Element Tower Wars

[holepercent]

Same elements. Same towers. A whole new way to play...

Overall concept

8-player FFA, fog off (there is not much point in choosing a target if you do not know the map). The key concept is to encourage interactivity. There must be strong incentives to send creeps and not play tower defence.

Interest and gold

There would be no interest. With interest, players have no incentive to send creeps as everyone would not build anything or send creeps and just farm the interest.

There would only be one way to earn gold. You receive gold based on the the time the creeps you send stay alive.

Creeps and Elementals

At the start of the game, you can only send the basic creeps (probably the first 5 of the TD) in waves of 15/30/45.

A player can be sent a maximum of 60 creeps every 30 seconds. A player who plays too slowly has to deal with a large mass of creeps. However, if his defense can hold, he is just giving his opponents more gold.

All other non-elemental creeps become available when a player has all 6 elementals.

After you send 200/500/1000 creeps of a particular element, the tier1/tier2/tier3 of that elemental is summoned for you. This encourages sending of creeps to receive the elementals you want.

With tier1 of the element, you can send fast creeps of that element. With tier2, you can send fast and mechanical creeps of that element. With tier3, you can send fast, mech, healing and undead creeps of that element.

If an opponent leaks the creeps you send, that player loses lives for the leaks and you gain that many lives. When you defeat a player (reduce that player to 0 or less lives), you gain the choice of a extra pure or bonus gold on the creeps you send.

Considerations

Mixed difficulty? reduced armour for creeps and lower tower costs for lower difficulties.

random mode? 'send random creeps' therefore randoming the player's elements?

sending creeps to self?

(transfer to suggestions when ready. feel free to add your suggestions.. )

[holepercent]

version 1.0

added overall concept, Interest and gold, creeps and elementals.

to consider:

gold for both towers and creep sending? or mana for creep sending and gold for towers only? balancing creep sending and building a defence --- both use the same resource? or 2 different resources? incentives and costs of attacking. must promote attacking for benefit.

how to prevent silence (competition over limited resources? if so, what resources? or go into regular TD mode?)

game ideally support both aggresive attackers and highly defensive players, although attacking should be favoured over defence.

[MagicalHacker]

After two extended brainstorm sessions between holepercent and me, we arrived at the following idea, as an independent alternative to holepercent's original system:

Overall concept

Up to 8 players, free for all, possibly with fog. The core objective is to capture the other players' elements.

Income

Income is fixed - players receive a certain amount of gold per time unit, the amount increasing exponentially over time like it effectively does in TD mode. Interest may or may not be active. Creep kills do not generate gold.

Elements

Players start with a certain set of elements (say 4 per player with 8 players in the game, up to 10 per player with 2 players), but never with all 6 elements. Elements are probably distributed equally such that all elements are equally available - or maybe not, as to introduce intentional choke points. When a player is successfully attacked (he loses enough lives in a small enough time frame - more on that below) he loses an element to the attacking player; this does not impact his current towers, but it disables him from building (or upgrading) additional towers using that element. Once a player loses all his elements, he has lost the game.

Elements are lost and gained without breaking the tier system; that is, if the defending player currently has tier 1, 2, and 3 of an element while the attacker only has tier 1, after the exchange they both end up with access to tier 1 and 2 of that element, and no access to tier 3.

Attacking

Players can send creeps belonging to the elements they possess to any other player. Non-elemental creeps are available to anybody, but they are inferior to elemental creeps (maybe they take 125% damage from all attacks rather than 75%?) - unless the attacking player possesses all six elements, in which case non-elemental creeps are superior to elemental creeps instead. Possessing elements in tier 2 or 3 makes it possible to send tougher creeps of that element for the same cost, as well as creeps with abilities (fast, undead, healing, mechanical). How the abilities are to be distributed among the tiers remains to be seen - or maybe tier 3 enables sending creeps with multiple abilities?

Attacks are sent in waves of 30, just like in TD. An attack wave can be bought with as much or as little gold as a player wants, with more gold resulting in stronger creeps. A wave has to spawn completely before a new attack against the defending player can activate; attacks sent until that point are queued. The attack queues against a player may or may not be publicly visible.

When too many creeps get through a player's defenses during a sufficiently short time frame, that player loses an element. The defender loses the element he has had the longest (the starting elements are ordered randomly at the start), and the attacker gains that element. How the attacker is decided when creeps belong to multiple attackers are getting through remains to be seen, but I'm confident I can work out a fair algorithm - I'll spare the rest of you the technical details though.

Arbitrary limitations

There should probably be a limit on the number of attacking waves a player may be sending at any time, including the queued attacks. This keeps players from blocking the game by sending very cheap attacks by the dozens. Players may be able to cancel their current attacks (maybe only queued ones) to free up attack slots, but this does not get them any refund.

Queued attack waves may be unleashed in order of strength - this makes it impossible for a player to be mostly unattackable by having lots of very weak attacks inbound.

If a player loses an element, all creeps still attacking him (as well as queued waves) are destroyed. This protects a player from being completely owned by a strong attack, making it less attractive to just save money to send a single very large wave.

Doubts and considerations

I'm not quite sure this system provides enough incentive for players to attack each other. I suspect this system encourages players to defend only, interest farming until they are capable to send a single crushing attack that the defender won't be able to defeat. Maybe income should be tied to element ownership in some way?

An alternative we're considering is to disjoin the defense budget from the offense budget, by making attacking cost lumber rather than gold or something similar. This will certainly stop people from spending everything on defense, but it also removes the tactical dilemma of balancing offense and defense. What we'd really want is a way to encourage attacking while keeping the balance issue open and delicate, but the only way we could think of to accomplish that is by connecting some immediate benefit to sending the creeps (without regard for their effectiveness) - which has the serious side effect of making sending creeps feel like buying something, rather than attacking. For instance, in line tower wars, by sending a sheep to a player I'm not attacking anything - I'm buying 1 income for 5 gold, and the fact that sheep spawn in my opponent's maze is entirely irrelevant to me. If someone can think of a way out of this paradox, please let us know.

[Kaini]

Okay some toughts. Most of them affect both versions.

I think it is a problem that the players can choose their target. On the one hand they could bash a player (I know there is a spam protection but I think thats an less-to-ideal solution) and a player could send weak waves to a friend to trigger the spam-protection and protect him from others.

There are some solutions:

- Waves are send to a random player (more funny: the sender himself can be the target too)

- Waves are send to the player who wasn't attacked for the longes time (more funny: the attacker himself could be the target)

- Solutions as above but the player can send it to a specific player if he pays a fee

I really like the way how to get elements in Holepercents version

[holepercent]

condensed version 2.0 (combination of both concepts)

Overall concept

8-player FFA, fog on. The key concept is to encourage interactivity. There must be strong incentives to send creeps and not play tower defence.

Interest and gold

There would be no interest. With interest, players have no incentive to send creeps as everyone would not build anything or send creeps and just farm the interest.

There would only be one way to earn gold. You receive gold based on the the time the creeps you send stay alive.

Creeps and Elementals

You receive 2 random tier 1 elementals at the start of the game.

You can send creeps of the elements you have. Once you send a player creeps, no other player can send creeps to that player until 20sec has passed. Non-elemental creeps become available when a player has all 6 elementals. If the defending player leaks, you receive one of that player's elements.

You receive tier 2/3 of any elemental after sending 200/400 creeps of that element.

With tier1 of the element, you can send fast creeps of that element. With tier2, you can send fast and mechanical creeps of that element. With tier3, you can send fast, mech, healing and undead creeps of that element.

If an opponent leaks the creeps you send, they are sent back to you (with no delay). That player loses lives for the leaks and you gain that many lives.

issues with system

how to reduce cash cows and effects on game (player sends creeps to a weak player, gains plenty of gold but does not actually defeat the player)

incentives to really defeat a player

the element you gain does not help your defense, with no option to gain the elemental that you really need.

[holepercent]

version 2.1 updated.

system change to getting new elementals and upgrading of existing ones.

-to receive a new element, you have to defeat a player or at least ensure that player leaks.

[holepercent]

Back to the first post.

updates:

-choice of bonus gold on creeps sent or extra pure for defeating a player

-max creep + time buffer (no more than 60 creeps every 30 sec)

[holepercent]

so what direction is this headed in now? what aspects do we still need to work out?

[holepercent]

Is the rest of the team removed from the pool?

[holepercent]

interesting: mixed diff for TW?

lower armour (and bounty/income) for lower difficulties?

[Karawasa]

I just wanted to chirp in and say that I am heavily leaning towards %'s idea. I will elaborate on this further in an edit soon to come.

[holepercent]

Time for an update?

[Karawasa]

I like %'s concept because it is an "Elemental" take on the classic TW game. It will be accessible to BNET players yet will have enough differentiation to make it worthwhile to play. It is fitting as a mode, not as another map. So, in essence;

1. Gold is earned by having creeps out. Every second (this is the default time anyway) you would get gold for each creep you have out.

2. Creeps are sent in waves of 15/30/45/60.

3. A player can receive up to 60 creeps every 45 seconds.

4. You start off with 7 creeps. One of each armor type.

5. When you send 200/500/1500 creeps of a certain armor you gain levels 1, 2, and 3 in that element respectively. You also get the same level of tier for the creeps.

6. When you send 400/1000/3000 creeps in general, you gain access to tiers 1, 2, and 3 respectively of composite armor creeps.

7. You start out with no special creeps. Tier 1 gives you fast and undead, tier 2 gives you healing and illusion, and tier 3 gives you mechanical. This is cumulative, so at Tier 3 you have all five.

8. When a player leaks, they lose a life. The sending player gains a life. The leaked creep is sent to the sending player. If he leaks it, it is sent back to the leaking player. It goes back and forth like this until it dies.

9. When a player dies, the sender of the killing creep gets a bonus. He will be able to choose between a pure or an interest. The pure works like you think, the interest decreases the timer for your income. It decreases it by 0.1 seconds. A cap of 3 for each bonus type.

10. You can choose who to send creeps to. This is a FFA game. There is no fog of war.

[holepercent]

3. A player can receive up to 60 creeps every 45 seconds.

to be more specific, when does the 45 seconds start from/reset?

player A:

receives 15 creeps from player B at 1:00

receives 15 creeps from player C at 1:30

receives 30 creeps from player D at 1:40

if player E tries to send 60 creeps at 1:50, are the creeps sent?. (this is past the 45 seconds from the first wave sent by player B.) when does the 45 seconds next reset?

alternate plan might be maximum creeps in area. say a player can have a maximum of 200 creeps in area. once there are only 199 creeps in the area, the next wave can be sent. this gives players a window to deal with the creeps. (on the assumption if the player has that many creeps in the area, he is likely to leak.)

or if the player has more than 250 creeps in his area, he loses the game.. (this stops players from playing too slowly, although it might result in a over-competitive game)

8. When a player leaks, they lose a life. The sending player gains a life. The leaked creep is sent to the sending player. If he leaks it, it is sent back to the leaking player. It goes back and forth like this until it dies.

might be possible for 2 players to cooperate and let creeps run between both of them, the defending player giving the 'sender' the gold for the creep through the entire path..

player 1 sends the creeps to player B. player B leaks the creeps, giving player A full gold.

creep is sent back to player A. player B is now the 'sender'. player A leaks the creeps, giving player B full gold.

the creep goes to player B again, who leaks it again, giving player A full gold.

repeat..

although it is probably too difficult to micro towers away from the 'leak' creeps..

it might be possible that both players keep sending each other enough creeps to lock other creeps out, and let 2 sets of creeps (one set in each player's area) run between them, killing just enough creeps not to be reduced to 0 life while amassing gold...

[holepercent]

random idea:

all players start with 100000 gold.

player loses gold for each creep in the area. kill early!

after a creep wave is defeated, player receives a gold bounty for the wave.

player loses the game if negative gold after receiving the wave bounty. (must sell towers before the wave finishes, ending wave with positive gold to survive.)

elementals and creep sending as per original.

[Karawasa]

Upon consideration and discussion;

The 45 second limit isn't such a hot idea. So instead, how about limits added at the time of sending? By this I mean,

Say you send 60 creep wave, then that player wouldn't be able to receive creeps for the next 30 seconds. But, say you send the 15 creep wave. Then that blocking time would only be like 5 seconds. Numbers to be worked out.

60 - 45 seconds blocking

45 - 34 seconds blocking

30 - 23 seconds blocking

15 - 11 seconds blocking

Note, the blocking ends prematurely if you clear the wave first.

[holepercent]

next to consider:

layout of creep summoning centre.

-3-page layout, player clicks

-element (composite, light, darkness, fire, water, earth, nature)

-ability (normal, fast, undead, mech, image, healing)

-number (15/30/45/60)

in separate pages, next option displayed once player clicks, probably with the option to go back.

costing of creeps and bounty (which gold plan).

[holepercent]

<- sends 60 composite undead creeps to karawasa.

75% sell or all towers sell for 100%?

[holepercent]

bump!

[Karawasa]

It's not canceled??? I love the idea and want to have it. Deaod is just busy in real life so we are focusing on getting the new towers finished first.

[Severon]

* 10. You can choose who to send creeps to. This is a FFA game. There is no fog of war.

Time for SC2!

I got a small problem with this just for fairness sack. With this people can team up against just one person, though you do have the creep blocking system in place so that will help, but one person can save up and send him powerful creeps while the other saves gold up for powerful creeps to send. If the defender player tries to send to many creeps he won't have enough gold to defend properly.

The alternative is to just send it to the next player in line:

EX:

Player 1 goes to Player 2

Player 2 goes to Player 3

ect..

If player 2 is defeated or not in game creeps skip and go to player 3.

this has issues and I'm aware of that, but I was told to brainstorm and think, so here is another idea to mule over.

[holepercent]

the aim is to be different from most other tower wars.. next in line is boring.

sending too many creeps and not having enough gold to defend is bad play.. balance is key..

[Severon]

the aim is to be different from most other tower wars.. next in line is boring.

sending too many creeps and not having enough gold to defend is bad play.. balance is key..

On the gold part I was referring to if they didn't defend they would be screwed since they have 2-3 players taking turn sending high gold value units at them just to get them out of the game. Once again I'll state I'm not sure which I prefer, maybe have it sent to a random player. I'm just merely pointing out that the system might be able to be abused and that we should take it into consideration, not blow it off because you don't like some alternative.

[holepercent]

next in line and sent to random player has already been discussed. FFA makes for more strategic decisions as all other players must be considered. a player has to consider who to attack and when to attack.

creep blocking is there to minimise a player being mass targeted by everyone else.

the aim is to increase player interactivity and for players to watch the tactics of all other players to balance creep sending and defences accordingly.

[Karawasa]

• 1. Mineral is earned by having creeps out. Every second you would get x mineral for each creep you have out. As game progresses the interval can decrease. Say by 0.1 every 10 minutes. Cap of 0.5 second interval.
• 2. Creeps can be sent in waves of 5/10/15/30/45/60.
• 3. Creep blocking is like this, with first number creep amount. 60 - 30 seconds blocking, 45 - 22.5 seconds blocking, 30 - 15 seconds blocking, 15 - 7.5 seconds blocking, 10 - 5 seconds blocking, 5 - 2.5 seconds blocking.
• 4. You start off with 7 creeps. One of each armor type.
• 5. When you send 150/750/3750 creeps of a certain armor you gain levels 1, 2, and 3 in that element respectively. You also get the same level of tier for the creeps.
• 6. When you send 300/1500/7500 creeps in general, you gain access to tiers 1, 2, and 3 respectively of composite armor creeps.
• 7. You start out with no special creeps. Tier 1 gives you fast, image, undead, tier 2 gives you healing and mechanical, and tier 3 gives you boss. This is cumulative, so at Tier 3 you have all six.
• 8. When a player leaks, they lose a life. The sending player gains a life. The leaked creep is sent to the sending player. If he leaks it, it is sent back to the leaking player. It goes back and forth like this until it dies.
• 9. When a player dies, the sender of the killing creep gets a pure bonus. The pure works like you think. A cap of 3.
• 10. You can choose who to send creeps to. This is a FFA game. There is no fog of war.
• 11. When you gain level 3 of an element or level 1 of all six, then you receive a pure for free.
• 12. You can't have more than 11 "summons" for elements. Creeps you send after 11 selections do not unlock new tiers or levels.
• 13. You can't send creeps to a player if they have more than 30 creeps out.
• 14. Bounty for killed creeps is equal to their income per interval amount.
• 15. Players start with 50 minerals. There are no other modes (they only appear in solo and classic games).