Sqdef, My Tower-defense Game

[sparr]

Why is money stored as a signed int? It rolls over from 2B to -2B 4B would only be slightly better, it should probably be a long long.

Also, beyond about 8 digits the money field isn't wide enough, and more than 999 lives the lives field isn't wide enough.

 

[sparr]

And, to be honest, I have grown a little bored with sqdef. The financial aspect seems broken. Most other games you concentrate on building the right towers in the right patterns and order. In this game success is dictated by how efficiently you can build your early collection of Colonies. But then Depots totally break even that idea, if you get ahead for even a moment then you are guaranteed a win and all that changes is just how much money you have at the end of the game. My previous post stemmed from a game on New World > Eternity where I had $1.8B on wave 58, then $-1.5B on wave 59, then $1.9B on wave 60. I actually *LOST* that game on wave 59 (thank god for saves) because I could not buy an extra life with my negative balance. I went back and bought a hundred lives at wave 52 and just hit select every couple of minutes for the next 8 waves.

Also, the various towers are a lot less balanced than in other games. You open with water or earth, maybe dabble in ice at some point, move on to towers in the mid game, and end up with a solid wall of outposts and armories. Maybe a scythe for eye candy. The expensive towers are not available in the early game, and the cheap towers are not useful in the late game. And some towers (fire, quad fortress) are never useful at all.

A bit of financial trickery... Once you have at least 33 Depots, you come out ahead if you sell all your non-money towers just before the end of each wave, then re-buy them after earning interest.

 

[Alex.]

Money is an unsigned 32bit int, I`ll take a look where that overflow could have come from - thanks for letting me know (I assume you use the latest version 1.4?).

I realize that the game`s design is lacking in some parts, I`ll try to make some small tweaks for 1.5, but aside from that and fixing glitches like the one above, I`ll move on to other things. If I`ll make another tower defense game, I`ll spend more time on its balance.

 

[sparr]

In terms of small changes that could address my concerns, most of them would involve changing some numbers. The income from killing creeps should increase faster. Some tower stats should be adjusted (more to come on that in a bit). And the Depot should be done away with, it breaks the game.

Also, on the overflow bug... After beating a level with an overflowed score, the game crashes in the future when I attempt to scroll to that map on the map selector.

 

[sparr]

I will correct a previous post... The Fire Turret is only useless compared to the Outpost in the current economic scenario, in which open squares for Depots makes the higher damage-per-square of the Outpost outweigh its slightly lower damage-over-time-per-dollar. If the economic towers are ignored, then the Fire Turret is the king of towers on most maps, closely followed by the outpost and ice turret.

I've also found that the 50% bonus is less a factor in the late game. The 3 best towers (which cover only two types of enemies) are nearly equal to an inferior tower against its favored target, and far better otherwise.

If I were to produce sqdef 1.5, some of the easiest changes I might make...

More damage or higher range for multi-target towers. At first glance it makes sense for the Split Barricade to do 1/4 the damage of the Barricade, but consider that the Split Barricade is not engaging 4 enemies at all times. Run four targets past it in a straight line and it will engage 1,2,3,2,1. If they go around a corner then it is 1,2,3,4,3,2,1. If they go around two corners then the 4-enemy stage lasts longer, but even in that case the average engagement is not even 3, so it should probably do at least 1/3 the damage of the Barricade, or have a slightly higher range so that it engages four enemies for a longer time.

Ditch the Depot and Colony, make creep rewards scale up faster instead. This removes the broken economic metagame.

Increase damage on the Quad Fortress. Right now without armories it does a competitive amount of damage, less over time than the ice and fire turrets bur more than others due to its extreme range. But when you introduce armories it becomes far less of a contender, because of the restrictions on armory coverage due to the larger size of the fortress.

 

[Alex.]

The easiest fix would indeed be doing away with the Depot. The Colony provides a fixed amount of money though, and it`s pretty useful throughout, even if its use in the late game is simply selling it for some extra money to get you out of a tight spot.

I`ll apply your suggestions about the range and damage of those particular towers, and thank you very much for taking the time to think about this

 

[mnm]

Alex is talking about the 1.5 version, did it ever been released?
The one i have is the 1.4A, i'm looking for an updated one.
This game is so awesome