Section 1: Pre-game mode selections.

Section 2: Basics of Element TD.
-Experience and custom builders.
-Interest.
-Elemental Damage.
-basic tower placement.

Section 3: Creeps.
-fast.
-undead.
-image.
-mechanical.
-healing.

Section 4: Towers.
-support towers.
-damage towers.

Appendixes.
-Sample build orders for various 4-element, 5-element and 6-element builds.

Standard: Play in a tower wars style. Send creeps to your opponents for income and to eliminate them. There are no waves sent by the AI. When you send creeps to your opponents, the creeps are also sent to yourself.

Classic: Play a tower defence game. Build towers to defend against waves sent by the AI in a defined order (chaos mode aside).


Classic Game Modes #1: Game selection

Competitive: All players play on the same difficulty. Wave countdown begins once a player clears the wave.

Casual: A mixed difficulty mode. Each player selects difficulty independently of the other players. Wave countdown begins once a wave is spawned. The countdown is as follows: level 1-15: 30 seconds, level 16-30: 45 seconds, level 31-45: 60 seconds, level 46-60:75 seconds, 60 seconds before wave 61 commences.

Race: All players play on the same difficulty. Wave countdown is independent for each player. Essentially, you play your own game, competing to see who can clear all 60 waves the fastest.

Extreme: The same as competitive, except all players start on 1 life. The next wave starts immediately once the wave is cleared.

Classic Game Modes #2: Difficulty

Very Easy: Creeps start with 50% HP with 10% damage reduction.
Easy: Creeps start with 62.5% HP with 20% damage reduction.
Normal: Creeps start with 70% HP with 30% damage reduction.
Hard: Creeps start with 87.5% HP with 40% damage reduction.
Very Hard: Creeps start with 100% HP with 50% damage reduction.

Game Modes #3: Random

All pick: You choose whether to spend your vespene on elementals/extra supply.
All random: The game randoms a elemental/extra supply independently for each player. It need not be the same for all players.
Same random: The game randoms the same elemental/extra supply for all players.

Classic Game Modes #4: Game length

Normal: You start at level 1 with 70 minerals.
Short: You start at level 16 with 1000 minerals and 3 gas. All level 1 elementals summoned before wave 16 starts are instantly killed.
Extra Short: You start at level 31 with 6000 minerals and 6 gas. All level 1 and 2 elementals summoned before wave 31 starts are instantly killed.

Classic Game Modes #5: Wave order

Normal: Play the standard wave order
Chaos: The wave order is shuffled except levels 1-5 and 60.

SECTION 2: BASICS OF ELEMENT TD

Elemental damage

light - 200% to darkness, 50% to earth
dark - 200% to water, 50% to light
water - 200% to fire, 50% to darkness
fire - 200% to nature, 50% to water
nature - 200% to earth, 50% to fire
earth - 200% to light, 50% to nature

Combining 2 elemental damage types.

With 2 elemental damage types, one of them is your base elemental damage type and the other is your secondary damage type to cover weakness of your primary damage type. For instance, you have fire and darkness. You start with fire towers as your primary defense. To cover the weakness, you build darkness towers.

If 75% of your damage is fire and 25% is darkness damage, it'll result in:

Earth, Fire or Darkness: 100%
Nature: 175%
Water: 87.5%
Light: 87.5%
Non-Elemental: 80%

Combining 3 elemental damage types.

There are 2 groups of 3 elements that cover each other in a circle. One is Earth, Darkness and Fire and the other one is Nature, Light and Water.

If you have 3 triples, each dealing one of the elemental damage types nature, light and water, it'll result in:

Fire, Earth or Darkness: 100%
Light, Nature or Water: 116.7%
Non-Elemental: 80%

Interest

Every 15 seconds, each player gains 2% of unspent minerals in interest. This encourages players to build the minimum amount of towers to clear the wave. Selling towers just before the interest counter hits 0 and rebuilding towers after that is a strategy employed by more experienced players. In random mode, since all towers sell for 100%, players would sell elemental towers for interest and to maximise elemental damage.

Experience and custom builders

Players gain experience for each game played, which allows one to replace the default scv builder with a custom builder of the player's choice.

Basic Tower placement

There are two general placements, two pass and long pass (there is technically a third one, called bad placement).

A two pass placement refers to a placement where the creeps would be in range of the tower for a period of time, leave the tower's range completely and make another pass on the opposite side of the ledge.

A long pass placement refers to a placement where the creeps would be in the tower's range only once but for a longer period of time. This is useful against single creeps, mostly elementals.

Creep Abilities

Fast - Every 3 seconds, this creep moves 2.5x faster for 1 second.
Healing - This creep heals nearby creeps for 20% of Max HP when killed.
Image - This creep spawns an image when attacked. Image lasts 5 seconds.
Mechanical - Every 12 seconds, this creep becomes invulnerable for 3 seconds.
Undead - This creep will revive after 3 seconds with 33% of Max HP when killed.

SECTION 4: TOWERS

towers part 2

appendix

replay database

tournament strategy

reserved for future use

reserved for future use

reserved for future use