Three TD dilemmas

Now that I've lost my defense concept map to a corrupted zip file and started over, I want it to be perfect this time. And considering that 5,000 minds know more than one...

I've already posted the concept some time ago (and received a rep point for it, hehe). Basically, the playable area is a small square, with the creeps spawning at a top corner and moving to the opposite bottom corner (red creeps top left to bottom right, blue creeps top right to bottom left).

Both teams maze in the same area, and may interfere with each other's maze. (read: place 1 tower to clog up the other team's nice maze, then watch the [other] TEAM IS BLOCKING - TOWER DESTROYED !! messages flood the screen)

The original idea involved offensive buildings to destroy towers directly, but since then I've realized that having your towers hit by lightning constantly and being unable to do anything about it is no fun.

Creeps get stronger only when you kill them, and you don't lose lives for leaking, but gain points for killing creeps.



So far, so good. Now for the things I'm having problems with.

1) Should this be a TD or TW?

Tower wars, where you spawn creeps for the enemy to increase your income later on, would be hard to implement, because if the enemy team manages to kill your spawned creeps, they get points, which is probably not what you want.

In regular tower wars, if your creeps don't make it, so what, you tried, and you get money for your attempts.

It would lead to two teams spawning absolutely nothing and turtling at 5 gold per 10 seconds for fear of giving the other team points.

That said, tower wars maps seem to be liked more than tower defense ones. Perhaps because the majority of tower defense maps suck horribly, but I wonder if when people have the choice between playing a TD or TW, they'll pick the TW.

It is already hard enough for a new map to find a place between the endless UBER GAY MAUL v34253254 maps everyone plays, I don't want to pick an outdated game style and make it even harder on myself. If I must do a TW, I suppose I'll have to find a way to make it work.

Are there still people who like tower defense more than tower wars?

2) How many towers?

There are only four types of towers: damage towers, DoT towers, slowing/debuff towers and boost/aura towers. I dislike the metagamey concept of different armor types, air units and other stuff you can only find out by trial and error.

So I could get by with only four tower types, preferably with simple effects to avoid video lag. One normal damage tower, one tower with higher damage but tiny range (maze well!), one that spreads out damage over multiple targets, and one that slows. Multiple levels per tower are needed, of course, and I was thinking of having five tiers per tower, upgradable individually, each multiplying the total price by 3 and damage by 4.

Of course, people want a lot of graphics and flashy effects, and as many very similar towers as possible, even if they are detrimental to framerate, overpowered (see the infamous reduce-to-1-hp tower in line tower wars), make it harder for newbies to figure out the 'uber combo' and contribute absolutely nothing else once everyone figures out that tower xx is the best.

And they may diss this map or quit prematurely when they notice it only has four tower types.

Should I give in to B.net demand and implement 100 different identical towers? Would having only 4 tower types hurt the map that badly?

3) RTFM

One thing I noticed is that no one ever reads the loading screen text, tooltips or text messages. I know people are going to move their tower builder all over the place, try to build in invalid places or generally do stupid things, and let the first waves pass before they even realize what is going on and where they are.

Mapmaking vets: in your experience, what would be the best way to force players to READ what I want to tell them?

Tower wars are fun....TDs are just getting boring now, i mean there about a MAUL for everything on TV and every word in the dictionary, and TDs just never appear on the CG list.

For my part, as long as it is original and fun, I prefer a good TD. Also, as far as towers are concerned, make original ones; give them custom abilities and make each and every one a unique in it's kind. I'd say about 40 towers, with the upgrades, so around 10 base towers with 4 upgrades each (?). That is, however, up to you to decide.

Also, when it comes to reading, I always read the loading screen, but it's true that there are not many Battle.Net Custom Map players that give themselves the trouble of reading it. In that case, I suggest that at the start of the game, you lock all players in cinematic mode, and use a Game Text trigger to create messages. Give the messages color so that people actually notice them, and hold the cinematic mode long enough for you to display all you need.

Given your ability to demonstrate the pros and cons of each side of each of your questions, I'm confident that you've got a good idea for gameplay-ability. Go to it.

1) I can't say anything about what concept is better, or more popular, TW or TD, I don't know that. However, I do have a suggestion about how you could solve your problem if the map was a TW. Simply, instead of gaining points for killing creeps, let the other team gain points for you leaking creeps. That way, it's in your interest to rush as many creeps as possible att he enemy.
However, a TD is a cleaner concept, where decisions such as "spend money on attack or defence?" are not present and the players can focus on a single task, building towers and mazes.

2) I don't think there is any dilemma here. You can definitely have more, many more towers, without them getting repetitive at all. I have thought about a TD concept before, and had many cool ideas: special towers that boost the capabilities of nearby towers (trueshot or brilliance aura), linking effects of various tower types... You, however, have even more potential here: your towers don't only interact between themselves and with the creeps, but with the enemy as well! You can have protective towers that don't allow enemy towers build next to them. You can have static towers that forbid nearby enemy towers to cast spells, and when upgraded, forbid normal attacks too. You can have towers that steal enemy towers, etc... And then, there are various towers or tower combinations used to counter all these.

3) I've heard that people leave a lot if the starting cinematic is too long/unskipable/there at all. I could never follow well all those tips TW maps give you during gameplay, a player is focused on other things at that time. There really never is any time to read the quests. I think loading screen is your best bet. Maybe a starting game text as well, but people who know the map should be able to start playing right away.

By the way, that's a dramatic piece of terrain, is it from the map or just a random doodle?