Mazing Guide

[Ayr]

Basic Principles:

1) Block the creeps path between way points (WP)

2) Use the longest path in the smallest area

a) This allows for your towers to have the most time-on-target

Advanced Concept:

1) Customize maze to fit specific towers

2) Make a multi-pass maze (one which the creeps have to pass through multiple times while making it from WP to WP)

-----------------------------------------------------------

Basic #1 - Block Creeps

Here is the location and order of the waypoints.

The creeps spawn along to the top, to the left. They proceed down to 1, then 2, and 3. From 3 they move straight up to the exit.

Lets look at what would happen when you lay a few horizontal lines down in the middle:

So, looking at this setup, the creeps would spawn at the top, moving down to WP 1. With these basic lines in place, they would have to go thru them to get to WP 1. Then to get to WP 2, they would have to go back through. And to WP 3. And to the exit. In the end, the creeps have to go thru the maze four times to reach the exit. Plenty of time to bring some pain.

-------------------------------

Basic #2: Condensed Mazing

So blocking the creeps path gives you more time to kill them. But if the creeps are out of range of the tower, then what good does that extra time give you? What we want is for the longest time on target. To do this, we make a maze that is the longest path in the smallest area.

Here is one of my first and favorite corner mazes. Placing a tower right above the waypoint gives a lot of time to attack the wave of creeps. With even a basic splash tower like fire element, you can usually kill off an entire wave using a single tower (early on). Move up to a AoE tower like Quake, and you can hit nearly all 30 creeps with one burst.

[Ayr]

Advanced Topic #1: Design your maze for a tower

Using a good condensed maze you have a good amount of time to attack the creeps. But some towers work better in a generalized maze than others. Take the Mildew and Ice towers. Their attacks hit every creep along a designated path, but with a standard maze this doesn't maximize their effectiveness, as most of the time there are no creeps along the line of attack. The following maze allows for solid utilization of the tower's potential. (credit to WindStrike for this maze)

In this maze the Mildew or Ice tower is placed at the green location. The "T"s represent the target spots for the 'attack ground'. Using the tower in this manner, the attacks hurt all the creeps along this path, on both sides of the wall. If you placed three towers at the "T"s targeting the center (green), you cover nearly all of the maze, which would receive constant damage, wasting very little of the tower's potential damage.

[Ayr]

Figured I'd share my collection here:

(Note/warning: the waypoints aren't always in the correct/ same location)

First is my 3-pass maze. I was able to get some pretty high fruit scores with this one. All-around versatile, but as stated, only 3 pass. (Colored for ease of reading. The rest won't be.)

Next is the Cross - Blitz. Located near the entrance. I used this in the tourney against Windstrike, for the win .

Moving the Cross down to the normal spot, you can build a pretty good maze, especially for Quake.

If you wanted to use Flamethrower, I made a maze for that. Perhaps not the best maze, but it can be useful for team games, as it gives enough room for a teammates maze. (although ideally in team games, one maze should be shared)

Next is the Oval maze. Quite useful for many things. It is intentionally shorter than the next maze, to try to minimize time off target for short range towers.

And finally my go-to maze, which I refer to as the Snail. I would say that this is just about the ideal maze for most towers. 4 pass, spiral, tight, and most towers can maintain target on creeps throughout.

Feel free to share your own mazes. And if you think you have a maze better than the Snail, I look forward to seeing it.

Enjoy TDing!

[Ayr]

Updated

[Guest The Muffin Man]

youre concept of time under tower is completely mis-guided,  you want the longest maze possible to draw out interest payments.....I have personally reached over 300k gold.  using the opposite principle