Active towers

[joesi]

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.

[Chiquihuite]

As cool as some of this sounds, TDs are inherently more macro-intensive games. We don't want to draw too much focus away from that aspect or we risk diminishing the type of gameplay that draws people to TDs in the first place.

So far, community feedback has been overwhelmingly in favor of making our existing "micro" towers easier to manage than they currently are (with added Attack Ground abilities, etc). I'm a fan of having to have some user input for a tower to reach their peak effectiveness, but we're generally looking for the delta between base effectiveness (with no micro) and peak effectiveness (with ideal micro) to be fairly narrow - about 20 to 25%.

[holepercent]

Interesting ideas but as already mentioned, players are already requesting to cut down the attention that needs to be given to individual towers (celerity, torrent etc). so any tower that takes all or most of the player's attention is probably a poor idea.

[joesi]

Interesting ideas but as already mentioned, players are already requesting to cut down the attention that needs to be given to individual towers (celerity, torrent etc). so any tower that takes all or most of the player's attention is probably a poor idea.

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.

[Karawasa]

Well how would you rate the new Celerity and Temporal? Celerity now has a "minimum range" of 7 when it comes to calculating damage. Temporal now has a new mechanic altogether.

[Megadramon]

Anything micro related could fall into a potential Hero Mode if that ever gets implemented. As Chiquihuite mentioned, TDs are usually macro intensive. Hero Mode could shift the burden of macro onto something more micro-able in a different type of game setup.