Tutorial: Tower Wars

Well, here I spent 2 hours writing a huge tutorial with lots of images. I click post, get an error saying my message contains too many images and I should hit the back button. I hit back. "Page has expired"

Thanks forums, you ate 2 hours of my freaking time.

Im not going to rewrite all of it. I attached the map, and the first part of my tutorial that I did save:


As my first tutorial I help you create a very basic Tower Wars map. Tower Wars is similar to Tower Defense, but a lot more fun.

Rules
Each player / Team has a maze and a number of lives. They must defend that maze against monsters, using only towers. If they fail to kill a monster before it reaches the end of the mage, the team loses a life. At 0 lives, you lose.

Monsters dont automatically appear. You have to summon them from a shrine. When you summon a monster, it will run through your enemy mazes.

You get gold every 20-30 seconds. The amount of gold increases as you hire more monsters.


Part 1: Our Map

The map we will be making is a very basic one, and is attached to this post. It includes a tiny maze, 2 units, a shrine, the triggers needed, and thats it.

Part 2: The Terrain
First things first. You cant do anything without terrain. For the terrain, you need to know how many teams you create this map for. For each team you will need an identical maze. For this map there's only one team, and monsters you hire will run through your own maze.
Guidelines:
- Use flat terrain. Dont make elevations everywhere. Your towers will miss if they shoot uphill, and this is not balanced. Flat terrain is the best you can have for a tower defense.
- Don't add too many good looking doodads and cinematics. Nobody is going to download a 2 MB tower wars.
- Add 1 large square sized path of where the monsters will spawn for each player.
- All paths should be created using tiles that cannot be built on.
- The path the monsters run through should be of a small size (2 blocks) as shown in the image below:




Part 3: The Units
The fun part, creating units! Creating is fun, balancing later on is a pain, but lucky you this map only has 2 units so is already balanced. For this tutorial, we will create a land unit "Wolf", and an air unit "Vulture" that will move through your maze.
Open the unit editor.
Create a new unit by hitting Ctrl+N, or click the top left picture in the toolbar. As base unit, select Neutral -> Cityscape -> Dog. Call the unit wolf and click Ok.
So what values do we need to edit / add? Here they are:
Collision size: Put it to 0.0. Not required but will look better when you have a lot of units.
Gold Cost: Put it to 5 for this tutorial.
Supply Cost: ALWAYS set this to 0 in Tower wars! For this unit it already is 0, but this is very important!
Hit Points Maximum (Base): Doh, the unit health. Leave it on 15.
Defense base: The armor value. Doesnt matter for this map. Leave it on 0.
Armor type: All up to you. Experiment with this when you balance a map. For now, leave it on Small.
Attacks Enabled: None
Abilities: None (delete the Wander ability)
Movement Speed: Put it on 260. 190 is way too slow for our sprinting dog.
Bounty Awarded: The gold you get when you kill it. Put it on 1 (Base)
Stock Maximum: How many wolves do you want to be available maximum at your shrine? Dont put this high or people will be able to summon millions of units. Set it to 10 for the wolf.
Stock Start delay: How soon your wolf will be available. Put it to 2. (2 seconds in the game)
Stock Replenish interval: Set it to 4. This way, every 4 seconds a new wolf will be ready for hire.

Thats all you need! Now the vulture:
As base unit, select Neutral -> Fellwood -> Vulture. Call the unit Vulture and click Ok.
Collision size: 0
Gold Cost: 8
Supply Cost: 0
Hit Points Maximum (Base): 20
Defense base: 0
Armor type: Small
Attacks Enabled: Attack 1 Only
Attack 1 - Range: 300 (small range)
Attack 1 - Weapon type: Missile (its ranged!)
Attack 1 - Projectile type: Banshee (will look like banshee attack)
Attack 1 - Projectile speed: 900 (normal)
Attack 1 - Targets allowed: Enemy, Mechanical, Player Units, Structure
Attack 1 - Damage base: 1
Attack 1 - Damage Number of dice: 1
Attack 1 - Damage Sides per dice: 7
Attack 1 - Cooldown: 1
This is maths , here it will do 2-8 damage a second.
Abilities: None (delete the Wander ability)
Movement Speed: 260
Bounty Awarded: 2
Stock Maximum: 12
Stock Start delay: 8
Stock Replenish interval: 5


So now we have our units! What's next? A tower of course. You need to kill the units!

Create a new unit, and select the human guard tower as base unit. Name it something like Outpost. Set the following values:
Gold Cost: 30
Lumber cost: 0 (Tower wars rarely work with lumber, too complicated)
Build Time: 3 (dont make people wait a minute for 1 tower)
Requirements: None
Upgrades used: None (looks more professional ingame =)
Damage Base: 3 (otherwise we'll kill all units in 1 hit)
Abilities: Remove magic sentry.

Thats the tower already. Now who's going to build our tower?
Create a new unit based on the human peasant, and set the following abilities:
Name: Tower Builder
Unit Classification: Worker
Supply Cost: 0
Structures built: Delete all structures and add the outpost.
Abilities: Delete all except Repair(human). He needs that or he cant complete the towers.

Almost done with the unit editor. We need 1 more unit: Our shrine. Create a new unit based on the Mercenary Camp. You only have to set 2 abilities:
Units Sold: Delete all, then add the Wolf / Vulture.
Abilities: None (delete hero select)

Part 4: The Regions
The units you hire will have to move over the paths, and to do this we need regions. Before we do this, we should place our tower builder and our mercenary camp on the map! Put 1 tower builder near the paths, and a mercenary camp too.

Now open the region palette, and we can add some regions! This is hard to explain in detail, but here goes:
Create 1 region around your mercenary camp, like this:
http://www.ipages4u.com/pic/NB_TW3.jpg

Create 1 region covering the square in the big square where the monsters will eventually go to when you lose your lives.

Create a real tiny region in the location where your monsters spawn, and a tiny region on each of your path turning points (should be exactly in the center):



Why like this and no bigger? You want your units to walk along a straight line, not cut off the paths. Keep adding regions for all your turns until all your regions are placed.

That was a pretty good, specific tutorial. Applause to you for being so motivated to make such a thing, even after you lost it once.

Tower Wars is the best kind of TD I think, being able to spawn the monstars for your opponent's maze is a great way for TD

One day the normal TD will become extinct I hope. Just figured Id make this. There are only 2 Tower wars, turret wars and tower wars, and both have map protection. I spent hours trying to figure it out completely but hey here we are :foot:

Hmm.... I began work on terrain for a TW, I just laid off just when I started... I don't feel any motivation to do a TD what so ever.
ATM I am doing STFU Arena (thread at these forums are in gathering crew forum)... Great tut though, keep it up mate.

Regards
Dead-Inside