Innovation in TD games

[Spikey00]

For me, having coop or vs in a tower defense is innovation. 

[eRe4s3r]

Coop or vs isn't innovation - the first TD map i ever played (in wc3) had both coop and vs modes with adaptive waves. Still boring to play though after the first complete win because once you know what comes and the "winning method" its just the same ol same ol.

Maze based TD's are more interesting but theres 2 or 3 "perfect" mazes that you just have to memorize to win them all

[keith.lamothe]

but doing damage and destroying towers is a big bad evil thing to do

Do you think that's unavoidable?  In general I agree that it's just a kick in the pants for the player, but I think that other mechanics could be introduced and adjusted so that the "durability" of a given tower/tower-formation is just one more dimension of the tradeoff matrix, so you can choose between "glass cannon" towers (that could be protected by others) and "damage-tank" towers, etc.  Or even the odd non-hittable non-blocking tower.

[eRe4s3r]

Well it depends, if destruction means loss of the invested money i'd say towers should never be destroyable. However - if theres a "resurrection" system where an alternate resource is used thats maybe limited per round (not money ;p) then i might find that acceptable, as i say not many TD Games have really innovated anything...

Alternatively, towers are manned and destruction means that the dudes inside retreat back to home - and obviously bring back their towers worth (-25% would be acceptable i guess).

If TD is mixed with JRPG don't forget that jrpg's also includes romances, unique characters and an arch-nemesis I would think that will be quite "expensive" to do.

[keith.lamothe]

Well it depends, if destruction means loss of the invested money i'd say towers should never be destroyable.

Money?  What money?  

I haven't really talked to Chris much about the details of the combat system, so definitely not saying any kind of "this is what we're planning", but many possible implementations don't involve the expenditure-of-money-during-combat at all.  Though presumably there would be some kind of scalar resources and the same issues could apply.

Anyway, I think it's clear that the problem isn't the risk of losing resources when a tower is destroyed, it's making the risk-reward balance reasonable and interesting

If TD is mixed with JRPG don't forget that jrpg's also includes romances, unique characters and an arch-nemesis I would think that will be quite "expensive" to do.

Oh yes, I am really, really looking forward to the characters and the story, etc.  And yea, expensive; we'll see

[eRe4s3r]

Anyway, I think it's clear that the problem isn't the risk of losing resources when a tower is destroyed, it's making the risk-reward balance reasonable and interesting

This very true

[Nibo]

Demigod is a bit of a tower defense game with creeps that fight you. A big difference between Demigod and most tower defense games is that you take towers instead of placing them, and you have a guy you control.

It's a very cool game, and they did finally make the network code robust. I haven't played it online in a long time though.

[Draco18s]

Master of Fortress has walls/towers/units that are completely destroyable by the "creeps" to the point where the tutorial tells you to block off the only route between the spawn and the goal.

It has a few downsides.  Engineer units (do massive damage, but are fairly low health) will get stuck and be unable to path.

The puckle gun (aka a mounted machine gun) is super OP.  Cannons are never useful to upgrade (that's that?  same range, same RoF, but more "damage" where the lowest cannon still just insta-kills every unit it hits?) and their rate of fire is so low that they can only kill 5 units.  Puckle guns have a fast rate of fire but low damage....but still get way more kills than even your cheap infantry units...combined.  Three of them next to each other with overlapping fields of fire basically take care of anything.

[eRe4s3r]

That game has a blatant obvious design flaw though, grid based map means diagonal attacks are 2.5 times more efficient than frontal attacks.

Since you can not build diagonal walls there will always be 1 unit shooting at 1 unit in a diagonal method, and thus whittle you down at the "sides" no matter what you do.

Just saying, if you make a TD game, you better not base it on a box grid and have units coming at you from an 45° angle. is the first thing i noticed in a medium map to be honest, build fort - enemies come, 1 always survives at the diagonal and attacks you with no recourse till the wall is dead.

[Draco18s]

I didn't bother playing after I was unable to finish the second Easy map due to engineers (I did actually manage to finish the third time, with my puckle gun strategy, but that's when I stopped).

But yes.  The game has serious flaws, but it still does tower destruction.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, we'll be sure to avoid "Angle Discrimination" and that sort of thing