Border of Triumph - A TD that strives to be different

(The current name isn't the best, so this will probably be renamed by the time it is released. Consider Border of Triumph a temporary name, unless people like it )

Border of Triumph - A (hopefully) revolutionary idea for the TD genre.

By: PurplePoot and Bobo_the_Kodo
Background:
Well, the other day I was watching my brother (Bobo) play a TD of some sort, and I finally realized how dull and repetitive modern TDs have become (I haven't played them in ages). So, I began brainstorming, and set out to at least think up an idea for a TD that would be enjoyable to play, and new, not just another copy of Wintermaul or Azure Tower Defense, etc, etc.
Border of Triumph will be a 2-team TD, with the teams having much more effect on eachother than "You lose, we win!"

Features (What sets this out among TDs?):

• Lives are done away with, and a different method of [scoring?] is used (see below)
• The towers are (at least more) interesting; there won't be any Archer Towers/Cannon Towers, etc. here... They will be mostly, if not all, triggered.
• Waves aren't just a monotonous stream of one kind of unit.
• Where you build matters: building near chokepoints will cause your towers to be weaker than building near sparsely (inhabited?) areas.
• 75% of your gold will be distributed among the enemy team at the end of every round, to prevent one player hoarding gold then getting some super-tower and ending the game.
• Building space is limited, so you can't just spam 20000 level 1 towers, causing you to have to think a bit while playing.
• The waves don't change in unit-types, but there are different 'races' of waves to make the game a little more interesting.
• Players decide what units will go against there enemies: there is no preset spawn.
• You're not expected to kill every spawn. In fact, you should probably only be able to kill half.

The Scoring System, and winning the game:
As mentioned above, you don't just leak X lives, then the game is over.
Instead, there is a small battlefield below the TD area with a base and a few towers for each of the two teams.
When you leak a unit, it will be sent to the enemy team's base in the battlefield, and will proceed to follow its appropriate task (see below)
A team achieves victory when its opponent's base is destroyed.

The Units, and their tasks:
There are seven races {Human, Orc, Chaos Orc, Undead, Night Elf, High Elf, and Naga} to add to the game, so that the battles aren't always footmen vs. footmen, etc.
There are 5 types of units. Each unit has its own strengths and weaknesses, and therefore depending on your strategy, it will be better to pick off certain units first.
Here are the unit types:

Light Melee {Footman, Ghoul, Naga Siren, etc)

• Light Melee will charge the enemy base once the enemies leak them and they appear in your base.
• Light Melee will attempt to let Heavy Melee take blows instead of them if they can.
• Light Melee units have the second-most health of any unit, tied with siege.

Heavy Melee {Knight, Abomination, High Captain, etc}

• Heavy Melee will charge the enemy base once the enemies leak them and they appear in your base.
• Heavy Melee units have the most health of any unit.

Ranged {Rifleman, Troll Headhunter, Chaos Warlock, etc}

• Ranged Units will charge the enemy base once the enemies leak them and they appear in your base.
• Ranged Units will prioritize on Workers, then units with low health.
• Ranged Units will flee when there are no melee units to back them up.
• Ranged Units have the second to least health.

Siege {Glaive Thrower, Ballista, Demolisher, etc}

• Siege Units will charge the enemy base once the enemies leak them and they appear in your base.
• Siege Units will prioritize on Towers, then Workers, then Ranged, then Clusters of units.
• Siege Units will flee where there are no melee units to back them up.
• Siege Units have as much health as Light Melee.

Worker {Peasant, Peon, Wisp, etc}

• Worker Units will proceed to mine resources once the enemies leak and they appear in your base. These resources will be randomly used to make the Health, Damage, and Armor of your troops stronger.
• Worker Units will flee from combat, if it occurs nearby.
• Worker Units have the least health of any unit.

Progress:
Terrain:___|||||||||| (50%)
Runners:__||||||||||| (100%)
Towers:___|||||||||| (10%)
Triggers:__|||||||||| (10%)
Upgrades:_|||||||||| (0%)

//note - does anyone know how to get good indenting and color together?

The rough terrain is done, but it needs detail (doodads, etc.).
The runners are completely done.
The towers that I have thought of ideas for are done, but that isn't many (2, plus a rough idea for a 3rd. I plan to have 11 towers, which can all be upgraded twice)
The triggers can't be really done without the towers, as since most, if not all, of the towers are triggered, the towers need to be done before the triggers for them can be written.
The upgrades are not the first priority.

So it doesn`t matter where you build.

What`s the point in removing one of the few tactical possibilities in a TD?

Sounds bad.

How does that make it NOT matter? It makes it so that the point of the game isn't to just spam towers at the end where everything converges


Well, in my experience, it seems to ruin the game, and also, this TD presents a ton more tactical possibilities in other areas.

Meh, if enough people don't like it, I may change it.

If your tower is going to do the same net damage no matter where you build due to artificial balancing, then it doesn't matter. Building towers in smart locations is part of strategy, and I don't see anything bad about it. If all locations are relatively even then it takes out that strategy from the game.


A better solution would be to make the game difficult enough and higher towers expensive enough that this is not an option. Also, there should be no incredibly powerful towers that will win the game for you. Another solution is to make the bases relatively weak, so that if you let down for a few rounds to build gold then the other team will destroy your base.

Overall it sounds alright, depends on just how much different it is from a regular TD. However, I'd stop adding in all these methods of artificial balancing, as they only detract from strategy.

Who knows, maybe ill change it

And also, they most likely WONT do the same net damage, judging by the fact that the towers arent just

Speed Tower
Spash Tower
etc...


True, but this also leaves the option of sub-saving a little bit of your profits with the penalty of giving away the rest, allowing you to still get that 20 extra gold you needed for that Greater Flame Demon or something.


I dont plan on it, but anyways, there still WILL be some towers more powerful towers than others, and often that screws up teh game if you get a tower like that early on.


The problem with this is that it could cause some kind of mutual standstill, if both teams did the same thing


Really different, i hope :P.


Well, there's only two, and in my opinion they don't necessarily detract from strategy, just change it

Meh, thanks for your comments, everyone so far

It looks like you have a lot of new unique ideas for this map. Of course since they're new ideas, we won't know for sure how good they are. It's best to take everyone's opinion on this with a grain of salt. I would recommend implementing those features into the map first, test it, then worrying whether or not ideas seem stupid or unbalanced. The idea of giving 75% of your gold to the enemy team at the end of a round might be stupid and unbalanced. On the other hand, it might be fair and contribute to a major part of the gameplay and strategy. No one will know for sure until you try it out.

People have pointed out possible flaws, but the map sounds like a good idea. Just dont get caught up triggering all the towers.

Thanks for your feedback as well, guys

Yeah, the 75% thing has brought up a huge dispute, but I think, to some extent at least, its something I would like to keep

Who knows, maybe it will turn out to be stupid, and be removed in favor of something else, or just nothing at all, or just nerfing it down to 25% or 50%, but the main thing I want to accomplish is prevention of the X players just killing the waves, with player Y saving up 2000$ so he can get his super-tower thats meant to be for around 20 rounds in on round 5 (well, you get the idea anyways)

Also, another interesting test would be to just make it so that you get no income per round, or something, so that saving would be a fairly hard accomplishment anyways, because you'd have to be keeping up to the increasingly upgraded waves of creeps.


Many of them are easy triggers, but just triggers enough to make the towers unique, as opposed to Just Another Speed Tower.

Hmm, finally, *bump* does anyone have any ideas for upgrades, other than, of course, Damage, Health, Speed, and Armor?

and...

What about the name?

(Don't worry, I expect lots of negative comments on this last thing, in fact, I personally think that it could be vastly improved )

EDIT: Might as well give some examples of some of the towers, and how simple the triggers are, yet making them different

-Iceberg? (something to do with frost, anyways :P)
Causes ice shards to randomly rain down nearby, damaging enemies upon impact
NOTE: This is the only tower i plan to have a random effect. There will most likely be one other one that has an AOE attack, but I'd like to keep most of the towers focused on single targets.
-Flame Demon (Or something...)
Shoots streams of fire at enemies
(This would look like a tower that has a .1 second cooldown with low damage, but instead of firing constantly, it fires for 1 second every 3 seconds.)

Sounds like some quite good ideas there. BTW, is it towers along edges of lane, or can build right across (except for certain unpathable areas ofc)?. I think build across and mazing is better.

So as I understand it, its like a TD, but leaked units get moved into a mini aos?

Are you going to have towers that don't attack but have some aoe effect? Like aoe slow etc. How about, to avoid the problem of having someone who saves money then buys a super tower, by not having any supertowers. Have it each tower is equal, just strategy for what you want to choose, and what your teammates are going to choose. Perhaps money you get from peasant workers could be used to cast spells that hinder the enemy? Like increase waves move speed, silence (from attacking) towers in aoe etc. Maybe it could also be used to summon hero units to join wave (could have aura).

I think it would be better if creeps weren't constantly getting stronger, but you are destroying the enemies tower defence, while creating your own. This way it is more involved that creating your maze, then watching them run thru it. The enemy are destroying paths through your maze etc, so you have to keep building. With every tower equal, and no real saving for super towers. You could upgrade individual towers, but perhaps just adds extra effects/abilities/aura? rather than massive damage boost.

In most TD's I've played, its better to build and get kills than it is to save. Kills often outweigh saving. I would go against the 75% thing, it sounds like it would hurt new players more, as the veterans would just build asap and not wait till the end of the round, thus giving the other team less gold.


Againt, even with income its often more profitable to kill rather than save. At least to a certain extent. Most saving happens mid game.


I meant that triggers dont define towers...
Just make sure you have a concept, and you dont start trying to think of ideas that involve triggers.


I have no idea what your map is like yet.


I thought that was finally :P


Be creative =\


What do you mean by causes ice shards to rain randomly nearby? You mean like Blizzard? Immolation? Phoenix Fire?

Anyway, it sounds fine. Just remember that complicated =/= good.

I think you have some nice ideas. The whole mini-AoS in the bottom sounds great, especialy in combination with choosable wave unit types. Some other ideas I think you should think more about.

For example, the 75% gold transfer. First of all, why exactly 75%? Second, while it is an interesting idea, I think it has some problems, the biggest one being that a slow player who waits until the end of a round to start building towers will automaticaly loose, because the other team will get 75% more income at the start and even more later because they will manage to kill more. Sure, the gold share could be moved up to the start of the next round, but those waits between rounds are problematic, make them too long and the game slows down too much. It would really be easier to just fix the tower balance so that saving gold is not a good strategy.


Concerning towers: I agree with WTFish that towers should be more equal. When you have two different towers, that makes gameplay more interesting because the two towers work differently and a player is given more strategic options. Upgrading to super towers, on the other hand, is far less interesting, because you get the same tower, only more powerful.

Sure, the waves get more and more powerful, but it's a common misconception that so must the towers. First of all, you have more and more towers from wave to wave, so you already get more powerful even without upgrades. If you have good tower combos and/or if it's a mazing TD, you can get considerably more powerful with each new tower you build. Second, in the kind of competitive TD you're planning, players should loose eventualy. The key here is not to beat the TD, it's to beat the other team.

So, super towers aren't really needed, you could have a great TD without them. What you do need are new towers. Not just towers that deal damage in a new way, different from the usual arrow towers, but an entirely new way of making towers. You need to come up with a new overal concept of how towers will work and interact. The two tower examples you gave lack that - they're just the usual individual towers that deal damage by themselves.

So, I urge you to think some more about this: a theme that your towers will follow. Perhaps towers with a lot of active abilities you need to micromanage? Or a special system for linking towers that gives you special effects with these links? A special elemental damage system? Towers that can interact with what's happening in the mini AoS? Towers that focus on moving the creeps? Just tossing some random ideas out there, for a possible inspiration. Once you have a theme, making cool towers that can combo well shouldn't be a problem.


Another thing you should consider is the snowball effect. For example, team A kills 3 creeps less than team B in the first wave. In the traditional way gold is awarded in TDs, with bounty, team B gets more gold this way, so when the next wave comes team B has better chances of killing more creeps than team A, and if they do then next wave they'll have even better chances... you can see where this is going. In TDs where the objective is to kill all the creeps this doesn't matter, but here this could be a problem, so you might want to reconsider how you award gold to players.

In addition to this, you have the mini AoS thing going on. This means that for every worker you leak more than the enemy, the enemy will mine more resources. For every ranged attacker you leak more than the enemy, the enemy will be able to kill more of your workers. Every melee unit you leak more will mean the enemy archers will have more time to kill off workers (because archers only stay in battle as long as melee units are around). As workers mine more resources, you get more upgrades. In the end, even if the loosing team starts playing better and leaks less than the winning team, the winning team's units win because they're better upgraded.

A team should eventualy win, but they should win because they consistently played well. If you have a snowball effect in your map, then the winning team wins because they played well for the first half of the game. This is something you should adress. I suggest that resources are used on something other than upgrades, something that gives a temporary advantage rather than a permanent one.

So in order to win I just have to sit there and leak as many units as possible? Sounds dull.
Or is it being owned by the enemy as soon as you leak it?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! I just lost 30 minutes of typing cause of a dumb site bug... Guess I learned my lesson.

Anyways...


If JoeUser leaks a unit from BobUser, then that unit appears for BobUsers team's base and attacks JoeUser's team's base.

About the super-towers, I meant more in the way of stronger upgrades of the normal ones, most likely just to save space once the area starts filling up.

Anyways, some questions that would all majorly change gameplay... what do YOU think of them?

First, the Mini-AoS

A) Should towers upgrade with the units? if they did, then this would make a difference as to keeping the gameplay similar throughout, and preventing good late-game play being much better than good early-or-mid-game play. However, the problem with this is that it could bog gameplay down.

B) When [basically everyone] referred to the battle part of the game as a Mini-AoS, are you suggesting/interpreting about player interaction? I was thinking of this myself, but the problem with it is that it would remove most of the strategy from everywhere else in the game, as you cannot have as much time to do Quality Assurance as to which units you allow to leak and which units you focus on killing. This, however, may also add something to the game, as you need to use more strategy as to balancing QA and battlefield-interaction, as both can increase your chances of winning [at least that round] to some extent.

C) Workers, I see, have been quite controversial. What about, to make them much more balanced, they mine X gold/lumber, return, then dissapear when they reach the base. Also, when the base has enough gold/lumber for an upgrade, it's more like a Roar effect than an Iron Forged Swords effect, as in the upgrade is one-round-only.

D) Should upgrades (most likely one-round-only) affect the units in the TD part of the map? For example... if JoeUser's team upgrades +50 health for this round, then should BobUser have to deal with that life bonus in the TD part of the game, or should his base just have to take the stress in the battle part of the game?

E) Bosses. Most TDs them. What do you think of them? Basically, a 'boss' in this would be a hero that runs through your TD, then, if leaked, has some basic AI to run around casting spells, healing, and stuff like that until it dies [which would be fairly hard, unless there was question B implemented] The problem with this is that, though it would make the game more unique, it may add so much to snowballing that it could ruin the game if you leaked a hero and they didn't.

Next, some overall gameplay questions

F) To deal with income snowballing, what about making all the players getting the income that the team which would have received the [most/least] income received? This would orient the strategy to the battle part more, and thinking up combos, as leaking won't hurt you income-wise any more than it'll hurt your enemies, but it'll still hurt your base, thus making it more important to kill to not leak than to kill to get more towers to kill.

G) Should you have 15 seconds or so before the round starts, but after the units are determined [and you are able to see them] to determine what you should build in response to that wave, as each tower has a unittype it cannot affect? This would make much more of a difference of H was implemented.

H) This, if implemented, would override A, E, and F, and should remove snowballing completely. What do you say to removing upgraded towers completely, and just having the basic 11 towers? Then, next, every round, after the TD part of the round is over, your towers are all cleaned up and you get as much gold as you started with? This way, much more of the strategy is short-term planning of different combos to present solutions to the problems you face at the moment, rather than getting a ton of towers to stop, basically, monsters.

Good post Anitarf .

B) I don't think players should be able to interact with the mini-aos. Like bonus round where all teleported there with a hero. I think it is better just focussing on the TD, but having a unique method of finding who wins.

How about this for a cash system: You get no money per wave, but gain money for deaths in the mini-aos. Perhaps the aos could have towers or something, so if in the first round the enemy leaks one guy, he wont reach the main base and attack it for ages lol. Towers would kill him.

Perhaps you don't even need money. Towers could just have a longer build time to balance it. There could be mazing towers, which build really fast, deal hardly any damage (just to get started with). Other towers with auras etc could have a longer build time. This way, you can destroy any tower without worrying about lost money from buying it (all you have lost is a bit of time). So its basically like time is your currency.

If you are not going to have money to build towers, just build times for certain things, you could just do my idea: Use money to cast spells on the enemy which harass them. Sort of snowballing, but make the spells not too powerful, to minimize this.

I think lane size should be quite wide and long, so you can't set up a massive maze within the first rounds, and it is with strategic placing of towers with your team that you don't leak the first few rounds. Perhaps creeps have no regen, so you can have a longer maze without that hurting you.

Are you going to have things like creeps with immolation or something? So your towers can die, and have to build new. I Can't remember what td I saw this in, but was quite interesting. If tower dies in certain place, they can cut through a whole part of your maze. It would be great if you could make a td that wasn't the same as others, and perhaps putting small clumps of towers in certain locations etc could be more effective because the enemy couldn't use aoe spells so effectively on your maze. Just having the same strategy work for most td's (and just having to find out which tower is the best lol) is pretty boring.

H sounds very interesting, but the question is how well it would go with the players. TD players usualy want to build increasingly powerful mazes. While I happily support genre-breaking innovation, I have to be fair and raise this point as well.

As for G, maybe before each round you could vote for what you want the creeps to be on the round after that one. In the meantime, a text is also displayed to you what your enemy voted one round ago for this round's wave.

For B, I understood from your post that the "mini AoS" is completely computer controlled. I think that's good, otherwise the map would be more a melee/AoS than a TD.

C sounds as a very good idea.

D depends. Depends on the power level of the upgrades, how frequent they are etc. If they were mostly damage upgrades then the issue doesn't even arise, since in the TD part only the hp are important.