4. Tower Variants

Tower Variants


  • It's that time again where Gankdalf spews out a completely random idea for no reason at all.

    What if we had a few different tower types to choose from with more specialized usage, but with equally as specialized weaknesses. Sticking to the 6 tower limit, what if there were say 4 tower variants, building any number of each to fill the 6 tower slots.

    Normal Tower

    Functions identically to the current towers. No clear attack type weaknesses or strengths. Uses very little energy per shot. Better if built near the target. Can be used to repair or heal.

    Sniper Tower

    Would have an additional action besides the normal attack() method. This method called lock() would be required before the sniper could attack its target. This would take several ticks before attack() would become available. This attack would massive damage (something like 1,000 damage) regardless of range, but would use the entire energy reserve in a single shot. Weak against swarm attacks, strong at busting shields. Poor at firing at targets near the room edge, but effective everywhere else. Cannot be used to repair or heal.

    Mortar Tower

    Functions similarly to a nuke with a short delay (1-3 ticks or something), but only fires defensively within its room with a much smaller radius and damage, and doesn't wipe every creep in the room. Similar to launchNuke() these towers would require a room position rather than a game object as its target. Can only have one airborne mortar at any given time. Creeps near the center of the blast take bonus damage. Strong against swarms, but weak against small shielded attack squads that can move out of the target zone. Can target anywhere in the room, but will deal damage to owned structures and creeps. Poor at firing at targets near your walls.

    Utility Tower

    Cannot attack enemy creeps, but can heal creeps, repair or build structures, and reduce the fatigue of allied creeps. Similar range and energy efficiency to a normal tower, but with higher heal/repair power per use.


  • Normal is normal.

    That sniper seems somewhere between OP and awful. OP because burst damage is what kills tough creeps. Awful because 1000 energy/shot is insanely high.

    Mortar needs some numbers on it. Very late game assaults take a lot of creeps, so it may be good early and late game.

    Utility seems kinda cool. Having just one to repair all your stuff might be a good way to save CPU.

    1 Reply

  • @tigga I honestly don't have too much knowledge on end-game defense, so I wanted to leave them a bit generic to just throw the idea around.

    The partial idea of sniper is that it would make defending against small shielded groups easier, but also make it almost impossible for it to deal with large numbers of creeps. 6 snipers should not be capable of one-shotting a fully boosted T3. Actually it shouldn't be capable of one-shotting any 50 part creep, so yeah a bit OP at 1000. It should greatly increase your capability to kill an armored creep to have these towers, however, due to reload speed and lockon speed they should be almost worthless against swarms of inexpensive creeps. I love swarm attacks, and was a little disappointing when I discovered that there is absolutely no viability for them in end-game. This tower's only purpose would be to weaken the shielded creeps strategy at the cost of making you susceptible to the swarm strategy even in end-game.

    The mortar should deal equal or slightly higher damage than the normal tower in the outer radius, and should probably deal similar damage to the sniper in the center, however, unlike the sniper, the center should in theory always be avoidable. The only time the center might be unavoidable would be if you have so many creeps that you cannot afford the calculation, so many creeps that you cannot move out of the way, or the opponent has somehow manipulated ramparts, creeps and/or multiple mortars in a way you cannot avoid the center due to getting trapped. These would mainly be useful against swarms or otherwise massive attack forces that could get guaranteed hits on due to large number of units that will be forced to take the blast or retreat. The main idea behind this was because the aiming puzzle sounded like a fun programming challenge.

    Yes, that was the idea behind the utility tower. It would be very nice, but would cost you 150-600 damage per tick when on the defensive. It would need balanced against the repair factor as well though, since it could potentially outweigh its own loss in damage by out-repairing attacks if it was too powerful.


  • Swarms still wouldn't be viable end-game. Ranged attack creeps on ramparts hard counter them. Packing strength into a small space has so many advantages over many creeps.

    Boosts are very good, and T3 tough is a force multiplier. Once you can break through the tough the creeps die very quickly, which is why burst damage is important.


  • Towers as is are fine. RCL8 you can't kill a room with decent tower code without T3 tough boosts. Adding these would just complicate that even further.

    If anything we need less towers, as RCL8 rooms aren't fun to siege for majority of the players (especially now that T3 boosts take forever to make)

    1 Reply

  • @shibdib that was kinda the idea. It wasn't to increase tower strength, but rather to give towers more specific weaknesses, but as Tigga already pointed out, these specific variations likely wouldn't cause the variation I was looking for.


  • I like the concept

    Instead of sniper:

    Beam Tower:

    • Damage start at 10% ramps up to 300% over 20 ticks of continuous firing.
    • Energy usage scales up.
    • Range penalty is reduced or falloff is shifted to greater distance. (Could have star craft void ray style lockon required)

    I like the utility tower. It would open up some weird behaviors with removing fatigue, but that could be interesting. I'd like to introduce more "pairing" into it, because it gives defenders powerful tools while allowing attackers to work around it. Rather than have full freedom, I'd gate the power behind having to lock on to a single creep so attackers can work around it if they are smart.

    Basically making a more power creep like tower that has affects.

    Utility Tower: +33% efficiency on heal/repair, no attack. Has abilities

    • Sync Ability: 2 ticks to target a unit/structure. No energy cost
    • Shield: Provides 5 boosted tough of extra health each tick, works on units and structures.
    • Radiant: Provides 15% thorn damage effect to unit or structure. (attacks against it damage the attacker)
    • Time Distortion: Adds/removes 2 move ticks of fatigue to a target unit. This requires re-syncing after using.
    • Enhance: Gives a 1 tick +20% effectiveness to all body parts of a creep, requires re-syncing.

    Considering control effects too:

    • Mirage: Alter a RoomPosition for the next tick to swamp/plains.

    Basically, I want power creeps and I feel like putting some of the effects on a structure might be both a good way to introduce them and gets around the balance problems of the "some players having half a billion power saved up"

  • Culture

    Tangentially related, I always thought it would be cool to have a structure (like a tower) that was basically an immovable creep- instead of assigning a specific set of specs you'd give it "components", like creep parts, which would define its functionality. With a limited number of component-slots and overall structures this would force people to have to balance economy and defense.

    1 Reply

  • @tedivm Yeah I really like how creeps are made of parts, and was a bit disappointing with power creeps not being made of parts. I would love to see towers made of parts, where you had to sacrifice attack parts to get more heal/repair parts etc.


  • I agree, it would be cool to be able to upgrade towers with parts. Like you have x slots in a tower and you can construct things to fill them based on your use case.


  • Or maybe some sort of power tower...

    😆
    1 Reply

  • @tigga My original thought behind the sniper was that it would actually be very effective at killing shielded creeps by doing that 1000 damage, but it fires one extremely expensive (like 10k power or something) as its entire capacity 😂