What is Tower Defence? - Everything Explained

A VIDEO guide to Tower Defence, the TF2 mod-gamemode. Tower Defence is a mod where players fend off waves of bots as they travel along a path by using towers and sentries.

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Tower Defence is a Team fortress 2 mod-gamemode. It’s played on specially designed custom maps and requires a server plugin to play.

The idea of Tower Defence stems from the videogame genera of the same name, which dates back to the year 1990. In roughly June 2009 development was started for Tower Defence in Team Fortress 2. After a long hiatus the mod was remade in late 2012. Today roughly 5 servers run this custom-gamemode.

So what is Tower Defence in Team Fortress 2?

Tower Defence is a custom gamemode where players place down defences in order to fend of waves of bots from capturing a control point at the end of a track.

Upon joining a Tower Defence servers players will be automatically put on the blue team as the engineer class and placed in a sort of lobby area. In this area players are presented with two choices. They can choose to start the game normally or password-protect the server. Regardless, players can join and exit the game at any time. They simply need to know the password if it’s turned on. The maximum number of human player on a server is 4.

After players choose to password protect their game or not they are placed in the play-space. From here players can choose to start the game. Once started waves of bots will start to spawn in. The bots follow a track on the ground. There’s a short duration of downtime between waves. After which point a new wave will automatically spawn. There are usually 65 waves in total; however the number is map specific. Waves of bots can vary greatly. As an example: one wave can consist of a large number of bots wile another can consist of a single bot with high health. There are even air-born waves.


In Tower Defence metal is an extremely important resource. Defeated bots drop metal that must be collected as soon as possible. Metal is used to buy tower and engineer buildings. Sentries and dispensers cost massive amounts of metal to build and upgrade. Because of the resource management aspect of Tower Defence players must communicate to pool their individual supplies of metal. One thing that helps in this process is chat command. In Tower Defence chat commands can be used to donate metal to another player or drop it, view other player’s total metal, build a sentry, see the server’s password and see what wave the game is currently on.


On one end of the play-space is a wall. The wall has illustrations that represent individual towers. Each tower has a price listed for the corresponding tower. If a player has the required metal they can purchase the tower. Once purchased a blue bot will be placed at a specific point in the map. This bot IS the tower. The bot can be moved via teleportation or by using secondary fire on it with a melee out. These bots continually fire, dealing damage in front of them. They’re used to deal damage to the enemy waves of bots.

Another thing to note about the wall is the left side with numbers. As the game goes on and the wave number corresponding to the number found on the wall is completed a panel will unlock. Once unlocked the player will be give a one-time choose between free bonuses. For example on this map beating the second waves grants players either the ability to place a second sentry, to build a dispenser or simply 1600 metal.

One last thing to note is towers may only be brought in between waves during the down-time.


And that’s basically Tower Defence in a nutshell. A solo or teamwork-based gamemode revolving around strategy and resource management. An interpretation of certain kind of gameplay brought to Team Fortress 2.


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Learn More/Find a Server

Notes:

• The plugin is semi-private. If you’re an interested server owner basically you have to contact the makers and ask them for the code. See their official site for more details. I am unaware of any non-official servers existing.
  
• To play go to their official site and click to join a server. For some odd reason their servers don’t show up in the server browser. I think connecting turns the servers on. It’s weird.
  
• Engineers can shoot bots too. I didn’t outright SAY this, but the video demonstrates it.
  
• All chat commands are:
  !m to display the metal amount of all players.
  !d [number] to drop that amount of metal.
  !t [player name] [number]100 to transfer that amount of metal to that player.
  !s to build a sentry.
  !p to see the server’s password.
  !w to see what wave you’re on.
  !c to display the list of commands.

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To play on an official server simply go to the official website's server page: http://tf2td.net/servers
From there you can click to join an empty server or copy+past the ip addresses into tf2's console: "connect [ip]"

Also see TF2TD's Official Steam Group.

More Mods

Want to learn about other mod-gamemodes? Visit my other video-guides!

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http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=230328731
- Previous Guide:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=229287811
All My Guides

[GarryTale :з #FixTF2]

is there a tutorial on how to make a server for TD that is comprencible?

[Attila the Pun]

I wish I could play this again but unfortunately the servers are always locked.

[MLGMagicHoodini]

Problem is people lock the server and then leave :/ also u could play singleplayer :/

[MrHades]

FYI
These servers are running with more people than ever!
I recommend you try it out.

[Rhy]

towe defence got servers again! check out blueprint.tf!

[Bouncer (TR)]

thes servers are DEAD

[confused albanian]

clayguy.... thank you for this

[DarkMeadow]

Servers are busted. None of the towers work. :l

[BorschtscH]

okay

[maniii]

@Borsch: the servers are working - it was just an update