1 More lumber

[Guest mrchak]

How about 1 final lumber after lv 60?

[Karawasa]

Will the trophy area run of of space?

[Guest xSolmyRx]

I'm slightly confused. Like... 1 more lumber, just for Ronald level?

Can always just extend the trophy area... Unless that's a bit of a mission?

[Guest Sancdar]

I don't think it will run out. Just check how many trophies fit in there with single player and greedisgood cheat.

[Guest mrchak]

The placement of the trophies can be adjusted slightly to allow for a little more space, simple as that. There's like 3 triggers that place them, and its like "put it at X + 50*number_of_elements, Y)

I forget the exact language, but that's the gist. Also 50 isn't the right number, but that is the general idea.

There's currently 13 trophies

so if we're going to make room for a 14th, its a simple % reduction.

That is, of course, assuming this idea is a good one.

[Guest xSolmyRx]

Sometimes I often wish for an extra lumber.

So I'm all for the idea... Testing it out will be rather interesting.

[Guest sillyboy_tomato]

"thumbs up to this"

But I think in extreme or chaos mode this should be removed for more troubles:P

[Twilice]

You could get 1 lumber at the start of the game,

or something else.

1 Extra lumber at level 30 for getting past half of the game.

[Cisz]

Why the extra lumber anyway? Would the map become better, if it gave you 30 lumber in each game? The map is limited in what you can build in one game. Is 11 lumber enough to win? Obviously yes. Would it get easier with 12? Of course.

With 12 lumber you can max out all tripples in every game. So the only difference bewteen triple-heavy builds would be the order of elements. With 30 lumber you could max out the elements in midgame.

So to add more wood would lead to less diversity, the end games would all look the same. Most or all towers available, no need to find a sollution for a missing type of support effect. And the map would become easier.

After many players that love the map spent a year to learn how to play it and nowadays find vh to be actually quite relaxing to play, you want to make it even easier?

[Guest mrchak]

i think the idea won't fly, though what about an essence rewarded to you in preparation for the elimination round?

Or is the current lumber and number of essences perfect?

[Cisz]

Imo each essence equals rougthly 10.000 extra gold, if you build a proper pure (splash). With a typical net worth of maybe 100k after wave 60, one extra essence won't change much and slightly reward players that have kept extra cash on pick. (Slightly because you can sell/rebuild, and not only on rnd, so players that don't have to relocate the money into the pure to get the 10k bonus on pick won't lose 25% of the worth of the pure, which is about 20k. So a player that has to sell/rebuild on pick to make use of the extra essence get's only an effective 5k.)

I'm a ronald hunter, so one more essence wouldn't hurt at all.

[Guest Ubernuber]

Extra lumber would be great, but only IF you introduce

a) an additional 7th element

more element tiers

c) quad element towers

d) more levels

for the reason Cisz quoted: diversity would suffer otherwise. Best would be all of the above of course (maybe minus the 7th element), but I know that's a boatload of work. Tier 4 dual element, tier 3 triple and tier 2 quad element towers as maximum would soooo own.

[Guest mrchak]

I think that 7th element is totally out of scope for this revision.

[Guest Ubernuber]

Granted, all of the above is wishful thinking ^^

I did some maps myself, I'd be happy to assist in coding... although adding new towers and rounds is mainly just hammering them into the unit editor, apart from the concept work.

I'll add some concepts for towers below... mainly when I get home for the quad element towers.

Rounds:

Additional rounds (say 61-75, Ronald being shifted to 76) can be done fairly quickly probably, just based on which elements and bonus abilities should occur. HP scaling follows some sort of curve that can just be extended.

Maximum lumber is then 11 + 4 (after levels 60, 65, 70, 75) = 15.

Tower diversity today

I'll mainly talk about the highest tiers of towers, since for the end game almost only these are interesting, at least for damage towers.

Today, one can get all but one element to lvl 2, and as such build (5 choose 3) = 10 different T2 triple-element towers out of a total selection of 6 choose 3 = 20 (50%).

Alternatively, one can get 3 elements to lvl 3 and then build 3 choose 2 = 3 T3 double-element towers out of 6 choose 2 = 15 (20%), and also 3 of the pure element towers.

Tower diversity tomorrow

15 maximum lumber result in the player being unable to get more than 3 elements to level 4, or more than 5 to level 3.

As such, one can still build 3 different max tier single/double element towers, or with a different build 10 out of 20 maximum tier triple element towers.

Additional tower diversity is added by quad-element towers, ideas for which I will outline below (when I get home and have good ideas). The first tier of quad towers is only buildable, when all required elements are at level 2. An upgrade to T2 is available, when all are at 3. Since only 5 elements can be powered to lvl 3, the player can build (5 choose 4) = 5 out of (6 choose 4) = 15 (33%) quad element towers at their highest tier.

For a moment I thought there was going to be a problem with fitting all the upgrade possibilities into the window, but there isn't. T1 triple towers can be upgraded to tier 2 (as they are now), plus 3 different quad towers (each adding one of the 3 missing elements). T2 triples can be upgraded to T3 triple, or to one of three T2 quad towers. For the double towers, we have the same game, since they can only be upgraded to triples or to their own higher tier.

Additional towers:

Single elements will need an additional level of ultimate towers. The 'pure' variants could be changed to give only a factor of 5 increase (half current strength) and not require essence to build, maybe slightly reduced gold cost as well. Pure towers would then be upgraded into 'Ultimate Light Tower' etc. which give a factor 10 increase, require essence and boatloads of gold (~35k).

T4 double-element towers further extend the power of the base towers by a factor of 5, for a correspondingly high cost.

T3 triple-element towers extend their base towers' effect as well.

In the case of very strong buff towers (enchantment, acid, well) the previous tier(s) could be nerfed slightly, and the third be only a bit stronger than today's T2.

The Periodic tower of the elements gets a second tier, which is a factor of 5 or (omgpwnz0rbbqh4x) 10 better than the T1 version.

Now for the new stuff (quad towers) where I actually have to think longer.

[Guest mrchak]

I can't speak for everybody, but I think adding another 15 levels, a 7th element, quad towers, etc... this is all out of scope for this revision, (at least as far as the discussions have gone right now).

These fall under the category of Major Changes, and I think you should start a new Suggestion thread.

[Guest Tigershark]T-T[]

Wow, that suggestion (Ubernuber's) sounds like.... cool - though I second that it is more like an Element TD 3.5 or maybe even 4.0 (Which would fit as Die Hard 4.0 just hit the cinemas

[Cisz]

A typical game of eletd last an hour. Any suggestions that doesn't make that time shorter won't find me interested.

[Guest Sancdar]

a) an additional 7th element

more element tiers

c) quad element towers

Please don't do this. Judging by the ideas we had on the last forum, the map would just get silly with 7 elements or quad towers. Another thread discussed the possibility of more element tiers, and the conclusion was that so many towers wouldn't benefit at all from the addition. Really, who wants an 8-second Root Tower?

As for an additional lumber at game-end reducing diversity, I wouldn't say that is the case. You're only getting this AFTER your build has won the game, right? I don't think it's a good idea, I just don't see how it's a bad idea either.

[Karawasa]

There won't be a 7th element. There won't be more element tiers. There won't be quad element towers. Redesigning what is currently in place is already a challenge in itself. I don't need MORE work .

Ubernuber, I thank you for the suggestions though. Trying to contribute to the map is always appreciated.

[Guest Ubernuber]

Ah, pity.

Tigershark and me discussed some possibilities for quad element towers already, missing only about 5 or so.

What about this: If I do all the additional units & abilities, could you include them in an EleTD mod (I know most map makers are not so keen to share their source code)? Or maybe if you're not objecting to a partial share, if you could export the unit & ability data, I could mod them and return them to you, together with possibly required triggers to make all abilities work.

[Karawasa]

I only object to the EleTD mod for now, because having multiple versions floating around hurts the map. Not a pity at all though. Your discussions with Tigershark are not in vain. You guys brainstormed ideas for all but five towers. Note, that a lot of towers are getting redesigned in Final, so there is plenty of opportunity for your ideas to be implemented. Feel free to make a thread in this area with a list of everything you guys came up with, I would be happy to read it.

[Twilice]

There were alot of talking in the old forums, and it got, how do you say it.

Over the edge, to splashy with dreams, Living in a fantasy dream with a mega cool tower that killed everything.

Maybe not what we want. But thats the impression I got from the old forums.

[Guest Ubernuber]

Rest assured, my ideas were not along the lines of "kill everything with a big explosion". Quad towers would of course have to be balanced against the rest, to be a bit better than triple towers and worse (damage wise) than T2 double towers (since 4 lvl 1 elements are more than 3 lvl 1, but less than 2 lvl 1 and 2 lvl 2).

The list just goes through all quad element combinations and then lists possible combinations from the 4 triple towers that result from them.

Example:

DEFL is DEF + DEL + DFL + EFL, which is Flamethrower + Laser + Enchant + Metal. My idea for that combination was the Blessed Killer Satellite, which does big single target light (or fire) damage in huge intervals. Imagine a ray of light coming from the sky.

Now this sounds like an adolescent power fantasy, sure. The trick to make it balanced is of course to not make it overpowered, but instead have it do comparable DPS to other towers. From a game mechanical point of view this tower is not all that different from the Hail tower, or any single element light tower. What does a huge damage per shot help you, if the enemies are one-hit killed anyway? You'd be better off building something with a higher rate of fire and less damage.

Along these lines I have some more towers. They don't radically differ from other towers in their effect - I mean, what can you possibly do with a tower - but they do add some more diversity.

This added diversity could for example introduce some decent earth based support towers and offer an alternative to the holy support quadforce of FWLD(+N). For example, imagine an earth + nature based tower that has a critical strike or bash aura.

Another thing I would aim at is to distribute the effects of slowing or debuffing towers over more tiers for the existing towers. Ever noticed the drastic effect a Supernova gives you over a Nova? Or Incantation over Enchantment? Or Venom over Poison? Or Hydrochloric over Acid? Distributing these drastic increases over 3 or 4 tiers instead of 2 or 3 would level the playing field a bit more and make single upgrades less mandatory (for example, normal poison towers will not do much against lvl 39, whereas venom will).

I'm conscious of the fact that these are far reaching suggestions, but I think in the long run, the map would benefit from them. I like playing EleTD a lot, but in some respects I find the balance of some elements versus others lacking. Ever tried an NWDE build, for example?

(Ok, Cisz will likely answer this with a perfect replay of NWDE on VHX, but for everybody else that's a close to impossible combination )

[Cisz]

I haven't won dwne on vhx yet, and my best sullution for vh is still with leaks, but thanks for your trust.