joesi

Well one issue is that the orbs fly rather high, so it's hard to tell exactly where they are going. That said, I tried them once and I guess they seemed a bit weak. I think the towers should have a rotational direction control (with a 10+ second cooldown), because sometimes it might be more advantageous to spin one way over another. I'm wondering about the damage triggering mechanism for this... if somehow a creature stayed right under the radius orb for a long time, would it take damage more than once? I can't remember the max radius exactly, but I think it was around 16? I think it would be good to increase it more.

I find many new players have problems with even the first rounds when they are playing on normal or easy. Because of this I don't think the default play style should be changed. If anything, I find the last 5-10 levels are just as boring, because by that point you're either most likely dead, or most-likely filthy rich just loading up on interest and getting ready to fill the map with more towers.

Yeah I'd rather agree. I can't say it's easier, but it's certainly VERY similar, as long as you use interest. It's maybe a bit harder at the start, but obviously with the interest, the "hard" parts at the end become quite a bit easier (such as fruits or final 5-10 levels) When I was playing with someone, he was on hard and I was on normal, and even when I was saving up more money and was ahead in net-worth at the start, he was like 50% ahead of me by a certain point (maybe level 30), and 100% ahead of me in net-worth by like level 50 or something (these are estimates & guesses, I do not remember)

The new fix for poison tower in .83 (which also kinda nerfed the AoE and damage buff a bit) seems to have made it pretty decent. It was bugged before — Karawasa said that after a while, targets of the towers wouldn't be able to take damage from other poison towers. (hope i did the explanation justice)

does harder difficulty offer more experience? Do earlier levels give less Exp than harder levels? Do fruit give exp? All things should be the case IMO

Poison tower is still terrible, if not even worse than it was before. The slower attack speed really seems to screw it, even though the damage and AoE is overall the same or better mathematically. It's such a mathematically tempting tower, but somehow it is an absolute epic fail. Drowning tower seems bugged — it starts at 3/4 energy, but it starts at full pressure. It's also very important that the tower's description describes what the AoE and speed is at each level, which I don't think it does right now.

So I tried out the celerity tower and it seems pretty good now. I think because it needs micromanagement to do well, it could maybe use another 10% buff or something though, since it requires micro to be especially effective (hence user should get a bit of a bonus) I think it's good enough as it is now though, seems comparable to some of the best towers around right now. Not particularly especially good on the fruit level, because it becomes impossible to micro that many towers. Nonetheless, got like 350 points on normal, which is pretty respectable.

I don't think you realize that flooding tower's ability mechanic can really be simplified quite a bit Essentially it more than doubles the tower's effective DPS (on average). The specific amount more than double depends on the max health (or current health if another tower is dealing damage before it) of the target, but it can be pretty huge. That's why the mechanic of the tower should be re-vamped in my opinion. That said, the use you mentioned is a more useful way of using drowning towers, but not necessarily worth it if the tower has pretty good DPS on it's own already.

I did what this guy did without using triple interest, just double interest (older version). It's cause Blitz/hate towers are stupidly OP (assuming it hasn't been fixed/nerfed yet) Overall the mechanic of Blitz isn't that great either, considering that all waves are the same limited length (even fruit, to an extent). You can essentially just calculate the average DPS it effectively deals each round automatically. The big catch is that unlike many other towers, this tower cannot benefit hardly any more at all from player micro. When you calculate the average DPS the tower deals, which I'm guessing is about 90% of it's fully-charged DPS (10k DPS for Blitz tower), and combine that with the fact the tower doesn't really benefit at all from micro, you get a tower that DRASTICALLY needs changing — at the minimum a balance change, at the maximum a complete ability revamp to be more strategic. edit: I see the tower has been nerfed now, just barely enough Problem is, it's still probably a bit too good, plus doesn't even take any micro to use effectively.

I don't think this kind of game blends itself towards being competitive well, but if you want to add that as a mode, then go ahead. I've always loved more tricky and skill-based disabilities to players: • Covering their mineral/gas/population counter at the top-right from being seen • Covering a portion of their main screen, or the command card so they have to use hotkeys. • Causing all towers cost x% more, but making creeps waves weaker for that same period of time. • And/or the opposite: towers are cheaper, but creeps stronger. • Create a wall in the player's creep path, accumulating them all together. Chances are this will usually help the player, particularly if they have substantial AoE, but there are situations where it could really screw them (short range high-dps towers) • Conversely, kill every 3rd creep, but give the remaining creeps 33% (or less) more max health - this screws over more aoe-oriented builds. And here's a real fun screwer-over: • While in effect, any time a player (successfully) upgrades or builds a tower, the equivalent number of creeps (based off the creeps kill bounty, doesn't need to be 1:1) will spawn at the player's entrance.

NO! why do people think this? (or has it been fixed?) Haste tower is terribly broken because it gives 800% attack speed when fully charged.. not 320%. You should not compare with pure towers for 3 reasons: 1. Pure towers are a very high level of upgrade, that is the most expensive in the game. In this game, upgraded towers are always far more efficient than the less-upgraded ones, and linearly comparing the most expensive tower to a less expensive one, is not accurate — you have to take into the account the non-linear gains that increased cost has. 2. This is more important in my opinion than #1: you must have essences, which are extremely limited. One will typically have a maximum of like 6 essences, or sometimes maybe only 2, while a person can fill their ENTIRE AREA with upgraded celerity towers. You make 1 argument using fruit wave, but don't realize that another argument you make essentially ignores fruit wave. AFAIK 2-6 pure towers is nowhere near enough to do well in the fruit wave, and hence need to realize that essence is a huge limiter, and justifies a high cost-efficiency of pure towers. 3. Somewhat related to #1: The more expensive a tower is, the harder it is to smoothly get. Cost sometimes beats cost-efficiency, because it's possible that even if a tower is super-duper cost efficient, it is just completely nonviable to get because of it's prohibitive cost. Take a look at real-life: We aren't all running the most efficient light bulbs, most efficient power plants, most efficient cars, etc. because they generally cost more... even if that cost will be offset by the better efficiency. Anyway, all that stuff said, I think celerity and temporal type towers should be very strong towers, and very possibly need a buff (I haven't looked at them recently, and cannot make a concrete statement).

In my opinion, it's because the type of micro needed to manage such towers is really tedious (celerity, temporal), and/or because the tower isn't powerful enough (celerity, temporal). I'm personally kinda in favor (maybe on the fence?) of having an attack point automatically feature for mold and ice towers also, but that doesn't mean that I am not interested in having a tower that's worth controlling, because it's powerful enough, and not tedious to use. That's the way I see things.

Maybe this could be a tower that I suggested that takes more micro to use: Manual-shooting tower (or one where you can select a point to automatically and continually shoot at) targeting a point, with fairly long range, but slow projectile speed. AoE can be anything from very small (will only hit 1 target), to quite large (depends on the skill level desired. I think large AoE could be a bit too problematic if auto-shoot was possible). edit: oh wait, is that the jet tower? I've never used the jet tower With regards to the idea of dealing a percentage of target's max health... no way would it be balanced. You could just build 7 towers spaced out, and kill all monsters, regardless of how high their health is. Technically, it also bypasses 50% damage elements, unless it was modified to deal half the percentage to such targets.

Not really. It's just a bit worse on fruit level, and still excellent on all other levels 1-60. It could still be good on fruit level because you can use more towers (light towers) to pick off the low HP fruits that can be killed before getting to the exit, as opposed to being forced to attack a more narrow-range of targets, such as only the ones near the exit being able to hit, while all the ones by the entrance have to attack new full-hp ones even though you might be dead by the time those ones would get to the exit. It's range 10, isn't it? IMO they are pretty good, you just want to use them on targets with less than 30% health (good with cannon towers or other AoE). The problem is that they can kinda get owned by medic type waves, especially if you have a big gap between the AoE and the death finishers. I really agree with this, except I also agree with Karawasa that the base interest should be lower for very easy, maybe 1 or 1.5%, and then .75% per upgrade (interest upgrades could have re-worked mechanics so that they buff base interest rate by 50%) I also think a bounty of .66 might be too little for very easy— it's supposed to be very easy after all, and even at the current 1ish bounty, people sometimes don't even get to round 50. Maybe having it like .8 base, then .87, 1, 1.15, 1.3 (which is almost symmetrical, unlike yours which punished easy more than it buffed hard) Other suggestions (remarks): • Haste tower is OP... 800% DPS = 10000 DPS, tons more than any other direct damage tower that I know of (and efficient per cost). If you didn't realize, the haste stacks with itself (multiplicative), so it's 111%^20 =~ 800%, as opposed to 100%+11%*20 =322% (which would be a bit underpowered at it's current damage) • Mimic/speed-buff/damage-buff towers don't seem too scale linearly enough for their upgrade levels... they are kinda useless at level 1, are overall good at level 2 (because of their base damage combined with their special) but still sucky special, and are ridiculously strong, if not OP, at level 3 where all of a sudden their special is 4 times stronger than level 2. I think the towers should scale more like 33%, 66%, 100% (20/40/60) and deal less stand-alone DPS, or very possibly none at all. • Poison tower is terrible, as you seem to know. Doubling it's damage might or might not make it OP, but it still wouldn't really make it a good tower IMO. I think it's ability must be re-worked. I think it would make sense to give a tower a DoT (damage over time)... especially with a name like poison. Is there a reason you haven't (to my knowledge) added hardly any (I think I saw one?) DoT towers? Would probably be good to be AoE to keep some semblance of similarity to the old tower, and maybe another tower could have high-DPS single-target DoT (maybe a burning one) • Ice tower seems a bit weak compared to mold tower (based off website, which I think is accurate), but I may be wrong? Should probably be water damage like someone once said before

I don't really want to call them micro towers (you can if you want), because in this case it's something one's intentionally supposed to manage while not really being tedious or anything. Anyway, what I'm referring to is the concept of a tower that will use most-of, or "all-of" a person's attention. The name for the towers could be called primary towers (as opposed to secondary), or active towers (as opposed to passive) Examples: • One I really like: A tower which has long, if not infinite (within play area) range, but somewhat slow moving projectile. Requires manual launch by the player, and targets a point, as opposed to a unit (splash damage). This is a very skillful tower to use, since it not only manually targets a point, but has a slow projectile speed, making it even harder to hit far away targets. If one wanted it to use less attention, you could always make it auto-shoot target point, but I don't know if it would be a good idea. • Support tower: A tower that will freeze a unit (manually targeted) for a fairly long amount of time, but take little, or no damage. Probably not castable on the same unit twice in a row for interest exploitation, or guardian/boss reasons. All sorts of alternate ability options too, such as teleporting the unit futher back instead. • innovative concept, but difficult or impossible to implement in SC2 editor (via data editor alone, but probably doable with triggers) and a bit complicated to explain: An AoE non-projectile tower (i.e. torrent/quake) that is linked between all it's other towers. For each tower built, the tower(s) gain an ability to actuate that particular tower — if I had 1 tower, it would have 1 ability (actuate itself), if I had 5 towers, each tower would have 5 abilities, each ability actuating a specific tower (shared cooldown among towers). When a tower actuates, it applies a damage-over-time effect (non-stacking) to an AoE blast around itself, and then while it's on cool-down (or not on cooldown, whichever you think would work better, I'm not sure) will buff all other towers by a %. The damage pretty much has to be DoT to prevent stacking the towers in 1 spot and taking no skill to use. Obviously since there's an ability for each tower, there will be a limit of x (max 13, 12 probably ideal) towers that could be built, although with a DoT ability, one probably wouldn't want more than that anyway. Maybe more active control would be suited for a new and separate TD game... but I don't really want to have to make one from scratch.

Magnify towers don't strike me as too special of a tower unless the website's description is wrong (although I looked at them in-game too and didn't seem too special, just i forgot their stats), not to say that their DPS or DPS per cost isn't good, because it is. However, when dealing with limited space and infinite money (such as normal mode fruit killing) drowning towers deal better DPS than magnify tower (based off website's stats, and taking into it's special into account). Of course to have the support tower to go with drowning tower would be spring tower. Not only are they better DPS, but based off the website, they have an additional 2 range. Anyway, the main reason I'm posting here is because: haste towers are crazy OP... You can mix haste towers with forges, but even without them they would still be a really good, if not the best, tower (Forges are mainly just useful for the really late game anyway when you get the teir 3). The reason why haste towers are so damn strong is because it seems their haste bonuses stack multiplicative with/on eachother, as opposed to addition. Instead of 20 stacks of 11% being +220% attack speed (320%), it's 111% to the power of 20, which is about 800%. While 320% attack speed would be a fair bit too weak for this tower (considering it's current damage), 800% is pretty ridiculous, especially for the fruit wave where they can stay on without deactivating for longer than typical (although there are still breaks in the fruit wave, which I find kinda weird).