Alternate Towers and Achievement System

[WindStrike]

(As this suggestion is not Tower specific, I'm placing it here instead.)

So XP currently has two uses - showing that you've played more than someone else and as you level up, more builder models. Well, honestly it isn't particularly rewarding. Other suggestions have gone around like making the periodic tower a rainbow tower, good ol' cosmetic stuff. However, this suggestion would allow more than just cosmetics and give more depth in gameplay. Since EleTD got featured, there's been a lot more new players, learning players, experienced players, and all that sorts, and it's not hard to get an 8-player game going nowadays.

This is going to be a 2-in-1 suggestion simply due to the nature of the primary suggestion.

That said, the Tower Ability Wishlist thread has a lot of tower ideas, good ones at that, submitted by lots of different people. I propose another building or separate UI for allowing alternate towers of all the damage towers. In total, there'd be 12 alternate dual-element towers and 12 alternate triple-element towers for a total of 24 alternates in addition to the existing ones. Essentially, instead of say having Quark Tower (Earth+Light), you could instead have (for example) a Static Tower. It has the same purpose of Quark Tower in that it's supposed to soften the creeps, but its execution is different. Let's say Static Tower is the opposite of Disease Tower (Dark+Light) in that it does more damage the higher the creep's hp is, however it is still single-target and short-ranged. It still has the same purpose as Quark, it won't necessarily kill the creeps, but it'll weaken them for other towers.

Now, new players wouldn't catch on to the alternate towers. In fact, it wouldn't even be available to them until they hit a certain XP amount (say Level 5, whatever that XP amount is), at which point the game will point out that the player has access to researching these alternative towers. These towers may have a higher skill cap than the original towers; that's perfectly fine, they're alternates. They will not be better than the original either though, it simply allows for a different option. It will have the same purpose but function differently.

As for how the UI works, could be a button for a tech tree of sorts (for tech tree ideas, Hive Keeper has a good tech tree UI, check it out). As you gain more XP, you'll be able to use it to gain more alternate towers. This tech tree would also have a design that allows you to choose your tower switches at the start of a match. If it's on normal length, these must be made before wave 5. Short mode and very short mode, before the timer goes off. And this is something that would carry over from game to game, so if you're testing out a build, you wouldn't have to set your towers every single time. I suppose another way is to just have the option on each tower, instant build time and irreversible.

Suggestion number 2, this has been mentioned a few times before (had one thread on it here), but it never fully expanded into what the achievements are, how much they'd give, etc. And the reason I'm incorporating this suggestion in with the alternate tower ideas is.... before, an achievement system only supported getting players more XP and builder models, aka nothing much. If there was something like alternate towers, then an achievement system would work.

First off, all achievements must be done on a minimum of normal difficulty. Unlike the multiplayer XP gain, achievements would be possible to gain in single-player (in fact, some of these might be nearly impossible in multiplayer games just because it's too easy for someone to screw you up towards some of the crazier ones). The following are a bunch of very basic achievements:

• Wave 10 - Beat wave 10 on at least normal difficulty, +10 XP
• Wave 20 - Beat wave 20 on at least normal difficulty, +20 XP
• Wave 30 - Beat wave 30 on at least normal difficulty, +40 XP
• Wave 40 - Beat wave 40 on at least normal difficulty, +70 XP
• Wave 50 - Beat wave 50 on at least normal difficulty, +120 XP
• Wave 60 - Beat wave 60 on at least normal difficulty, +250 XP (arbitrary values are arbitrary)
• Dual Tower - Build a dual-element tower, +20 XP
• Triple Tower - Build a triple-element tower, +30 XP
• Fruit Cake - Get 100 points on the fruit round, +300 XP

Stuff like that. Of course, there’d be some crazy achievements along the lines of Extreme, Very Hard, Chaos, All Random, Normal length, go (lol).

So it’s a very large suggestion, but a good amount of it (the tower ideas, for example) is already there. It would certainly add incentive for replayability and keeping players interested.