Tower Defense Gaming and Computational Intelligence Part 3 | TD Gaming

Some tower defense games don’t have a designated path, the placement of the towers themselves forms the path for the enemies.

Enemy simply try and take the shortest path to the end of the level.

Some games even have enemies come in from all angles and the placement towers is limited. The style of game is actually more geared around keeping your towers intact and not defending an end position on the map.

Another popular theme in tower defense games is one in which the enemy’s connection to destroy the towers. Take Plants versus Zombies for example, in this game the enemies the zombies can destroy the towers. They follow their parallel lanes toward the end positions, multiple end positions, and they destroy towers as they go and your tower options and placements are limited. Once a single enemy reaches the end you’ve lost.

So there are different types of TD maps that we can differentiate between.

One is linear and/or branching paths. The other is free-form. And the third could probably be called either parallel or survival-based lane play. Mix-and-match  between these can exist as well.

In most tower defense games, specific towers target specific types of enemies. The types of towers that target multiple types of enemies are generally not as strong. The differences between the towers can include the amount of damage they do, attack formation, effects from attacks, and firing speed and the range at which they can attack enemies. Usually when you purchase more advanced towers, these different attributes can be improved. This can either be through buying stronger towers or upgrading the ones that you have.

Some towers can fire multiple tax at once in different directions, instead of just one linear attack in one direction. There are even some tower defense games with hidden enemies that you need specific types of towers in order to see. Some towers can actually also gain increases and resources or move the enemies backward on the map.

Sometime defense games actually utilize combination attacks between towers as well. That is to say, if you follow one attack with another specific tech from a different. It will do more damage than the two attacks separately. So the combination of the attacks are more than the sum of its parts.

There’s also hero-based gameplay. This means that you have a specifically player controllable hero unit that you can move around the map to attack enemies. This makes it more of a personal experience because you’re actively engaged not only in placing defense towers but an expert participating as the hero itself.

continue reading on Tower Defense Gaming and Computational Intelligence Part 4

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