Tower War, how to do it right ?

[Leartes]

Hello everyone,

My favorite types of maps are AoS and Tower Defence/War. Since there are AoS out there that surpass my skills by far, I want to try to make a good tower map.
I like LegionTD and Tropical Tower Wars a lot, but there are some problems in the genre that I'd like to solve.

Problem 1:
Once you know a really good buildorder for one race you can stick to it and win most of the time. This is boring as hell, as it doesn't encourage trying different things out and it encourages stealing other peoples BOs.
In WC3/Starcraft you pick a race and can try to master it forever, in LegionTD you can google for a good buildorder and be a very successfull player without understanding a lot.

Is the biggest problem for now, all other can wait till this one is solved

Any suggestions, what can I do to make pre-made buildorders weak in comparision to good knowledge of a races abilities?

 

[Raging Ent]

Micromanagement.

Making a prebuild order requires no player skill, just lower your brain activity to 0% and place it.
If players need to micromanage everything, they need to play a active role in the map.

This can be achieved by, for example, giving every race 2 or 3 damage towers, and 2 or 3 towers with spells.
And unlike Element TD, these spells need to be manually cast instead of automatically.

 

[Nestharus]

Leartes, it sounds like you don't understand much of tower wars at all.. the build order is just one aspect of the game. If you just built and didn't micro manage every time, you would lose in no time to me.

The build order shouldn't matter, that's noob basics... lol

There are 3 basic types of mazes, one primarily for splash, one primarily for melee, and one for everything else =P. As you get bigger, you can add a fourth type for long range. Just because you know these types of mazes doesn't mean you know how to play, that means you just graduated from being a noobie to being a beginner that's finally able to start diving into the game.

From here, you need to learn about proper sending. However, this doesn't mean you shut off and always send this way, this is where strategy comes into play (the saving, different introductions, etc).

And while you send, you have to look at what the other person sent and the spacing of the sends and then build/prepare to micro manage accordingly. You should slowly build on to your maze (spend a small portion of gold every round). You also need to calculate how much you should leak on massive sends (don't let them make you overbuild, or you've lost).

The goal is to make the person build a little more than they had to, thus lowering their income relative to yours. The instant this happens, you win (in a pro match).

So you see, tower placement has almost no bearing on the game... only noobs worry about that. The real pros worry about overbuilding and oversending (the balance). To minimize building, the pros micro manage all their towers to maximize damage.

Granted, there are like 0 pros atm (I don't know any besides me nowadays, hence why I pretty much quit playing tw).

Before you start a tower wars map, if you really want it to be good, you first need to actually understand the game. Some of the best tower wars maps were made by masters of the game. Think of clans like TPP, TDoC, and other ones that I can't remember the names of.

Also, micro management is not about knowing which types of towers to place where, it is about actually clicking on those towers and manually controlling which units they attack and in what order. Try doing this with 100+ towers against 100+ monsters while sending and building and then tell me tower wars is easy =P.

It is super difficult and super fun ^^.

 

[Leartes]

Thanks for you replies, both of you brought up the topic of micro-management. To be honest, I don't like this part as much as you do. I guess there should be some micro. Legion TD has none at all so it is much easier than Tropical TW (didn't like LineTW due to its random ffa character, are there more major Tower War maps out there?).
I conclude there should be some micro involved. I could fore example make the builder a hero without attack but come abilities. This would put some emphasis on timing/aiming abilities correctly without getting apm requirements to high.

What I like most (and hopefully some of you share my opinion) is the part where you anticipate what your opponent could do and how to build to stay one step ahead.
In LegionTD you know how strong a certain wave is and what your opponents can send you at this point => pre-made build-order works well.

If you don't know how much money you have at your disposal or waves change drastically from game to game pre-made builds stop working. (Or make towers random like in GemTD, though I won't do that)

I thought about making waves dependant on your opponents races, like there is only a skeleton wave (with fortified armor) early on if someone picks Undead as a race. Therefore you only build early siege damage if there is some Undead opponent.
The drawback would be that I'd need tons of waves for every stage of the game, this could get too hard to balance (usually it is hard enough to balance vs one set of waves). Maybe I should stick with making race-dependant creeps to send ? Though I dislike sending some skeletons with the regular elven archer wave

Hope you got some more ideas.

If you don't have anything left to say to problem 1, how about Problem 2:
Usually there are several tiers of tower from cheap and crap to expensive and super-strong. Usually you build some cheap towers early until you can afford stronger ones (and only use the cheap ones for mazing if the map allows it). I think it is a waste to design tons of towers if most of them only get used for a short period of the game. I'd prefer a setup where it still makes sense to build some cheap towers later into the game and put more amphesis on the right unit composition than building tons of super-dps + a small amount of utilitiy towers.

 

[Nestharus]

that'll ruin the game

you're trying to focus on building in a game that isn't about building

take the tips and learn to play tower wars right, then try again. Believe me, just about nobody on b.net even knows how to play tower wars, even if they think they do >.<.

 

[Leartes]

Did you ever play LegionTD ?

There is no such thing as micro in it. It is not even possible to do anything combatrelated at all during a wave.

Also there is no maze, so most of your points are not valid ...

Anyway, I guess you prefer the Line/Tropical TW approach of income vs safety and lots of mazing and micro. It is fun as well, but not the type of gameplay I like most.

EDIT: LegionTD is also about income vs safety but omits the maze and micro. By doing so it becomes pretty trivial and to solve this I am looking for options to make it a complex game without reintroducing tons of micro requirements (some options to react to a wave would be nice though - like giving some spells to the builder).