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All towers automatically target the first thing that comes into range.
Arrow Towers: (Aka: Propelled Arrow Dispensary)
These lovely little towers are the cheapest towers out there, and great for mazing. Interestingly enough, they're also excellent at tearing apart the health of enemy units. Despite their low cost, they're a mainstay even into late game.
Normally, you build arrow towers either when trying to create a maze quickly due to a large number of units getting past your defenses early, or when designing a maze that expects to have units with their health bars exposed (shields and armour both depleted already) at that point in the maze.
Don't understimate arrow towers; they will be with you all game, and if used properly, can seriously pack a nasty punch.
Making adventurers and knees everywhere quiver in terror. That is how an arrow tower do.
Cannon Towers: (Aka: Ballistic Impulsion Facillitator)
The cannon tower is kind of so-so against shielding and rather mediocre against health, but it truly shines as it strips away armour with remarkable efficiency.
It's not impossible to win a game without using cannon towers, it's just very difficult and requires a not very strong opponent =P
The thing is, towers are kind of stupid; they shoot the first thing that comes into range, and keep shooting it until it leaves range or dies. This means if you have a big pile of cannon towers, they'll shred a target's armour immediately! And then... they'll keep plinking away, doing almost no damage to the health bar, ignoring the target directly behind the one they're shooting at which is still at full armour.
As such, you'll typically want to have a mixture of cannon and arrow towers bunched up together. This way, the cannons kill the armour, then the arrows kill off the health so the unit dies faster, and the cannons can move to their next target faster. This is just generically more efficient as a whole.
BOOM BABY! That is how a cannon tower do. Unless it's hitting health, then it's more of a "plink".
Lightning Towers: (Aka: Voltaic Liberation Apparatus)
Lightning towers are great, because they'll hit 3/4/5 units (at level 1/2/3), and do immense damage to shielding, as well as pretty respectable damage to armour. The problem is, they suck against single targets, and they suck even more against anything which only has health left compared to other towers (such as the arrow tower).
You typically want a nice big bunch of lightning towers at the very start of your maze to rip away shields and hit enemy units while they're all packed together in a tight group.
Since Sudsie can add shields to units during the course of a run, after your opponent reaches T3 units, you're going to also want to put groups of 2-3 lightning towers throughout your whole maze to continually remove the shielding as it's reapplied.
PEWPEWPEWFREAKINGPEW. That is how a lightning tower do. After it's 37th cup of coffee that morning. Actually, it fires rather slowly, but it's mostly just because the operator has problems hitting the button when their hands are shaking that much from terminal caffine poisoning.
Hammer Towers: (Aka: Mechanized Stature Diminisher)
The hammer tower is great for crushing a single, strong unit and stunning them in place for a few moments while your other nearby towers rip into them.
The downside, is that hammer towers are pretty much useless against groups of targets, or a target that's already low on health. Even moreso, having lots of hammer towers in a row is pretty much a waste of space, because it means the enemy won't be getting shot at by surrounding towers while it's stunned in place.
It's highly advised to use these towers sparingly, and only at the end of a very long game. They're expensive, and not very useful against most units, but do have their place against dealing with targets like the equine transports and Mortimer. If in doubt as to whether you should use a hammer tower, the answer is probably "no".
STOP. Hammer time. That is how MC Hammer do. Hammer towers mostly just go "bonk", however.
Fan Towers: (Aka: Cyclonic Momentum Decelerator)
These are some of the best towers you have at your disposal, and for good reason: they can cripple the movement speed of any units up to 4 hexes in a straight line in front of them.
Fan towers slow by 30/50/70%. For those who have issues with math, think of it in the reversed order; A unit goes from 100% speed without a fan tower, to 70, 50, 30. This means a level 3 fan tower is 3x as effective as no fan tower at all, and over twice as effective as a level 1 fan tower.
Because fan towers are so powerful, allowing enemies to be in range of other towers for about 3x as long as normal, it's a good idea to plan your maze accordingly. Try to change direction every 4 hexes or so. Sometimes this can be a drastic change, and sometimes it can be as simple as just moving up one hex but otherwise continuing in a straight line.
Whatever you do, make room for fan towers in your maze build, as they're the single most efficient tower in the game. No other tower makes the surrounding towers that much stronger for the cost.
One thing I've personally found that works really well, is making a triangle shaped maze with 4 hexes on each side and a fan tower at the end of each line of hexes. This allows for the entire triangle to be firing the entire time, allowing for very efficient use of firepower for the longest possible time. A series of triangles in this manner allows for excellent damage output on maps with lots of open space to plan them.
Mobs in the wind, all we are are mobs in the wind. That is how a fan tower likes to think it do, but it turns out it's just blowing hot air.
Catapult Towers: (Aka: Torsion Projectile Approximator)
These towers don't do particularly great damage, but the range on them can be ridiculously high. Fully upgraded, these things can hit almost anywhere on the map. With amp towers, the "almost" bit is pretty much removed.
There are a few problems with catapult towers, however. First off, they don't really do that much damage. Second, they're expensive. Third, their targeting is based upon the speed of the target at the time they fire; if the target walks into or out of a fan tower's range in the meantime, the catapult will probably miss entirely. Fourth, despite that these do splash damage, it's largely irrelevant because units can't really bunch up very tightly due to the single-file aspect of the game's design.
As such, catapults really just aren't that very good in most situations. You can almost guaranteed buy something better with your money.
However, some maps have handy positions in the middle of the map that units can't walk near, which are perfect for catapults, and due to the nature of the random placement of the mines, this can sometimes mean certain areas of the map are completely boarded off, meaning catapults are the only real way to make use of those hexes at all.
As such, catapults have a very viable use mid to late game, but if you have to choose between a good maze of fan/lightning/cannon/arrow towers, or catapults, go for the well designed maze instead every time.
Catapults are good at what they're designed to do; they are NOT a bread and butter tower, however.
What say you and me, baby, go out for a little fling? This is not how a catapult do, but when it's drunk enough, it certainly believes this to be the case. Remember, don't drink and hurl balls of iron at enemies.
Amplification Towers: (Aka: Optical Proximity Multiplicator)
These towers sound awesome, but they're kind of subpar unless they're fully upgraded and surrounded by towers on all sides.
The problem is that, at maximum level, the amp tower only gives +30% damage and +15% range. The range doesn't benefit most towers very much, and the damage amplification means that, even at level 3 with 6 towers benefitting from the bonus, you only get 180% damage total. If you'd just built another tower in the same spot instead, you'd get 100% damage, so it's only 80% stronger than another tower of the same type. Edit: now changed to +35% max damage boost.
Due to the excessively high cost of amp towers, they're generally not worth building until you're very late in the game, and even then, only if they're level 3 and surrounded by at least 5 other towers. 4 towers affected mostly breaks even (120%), while 5 and 6 are marginal improvements.
Although these say they don't affect towers that don't target units, they do actually work on catapults. Considering catapults are often shoved into positions far out of the way to make use of hexes which would otherwise be useless, and that the range boost is a percentage on top of an already immense range, these combined factors make amp towers excellent when combined with catapults.
We, isht, like, tha BESHT FRIENDSH EVAH! This is how an amp tower do, even when it's sober. At least, that was the theory. The amp tower claims to be a social drinker, but to be blunt, we've never actually found evidence they can be sober.
Lava Towers: (Aka: Molten Discomfort Distributor)
Lava towers are a unique case; every other tower in the game takes up 1 hex, while lava towers take up 7; one center hex, and the 6 hexes immediately adjacent to that hex.
These lava towers are excellent for damage output, and can in fact set multiple targets on fire at a time, but due to the single-file nature of the spawn, and that all units except zoomers walk at the same pace, you'll generally only get 1 target at a time hit by the lava... and even worse, that one target will hit each bucket of lava in a row, and the next bucket won't be prepared until after the unit behind it walks past.
What this means, in practice, is that the lava towers are a lot less powerful than the first appear. They do good damage, but they take up a lot of space and are really only good for one target at a time in most cases, even with using fans.
To make matters worse, lava towers are really awkward because they require a huge amount of space, and you have to design a maze that involves walking into at least 5 or 6 of the bucket dump spots around the tower in a circle. This often means that many maps can't support even a single lava tower, and even in the ideal circumstances when they can, the lava tower has to be built around as a central fixture.
The shape of the lava tower also makes it nearly impossible to efficiently place fan towers, and other towers will be stuck in rather clunky, non-useful positions around the outside of it. As such, while it's possible to place a corner tower on three corners of the lava tower and treat it as one of the triangle fixtures I was mentioning above, to be blunt... it's usually not worth the effort to try to cram it into a map you're working on. You're almost always better off just using smaller, normal towers.
Now, despite all the bad things I have to say about the lava tower, it actually has some really awesome points to it. It's great against armour and health. It can hit multiple targets, and it does quite respectable damage overall. If you happen to have the space to fit one into your design, or even two or three, it can be well worth the effort to cram a lava tower into place.
I just don't recommend it on anything but the largest and most open of maps.
Burn, baby, burn! This is how the lava tower do. Actually, it mostly just sobs in the corner and pretends it has any friends, despite that no one wants to get near it. OOOH BURN! See, that's how I do. I'm kinda cruel like that. ^.~
There's several key types of unit composition, but generally they look about the same:
Early on you'll have lots of one type of unit, such as Mr. Moopsy, or lots of knights/zoomers.
Note that zoomers are great for smaller maps, maps with awkward placement of mines, and maps that make it very hard to build a good, dense maze. The downside of zoomers is that they're faster than other units, so you can't really pair them up with support units.
You'll often also see people send a full wave purely comprised of the medic, Baron Von Pepto. The reason for this is that they won't all die next to each other, but will instead be spread out across the entire map as they die off, making most of the map be covered in their healing aura for the next wave to be sent after them.
This means you can generally send a full wave of the baron, followed by a second wave of mixed units.
The mixed unit choice is typically either knights + sudsies, or stanleys + sudsies. Note that about a 2:1 ratio of sudsie to her cohorts is ideal, as sudsie's range is such that about two of them can spam shields on the target in front of them at any given time.
For this composition, you will want your leading unit to be something that will take the hits for sudsie (stanley's great for this), followed by 2x sudsies in a row directly behind them.
Some even more advanced builds include a mixture of sudsies + equine transports, with knights+sudsies inside of the transports. This is cost prohibitive, but quite effective at breeching defenses.
Note that sudsie can't add shields to other sudsies (nor herself), and the baron can't heal other barons or equine transports (transports have like 1 hp or so; all their health is comprised of armour, not actual health).
Mortimer is a game ender, but he's entirely too squishy without full upgrades. All of the universal upgrades that affect all units are percentage based, and since he has rather high base stats, these universal upgrades give him larger bonuses than anyone else. The downside is that, without these upgrades, he's kinda mediocre for his cost. Once he's at full upgrades, it's just short of impossible to kill a full 5x wave of Mortimers before they reach the castle. Even under ideal circumstances, they're going to get at least a few swings in.
Regardless, the specific details of the various team compositions vary widely based upon what your enemy has for a tower setup, and how the map is laid out. As this can vary based solely upon the placement of where the mines showed up, I can't really say any one composition is universally better than any other, as they never will be.
If you do find that your enemy doesn't have many cannons, or many lightning towers, however, you might want to focus on units with especially high armour, or those with high shielding, and boost those universal upgrades first.
For example, more gold is better, right? Well, no, not always. You may notice how prohibitively expensive it can be to upgrade your mines, both in gold cost and BP. Often, it can be better to have a bit less gold for awhile, but keep heavy pressure upon your opponent.
Keep in mind that you get BP for sending units. If you send bigger, stronger units, you can then use that BP to enhance your units without costing you extra gold. This means you aren't paying more gold, but your opponent is forced to spend gold on towers rather than units or mines. This makes it very possible to be aggressive enough to back your enemy into a corner, making them waste all their money just trying to keep up with your continual onslaught of increasingly stronger units.
As such, you need to balance between increasing your income, keeping aggressive hostile pressure up on your opponent, and ensuring your own defenses are fit for combat.
Note that, if you have more investment in stronger early towers, you can cripple an enemy's offensive capability. If they're spending gold on big units, trying to get extra BP, but your towers are so strong they're butchering the enemy units before they have much time to generate any real BP, then you can slow the progress of your opponent's army significantly, letting you gain upgrades, units or gold as desired.
Most of the strategy you'll find, comes down to building mazes, and balancing your BP income, your gold income, your attack pressure, and your defenses. It's not possible to focus on all of these at the same time, and the difference between a good player, and a truly great player, often comes down to just being able to notice tiny shifts in which of these is more important to fund at any given time.
It's very easy to tunnelvision if you have an enemy throwing an early rushed stanley at you, for example, and just keep pouring more and more money into your defenses, all the while they're ramping up their economy as you're so busy building defenses that you're not fighting back. One good heavy assault of your own could cause them to grind to a halt and go on the defensive themselves, but you instead get stuck just forever trying to build more towers, always just a tiny bit behind their constantly increasing BP funded upgrades.
Try to reevaluate during each wave if you need to change your strategy. Sometimes it can be worth it to let a few units through if it gives you an advantage two waves from now, assuming you can survive that long. Also note that, if the enemy is down to just 1-3 units, the value of those units in BP is almost nothing, so it's alright to let a few through sometimes for longer than you might like, as long as you get most of them early on.
In Tower Wars, this doesn't work in 90% of situations.
Generally your greatest strength is to be aggressive on attack, and try to force your enemy into tunnel visioning. However, that means you're going to need some gold at some point as well. The trick, I've found, is to normally just send units as you're able to, and never buy the upgrade that lowers the cooldown on them until you're at T3 mines. The extra sending speed won't matter early game for getting units through, but it will hurt your economy badly.
Instead, keep in mind that T2 units, namely the knight and zoomer, cost 531 for a full group unupgraded. With one upgrade of +2 slots, you can get an extra one added for 590 total gold per wave. Keep this in mind!
With all of your level 1 towers at 6/6 miners, you generate 35 gold per tick, and in the 45 seconds it takes for your units to be ready again you'll generally make about 100~200 extra gold for each wave you send than you needed. The trick here, is to generally keep up a constant pressure of units, constantly churning out more BP, and after two waves upgrade a mine and give it +1 miner. This will be roughly enough (give or take a tick of gold or two, based on your timing) time to have enough gold for your next wave. From there, add another +3 miners, as the extra gold income will pay for the slight discrepency.
This is a very similar method applied later on when you're upgrading from level 2 to level 3 mines; the difference is to stick to an alternating wave of 6 peptos (828 gold) and knight/sudsie/sud/knight/sud/sud/knight/knight (788 gold).
Alternatively, if you're being overly aggressive and push for an early stanley, you can go with stanley/sud/sud/stanley/sud/sudsie (1200 gold); this is a bit slower, and I advise it after your first T3 mine is filled out, but before your second goes up.
It's not really possible to give exact times, since I can't say "at X time during the match, you should have Y upgrades". The thing is that, between the different maps and the randomized placement of those mines, it can speed up or slow down the game significantly based on how much room you have to work with when building a maze.
Additionally, the player you're fighting against may do something unexpected which can throw you off your game; for example, one player I fought once didnt' build any towers at all on their first wave; they just spammed the max number of units out to overwhelm me. Since I wasn't expecting that, it caused some significant issues with my build and timing, and they got a lot more BP early on then expected.
If a player's overly aggressive, or overly turtle-defensive based, it can seriously change when and where you should upgrade, so do so at a pace that feels comfortable to you, and don't be scared to let 1-2 units through your defenses early on when they can't do much damage nor provide much BP.
- Hyper-aggressive
- Turtle
- Balanced
The hyper-aggressive and turtle builds are typically both quite effective against newer players, but aren't as useful as the balanced build against better players.The aggressive version involves relying almost entirely on raw offensive attack early game, hoping to get a few units past their early defenses. This usually involves sending 225-275 gold worth of units on your first wave, in the hopes that their defenses won't be strong enough to handle the sheer mass of units coming their way. The downside is that your own defenses are significantly crippled, and if they are slightly more balanced than you are, or go heavy defenses, it can counter this entirely, and all you'll have accomplished is feeding them gold for their own wave. This does work especially well on maps which have really bad randomized mine placement so that there's not much space to place towers at the front of the map. It's especially bad on wide-open maps with lots of room for towers at the front of the map.
The turtle strategy begins by not sending any units, instead having heavier defenses and waiting for their units to reach you, killing them off for the gold bonus, then spending that on a few extra units to send back. Honestly this doesn't work so well, since the delay means your opponent will probably have upgraded their mines ahead of you, and will then be able to spend extra gold to get more towers up. So honestly, it doesn't work if they're paying close attention at all. Against a newbie, however, it can really cripple them, especially if they forget to upgrade their mines immediately as soon as their BP comes in.
Edit by Ar-Pharazon: the following paragraph is based on the game starting with 200 gold, 0 BP. The game now features a randomized start that will most likely give you more resources than that. Please take this under advisement as you read on.
The balanced strategy involves sending about 175 gold (7 units) worth of moopsy on your first wave, which will conveniently drop you at 100 gold left for towers (4 arrow towers) right off the start. As the units walk towards you, you can get enough gold for another tower or three, depending on the map. Some maps have a really long walking path to get to the entrance, and on these maps you're typically a little better off being slightly more aggressive, but not too much.
This is only the first wave, but it sets you up for the rest of the game, and can give you a very early advantage in play. If you get 6 miners and your opponent only got 4, that can be the start of a snowball that gets you knights out a wave before them, and that can set them back heavily on building defenses, and that alone can net you the win.
After the first wave, however, these strategies largely come back together within the next wave or two. You want to upgrade to 6 miners on all 3 mines ASAP, and you want to remember to be spam clicking to add miners as soon as the BP comes in. Even delaying one or two ticks on gold can have you fall behind significantly at times. The difference between sending knights/zoomers a wave before your opponent is a very big difference.
Right now you have two main things to focus on:
If you can get even one or two units past their defenses, those extra few ticks of BP can be the difference between getting another miner or two, or starving for gold. Having double the income of your enemy early game is kind of hard to argue as being not useful =P
The second point here, is that you directly control how much BP your opponent gets. If you spend more gold upgrading towers and building more of them, you can kill their units faster, meaning they get less money. You don't want to build a long, narrow line of towers here, but rather, you want it at least double wide, preferably double-wide on both sides to pour as many arrows into their troops immediately out of the gate as possible.
The faster their units die, the less BP they get. This means you want to spam out towers as fast as possible on the first wave generally; build them mid-combat, left click and hold, waiting for a unit to die to give you that +10 gold bonus to pay for another tower ASAP, regardless of which strategy you picked to start with on sending. More defensive firepower is your key here.
This is your first balancing act, trying to balance more offense versus more defense. You don't really have to worry about money, since as long as you have BP, you want to spend it on extra miners as soon as possible, so you can ignore it for the moment. The simple balance here is more offense, or more defense, that's it. You trade off one for the other, and after a point, more units sent becomes a liability due to less defense. One less tower is a big deal on othe first wave; bigger than 1 more unit sent generally.
Anyway, once you have your full allotment of miners (usually; there are occasionally cases where it can be better to have 6/6/4 miners if it lets you get your knights out a wave early), you want to get your tier 2 unit out ASAP. Upgrading Mr. Moopsy is largely a waste of BP at this point. He's nice, but he doesn't have armour =P
Knights and zoomers both have armour. Remember how arrow towers suck against armour? Well, these both have armour; zoomers have more armour and are faster, so can be great for getting your foot in the door on a small map. The downside, is that on larger maps where zoomers can be easily killed, you're not going to have the money and BP to change for awhile once you pick them, and the knights synergize much better with sudsie and von pepto, so you'll quickly find that, if you can't get a really large advantage from the zoomers, you may as well just go for knights.
Regardless, getting your T2 units out ASAP is a priority after getting miners, and if you can get T2 before miners somehow, (like if you know you'll be about 50 bp short if you buy those last two miners) it can be worth sacrificing them to get the T2's out early.
Once the T2 units are out, you're now opened up to having enough money to start building a maze. I'd advise planning it out in your mind by looking at the hexes, and counting out to 4 in a straight line to figure out where you want to place your fan tower, and build around it even if it's not placed.
Upgrading your arrow towers, replacing them with lightning or cannon towers, and so on, all starts to break down at this point based upon the map, how good of an advantage (or lack thereof) you got in these first few minutes, and how aggressive your opponent is. After this point, I can't help you anymore with broad generalizations, you have to be able to think on your feet.
Additionally, even though the game's very slow in pace, and takes a long time to play, there's always a lot going on. You're never really more than a few seconds without something important to take care of, or something to plan out. Be careful of getting complacent, or tunnelvisioning if they keep sending a powerful force. If you find yourself going for more than 2 enemy waves without having sent anything, only having boosted your mines or towers, then you probably need to back off for a second and wait for money to come in to attack with.
There's a lot going on, and despite being slow, it's a very engaging and interesting game. It's not quite on par with the tactics and strategy of chess, but it's a lot farther up there in strategic planning and tactical execution than you might think.
For those who are totally new to the game, I would also advise taking all this information as provided, and fighting the single-player bots. The AI programming on them was really well done, even if there's a significant difficulty jump from the 1st to the 2nd bot.
Practice hard on fighting the bots, and if you can consistently defeat the 8th bot, and have read through this guide, then you're ready to take on human players without any issue. This way everyone will enter into the arena at roughly a similar skill level, and you'll get closer, harder matches =3
Anyway, have fun! I'd say good luck, but there isn't really any luck associated with this game. It's pure skill ^.~
I've thought of a few minor things that I could add as well to make it a little better, so I suppose I'll refine it a bit more over the next few days instead of just sitting down and writing it all out at once like I did this time XD
May as well make it as high a quality as possible before officialificating it. That's a real word. Honest. Just coined it now. o.o
:-) Having read the other guides that are up there now, I remember someone commenting that some pictures would help. Voyle's original guides, pinned under General Discussions, had some useful screenshot examples of maze layouts. Sorry for suggesting extra work -- but wait, you guys do it to me all the time. ;-)
I'd like to know if I could add you so we could play a few matches of Tower Wars together? It'd be nice to play this game with a possible friend, since I don't have anyone on my friends list who plays this. But it's okay if you would like to keep your friends list the way it is.
Also, thank you for the guide, I find it extremely useful :)
Why the hell Steam doesn't include a message box for introductions when adding friends is beyond me.
EIther you already know someone when trying to make them friends, or you don't... and most people would assume you only friend people that you know. They'd be wrong for many people who pick up friends lists like katamari balls, but still XD