How to make a Team Defence

Give a meaning to your TD - Theoretical part

Introduction: The trigger part is mainly for a TD meant for TD with 1 or 2 teams. Some tweakage is required by you, if you wish to make a TD, where every players defends for himself/herself.

Frozen Throne Required

Planning Creeps
Planning Towers
Planning Pathing

Before we are going to make some real triggers, you have to know, what you are planning to create – creeps, towers, abilities and/or special features, twists. I am going to give a few tips how to do that.

Step 1 - Planning Creeps

Firstly, open Excel (I tend to create my notes, plans in excel or in word, but pencil and paper or text editing programs will do, too.) and create 6 columns named creep, level, HP, special features, movement speed and armor.



Then leave one row blank and start filling the table. It makes your life a lot easier: You can put down notes, even if you are not able to use WE. (Maybe you are at work, on vacation with a laptop, ect)



Step 2 – Planning Towers

For planning towers, open sheet 2. Now create 7 columns named tower, cost, damage, attack, cooldown, upgrades to and special features.



Now remains only the issue of thinking out the towers, and filling the table. (I find thinking out things as amusing as creating them in WE for real).



Step 3 – Planning Pathing

The keyword for team defences is symmetry. You want to give all the players equal oppurtunities, which makes gameplay fair. Before starting, decide, how many players your TD is going to have. My TD is going to have 8 players. Now, ill make a scetch drawing of my pathing map, considering it has to be symmetrical for 8 players.



I used Excel, so no drawing skills required to do this simple scetch. (Row and Cell width are the same)

As you see, I have marked the starting positions and end point. Now, being happy with the result, ill make it for real, in WE.

Making Towers
Tower Upgrades
Building Towers
Modifying Creeps

Step 1 – Making Towers

Start making your towers, by opening Object editor and choosing a base tower. Ill choose Undead Spirit Tower, because if you use a undead builder and an undead tower, you can build multiple towers at a same time. Like, when building with undead builder in melee maps.

Start, by changing the base damage. I changed the base damage to 16 for my level 1 Spirit Tower. Now I bet you ask what dice and side do, how do I operate with them. Its actually very easy, if you follow the formula.



After that, if you want, you can adjust the fire rate, cooldown. The lower it is, the faster it shoots.

Now, get rid of the building requirements of your towers, because you are making a TD, not a melee map. This allows your builder to build level 1 towers from the beginning of the game.



Because I based my towers off an Undead building, remove the blight growing ability from the towers and change the Pathing – Pathing Prevented By to nothing. That allows your Undead tower to be built on grass, not on blight.



Also, set the Stats - Food Produced to 0



Finally, for eye candy, change the model and icon to something you like.

Now, how can I add special feature to a tower, like slowing ice attack, poison?

Copy paste your newly made tower and change its name to Frost Tower. Then find its abilities field and add Frost attack.



TIP: You can convert hero spells to unit spell and add them to the towers also.

If you use spells, which pause the creeps, like bash, then remove attacks from creeps, so that they don’t attack your towers, if they have been paused and the unpaused.

Step 2 – Tower Upgrades

Upgrading Towers in a Team Defence is a must. Firstly, select your Spirit Tower can copy paste it 2 times. Now rename the just CnP’d Towers to Spirit Tower level 2 and 3. Raise their attack damage and lower their cooldown accordingly, to justify the upgrading cost. Higher level towers are usually better than lower level towers, right? Now locate your Spirit Tower level 1’s Techtree – Upgrades To field and add Spirit Tower level 2 there. Now do the same process for the level 2 tower, only add Spirit Tower level 3.



TIP: You can make towers, which allows you to choose from various upgrades. Example, a Siege Tower, which can upgrade to level 2 Siege Tower or to a Archer Tower.

Step 3 – Building Towers

Because you made custom units, you need to change the Techtree- Structures Built field for your builder. Add the Frost Tower and only the Level 1 Spirit Tower. You don’t want players to build level 10 towers from the beginning, do You? If you have made any other towers, add them too.



The second thing, which you need to change for the towers is the is the Stats - Gold Cost. Ill change the gold cost of Spirit Tower to 90 gold and remove the lumber cost. Then ill make my level 2 Spirit Tower cost 145 and level 3 cost 230 coins.



NOTE: If you want, you can have both – the gold and the lumber cost in your TD. But you have to make sure, that you add lumber bounty to your creeps. (Explained in step 4.)

The final thing that you need to change is the building time. In a melee game, Spirit Towers take 35 seconds to build. That is too long, furthermore, if a new level starts in 30 seconds. Change the building time to 5 seconds. For the level 2 change it to 6 seconds and for level 3, change it to 7 seconds.



Step 4 - Modifying creeps

After finished making towers, proceed with creeps. Start by changing the the Hit Points of your creeps. In the beginning, creeps should have low life and armor because nobody doesn’t want to play your TD if they can’t beat the first level!

I choosed footman to be the level 1 creep for my TD. Now, if I remember correctly, the Spirit Tower which we made, had 16 damage. I’ll give my footman 3 times that many lives, 48 lives. Make the creeps stronger with every level. Example, I gave footman 48 lives, the next level creep has 96 lives, then 192 lives.

.

Also, I lowered the defence of the footman, and raised for the other levels a little bit.

Note: 1 armor gives a unit 5,6% more HP. Example, if you have a unit with 100 lives and 10 armor, then he acts like he has 156 HP.



Balancing is hard and takes time, it difficult tell how to balance, because you have to bear in mind your tower damages and special features, ect.

To prevent the creeps attacking your towers, remove their ability to attack.



Finally, you can modify the bounty the creeps give. Find the Stats - Gold Bounty Awarded base, dice and side. The same formula applies here as with the damage base, side and dice. (If you want to add lumber bounty, change the Stats - Lumber Bounty Awarded base, side and cide.)







Note: You can spice up your TD with special creeps. For example, very slow but very strong creeps, creeps, that cast spells on themselves, flying creeps ofcourse. If you are planning to make a boss in your TD, I suggest giving him more lives and armor.

PART III

Triggering

Map initializiation triggers
Creating players their builders
Spawning the creeps
Issuing the spawned creeps to move
Counting kills
Winning trigger
Final Touch

If a trigger contains variables, I bring out the variable type before the trigger.

Step 1 – Map initializiation triggers

When you have decided the creeps for your TD, start setting them into variables.

PlayerIngame – Player Group Variable
Creep_Array – Unit-Type Array


Step 2 – Creating players their builders

Alot of beginner TD’s have preplaced builders, meaning every time you start a map, a player has a builder, even if the player isn’t in the game. To give only the players, who are playing, a builder, create the following trigger, using the player group variable, what you made before.


Step 3 – Spawning the creeps

There are alot of creep spawning triggers. I will make one, which uses food count and some variables to spawn automatically the creeps for every level. First create a spawning point region for player red. (Later create one for everyone). Then, place the starting location on top of it. (You need the starting location on top if it, because I am going to use the starting location in the spawning trigger loop.)



Creep Count – Integer Variable
Timer_Variable – Timer Variable
Timer_Window – Timer Window Variable
Gold_income - Integer Variable

This trigger first creates a timer and lets players know how much time is left until the next wave starts. It sets the win count and creep count +1.

When the timer expires, it spawns the creeps. If the conditions are met, it runs the boss spawn (optional, check out the demo map for more info). One the creeps are spawned and dead, the previous trigger starts again, starting a timer. (So its like in a circle, Create timer>wait>timer expires=creep spawn>creeps are dead> Start the timer)

Step 4 – Issuing the spawned creeps to move



To make the spawned creep move from the spawning point to another point, you need to create regions, aka checkpoints in a TD. Then you have to order your spawned creeps to move from the spawning point to the checkpoint, using the trigger below.

The condition is needed to issue only the player brown (Bad guy) creeps to move to the checkpoint.


Step 5 – Setting the „lives”

Almost all TD’s use „lives”. First of all, make a „endpoint” region. Then, you need to create a leaderboard. Rather than adding all players to the leaderboard, add the players, who are playing the game to the leaderboard.

Lives – Integer Variable, Initial value 10

Now to the part where you loose your lives. Usually, every time a player leaks, one life is taken away and when the lives reach zero, defeat all players.


Step 5 – Counting kills

For counting player’s kills, we use the same leaderboard. It is very annoying to create a trigger for every player, just to count the kills. Lets leave that option and do that in one trigger.

Kills_Count – Integer Array. Initial value should be the number of players you have in your TD.

Final Touch

If a player leaves you have to remove him/her from the Player_ingame. Also you can set [left] behind his/her name and remove all the left players' buildings. (Repeat for each player)


It is useful, when players have the ability to sell the built towers. Its quite easy to do that.

Firstly, make a dummy spell which requires no target unit nor point (like thunderclap). I will base it off item area healing (But channel will do, too). Then ill change the fields all to do nothing and the icon to something nice, like gold ring. Now add the ability to all of the towers.

Then, locate your towers point values.



Now, for example, the first level Spirit tower in the demo map costs 135 coins. The point value has to be the same. The seconds level costs 145 coins, so now, you have to add the first point value to the seconds one, 135+145=280. Finally, the level 3 tower costs 230 coins, so you have to set the point value to 280+230=510. That makes sure that you get 50% of the money back which you spent on upgrading and building not the 50% of the money you spent on the last upgrade.

Finally, to sell the tower, make this trigger.


A trigger which removes the corpses to reduce lagg. You need to call a local. (Use a custom script for that)


If you want, you can apply a kick system for your TD. (Im using player red as the player with the ability to kick, altough I dont encourage kicking players)


Team Defence Template BETA 1.2 includes

• Template Towers
• Triggers from spawning creeps to counting kills
• Symmetrical terrain
• 1-8 player playability
• No lagg causing periodic events
• Kick trigger
• Plus, its easy to manipulate and change it.

Happy map making. Feedback appriciated.

Haven't read it all yet seeing it's long, Though it seems you put about 2 hours of typing only (not including the planning part), Hope this gets approved.

Pretty neat man!

As before, it's good. =) (Before is TH.net)

Very useful, and simple to understand. good job

Please attach the images to your posts instead of linking to off-site sources. Otherwise this can't be approved.

And believe me, I really want to approve this!
Good work

Can be done.

EDIT:

Hosted the images here, edited the 3 posts.

Good tutorial, i like it =)

Off-topic question:
Does this mean that I can't submit my HUGE tower defense tutorial (which includes even more) plus a free TD template ??

You could graveyard this and approve yourown tutorial

No, keep both. The more, the better.

I agree, we can always have more tutorials on the same topic when they're well written. People have different tastes and some might prefer your tutorial.

Oh, and this is approved.

Team Defense ? It's not a Tower Defense ?

Basically the same, I think. Actually a Team Tower Defence should fit it the most.