Sunday, 18 March 2012

Guide to Beating Tower Defence Games(Circuit)

To clear up any confusion that you may have, there are 2 types of Tower Defence games, first one is the "Circuit TD", which means that enemies will follow a certain path to the end, these are generally easier to play. Second is the "Free-Field(FF) TD" which allows you to place your defences anywhere you want on the map, regardless of how it effects your enemies' movements, as long as it has a path to the end of the map. This is a guide to Circuit TDs, as for a Free-Field TD guide, I will upload that at a later time.

 
Tower Defence games are quite popular, or were popular a few years back. I'm sure that almost everyone has at least played one TD game. I've played them a lot and I'm sure that if you ask your neighbourhood strategist, he/she'll say that they are quite addicting. There is no 100% Sure-Fire way of winning a TD game, so don't put any hate comments on this post, but I would gladly accept your other comments. The point of this post is to help people by giving strategies that are useful in beating Tower-Defence games.

The first thing you absolutely must know before you can even think about winning a game on anything but easy or -in some cases- normal difficulty, you must familiarize yourself with the different turrets or constructions you can build. The reason for this is simple, you need to know the effects that each different tower has on the objects or beings spawned. Whether it be slowing, stopping, or attacking the enemies, they are almost always important (with exceptions to attacking turrets, since some are obviously better than others). What you should be looking for are first, the best offensive turrets, which means the ones that attack the fastest with the most DPM(Damage Per Minute). Once you've found that, you get a slowing or stopping turret, if there are multiple choices, get the one that effects the most enemies, because generally those types of structures have a low firing rate. Then you get the specialized defences, such as turrets that can see invisible targets, or have bonus damage against specialized enemies. Another important type of turret to look out for are the AoE turrets, meaning Area of Effects. These can attack multiple enemies, and should be bought early on, since they are usually cheap and are effective in early game. Lastly, you have your support turrets, they help your offensive turrets increasing damage or attack rate or gives some other bonus.

So a list of what you have to do
1. Find a game
2. Read the description of the buildings you can place
3. Identify the 
  • Slowing/Freezing turrets
  • Damage Dealing turrets
  • Specialized turrets
  • AoE turrets
  • Support turrets
4. Read the rest of this post

So now that you know what to get, you now need to know how to place them. It's quite simple, as I've said at the end of that last paragraph, you should get AoE turrets early on. But before that, you need to buy a basic turret, these are the cheapest and most useless turrets in the game, and they're your best friends because they can kill the weak early game enemies, they are a great and cheap source of revenue. When you get enough money or points, or whatever currency that the game requires, you buy an AoE turret. You set this close to start of the track/circuit for easily farming the enemies. The AoE are the most OverPowered Early game turrets that you usually come across in most Circuit TD games. 

When you get past the early game, you will encounter stronger enemies, you sell your basic turrets, but you probably still don't have enough money for any high Damage Dealing turrets yet, so you go for the Slow/Freeze ones, you set these at a bend in the track, where the enemies turn around, there, you can freeze the enemies as they come in one path, and keep freezing them as they leave. The bend should also be close enough to your AoE turret for it to hit the frozen minions -if not, then you need to put another AoE turret- , or it will be no use. The Freezing tower will stack up lots of enemies and that's a perfect place for more AoE turrets to be positioned. If the game you're playing has flying enemies that cant be hit by -or doesn't take much damage from- your AoE turrets, then you have an extra job of setting up specialized towers to fight the special enemies off, whether they fly, are invisible, made of stone, or whatever, you still need specialized towers or you will lose.

So now you've beaten wave after wave, mobbing with your AoE turrets and had a few lives taken away from specialized units or whatnot. You've probably saved up a nest egg for your late game by now. So it's time to spend it. Most Damage Dealing turrets will have either, high range, fast attack speed, lots of damage, or a combination of these three things. So here's what you do in the case of having one or another of those three assets on your Damage Dealing turret. 

1. If it has high range, you put them in the middle of the map, so they can reach -or almost reach- from start to end of the map.

2. If it has fast attack speed, you place it near a bend in the circuit, so it can attack enemies for a longer duration.

3. And if it deals lots of damage, you also place it at a bend in the circuit, for much the same reason.

Once you've installed your first Damage Dealing turret, you'll probably be able to completely annihilate any wave that comes through, but not for long. The game tricks you like that, it'll lead you on with weak opposition, then when you've become lax, they'll spring a huge wave at you that you can't fight against. So you need to keep placing and upgrading more damage dealers and specialized turrets, because you probably have about 20 more waves to get through before the end.

Lastly, I mentioned something called "Support turrets", they do as their name dictates, they support your turrets. When should you put these? Well it depends on what type of support it gives, if you deem it important, then go ahead and place it in the area that will affect your best turrets. There's also the price, if it is meant for early game, then you place it to help your AoE turrets, if it's for late game, you place it when you have Damage Dealing turrets. To determine whether it's for early or late game use, look at the cost of the tower -as I've said- and ask yourself, "Is this going to take me a few waves to get?" if it's just a few, it would be suitable for early game, if a lot more, then late game.


If you would like links to a few Tower Defense Games, look at the bottom of the post. Thank you for reading, and a guide to Free-Field TDs will be posted later. 


Here are some in no particular order---

1. BitMap Turret Defence

2. Bloons Tower Defense 5

3. Defender Tower Defence

4. Cursed Treasure: Don't Touch My Gems!

5.Protector IV



-The Rooster
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