WindStrike

Patch should be up very soon. Courtesies of the slow game of networth winning by default, and with AoE apparently being too weak, have a patch that hopefully fixes that, or at the very least, puts us in the right direction. General Custom Wisp Set & Custom Builders for our amazing and generous supporters! Matches have Steam ID Match Tracking! Now you can copy your favorite player's build faster than ever! You can now set your lives for Sandbox. Bug Fixes Fixed remainder frog kills not adding towards the final score Fixed slow adjustment on fast creeps Scoring Frogs base points lowered from 250 to 200 per creep Wave Speed bonus points increased from +2% to +4%, up to a maximum of +120% and down to minimum of +0%, so you can now no longer get a negative speed bonus. Each wave now has +5 base score per creep (+3 on express), making early waves have more value overall. For example, on Classic, instead of Wave 1 giving '1 * 30' score, it now gives '6 * 30' score. Updated fast scoring to use the intended 30 seconds as the tiebreaker. Balance Express Random Mode can now select a level 2 element at wave 6 (down from 9) and level 3 at wave 15 (down from 18). Bulky Creeps have gone out the window. In their place comes the fearsome Temporal Creeps! When its health drops to 25% health or less (this includes death), it'll warp back in time by 3 seconds, restoring both its position and health. Avenger Creeps' debuff increased from 3 seconds to 5 seconds. Quark Towers have a bit of a revamp bat. Base damage reduced from 200 to 160 and their max stacks have been reduced from 15 to 7; however, when they switch targets, instead of losing all stacks, they only lose half the stacks. Overall, this is a buff early-game, and somewhat of a nerf late-game; however you can now stick 'em in more than just the peninsula locations and they can still be good. We're not touching Life Towers just yet; basically, we wanna see if this patch effectively nerfs them due to the speed bonus amp; if not, expect some changes next patch. There's a number of other towers that apparently need some rescaling as well, namely dual element towers.

Thaaaaat's a tooltip error, it's supposed to say 1675. Error on mah part, mah bad.

As there are both scoring changes and balance changes, you assume correctly. Preview patch is up!

As global onslaught of a hippocampelephontacamelos named Bob decimates the cotton candy gorillas with heat-seeking killer bees- wait, wrong game. We've got another patch coming anytime between now and a few days, just got various bugs and balance to test out. Here's a preview of what's to come! General Custom Wisp Set & Custom Builders for our amazing and generous supporters! Matches have Steam ID Match Tracking! Now you can copy your favorite player's build faster than ever! You can now set your lives for Sandbox. Bug Fixes Fixed remainder frog kills not adding towards the final score Fixed slow adjustment on fast creeps Scoring Frogs base points lowered from 250 to 200 per creep Wave Speed bonus points increased from +2% to +4% Each wave now has +5 base score per creep (+3 on express), making early waves have more value overall. For example, on Classic, instead of Wave 1 giving '1 * 30' score, it now gives '6 * 30' score. Updated fast scoring to use the intended 30 seconds as the tiebreaker. Balance Express Random Mode can now select a level 2 element at wave 6 (down from 9) and level 3 at wave 15 (down from 18). Bulky Creeps have gone out the window. In their place comes the fearsome Temporal Creeps! When its health drops to a certain percentage or less (this includes death), it'll warp back in time by a few seconds, restoring both its position and health. Still testing exact numbers. Avenger Creeps' debuff increased from 3 seconds to 5 seconds. Quark Towers have a bit of a revamp bat. Their max stacks are reduced; however, when they switch targets, instead of losing all stacks, they only lose half the stacks. Still testing exact numbers.

Frog board is nice, but... normal difficulty > insane difficulty for frog board? Hmm, I suppose we could alter that in-game to make it so higher difficulty frog kills count as more frog kills.

Regarding the suggestion to alter the scaling, we're gonna try a bump up of +10 to all creeps, so instead of Wave 55 being x55 the value of Wave 1, it'd be 65/11 = x5.9. It's still considerably higher, just no longer making the initial 10-ish waves completely insignificant.

Oh man, I barely even remember that version, lol. I'd say the ultimate test of "how good are you" comes down Insane + Random + Chaos + Rush + Express. You have to know the game so well and inside and out and what goes good with what, and with super fact reactions. I've personally never beat it, I did manage that on Very Hard, but not Insane yet. Totally need to run that sucker in multiplayer games, that'd be a hoot to play and watch. We do have multiplayer stuff coming down the road, aka "try to beat each other out" instead of just surviving to the end. Sometime within the next month, we should be getting a new mode that kinda does that, though not fully. I'm working on an idea that's to be implemented down-the-road that's intended to give the experience of Competitive Element TD, but... it's hard. Trying to reinvent the standard Tower Wars mode is quite difficult.

Yup. ... though, that would involve a lot of selling to pull that off, and that'd probably result in you dying before you got to the end.

Apparently, on the opposite side of the spectrum for Speed, someone actually beat Insane + Chaos + Rush, but only got about 240k and then no frog waves killed. Also, I totally wasn't expecting people to break past 5 waves on icefrogs, hence why I thought 400k was the cap.

Yeah, Insane is still beatable, but I have yet to pull off a clean run. Pure Rush worked up till about Wave 45, at which point it promptly fell off horribly.

I stand corrected. Moonwalking while also rotating in random directions while rotating around random points.

War... war never changes. But this time, war has changed. Anywho, for anyone that felt the game was "too ez", we thought so too. Courtesies of everyone's feedback, our team's unfortunate opinions, and copious amounts of testing, we present Patch 1.0. From now on, all patches will use 1.XX. Enough talk.. have at you! General There is now a Credits screen at the end, displaying the Developers and anyone that's supported us via donations. Pure Essence gold bonus halved due to pure rush being way too easy. Single Player lobbies will now randomize the starting area (it can still be manually chosen) Improved visuals of Electricity, Tidal, Runic, and Windstorm Towers. The exponential lives lost for creeps leaking multiple times in a row has been removed. Game Settings are now visible for Spectators. Bug Fixes Voting will no longer consider disconnected or timed out players for choosing the settings Fixed various potential abuses with upgrade cancelling and ground attacks Well & Blacksmith Towers should no longer cast the same buff on one tower. Life Tower lvl 2 tooltip adjusted to better reflect the ingame behavior (it used to show you gained a life every 2 kills while it’s actually every 1.5 in average) Sandbox New setting: No Cooldowns All towers and upgrades build instantly. All abilities don't have cooldowns, so 1 Well Tower can buff all towers in its range! New setting: Zen Mode You don't lose any lives from leaks, but you don't deal any damage either. With this, you should be able to create a galaxy faster than ever before! ... and break your computer in the time it'd take to make some tea. Scoring Consecutive combo bonus is going out the window, which is the number one cause of the scores being horribly skewed towards "kill-as-fast-as-possible". After running some calculations, these were causing close to a x3 score amplification. One mistake was capable of dropping it down from x3 to x2 or less. Like Express, Classic Mode will receive a Networth bonus, which applies after clearing Wave 55. Both Classic & Express Modes now receive an Overall Speed bonus, which also applies after clearing Wave 55/30. This is applied additively with the Networth bonus. Rush & Chaos Modes are meant purely for fun and were not intended to be required for top scores. Their Score Multipliers are being removed. The value of each Icefrog has been bumped from 100 to 250. In theory, top scores shouldn't go past 400k, especially after this next change... Creeps The HP Scaling has been increased on both Classic & Express. Classic: 18% --> 18.8% Express: 32% --> 33.6% The early game is barely affected, but by the end-game, creeps are up to 40% stronger. Healing Creeps heal 25% on death, up from 20%. Fast Creeps boost to x2.5 speed, up from x2. Regen Creeps recover 3% hp per second, up from 2%. However, it's capped at 75% health, down from 100%. Two new Creep Types are being added to fill in most of the blank waves: Bulky: Half the count (15 instead of 30), half the spawn rate (aka, more distance between each one), double bounty, double the leaks, and 225% hp each. Hard counter to AoE. Avenger: When it dies, all towers in a small radius around it receive a stacking debuff that reduces damage by 10% for 3 seconds. Each stack is on an individual timer. Hard counter to clumped defenses, like entrance camping. OSFrogs are now assigned in a predetermined sequence instead of randomly. Towers Nature Tower damage decreased from 80 / 520 / 3380 / 33800 to 72 / 470 / 3050 / 30500 Haste Tower being buffed back partially. Max stacks back from 15 to 16, reset time back to 4 seconds, but damage down from 1000 to 900. It's roughly a 10% buff. Gunpowder Tower damage decreased from 32 / 160 / 800 to 30 / 150 / 750 Quake Tower single-target damage increased from 600 / 3000 to 900 / 4500 Quark Tower now has a stack cap of 20 I know this saddens you sandboxers that love seeing 50 million damage Quark Towers. It was nerfed for a different reason though... Obliteration Tower can now Attack Ground

Another glorious idea for the to-be-eventually-added-absolute-chaos-mode. Genius.

Ow. Pain. Agony. I hope you guys have fun trying just trying to beat Insane difficulty. Patch comin' up later today fo' sho'

It was mainly to test stuff out, but it has a side effect of making those helpless stone boar couriers absolutely invulnerable. Or, better yet, you can turn on rush + zen and drop some mass slows + runic towers to see how many attacks Runic tower can fire at one spot as your computer sweats tears of overheating death trains running OSFrog. Now with 200% more blue screens!

Ahh, okay. Quake Towers are like that too; they're strong, but not really OP, just versatile. Update on preview patch, check out the Sandbox section above.

Next patch will make it easier to make a galaxy, courtesies of extra options in Sandbox like No Cooldowns (1 Well Tower can buff every tower in its range) and Zen Mode (you don't take damage, but you don't deal damage either). Time to break your game faster than ever!

As of the next big patch, we're going to start manually labeling the patches with arbitrary numbers that everyone in existence uses. Said patch will be the officialized officialization of 1.0, which will hopefully have less bugs than ever. Anyhow, onto what to expect from the next patch. Some numbers are included, but not all of them, due to testing: General Pure Essence gold bonus halved due to pure rush being way too easy. Moar visual changes to some projectiles. Sandbox New setting: No Cooldowns All towers and upgrades build instantly. All abilities don't have cooldowns, so 1 Well Tower can buff all towers in its range! New setting: Zen Mode You don't lose any lives from leaks, but you don't deal any damage either. With this, you should be able to create a galaxy faster than ever before! ... and break your computer in the time it'd take to make some tea. Scoring Consecutive combo bonus is going out the window, which is the number one cause of the scores being horribly skewed towards "kill-as-fast-as-possible". After running some calculations, these were causing close to a x3 score amplification. One mistake was capable of dropping it down from x3 to x2 or less. Like Express, Classic Mode will receive a Networth bonus, which applies after clearing Wave 55. Rush & Chaos Modes are meant purely for fun and were not intended to be required for top scores. Their Score Multipliers are being removed. In theory, top scores shouldn't go past 400k, especially after this next change... Creeps Towers have been getting buffed a lot, but Creeps haven't, and as a result, the game is kinda easy, even on Insane. Let's fix that... The HP Scaling has been increased on both Classic & Express. The early game is barely affected, but by the end-game, creeps are up to 50% stronger. Healing Creeps heal 25% on death, up from 20%. Fast Creeps boost to x2.5 speed, up from x2. Regen Creeps recover 3% hp per second, up from 2%. However, it's capped at 75% health, down from 100%. Two new Creep Types are being added to fill in most of the blank waves: Bulky: Half the count (15 instead of 30), half the spawn rate (aka, more distance between each one), double bounty, and 250% hp each. Hard counter to AoE. Avenger: When it dies, all towers in a small radius around it receive a stacking debuff that reduces damage for a short time. Hard counter to clumped defenses, like entrance camping. This one is a game changer. Towers Nature Tower receiving somewhere between a 10-15% damage nerf. Should be stronger than what it originally was still, just not as silly as it currently is. Haste Tower being buffed back partially. Max stacks back from 15 to 16, reset time back to 4 seconds, but damage down from 1000 to 900. It's roughly a 10% buff. Gunpowder Tower damage reduced slightly. It's just a little bit silly early-game, at the moment. Once we get scoring finalized for next patch, I'll include a thread on the forums that explains exactly how it works, complete with some spreadsheets. There's also a few towers I gotta run extra testing on, ie Tidal Tower is supposedly a little strong, but I'm not sure yet. Lemme know what you folks think! We're aiming to release on or by Monday.

Hmm, problem with Lightning is that it doesn't synergize with any supports, it's more of a tower that really helps out early game and acts as a bruiser the rest of the game. I've tried buffing it, but any stronger than it currently is and it's absolutely broken for the early game. Only theoretical change I can think of would be to make how it bounces based on how close creeps are rather than a set range, so that with slowing, it could bounce more than 3 times. It's iffy though.

Yeah, next patch, for Express Mode, Shield creeps are getting phased out. Fast creeps are replacing it, and on most the blank waves, Undead creeps are replacing them.

Thanks for the ideas guys! I can't respond to all of them just yet, though skimming over everything, i keep seeing the Vengeance idea (not just in this thread, other places as well), aka when the creep dies, reduce the damage of all towers in an area around it, stacking debuff, short duration. Gonna have it tested out and see how much it changes the game (gud-bye entrance camping vs. that creep type, lol).

Quark tower should already be doing that, unless we accidentally changed it in a recent patch.

Unfortunately, I can see this being abused. It's be a slow version of the buy/sell abuse trick for random, but allowing it to even be possible in single-player even to a lesser degree would break things horribly. Someone did suggest doing a 100% sell but with a 30-second delay before it actually sells, all pick only. Not entirely sure how I feel about it, I'd need some opinions on it first.

Oh god, I love quark tower. I found that tower scales unusually well. Like, you can have 5 tier 2 lightning towers by wave 40 and they're practically useless even with supports, but 5 level 2 quark towers w/ support holds up super well.

Scoring is really weird at the moment and is in the process of being revamped, cause right now, it's super skewed towards completing the game as fast as possible without losing lives. It pretty much doesn't matter right now if you clear 10 frog waves on insane (which I'm actually not sure is even possible). As a result, some towers that are actually kind of underpowered late-game but OP early game (ie Haste Tower) are causing serious imbalance issues when they shouldn't be.