Hi everyone,

We are looking for someone who can help make our game more fun and to improve the game design.

About the game

It is a 2d game for 2 players (currently 1 human vs 1 bot), similar to the game “Age of Wars”. Both players have a castle and can recruit units. The units of the players fight against each other. Goal is to destroy the castle of the other player. Besides units, the players can build buildings too. Additionally, there are a lot of different tribes and units and the human player is able to unlock each of the units over time (and select 5 of them every match).

What we are looking for

The programming part is nearly finished (by me) and the graphics are nearly finished (by my brother).

However, now the question is: "What can be done, to make the game as much fun as possible?". While I am trying to handle game design as good as I can, I am not an expert in this topic. Someone with more experience or even just a fresh perspective could help us a lot. If this sounds like you, “do you want to join our team?".

An example of the game design type of work

• Issue: The stronger player dominates the weaker player and kills the units of the weaker player, while his own units survive, making him even stronger over time. Possible ways to avoid this:
  • Defensive buildings: possibility to defend castle even without units
  • Decouple money from kills: Do not give money for kills, but for example introduce an independent building that generates money. This way the already stronger player does not get more money than the weaker player
  • Different unit effectivities: similar to rock, paper, scissor, make some units more effective against others. This way, the weaker player could outplay the stronger one by using better tactics
  • High castle health: That way a player does not instantly loose, when the enemy is stronger for some time. Instead, he has time to recover and strike back

Open game design topics

• Difficulty: We are currently designing a few (simple) levels and want to make them increasingly difficult
• Excitement and fun: We are trying to make the game actually fun, exciting and challenging. Right now, it, honestly, is a little boring, because once one of the players has a strong army, there is not really much the opponent can do about it, except wait and hope his castle health is high enough so he has time to earn gold and enough spawn units
• Tactics: We are trying to make the game simple and easy to play and understand, however, right now, the tactical aspect of the game is a little underwhelming. Possibly some more tactical depth should be added

If you are interested in joining our team, please let us know! ?

Thank you very much.

Best regards

Felix

Update

Here is a video showing the current gameplay:

Do you have a discord name?

My Discord name is “Logende#6369”

The game is a Tower Defense which is derived from RTS games.

I've seen TD games with enemies attacking constantly until defeated, and then there is a new level with increased difficulty.

Or enemies attack in waves, every wave increasing numbers and enemy difficulty.

Your game is for 2 players and every kill increases money to buy units and buildings.

Ideas:

• Instead of money from kills, every player has a fixed amount of "money" per game tick. Say there is a building "farm" which produces the basic resource "food". With food you buy different units and buildings. If every resource producing building is destroyed then it's game over.
• The players can choose to build obstacles, defensive buildings, defensive engines, storage buildings, better farms, hospitals....
• Infantry: slow, resistant to archers but vulnerable to ballistas,fights in melee, can garrison and capture buildings
• Archers: less slow, can shoot from buildings
• Worker: less slow, can build and destroy
• Scout/spy: fast, can hide, useful to find out enemy plans
• Ballista: very slow or immovable, kill units
• Catapult: very slow or immovable, destroy buildings
• Units with low health retreat automatically to hospital

Problem: The game is 1D, there is no room to maneuver. Some units should bypass most units while being caught in melee with others.

As you can see it can be as complex as you want.

merkutsam said:
Instead of money from kills, every player has a fixed amount of "money" per game tick. Say there is a building "farm" which produces the basic resource "food". With food you buy different units and buildings. If every resource producing building is destroyed then it's game over.

Good idea! Actually, we already do it kind of like this: The castle of the player produces a fix amount of money per x seconds (low amount of money, fast cooldown) and the player has a gold mine which produces an increasing amount of money over time (high amount of money, slow cooldown).

merkutsam said:
The players can choose to build obstacles, defensive buildings, defensive engines, storage buildings, better farms, hospitals....

Farms as building type is something we could add. We already have:

• Obstacles
• Defensive buildings (e.g. flame thrower or cannon)
• Healing fountain

and we consider a building that allows “fast travel”: If you have, for instance, two mine shafts, units could enter the first one and would be quickly transported to the second one

merkutsam said:
Infantry: slow, resistant to archers but vulnerable to ballistas,fights in melee, can garrison and capture buildings

Right now, we have the unit types Hero, Tank, Melee, Ranger, Mage. The tank, for example, has a lot of health, but only a short range attack. Additionally, units can wear armor, which makes them immune to attacks of rangers/mages (long range attacks). Units with armor are very slow.

merkutsam said:
Archers: less slow, can shoot from buildings

That one is something we could consider: The ability to place units in buildings. There is just one potential issue we want to avoid: in the games “Legendary Wars” and “Monster Wars”, the player can make units wait and stop moving to the enemy. That way, the player can build as many units as he wants and then quickly overwhelm any enemy with his army. That way, I easily won every fight in those games, because I just waited until I had a huge army and then attacked. To avoid this, in this game, units automatically walk towards the enemy and attack the enemy. They can not be stopped or controlled manually. Having a building, which allows just one unit to be stationary, should probably be okay, although if, for example, a Hero with tons of damage and a long range, would be placed there, it might be overpowered already.

merkutsam said:
Worker: less slow, can build and destroy

Interesting idea. Right now, we do have “builders”, which can be easily killed, but can build powerful buildings.

merkutsam said:
Scout/spy: fast, can hide, useful to find out enemy plans

This is something we can think about. Invisible units, in general, could add a new element of strategy.

merkutsam said:
Ballista: very slow or immovable, kill units

Right now, we have ballistas as immovable buildings that the builder can create (for money and only in fix building slots).

merkutsam said:
Catapult: very slow or immovable, destroy buildings

Actually, some kind of unit or building, which is very good at destroying other buildings, is a great idea!

merkutsam said:
Units with low health retreat automatically to hospital

We will think about that one.

merkutsam said:
Problem: The game is 1D, there is no room to maneuver. Some units should bypass most units while being caught in melee with others.

I would say this is an disadvantage and advantage of the game at the same time. This is what makes the gameplay special/interesting.

Right now, it works like the following:

• Units of the same team automatically form a formation: low range units (melee) automatically goes to the front of the formation and long range units to the back
• Both players have one active formation at a time (except a player has zero units alive)
• Once the units are close enough to attack each other, they stop moving forward and attack
• The formation updates in real time: if a new unit is added during an ongoing fight, it will seek a proper slot in the formation and the other units will move to make space

In the future, possibly flying units will be added, which will be able to bypass most of the enemies.

One more notable detail: attacks of the units can destroy each other (e.g. fireball destroys flying axe or arrow destroys boomerang), based on the strength of the corresponding attacks. Because of that, the players, basically, try to increase their total attack strength, in order to outmatch the enemy. This feels somewhat like the following scene:

Both sides loose and add units to their formation over the time of a fight, trying to outmatch the enemy.

To pile on to the suggestions;

1. Make the hitpoints of the castle relatively small. Since the game does lend itself to one player getting dominance relatively quickly, you don't want to drag out the battle when it's clear who's going to win.
2. A game like this is all about having a good rock-paper-scissors system. For example mounted beats archers, who beat infantry, who beat mounted. For this to work, you need to force players to chose between three or more options, instead of sending out all unit types at once. One way to do may be to have a high unit cost, so players simply can't afford to send all unit types.
3. Along the lines of point 2, provide buffs to having a lot of the same unit type. This fights the natural advantage a balanced army has. This can be in the form of another unit that helps all units of the same class. For example a general that leads your infantry, or an apprentice that powers up your mages.
4. Make sure every unit has a weakness. If someone gets an brief advantage by spamming one unit type, it should be easy to counter that the next round (but of course a better player will anticipate the counter, and spam units to counter the counter).
5. Make each faction feel unique by giving each an advantage for a particular player strategy.
6. In a game like this you have two metrics of how well you're doing: the number and streangth of units in play, and the position of the line of scrimmage. Try to make it possible for these not to match. For example, have units who knock back the enemy without dealing a lot of damage, and have slow moving powerful units.
7. Make sure the play area is wide enough so that as a player is loosing the line of scrimmage, they gain the benefit of reacting better because they can see which enemy's units are on the way.
8. Area attacks are a counter for large numbers of units. Percent of max hp attacks are a counter to singular strong units. Include both.
9. Make sure you have a test mechanism that tests the balance of each strategy and faction. Game-play telemetry is useful too, if possible.

Is the game intended for 2 human players or single player vs AI? AI will always be at a disadvantage against humans so either you make a very good AI or you give aids-cheats.

You say you want to avoid one player holding attacks until he can overwhelm the other. So the gameplay would be about sequence, the player tries to produce units in the right sequence, countering enemy units and sending their heavy hitters at the right moment to destroy enemy castle. King Mir had very good suggestions to implement for this gameplay.

Don't give armor to shooters and mages or they will steamroll everything. Also King Mir mentioned Area attacks to counter numbers, then you need a unit resistant to area attacks to counter the former.

attacks of the units can destroy each other (e.g. fireball destroys flying axe or arrow destroys boomerang), based on the strength of the corresponding attacks

The problem of 1 Dimension and missiles collidig whith each other is that once a formation is able to overcome the enemy firepower it will destroy everything behind, and it's unlikely the enemy will be able to amass enough firepower to tip the balance again. I suggest to rethink that mechanic implementing King Mir ideas about rock, paper, scissors.

I like the idea of a wide space between castles so the batlle moves back and forth. Maybe add a mechanic to send a builder to a specific point and build a specific building there.

merkutsam said:

Is the game intended for 2 human players or single player vs AI? AI will always be at a disadvantage against humans so either you make a very good AI or you give aids-cheats.

You should probably do both. Have a difficulty scale for AI buffs, and do your best to make a smart AI.

merkutsam said:

Don't give armor to shooters and mages or they will steamroll everything. Also King Mir mentioned Area attacks to counter numbers, then you need a unit resistant to area attacks to counter the former.

A unit resistant to area attacks is simply a unit with high hp or armor. The trade off is lots of weak units, or one strong unit.

Right now, we have the unit types Hero, Tank, Melee, Ranger, Mage. The tank, for example, has a lot of health, but only a short range attack. Additionally, units can wear armor, which makes them immune to attacks of rangers/mages (long range attacks). Units with armor are very slow.

Ok, So melee is cheep and has large numbers, and is strong against rangers. A mage can have an area attack to be good against that. A tank has armor, so counters a mage, and also the low attack of melee. Then maybe your hero deals damage proportional to max health, so counters both mages and tanks. And a ranger is also cheap, but has a bonus against tanks. There you go, 5 way RPS system.

For example.

Then give each faction a special unit or ability that boosts one or 2 of those 5 unit types.

Another thing, you mentioned that you have a healing fountain. I actually think you should avoid having abilities that heal units, because they keep units on the field. You might still be able to make it work if you favor certain unit types. For example, heal hp at a fixed number per second, so that it favors cheep units, and make this a faction special ability, for, say, snowmen.

King Mir said:

To pile on to the suggestions;

1. Make the hitpoints of the castle relatively small. Since the game does lend itself to one player getting dominance relatively quickly, you don't want to drag out the battle when it's clear who's going to win.
2. A game like this is all about having a good rock-paper-scissors system. For example mounted beats archers, who beat infantry, who beat mounted. For this to work, you need to force players to chose between three or more options, instead of sending out all unit types at once. One way to do may be to have a high unit cost, so players simply can't afford to send all unit types.
3. Along the lines of point 2, provide buffs to having a lot of the same unit type. This fights the natural advantage a balanced army has. This can be in the form of another unit that helps all units of the same class. For example a general that leads your infantry, or an apprentice that powers up your mages.
4. Make sure every unit has a weakness. If someone gets an brief advantage by spamming one unit type, it should be easy to counter that the next round (but of course a better player will anticipate the counter, and spam units to counter the counter).
5. Make each faction feel unique by giving each an advantage for a particular player strategy.
6. In a game like this you have two metrics of how well you're doing: the number and streangth of units in play, and the position of the line of scrimmage. Try to make it possible for these not to match. For example, have units who knock back the enemy without dealing a lot of damage, and have slow moving powerful units.
7. Make sure the play area is wide enough so that as a player is loosing the line of scrimmage, they gain the benefit of reacting better because they can see which enemy's units are on the way.
8. Area attacks are a counter for large numbers of units. Percent of max hp attacks are a counter to singular strong units. Include both.
9. Make sure you have a test mechanism that tests the balance of each strategy and faction. Game-play telemetry is useful too, if possible.

1. That would be one possibility, yet I think it would be better to find a way for the player to successfully defend the castle against even a big army and to launch a counter attack. It is true, that during one match (/game) in one battle, there, usually, is one clear winner (the stronger army destroys all enemies), however, the goal is, that there are multiple battles during one game. The player should still have the possibility to destroy the army of the enemy after some time. Possibly, because of tactical elements, such as 'rock, paper, scissor'-like unit types or, for example, area attacks
2. I agree and have one more comment, which I will add to point 3
3. this is a great point. The player should have an advantage by having many units of the same type, otherwise he will simply build a very balanced army. Maybe the following: The main attribute of the unit (e.g. health for tanks, damage for mages, range for rangers) is boosted, based on the amount of units of that type. For example, more tanks results in even more health and more mages results in even more damage. This is a really good idea.
4. Similar to point 2 and 3. If we use the rock, paper, scissor system and boost groups of the same unit type, this would apply
5. Would be ideal and we should definitely invest time into this topic. Probably not very easy, because there are over 20 tribes, yet, I guess, it would be okay, if there are some overlaps
6. Already the case, to a certain degree: Units can have armor (makes immune to mage/ranger attacks), which makes those units very slow
7. Yeah, although there needs to be a good balance. Otherwise, it might be frustrating: If you build a good army, which finally arrives at the enemy, but the enemy builds an effective counter (he has a lot of time to react, because he knows exactly who is coming to him) and you do not have any ways of helping your army, because support would take too much time to arrive, this would be frustrating
8. Good idea. Especially the area attacks. I am not sure about the ‘Percent of max hp attacks’, because they might be too op against Heros and, otherwise, useless against everyone else. Possibly a viable special attack with a big cooldown
9. Yes, I agree. We already set up Python tooling, which can automatically simulate matches and print out statistics of the resulting matches. The game simulation depends on the AI, though. If we succeed, we will use reinforcement learning to train a good AI

merkutsam said:

Is the game intended for 2 human players or single player vs AI? AI will always be at a disadvantage against humans so either you make a very good AI or you give aids-cheats.

You say you want to avoid one player holding attacks until he can overwhelm the other. So the gameplay would be about sequence, the player tries to produce units in the right sequence, countering enemy units and sending their heavy hitters at the right moment to destroy enemy castle. King Mir had very good suggestions to implement for this gameplay.

Don't give armor to shooters and mages or they will steamroll everything. Also King Mir mentioned Area attacks to counter numbers, then you need a unit resistant to area attacks to counter the former.

attacks of the units can destroy each other (e.g. fireball destroys flying axe or arrow destroys boomerang), based on the strength of the corresponding attacks

The problem of 1 Dimension and missiles collidig whith each other is that once a formation is able to overcome the enemy firepower it will destroy everything behind, and it's unlikely the enemy will be able to amass enough firepower to tip the balance again. I suggest to rethink that mechanic implementing King Mir ideas about rock, paper, scissors.

I like the idea of a wide space between castles so the batlle moves back and forth. Maybe add a mechanic to send a builder to a specific point and build a specific building there.

The game is intended for both. In the beginning, human vs AI. Later, we want to support human vs human too. The game, already, is deterministic (if the same hardware is used) and human vs human should be possible, but probably is still a lot of work to implement.

Yeah, the AI should be really good, which is why we are trying to train it with reinforcement learning. Additionally, we already wrote some balancing helpers: the money, which the AI gets, is multiplied with a balancing factor. This balancing factor depends on the worth of assets (money/units/building) the AI has in comparison to the enemy. The AI can get up to 1.5 times as much money, as usual, if it is very poor, compared to the enemy.

Yep, the game is about sequences of units and battles.

Regarding the 1 Dimension issue: this is, in general, correct, yet via mechanisms, such as a rock, paper, scissors system and the other ideas discussed above (e.g. area attacks or special attacks of the heros, with a big cooldown) it should be possible for a player to turn the game around to their advantage.

The possibility of building buildings at any position is something we have to test out. Maybe it is really good, maybe it is overpowered.

King Mir said:

merkutsam said:

Is the game intended for 2 human players or single player vs AI? AI will always be at a disadvantage against humans so either you make a very good AI or you give aids-cheats.

You should probably do both. Have a difficulty scale for AI buffs, and do your best to make a smart AI.

merkutsam said:

Don't give armor to shooters and mages or they will steamroll everything. Also King Mir mentioned Area attacks to counter numbers, then you need a unit resistant to area attacks to counter the former.

A unit resistant to area attacks is simply a unit with high hp or armor. The trade off is lots of weak units, or one strong unit.

Right now, we have the unit types Hero, Tank, Melee, Ranger, Mage. The tank, for example, has a lot of health, but only a short range attack. Additionally, units can wear armor, which makes them immune to attacks of rangers/mages (long range attacks). Units with armor are very slow.

Ok, So melee is cheep and has large numbers, and is strong against rangers. A mage can have an area attack to be good against that. A tank has armor, so counters a mage, and also the low attack of melee. Then maybe your hero deals damage proportional to max health, so counters both mages and tanks. And a ranger is also cheap, but has a bonus against tanks. There you go, 5 way RPS system.

For example.

Then give each faction a special unit or ability that boosts one or 2 of those 5 unit types.

Another thing, you mentioned that you have a healing fountain. I actually think you should avoid having abilities that heal units, because they keep units on the field. You might still be able to make it work if you favor certain unit types. For example, heal hp at a fixed number per second, so that it favors cheep units, and make this a faction special ability, for, say, snowmen.

Yeah, the healing fountain should have a very limited amount of heal hp per second.

Regarding the rock, paper scissor topic: right now, I consider the following system:

• Tank simply has high health but has no other big advantage. Also it has a low range
• Melee is rather cheap, deals a decent amount of damage, has a low range, has medium health and is very effective against buildings (which have a lot of health and are, otherwise, hard to destroy). The more melee units are close together, the more damage they deal
• Ranger has a high range, low health, medium damage and is effective against tanks. The more ranger units are close together, the more range they have (yet not too much, otherwise it would be very op)
• Mage has a high range, very low health and high damage. The more mages are close together, the more damage they deal