units after round 20.

Tower bonus:

All non magic towers which are build on your biggest tower will gain a 10% damage bonus.

Moat:

The movespeed of creeps walking through the moat will be decreased.

Camera control:

The map features full control of the game camera, when having your builder selected you can sway and zoom the camera (I,J,K,L Keys) into your desired position, allowing you to zoom in on your enemies or to get a good overview of your castle from all sides.

every player selects a leader at the beginning of the game or gets a random one. If your tower kills a creep the experience will be shared between all (maximum 4) leaders of your castle, where you will get twice as much exp for beeing the killer. Bosses and champions give extra exp to the killer only.
The leaders will remain in the center of the castle and are not able to directly attack the creeps, they slowly regenerate mana which they can use to cast mighty spells on the creeps, their allies, themselves or their towers. Leaders are especially important in the late game.

Here an example right out of the leader selection ingame:

Creeps:
To keep the game interesting at all time i implemented a whole lot a special creep abilities, every third round from round 1 till round 40 has its own ability which makes it harder or just different to cope with them. During the last ten rounds each and every round has its own ability to give those last rounds the little extra spice needed in preperation for the final boss battle. Here are a few examples of the creep abilities:

Bosses:
Every 10th round there will spawn one boss for each player, bosses of course all have several different and unique abilities which should guarantee for you to have a special interactive and entertaining challenge. I will leave the boss abilities for you to discover yourself.

I am always happy about positive and negative, constructive feedback, i hope you all enjoy the map as much as i do.

Best regards,
Suto

 

[shawster]

looks sexy.

definitely going to try this. your thread looks really good, the hero selection looks good, and i love the bounty/reputation thing.

 

[Dreadnought[dA]]

Very nice... A TD finally worth trying =D

 

[shawster]

Alright, I tried it.

I have to say, I am impressed with so many things in this TD. Everything looks well made, however, there are a couple of things that were iffy for me.

First of all, there were some simple grammar errors, all over the map. You wouldn't need to go hunting to find a grammar error.

Second, reputation seems to dwindle down at like level 25ish. I don't know if I should have challenged more/earlier or what, but i was pretty stumped on reputation. Basically, if i wanted to get anything other then a headhunter, I would not have had enough reputation. It takes for you to get a max specialized basic tower like 10 reputation or something. It takes you a couple of levels / challenges to get that much. Yet, when if I finally get enough for like 3, they would be ineffective. At level 20ish i had specialized in siege and had already finished the siege family. At level 25 I had ran out of reputation, and was pretty much screwed.

Another small point, the fights with the bosses are well.. they just get stuck in the moat stunned/super slowed hardly. Maybe you intended this, but i think the boss fights we're a little bit easy.(until later, that is)

I just want to say, however, that it may have been my fault I was completely stumped, I don't know, it was a learning experience.

Lastly, maybe I want something new out of this TD. This TD is very good all around, but maybe a little more unique couldn't be bad.Yes, I know you had new heroes and the reputation system, but heroes in TDs and reputation / lumber has already been used. The heroes did not provide much of the game up to level 27ish, sadly. And the replay value is a tad bit low. I'm always looking for replay value in TDs. Either a save/load system and you get points everytime and can get better towers (shopping maul/ele td) or maybe different towers and races. And because there is no mazing, the game was slightly straight forward.

This is just an opinion from a TD connoisseur, however. I notice that you're TD isn't out of the beta and people love it already, so do w/e you want with my feedback. And all in all, i have to say that the presentation of the overall map was what impressed me the most.

(pm me for td reviews! jk)

 

[Suto]

Hi and thanks for the feedback,

@shawster: Could you help me with the grammar mistakes you found plz? Maybe take a minute and write them down the next time you play and send me a pm.
Reputation is intended to be rare, if you were totally screwed at like lvl 25 you did something wrong tho. I always tend to have too much Rep at these levels. (You need 5 rep to get a max specialized basic tower btw.)

You are the first one to say that Boss fights are easy i don't know, maybe you played on Tourist difficulty, try playing No Pain, No Gain and you will see that its important to find the right balance between headhunters and other towers. From my experience the ppl in B.net always have problems with the bosses, even on tourist

As for the replay value, some people like the challenge to beat a game in all difficulties, i personally prefer to play race mode games 1 on 1 against friends to see who has the better / faster strategy. I was planning to implant special towers for each leader tho as well as bonus leaders you can only access if you managed to beat the game on a hard difficulty before, but unfortunately i don't have much time to work on the map anymore.

greeting,
Suto

 

[shawster]

Alright, i'll quickly jot down some grammar mistakes next time I play.

Maybe i did do something wrong meh. I played on the medium difficulty.

thanks for replying to my critique .

 

[Rui]

Reopening on request.

 

[Suto]

Thanks Rui,

i finally updated the map to run on the latest WC3 version as well as fixing some small glitches with the magic towers not attacking correctly.

If you find any more bugs or like to suggest balancing changes let me know

Greetings!

 

[Calciumcarbonat]

This is the best made tower defense i have ever played
I played it often with my friends
but it gets boring after a time
you should give it a higher replay value (maybe by different races)

(sry for my bad english)

 

[Suto]

Try to play it on the hardest difficulty and u will see that the leader you choose makes a big difference