Tower Wars Gameplay Fixes

[Nestharus]

Tower Wars has a few gameplay issues.

1. Once the maze is developed, the intensity of gameplay goes down dramatically. The game is usually decided in the first few minutes, except for major air waves. I am of course talking about classical wintermaul wars with the large invisible squares.

2. For any given gold cost, only one type of unit can be sent. There is a 30 gold unit, a 20 gold, etc. You can mix them up, but depending on the gold cost, the unit is stronger over all. This should be changed so that you can develop your units and mix them up however you like whenever you like.

3. If sending is developed (researched to have x types of sends and then upgrade them for specializations), then the player's strategy is kind of set.

4. Once a defense is developed, it is kind of set.

There needs to be a way to keep players trying to outwit each other, building, raising income, and sending, while keeping gameplay intensity way the hell up.

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix these issues without putting the game into a stale state? Looking for that early game intensity, where 5's, 10's, 20's, and 30's are mixed up to maximize leakage and income and the maze is developed with intense micro control to minimize leakage. I want that intensity to last through the duration of the game .

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one possible way is to add multiple points of leakage. As the game progresses, new points are added on. These add-ons can be done by the opposing team. They could research a new point and then you would have to quickly work to defend it. From here, each point would have its own sending shrine that is built up. You would be able to specialize different types of offenses at different points, and the opponent would have to continue to react to them. It would add a great amount of intensity to the game. You would both continuously be countering each other and working to break the other person down. This combined with tactical abilities, tactical sends, and tactical towers would make the game very, very difficult.

 

[Awsan]

another possible way would be the use of towers and creeps with manual abilities. These abilities could really change the way the tower war works.

 

[Nestharus]

the problem is that it changes how tower wars works, and the goal is not to change the game, but to add more depth to it while fixing the issues.

Don't change the nature of the game, keep it. That's why fixing these issues is so difficult ^)^.

 

[Dr Super Good]

1. Once the maze is developed, the intensity of gameplay goes down dramatically

You could prevent mazes from ever being fully developed.

Once sends reach a certain progression (kind of like a certain level as they do improve as cost goes up progressively) they no longer can be killed in a single segment (once their health reaches a certain level, they are made invulnerable) and are forced to go through to another segment. To prevent a player being slammed against a wall when the switch over occurs, the health amount starts out very small proportionately and increases until 50% in which case another segment opens and the system repeats.

This other segment needs new towers (to kill the spawns) and also new maze. Since gold is less valuable due to income inflation, walls in this next section cost a lot more gold than in the first section. What this does is then force the starting game play into another tier so the player has to shift. The player not only has to build up a new maze since they can no longer kill monsters in the first section but they also need to balance how much damage is being dealt in the first section to optimize it as much as possible.

Instead of having to manage 1 maze, the player then has to manage 3 and keep it all balanced since they cannot leave monsters to be killed in the last segment (some mechanic is needed for this, maybe an armor increase as the spawns change segment). The big plus is it would recreate that challenging early game multiple times during a session as you progress. The big downer is that it could be viewed as kind of boring for the same reason since it is basically early gameplay forced on you.

2. For any given gold cost, only one type of unit can be sent. There is a 30 gold unit, a 20 gold, etc. You can mix them up, but depending on the gold cost, the unit is stronger over all. This should be changed so that you can develop your units and mix them up however you like whenever you like.

Throw in a unit modification system which allows upgrading of spawns in a certain way. The idea would be to allow attacking players to improve their units over time to counter a particular enemy defensive strategy so that the enemy constantly has to be on their toes and willing to change and adapt. Instantaneous improvement could be supported but might be unfair as basically you could save up an totally bulldoze an enemy defensive so gradual improvement Is probably best.

Although I have little understanding of these particular defensive strategies you refer to. An example could be a defensive strategy relying on high damage slow-ish fire rate towers could be countered over time by improving spawn resistance to high damage attacks which over time gives them force armor so they cannot be one-shotted. Or if slowing or debuffing towers are used heavily, you could improve crowd control resistance so that your spawns are slowed less and debuffs are less effective. Or if an enemy has a very long maze strategy you could improve speed at the cost of health so that your spawns will make it through their maze faster with less hits landed on them.

3. If sending is developed (researched to have x types of sends and then upgrade them for specializations), then the player's strategy is kind of set.

4. Once a defense is developed, it is kind of set.

An approach from hero line wars (the proper version, not poor quality newbie messed ones) was to give players abilities that could directly influence the other team. In this case it was spawning units to give them problems or debuffing them so that they were less effective.

The same idea could be adopted to a tower wars where on top of sending spawns, you can send nasty effects to hit them when they least expect or need it. An example could be an ability that temporarily disables the pathing of a wall segment allowing units to walk through it as if the wall was not there. Another example could be to disable an enemy tower, temporarily or even permanently so that they need to adapt. Or maybe you could redirect their spawns for a brief period back at them so that their own offensive back fires.

Obviously these ideas may or may not be balanceable. But having the option to do something outside the rules of standard tower wars to your opponent with hilarious, devastating or strategic results could certainly enhance or even become late game play once mazes are set.

Well that's my 3 ideas. I am sure each has its own merits and could possibly be worth a try but if it will be competitive or fun it is difficult to tell.

 

[Nestharus]

I was thinking of the latter 2 already, thanks ^_^. The first one is interesting, but it strays a bit too much from the gameplay mechanics of tower wars :\. There should be a way to keep the intensity up w/o having to resort to developing the maze. I was thinking along the lines of more tactics (as you were talking about in part 3) and tactical towers, but that's probably not enough =).

Developing spawns over time is not necessarily a very good idea. There's no real strategy involved unless the spawns reset after every round.

There are a few possibilities

1. when you leak, you get a charge that you can spend on a stronger spawn
2. when you cause the opponent to leak, you get a charge that you can spend on a stronger spawn
3. some spawns require x spawns to already be in the spawn area (commanders?). This would require possible synchonized massing to get them (the entire team must send together and one person on the team sends the commander).
4. Buildings that are only up for x number of rounds to support w/e

Maybe the right way to go about tower wars is to just leave the intense fast gameplay and micro control for the start (phase 1) and then move into intense strategy and development w/ counters for the next (phase 2). The beginning would be about speed where as phase 2 would be about keeping up pressure from offensive strikes. Tactics could be used for defense (including tactical towers).

 

[Dr Super Good]

You could also look to shorten the game. By this I mean that you hit end game sooner and so there is less end game time which is not intense. It might be viewed as simplification but the idea is to remove long boring bits and focus on the early intense parts. This is kind of the approach used by Blizzard for SC2 where the average match lasts well under 20 minutes (probably more like 10). Obviously a tower wars that short would be kind of boring but the idea is to carefully design a game session life cycle.

Early game -> Mazing
Mid game -> Building defences, improving spawns
End game -> Super abilities kick in to end the game

More phases may exist, I am not a Tower Wars player. Allot each section a certain amount of time and then focus on the changes required to make it last approximately that long (obviously slower if newbies, maybe faster if pros). It could quite well mean cutting down a lot of spawns and towers so mid game lasts shorter.

Using this approach you could minimize the boring times and focus on the intense parts. It could also potentially make the game a lot more competitive as generally competitive players generally like shorter game lengths.