Alternative Element Tower Wars Design

[WindStrike]

(Repost of one from Ideas forum, since that forum can't be seen by guests)

(Do note, this would require a lot of work and probably several months of work to get this off the ground. But, I think it'd be worth it, and it'd be something different from the standard Tower Wars games)

Before I get to the main meat of this, the idea would first require a rework of the game to start with. Let's start with the UI.

The elemental picker would still be there, but it would not have a multi-function spawn creeps. It'd be just like normal EleTD, inclusive of the waves. Every 60 seconds (this can be changed), the next wave is automatically sent, and you'll be able to choose what's sent next wave (as for targetting system, let's just say it hits the next player in line for now; this can be changed). There'd be a menu to choose the creep type (composite, light, dark, water, fire, nature, earth), and then there'd be two more menus. If you pick one out of one menu, you don't get the one out of the other menu. One of these menus would be your standard creep abilities - normal (gives +15% hp boost or something), fast, mechanical, image, healing and undead. In other words, this is a Creep Workshop, where every wave, the creeps scale with wave number (just like it originally is).

That third menu is what makes this go nuts - just like how combo element towers have special abilities, creeps will be able to gain special benefits based on what element combo you have. They would not necessarily be based on the tower itself; they also wouldn't necessarily have the intent of killing the opponent. Here's some examples below (not necessarily what they'd be, just ideas):

• A Light Wave w/ Light+Nature (Level 1) Bonus - Every 15 creeps killed by the target would give you +1 life
• A Dark Wave w/ Dark+Water+Earth (Level 1) Bonus - Every 5 seconds, creeps will shoot sludge out, slowing the attack speed of nearby towers by 10% for 3 seconds
• A Nature Wave w/ Nature+Light+Earth (Level 2) Bonus - Every 3 seconds, a creep will gain a 15 second armor bonus that increases their damage reduction by 30%
• A Fire Wave w/ Earth+Fire+Light (Level 1) Bonus - Every creep killed by the target sends back a 25% bounty bonus
• An Earth Wave w/ Earth+Nature (Level 3) Bonus - Every 10 seconds, a creep will back up by a range of 6 and slingshot forward at +200% increased speed for 3 seconds (lolwut)
• A Water Wave w/ Fire+Light (Level 2) Bonus - Every 5 seconds, creeps hurl a bolt of lightning that bounces up to 3 times, dealing damage to the primary target. Each jump deals 20% more damage. (Tower destruction?)
• A Nature Wave w/ Dark+Light (Level 3) Bonus - Every 3 seconds, a creep will clone itself. The clone has no bounty value, and it lasts for 15 seconds.
• A Composite Wave w/ Nature+Water (Level 1) Bonus - All creeps move 10% faster.

Once again, these are just examples and by no means represent the final outcome of what it would actually do.

As you may have noticed, the first five examples had buffs applied to an element as part of the combo. Life buff applied on a Light Wave or Gold buff on a Fire Wave. However, the later three examples were completely different. In other words, the combo buff does not have to be applied to one of its component elements. So long as you have elements, you could apply a Storm buff (Light+Water+Fire) on a Dark Wave.

As for income, you'll notice that as a result of picking the next wave, there's no cost for it. There's multiple ways to implement income in this, but keep in mind that so long as income is a primary function of a tower wars game, people will assume it's the main thing to go for, and everything else that seems cool about the game will feel like a gimmick. My suggestion would be another addition to the UI - you can send extra creeps to the enemies per wave for an extra cost. However, this would increase your income based on the number of extra creeps sent. You'd get the income upon wave completion. With every wave, the cost/income would increase slightly. Obviously, it's a little detrimental to try and income spam right off the bat and instantly get ahead, because then you'll die when others send too many creeps at you. So income in this case would be a sub-factor - it'll affect the game, especially in the long run, but it won't be something that's smart to rush (example, level 3 elements aren't smart to rush either, but at the same time, it's possible (I've pulled it off in standard EleTD game, Light 3 by Wave 16, lol)).

Fyi, income would be the type of difference 2% interest makes. Maybe less, but definitely not more than what 2% interest is capable of.

Countermeasures - obviously, people will look at the person they're targetting and try to spam the same types of creep abilities that'll kill them. There are ways around this, but at the same time, only the experts would be able to handle situations like that. To make the game a little more newb friendly, you can only send the same ability once every... oh, somewhere between three and five waves. And to truly allow it to be newb friendly (aka, level of classic EleTD), the system can be completely randomized - it'll send a random elemental/ability type if you set it to be (and in the case the targetting system allows you send to specific players, there'd also be a random option as well).

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All in all, this wouldn't be your standard Tower Wars. Mainly, what I'm looking for in suggesting something as crazy is this is something that has as much depth (if not more than) as the original EleTD. There are a bunch of different Elemental combinations, strategies and play styles you can conform to, and even after years of its existence, people are STILL finding awesome combinations and the like. This idea for a Tower Wars game would amp the competitive level and keep that same level of depth that the original EleTD while adding an offensive element (pun not intended).

I'll try to make this idea a little neater/more organized down the road. I'm aware I'm also missing some things, ex: Damaged Towers and Selling (assuming tower destruction is even in), what happens when your creeps kills a player, does your creep pick get locked in 10 or so seconds before the wave so that the target player can see what you're sending at them, etc. etc.

Fyi, I'm not pushing for this idea unless the current state of Element Tower Wars doesn't do so well. But nonetheless, questions, suggestions, comments, etc, fire in the hole.

[WindStrike]

Gonna just toss random ideas related to original in this post

• Rather than having "Undead, Fast, Image, Mechanical and Healing" as part of the standard, they can be part of the combo abilities. Image would be Light+Dark (Trickery), Undead would be Nature+Dark (Death), Healing would be Nature+Light (Life), Fast would be Fire+Water+Earth (Haste), and Mechanical... frankly, I don't know what it'd be. I dunno, that's simply based on the towers and can be changed. This would allow you to still have two menus, but instead it'd be "Dual Combo Types" and "Triple Combo Types".
• Keep the difficulty levels.
• Whatever the targetting system is, it needs to make it such that everyone is hit every round. No one would get hit by more than one person in a round. If possible, I'd make it based on EXP somehow, maybe the highest level player cannot target anyone except the lowest level; lowest level can target whoever. I dunno.
• Start with a Level 1 Element. The plus side, it'd get the game going faster. The downside, people unaccustomed to standard Element Tower Defense wouldn't have a chance to get familiar with the standard gameplay.