First and foremost, if you've ever played TD (tower defense) games, please take 5-10 minutes to fill in the poll above - even if you don't particularly enjoy them. Also, since I'm not 100% sure I covered everything in the poll, please feel free to share your experiences/preferences below as well. Also, please note that all three questions have multiple choices enabled, so please click on each selection that you feel is eligible for you; however, do try to avoid picking mutually exclusive options (eg 1a and 1b, etc) as picking these both will make little sense.

I've made the poll public, so you know. There shouldn't be anything too incriminating in it, though

So yeah - if you'll be so kind...

What the hell? You saw my tower defense post in the For Beginners section didn't you?

I don't really know what it is about tower defense games that I like. It might be a bit of cause and effect sense from the game that I like but I'm not sure if that is it alone. It also seems the abilities of the towers certainly seem to have an effect on my opinion but I couldn't tell you that it's any one or combination of abilities.

I've played a handful of TD games and wrote down some thoughts regarding each on my website here. The TD style games I've played are:

Garden Inventor (October 2010)
Cursed Treasure (September 2010)
Friendly Fire Tad (September 2010)
Mushroom Farm Revolution (July 2010)
Trap Master (June 2010)

I don't think I mentioned it on the website but Mushroom Farm Revolution actually hooked me pretty good. I was playing it for a couple months before I got tired of it.

Also, another one that isn't listed there that I liked was Creeper World. I think I enjoyed that one because of the different towers and their different attacks as well as their dependency on each other.

Other than that some points that are on the lines of your options...

• Multi-player is so low on my list of things I'd be looking for in a TD game that if it was mentioned in the game description I'd be more likely to bypass the game entirely. Then again, I'm not a social gamer and therefore not necessarily part of the demographic you're interested in.
• Installation technique is of minimal concern to me when playing games from home. However, I play games occasionally on my lunch break at the office and I'm unable to install anything.
• Flash games have indeed spoiled me and make me much much less likely to pay for a TD game.
• Of the above games, I considered maybe paying for a full version of Creeper World (didn't though). I don't remember the price tag but if payment and download options were easy I might have paid $5 to $10 on impulse.
• I enjoyed Mushroom FR and Cursed Treasure but the idea of paying for them was far from my mind, likely due to the games distribution technique (it was already free).
• I'm would be ok using other forms of online distributions like Steam that involve a subscription or some other convenient form of payment.

Fl4sh - nope, I didn't see your post in For Beginners . I'll have a look at it now.

Kseh - could you please also fill in the actual poll - for now I'm finding these results pretty interesting (a few unexpected things + some rather strange things (50-50 preferences)). I could certainly use some more statistics, though!

One problem I have with the poll is that a lot of the choices feel like if you pick one you shouldn't pick the other, but I feel like I'd accept a lot of the design choices as long as they were done well.

I've really appreciated Desktop TD and a War3 map called "burbenog" or something.
The first empathizes maze layout, the second uses a predefined path and gives the player more control by stacking a wider range of tower capabilities.
Me and my friends are still trying to finish burbenog at hard after... I don't know, 5 years?

Here's what I find important in TD games, I can express it much better in words here than in the poll.

1) I don't want multiplayer at all. I want single player in Flash, (both multiplayer and installing are too much of a hassle, and I use Linux)
2) There must be a campaign with upgrades between missions! There must be upgrades and the ability to replay earlier levels with the upgrades. There must be hard to earn skill points to do these upgrades, and there must be enough of them and hard enough to earn them (but not discouragingly hard) to keep you busy for hours or even days. GemCraft's upgrade system was fantastic!
3) Building mazes is nice but there are very fine games without maze building too, such as GemCraft.
4) There must be a mode where there keep coming progressively harder waves forever. I hate it when after 50 waves the game suddenly stops while you could have kept going due to your nice buildup.
5) It's very important that there are different towers for different strategies, and types of towers that are good against types of enemies. The splash damage vs single hit damage and air vs ground in Desktop TD was a good example, and the colors in GemCraft are another good example. And things that slow down, boost, etc..., obviously are very interesting.

Best TD game I've ever played is GemCraft 0 and GemCraft 1. Second best are the ones with the balloons and monkeys from Ninja Kiwi. Third best is Desktop Tower Defense. The one that gave me the most hours of fun was definately the GemCrafts.

By the way, if you want to make a multiplayer TD game, like it seems from the poll options, by no means I want to stop you from doing that, go ahead!

I don't have any specific plans just now, but I have toyed with the idea. I figured I might just as well see if my taste in these matters comes even remotely close to what other people prefer. way2lazy - I know some of the choices are a bit mutually exclusive, which is why I wrote that you should try to avoid picking both; however, this was meant to imply that you can actually pick both if you can't decide or if both options are true for you.

Lode - what you wrote about a TD game having to be Flash-based actually rather sad and alarming (I'm not saying your arguments are wrong or bad - or even that I disagree with you - in any way; I'm just commenting on the reality). I personally think the latest web-based trends have (possibly temporarily) created a vacuum in the gaming industry. As I only just recently had a rather involved discussion on this topic, however, I'm starting a completely new thread for it

Thank you all for replying to the poll, however I'd still prefer a larger sample pool!

Lode - what you wrote about a TD game having to be Flash-based actually rather sad and alarming (I'm not saying your arguments are wrong or bad - or even that I disagree with you - in any way; I'm just commenting on the reality). I personally think the latest web-based trends have (possibly temporarily) created a vacuum in the gaming industry.

I'm in the same boat as Lode. I play a ton of flash games, and I would personally never pay money for a TD game with all the flash ones available. Not to mention I checked the box saying I prefer short play periods. Tower defense games are fun, but I think I'd have a problem coming back to them.

By the way one of my most hated TD strategies is where they assume you'll do the build a tower then sell a tower trick to beat a mission. I can't tell you how many flash games had a mission like that which gets dull quickly. I'd really like to see more puzzle TD games that had me using combinations of towers. There are a few flash games that do that. One had it so that you could combine 4 towers next to each other into a larger tower that was a hybrid of the 4 towers. I find stuff like that interesting.

By the way one of my most hated TD strategies is where they assume you'll do the build a tower then sell a tower trick to beat a mission. I can't tell you how many flash games had a mission like that which gets dull quickly. I'd really like to see more puzzle TD games that had me using combinations of towers. There are a few flash games that do that. One had it so that you could combine 4 towers next to each other into a larger tower that was a hybrid of the 4 towers. I find stuff like that interesting.

What is this trick? I've only played extremely casually, so I'm not sure if I know any "trick".