Kind of reminds of Total Annihilation but tower defence instead an RTS.

Could be good, what about scrapping gaining matter from killing enemies and instead have two economic builds. Metal Maker and Power Generator, each produce so much resource a second. Towers require metal to build and consume energy with each shot and can’t fire if you run out of power. Running out power doesn’t cause a blackout it just slows down the rate of fire, as you have to wait for the power to regenerate enough to fire.

This creates a strategic trade off for the player they can either group towers together which means the energy usage per second is very high and requires lost power generators to meet the demand, or they have their towers further apart requiring less energy per second as not all towers are in use at once.

Alright, thank you very much for your feedback it has helped and I'll hope you agree with me that these additions will add to the depth of strategy, remove the malice of energy, and make the game overall more enjoyable.

I took all of your suggestions and thought about localized effects, special powers, increasing carnage, and removing the negative reinforcement of energy (clearly you thought the fusion towers were not sufficient, and they are pretty high-tech meaning for most of the beginning the player would be frustrated over having to build energy towers with no benefit in sight).

Well it got me thinking about spending energy for special effects in game, however I was apposed to the "Cast a spell here" as this was supposed to be sci-fi themed and having power originate from the player as opposed to a tower would make energy seem more like mana. So I decided that the best course of action was to add additional support towers that would create localized effects.

Entries with an (n) are towers that will be renamed for immersion purposes.

It's important to note that these towers' effects will NOT be automatic, the player will have to select the tower and either double click it or select "activate effect" from the upgrade/info menu.




Again, if you have some feedback on these towers please post it as well as any idea for additional ones. ( I would especially appreciate names for the new towers!)


I'm also thinking about changes to the "Black Out" effect. Especially since some nasty mobs (Mob effects will be color coded) will have an EMP effect which will cause them upon death to drain a substantial amount of energy. With the current system they would be extremely over powered if teamed up with Speed, or Enraging enemies.

Have a look at "Harvest: Massive Encounter". This is a kind of twoer defense game where you not only have to mine resources (the equivelent of Gold), you also havea to manage power (in the form of little balls of energy that move between power pylons).

You said something about a tower that makes Energy every time it fires - is this a tower that is only available later on? If the cheapest tower (like the pellet tower in Desktop Tower Defence) were to be that generates-Energy-every-time-it-fires tower, players wouldn't end up waiting for resources to save up as often.

This tower would obviously (like all cheap towers are) only deliver low damage, therefore not collecting as much Matter, therfore requiring the player to eventually add more powerful towers to their arsenal to expand more quickly.

The energy gameplay element could be considered virtually pointless around the start of the game, but in turn this would provide a smoother difficulty curve, and there would also be less instructions to force onto the player (e.g: getting them to read tutorial pages).

Another option is simply throttling the fire rate of towers to match available power: for example if a tower spends 3 energy units per shot and it can shoot up to 12 times per second, and power plants produce 180 energy units per second, 1 to 4 towers are underpowered, 5 towers can fire at their best without waste (3*12*5) and 6 can shoot 10 times per second (3*10*6).

This system is obviously incompatible with blackouts, but it could be combined with excess energy accumulation, with multiple power grids (either Pylon-like as discussed or with explicit point to point connections), and with special attack modes that require extra energy. Some towers, like missile launchers, might consume no energy.

Plain shooting towers should be unusually cheap, since their marginal usefulness is not shooting more but merely distributing the same pool of firepower where it is needed; towers with special effects (paralysis, continuous damage etc.) that need to be spread along the whole path would be very important.

I really like the idea of using energy as another resource.

What if instead of creating a blackout effect, just disable any guns added to a grid with insufficient power.

So if you have X number of energy units, you can add guns until that energy is used up. Bigger guns might take more energy.

There could also be an order of consumption. So maybe small guns get energy first, followed by more power hungry guns. If you are at your limit and you add another small gun, that might shut down a big gun because there isn't enough energy to go around.

Maybe you could have multiple energy grids at higher levels, giving players a greater challenge when placing towers.

Forgive me if this was already your plan. I think the idea is very cool.

While the tech tree idea sounds good too, I think you might be getting into too much by having both mechanics. Go for one, and if that game does well, add the other mechanic to version 2. Or make 2 different games.

One of my favorite TD games is "Grid Defense The Awakening" It's not a flash game, but it has some really neat mechanics.

Not a big fan of the wormhole idea. Might be confusing and the implementation would have to be really spot on to help players understand it.

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Original post by SigmaX Not a big fan of the wormhole idea. Might be confusing and the implementation would have to be really spot on to help players understand it.

Just want to point about some things about the wormhole: The way I explained it was a from a programming point of view, or HOW I was going to implement it. In reality it's very simple; Bullet goes in entrance, bullet goes out exit.

I've been thinking a little bit about the black out mechanics to make sure it's not an Insta-KO. I've decided on upping the duration to 10 seconds but instead of disabling all towers I will reduce firing speed to 50%.
(high lighted for importance)

Quote:

You said something about a tower that makes Energy every time it fires - is this a tower that is only available later on? If the cheapest tower (like the pellet tower in Desktop Tower Defence) were to be that generates-Energy-every-time-it-fires tower, players wouldn't end up waiting for resources to save up as often.

The tower in question is the Anti-Matter tower and it is very high-tech. It's designed to be an 'oddball' tower and one of its curiosities is that it produces energy.

I feel that adding a low-tier energy producing offensive tower (long name) would make energy support towers completely obsolete which was not the point of the tower at all.

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Plain shooting towers should be unusually cheap, since their marginal usefulness is not shooting more but merely distributing the same pool of firepower where it is needed; towers with special effects (paralysis, continuous damage etc.) that need to be spread along the whole path would be very important.

There is only one plain shooting tower, and it is extremely cheap. However, this got me thinking about a low tier tower that would be not only cheap, but consume no energy at a severe cut to damage output.

Here's what I have:
Name: Magnetic Projector
Cost: 3 Matter
Energy consumption: 0
Abilities: Will continue to fire during blackouts unhindered.
Limitations: Can not attack Stealth or Grounding enemies.
Damage: 1 damage per second at level 1, 15 damage per second at level 5
Requirements: none.