Hi I am currently developing a tower defence like game in space. You build spacestations to kill incoming enemies. I want some form of income. I don´t want mining/harvesting ships that mines asteroids or something similiar. I was thinking of small stations that just generates income but that doesn´t sound that good either. Any suggestions?

You couldn't do it early on, but one type of resource might be salvaging the remains of enemies (I'm assuming ships since it is space).

Another might be having some kind of trade station which have little shuttles that come in from time to time, that you have to protect. If the shuttles don't make it to the station, no income (or at least reduced income).

Immortal Defense used a pretty simple system where you would get points used to build units every time you kill an enemy, but ultimately you only get a certain percentage of the points you earn based on how many enemies got through your defenses (100% if none got through, 95% if one did, &c). Also, the faster you destroy enemies the faster they come through and the harder it gets to defeat them, so you could kill them gradually and get a mediocre 100% or you can blast them all at the starting gate and get a really high score but a potentially lower percentage.

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Original post by Andreas Persson Hi I am currently developing a tower defence like game in space. You build spacestations to kill incoming enemies. I want some form of income.

The defenders have a blog, and the earthbound readers of the blog deposit payments in earthbound banks. And advertisers want to put ads on the blog as it becomes more popular.

How about the player automatically gets a tiny amount of cash inflow. Also you can make space stations that automatically spawn money. That way, the player has to choose between a defensive space station and economy. On the first wave, they could begin building walls with the economy space station and build a single defensive to take out incoming enemies. Or they could build all defensive, but then they wouldn't have any money until the next wave when they get a tiny amount of income. That would force strategy and wall building etc.

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Original post by Andreas Persson I don´t want mining/harvesting ships that mines asteroids or something similiar. I was thinking of small stations that just generates income but that doesn´t sound that good either. Any suggestions?

What if you had small stations that float in space, and use solar cells to charge up large, space-shuttle sized batteries? The batteries could then be automatically shuttled down to a sparsely-populated planet that relies on the batteries to run critical machinery. The reason why they could not charge the batteries on the surface would be due to the atmosphere. Even Earth's atmosphere blocks out most of the sun's power, which allows us to stay alive, but I could only imagine what kind of power super-heavy duty solar cells could get outside of our atmosphere.

You could also have stations that are collecting solar radiation through some kind of sci-fi technology, and storing and selling it to power space ships. The space ships could dock to the station and fill-up, just like a terrestrial gas station. This could occur automatically in the background of the game once the the radiation-collecting station is built.

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Original post by Tom Sloper The defenders have a blog, and the earthbound readers of the blog deposit payments in earthbound banks. And advertisers want to put ads on the blog as it becomes more popular.

As zany as this might sound, you could actually make this work if you change the context of a tower defense game. Most of these games have a mood of dire threat-- the flesh eating zombies/aliens are invading or the all butchering army is coming-- but what if this was a space sports game? The context wouldn't be so heavy, it would stand out from all the other tower defense games and you could give it lots of real wacky/spacey sports game color. You could even blend the two in a sort of Starship Troopers motif with aliens that blindly invade and are killed by the humans for sport.

My vote goes to the trading station with incoming trade ships. This way you can have splash weapons potentially damage traders, enemies cloaking as traders and some kind of interceptor ships that fly out and escort the traders until they come within firing range of the station.

Optionally they might pick up some resource which you gather. For example your station might be orbiting a planet and you need to build stations that send shuttles down to the surface to gather resources from the planetary colonies. I.e. "just generates income".

Thanks for all input :) will try out a few of them and see what feels right.