A Tower Defence map, not started yet (21 ideas)

These are plans, things that I would like to see in a TD, some of the things are in other ones already, but I haven't played lots of TD's, so tell me what you think of these ideas.

1. Having teams, im thinking 2 teams, each team will have a pool of money, not actual money you spend on towers, but a pool of points or something, just an integer variable that will be used to spawn monsters for the other team. So say each rat costs 1 gold to spawn, a rabbit costs 2, you have 10 gold available to spend, you can spawn 5 rabbits, or 10 rats. Just for example, there will be many more. Each team will have 3 or 4 players max, each with their own path to cover, so teamwork isn't neccesary, but a teammate may help by adding towers to the weak player.

2. There will be no units to hire at all, except for the tower builders. It's tower defence for a reason.

3. Each tower is a hero, or rather a tower that can level up, and I mean every tower, so the more you kill, the more can be upgraded.

4. Custom items, each unit you spawn for the enemy will have X% chance to drop an item relating to their level, so a rat (level 1) cannot drop a level 2 item. Which can be picked up telekenetically by the towers.

5. Sell option (which is pretty much standard with TD's now), but you will get 50% of what you paid back, and another 10 or 15% of the towers worth will be added to the pool of money to use to spawn.

6. You can add your own cash to the pool for spawning creatures.

7. Similar to Blizzard's TD, there will be a booster tower, which will be a hero also, however, the booster tower can be leveled up via your own gold, instead of waiting to level up. Each level up will grant the next level of "boost" auras to be used.

8. Again, similar to Blizzard's TD, there will be global upgrades, except instead of replacing the tower, it will be a global upgrade to the towers themselves, IE, adding more damage, splash damage, bounce attacks and what not.

9. Each tower can be upgraded via cost, or for free when the tower reaches a certain level.

10. You have to pay to allow the next "level" of creatures to be spawned, meaning at first you can only spawn level 1 creatures, maybe 8 of them, then you pay to get the next tier available.

11. You can't block the path with your towers, but you can either build, or temporarily summon blocking towers, which do not attack, but they are able to build on the path, these will not be invincible.

12. Many towers, im not meaning many including the upgrade ones, I mean there are alot of towers that you are able to build, and like I said, they are all heroes, that doesn't mean they have 5 abilities each, maybe they some dont have any abilities, or have 1.

13. Level spawns at the same time as player spawns, technically you could just not spawn any monsters at all for the other team, and there will still be spawns for levels. (Levels undecided) But each level will have multiple units, not all 1 type, like level 1 footmans, level 2 knights, there will always be a mix. And each one has a different penalty. Which will add in a sence of micromanagement, so if you know you are going to leak, you can target the one that will do the most damage to the lives, etc.

14. Multiple penalties, with different "sets" of lives.
-Some leaked monsters will take a life off of your total
-some will take away from the whole group
-some will cost you money
-some will curse your towers for the next spawn

Just lots of bad effects when you leak that are dependant on what you leak. So if you leak a badass monster that takes away 2 lives from everyone, people will get pissed at you.

15. Shops, many many different items you can equip on your towers, things like orbs, or damage bonuses. Or castable spells.

16. You can relocate your towers for cost, if you screw up your placement, or you just want to replace them, instead of selling the tower and rebuilding it for a loss, you can pay a small amount of gold to move the tower instantly, ofcourse there is a limited amount of movement, meaning you cant move across the map, but the majority of your path, so you dont put all your towers at the front, then when you leak, you move them all back.

17. You can buy experience for your towers, if you need just a little more exp to level it up, instead of paying the whole cost to add the level (which will only bump it up to the level, not adding a whole level up amount of exp) you can buy exp.

18. Lag free spawning

19. Occaisonal money additions, the game will give money to the weak one, and every now and then add a little bonus.

20. Unique pathways, where you can have U-turns in the path and place your towers strategically to attack while they are coming, and while they are leaving.

21. Custom spells, items and stuff, nothing left plain


Please add some more ideas to what you think will be a good TD. Please think strategically on this, I don't want to make a lame TD. All stupid ideas will be ignored.

And yes I know there have been a bazillion different TD's made. But nothing that has been extraordinary. I want to do with TD's what DOTA did with AOS gameplay.

My idea, TDs are overdone, don't bother making one. And if you still feel the need to make it, you HAVE to make it suck, otherwise no one will play it...

wow that sounds really good. i think it should be a definate success.
altho on first glance i think you should have the "builder" unit be the one to pick up/carry items to the hero towers. that seems like it would make more sense than "telekenisis by some building"
anyways, good luck.

I know DoCa, they are overdone, but since they are played so much, if my map is a hit, its almost guaranteed a success because so many people play them. AnArKi, that sounds like a good idea, the builder to carry the items to the tower, or a runner unit that will pick them up.

Here's a screenshot of what I think the path should look like, start on the left, split up, then meet back up, then finish the run

Well, I guess I can share, I am doing a td too, well, kind of a td. But I thought a nice idea was to not have a single set path. What I mean is, different monsters may move differently. My example would be, normal guys go along terrained path, but kamikazee lvl monsters do something different, skipping parts, or just having an all around more direct path. Requires a little more thinking, and a little more thought when making the path too, so people can't accidently block when they don't know any better. (Not actually what I am doing, but similar)

Here's a shot of the map from birds eye view. The 12 boxes on each side of the map on the bottom are 3 things for each player. First box is the tower builders, second is the items you can purchase, and the 3rd one is upgrades to towers. They may change, but these are the bare bones of what it will be. Note the tileset WILL change, its still base right now.

Another thing I will add in, is detecting towers, because some spawns will be invisible.
And also, some units will spawn at one end, while the others will spawn at the other end. This will alternate during the game somehow.

EDIT: And each little building thing in the bottom middle (6 or 7 on each side, cant remember) are placeholders for tiers of spawns. Yeah you can spawn a shitload of units.

ahh damn there goes my herotower td's exclusiveness

Looks good, but Please do NOT make it completely easy like the ripped-off wintermauls/etc. Also, making less courses and making teams of two would work better imho.

Yeah for sure, another part of the plan is to make it hard but flexible, so you cant always do 1 strategy to win, there will be multiple ones.

If you do teams, you should make some way to help teammates OTHER than building towers for them. Maybe like wards that you can buy (item used by the builder) that will get a temporary aura bonus or something but if you use them in your own area they get killed and it adds a charge to the item again (so you don't lose the charge)

You could make all kinds of wards, like damage, hp, faster firing, slow enemies down, healing ward that hurts enemies, and multiple levels of each kind

Yeah wards will be included, and aura wards can be used too. Which is actually a good idea. There are 14 towers made right now, these are just the base ones. I'm at school right now, but I will try to name them all off the top of my head.

Arrow tower: Single shot tower, no abilities, CAN learn impaling arrow later on
Multi-Arrow Tower: Shoots multiple targets, starts with 2 targets, no abilities, CAN learn impaling arrow later on.
Cannon Tower: Your basic cannon tower, slow shot, AOE damage, no abilities, CAN learn a boost to range.
Slowing Tower: Shots the same speed as cannon tower, 1 target, slowing ability, 5% each level.
Stun Tower: Deals no damage at start, 1 target, stuns target for .25 every level, eventually deals damage as it levels.
Fire Tower: High damage, short range, AOE damage, CAN learn fireball, fire nova and burning aura.
Ice Tower: Medium damage, short range, CAN learn frostball, ice nova and ice boulder (blocks pathway)
Earth Tower: High damage, average range, slow attack, CAN learn splash attack, earthquake and shockwave.
Lightning Tower: Low damage, average range, fast attack, CAN learn purge (negative armor effect), chain lightning and Static nova (Deals % damage very small range)
Water Tower: average damage, average range, average speed, CAN learn water elemental, knockback (deals damage also) and SOMETHING ELSE HERE
Detecting Tower: No attack, detecting aura (starts off small range, grows with levels)
Booster Tower: No attack, CAN learn speed aura (speeds up tower), slow aura (slows down walkers), damage aura (increases damage of towers), crippling aura (decreases walker armor)

There are also 2 more towers that I can't remember right now.

EDIT: 1 of them is a bounce tower, it has average damage, above average range, average speed has 1 bounce attack, each level adds a bounce. Each bounce does 25% less damage than the previous one.

EDIT 2: Wow got home, turns out there was only 13 towers.

Added a blocking tower, these towers you CAN build on the path, but they are fairly small, and won't block a large amount. But they do cost quite a bit. They will not have any attack or abilities.

Yea thoose look pretty good, some of them Im using already, Im basically making the most different, unique td I can think of, basically just to see how it turns out.
What Ive also done is semi merged it with a hero arena type thing, except the heroes actually have an impact upon your leaking ability, not like zoator where they sit there just to kill creeps. Theyre not free roaming, theyre confined to an arena type thing, where depending on your level, the leaked units (it will be blanced so you will pretty much always leak through either segment) are transported there after running the td segment, heroes then kill thoose units, if all the heroes get killed, the leftover creeps 'leak'. Every 2nd level, creeps spawn to the arena type bit before running the maze, every 5th level will probably be arena only, with pvp type games.
What I have noticed from the recent good popular tds like ZTD2 and skibi is that people liked the mini game/hero part even though it is really primitive and has no real gameplay impact, and that beyond firing of the occasional spell, towers shouldnt have to be microed intense. This doesnt mean you cant give towers abilities, except it is best if they auto use and auto select there powers, only the occasional AoE or single target spell.
Ive also got an interesting tower system, which I wont go into much, but Ill just add the idea of towers that 'merge' with others, using mount hippogriff etc. Also having elements is a good idea, it adds more flavor to the game, but needs to be well balanced. Im letting every player able to build universal towers, as well as thoose of their chosen alignment.

Oh, btw could someone link me to a lag free spawning example.

Sounds Great, I love TDs. I made one (and it has ALOT of the ideas you mentioned) back in November. Never released it because I couldn't lock it (heavy locker had a problem with it) then patch 1.13b came out and messed it up too... Will release it when the new WEU comes out.

If you need any assist I would love to help, I made my TD completely from scratch. :D


Another Idea (one I used in my td) was having the path break multiple times, and the pathing monsters RANDOMLY choose which way to go (and it didn't lag any either :D) Mine had upto 8 players co-op and up to 30+ different combinations of paths they could take... 100% random. (its not as bad as it sounds.. its not like the player would build somewhere and the monsters could completely avoid the towers or anything.)

Ive got a couple of ideas for you.
Have the original cost of some towers low and a long build time, but before the tower can attack or even gain exp they need to be activated; the point of this is for the expensive buildings the players can start construction when they still have little cash. Have the towers automaticly activate themselves if you have enough cash, but flash colors and maybe use floating text if unactivated. Also allow people to deactivate towers for money, and reactivate for the same amount.

Allow players the ability to redirect attackers from their own maze to an allies, or maybe enemies.

Allow players to steal cash and lives from opposing players, or even allies.