Tower Defense and Cube 3D

     I am a big fan of tower defense. The first one I played was a mod for Warcraft III, from before it was 'World of' . It set my expectations for tower defenses, though I was to be often disappointed. Don't get me wrong, I've come to appreciate and enjoy the strategy involved in other games; they just employ techniques that sometimes bug me.

     First, I'll describe the mod. I believe it was called Cube 3d Tower Defense. You started with enough gold to build a basic tower or two. Monsters came out of a cave and headed toward your home base. Kill the monsters, gain gold. Let the monsters reach your base, lose health. That's the short and sweet premise of all tower defense games, actually.

     Other common tower defense tropes include multiple types of towers and multiple types of enemies. Common towers include: a standard attack tower, one which does weaker faster attacks, one which does slower more powerful attacks, and one with great range. It is not uncommon to have one or more towers with special attacks, such as splash damage, poisoning, or slowing enemies.

     Typical enemies include a standard, weak enemy which can be taken out with 1 to 5 shots of a standard tower, faster enemies which often come in droves and can be taken out with 1 or 2 shots even from a weak tower, and an enemy with a lot of health which usually ignores a portion of the damage done to them. It's not unusual to see an enemy which can heal other monsters, ignore some or all special attacks, or fly directly to the exit, ignoring the regular path and placement of the towers.

     Most tower defense games have a set path along which the monsters travel, and upon which towers cannot be built. Cube 3d, however, had bases (in addition your home base-think baseball) which the monsters travelled to in a specific order; if the travelled over base 3 to get to base 2, they went back to base 3 before proceeding on. If you blocked their regular path, they found another way. If there was no other way then, and only then, they started attacking your towers until they could get through. You could make fantastically complex labyrinths.

     Those are the parts which for many tower defense games are missing, particularly the ability to block off the monster's path. Of course, the towers and the monsters already existed with attacks and defense fully statted when the mod was made; the tower defense part was a relatively simple add-on. Most tower defense games, on the other hand, are made from whole cloth.

     Tomorrow, I will discuss some other tower defense games and what I like and find awkward about them.