What's the greatest strategic, war-waging game on Cubecraft? Yep, it's Tower Offense Tower Defense!
Ok, I'll get straight to the point here: it might be a good idea to have more advanced settings for tower placement while playing Tower Defense (mainly to resolve a few issues that I've seen while playing TD)
One issue is not being able to let teammates choose your upgrade paths for your own towers or being able to sell them (while I know that it is so people don't troll their teammates by just obliterating any towers placed, it is useful sometimes). Usually during TD you are mostly focused on something other than a few specific towers that you've placed, and if you've accidentally placed the tower on a 5x5 space or your teammates want to actually upgrade your towers but can't, it would be nice to be able to address this issue. Here are two of my proposed solutions:
- Add a toggleable option to let teammates edit your towers
- When teammates want to remove/upgrade a tower, you get a confirm message in chat
The toggleable option would probably make more sense, and it could be in a settings menu that you can change possibly in the hub or in-game. Basically, it could be refined too, so maybe you could let teammates upgrade your towers, but not be able to sell them or vice versa. For the chat message option, I think it could go something like this: "Noodlesticks wants to upgrade your Necromancer Tower to the shulker upgrade (T3). CONFIRM / DENY" Now, I know this would get annoying fast (if someone's trying to upgrade a ton of your towers, but this is just a concept and could likely be improved upon.
Additionally, it might be nice to have tower snapping, which would basically be a toggleable option in your TD settings. When applied, whenever you put a tower in a designated space (one of the checkered spaces), regardless of what block you focus on, as long as it is within the boundaries of a specific checker space, then it will place your tower directly in the middle. This could possibly (and probably would) also work with the larger 5x5 towers. This ensures the entire team can maximize the given space and not have to constantly pester you to remove a tower because it's taking up 2 spaces. Again, this will be a settings option (and not just something that you can't turn off), and possibly could be set to on as a default setting.
Adding onto allowing teammates to change your towers, perhaps there could also be a setting to let you allow or prevent teammates from snapping your towers to the default checkered spaces, so your teammates can quickly fix a tower's positioning if you accidentally place it 1 block too far to the left.
Another nice feature might be mass tower selection/bulk tower selection. What this means is basically a way to let you place multiple towers at once, perhaps giving you a very slight discount for buying in bulk or simply just letting you place multiple towers, effectively saving your time without giving you any discounts. Basically, maybe you have some sort of tool in your inventory that lets you select a region of checkered spaces, and then you can right click on one of the spaces that are currently selected to enter the tower menu and then select the one type of tower you want to place in all the selected spaces. This tool/feature could probably also work with tower upgrades, and if you ran out of coins, then it would upgrade all the towers as possible with the current amount of coins you had at the time (you could also go into settings and change a setting that would either let you do a partial bulk placement if you didn't have enough coins, or you could choose to either only let you bulk place towers if you had enough coins or maybe even queue a bulk placement until you had enough coins.
In terms of being able to select both 5x5 and 3x3 spaces, maybe you could pick a tower type for the 3x3 spaces that you selected first, and then a tower type for the 5x5 spaces next. If you chose leach for all the 5x5 spaces, then it could probably also let you pick a different 5x5 tower for the rest of the 5x5 spaces.
Perhaps the spaces being selected could have a visual rectangle showing what spaces are selected, which would help if you forgot which spaces you selected. I imagine there would probably be a confirmation message as well, as if you accidentally wasted all your coins on a bunch of archer towers, selling them all would take a long time and also would cause you to lose a ton of coins. Perfectly segwaying into the next bit, perhaps this bulk selection system could also let you mass-sell towers, although not letting you sell other players' towers (if the setting was disabled) and also prompting you before mass-selling.
Also, sometimes when you shift-right click a tower to quickly upgrade it, it will prompt you to select an upgrade path first (this might just be a bug). Maybe you could choose your default tower upgrades in the settings menu, or choose to take the cheaper path if you didn't have enough coins for the 2nd one, and then take the other more expensive path when you had enough coins. Or, if you only owned one of the point upgrades for a tower, you could let it prioritize the upgrade paths that you had fully unlocked first.
Adding on to this already massive suggestion, it would be nice to have some more QoL features in Tower Defense (although this strays off of the "advanced tower placement" idea). For one, when sending a mass wave of mobs but on cool down, maybe you could queue your mobs to be sent when you can send them (this could be a toggleable setting, if turned off, then it would act like how it is now), and if you ran out of coins, then it would send the mobs only when you got enough coins, or prompt you that you ran out of coins and would ask you if you still wanted to send them, or cancel the queued-up troop order.
When sending mobs, you can also only see the amount of mobs being sent and the cost of sending the troops, but it might be also nice to see the total EXP output of sending your troops to war. Basically, it would add up the total xp and then tell you the total amount of xp you would get if you sent the mobs out on their strategic mission to obliterate the other team's fortress.
During the game, it might also be nice to see who owns the tower you are looking at or all the towers in general by putting the tower owner's username right under the tower name. This could also probably be toggled in the settings, although this might be redundant due to how you can see the tower owner when right clicking the tower.
At the end of the game, maybe you could stick around a bit and see total statistics of the match (maybe showing the players who sent the most mobs, placed the most towers, dealt the most damage to the fortress, etc. but not giving them any extra rewards - or maybe they could? It would also show you your own personal stats and your team's stats.)
Also, maybe when waiting in the TD lobby, maybe you could read up on some example strategies for Tower Defense or learn about all the towers, giving you something to do while waiting for others. Or, there could be some minigames/things to do added other than do the parkour (although the wait times are relatively short now, so this isn't that big of a deal)
So, that about sums up my giant list of suggestions for Tower Defense, and although things are perfectly fine at the moment in TD, these changes might make the overall player experience a bit better and give players a way to be a bit more faster/efficient while playing and strategizing. Thanks for reading, put any criticism or opinions in the comments...
-Possibly Noodlesticks
TL;DR (or "Noodle made his 'essay' too long and I don't want to read it but I still want to know what it's about")
I have proposed a bunch of new features to make a player's Tower Defense experience a bit better, all of which mostly focus on QoL fixes:
- Option to let teammates upgrade/sell your towers
- Option of using tower snapping/letting teammates tower snap your towers (towers snap to the grid automatically)
- Mass/bulk tower selection (to place, upgrade, or remove multiple towers)
- Visual rectangle to show your tower selection area (goes with the previous suggestion)
- Ability to set your default upgrades for tower quick-upgrades
- Ability to queue mass tower placements or troop orders (waits until you have enough coins / when cooldown is over)
- The ability to see how much EXP you'll get from sending X amount of mobs (QoL change)
- Option of being able to visually quickly see who owns what tower (QoL change)
- End-of-game statistics (to see how you did or how your team did)
- Tower Defense lobby additions (a detailed "Tower Defense Guide to read and/or other things to do while waiting, this isn't really needed at the moment though since wait times are relatively short)
(Side Note: I might attach some mockups of GUIs or other features that I suggested, but I don't really have the time to do that at the moment. However, I might get to doing that later, if a visual would greatly help with understanding each of my suggestions. Also, congrats, you read this side note even though you didn't really need to!)
now that I think about it, what would tower offense be like? Would it be the opposite of tower defense? hmm....
Ok, I'll get straight to the point here: it might be a good idea to have more advanced settings for tower placement while playing Tower Defense (mainly to resolve a few issues that I've seen while playing TD)
One issue is not being able to let teammates choose your upgrade paths for your own towers or being able to sell them (while I know that it is so people don't troll their teammates by just obliterating any towers placed, it is useful sometimes). Usually during TD you are mostly focused on something other than a few specific towers that you've placed, and if you've accidentally placed the tower on a 5x5 space or your teammates want to actually upgrade your towers but can't, it would be nice to be able to address this issue. Here are two of my proposed solutions:
- Add a toggleable option to let teammates edit your towers
- When teammates want to remove/upgrade a tower, you get a confirm message in chat
The toggleable option would probably make more sense, and it could be in a settings menu that you can change possibly in the hub or in-game. Basically, it could be refined too, so maybe you could let teammates upgrade your towers, but not be able to sell them or vice versa. For the chat message option, I think it could go something like this: "Noodlesticks wants to upgrade your Necromancer Tower to the shulker upgrade (T3). CONFIRM / DENY" Now, I know this would get annoying fast (if someone's trying to upgrade a ton of your towers, but this is just a concept and could likely be improved upon.
Additionally, it might be nice to have tower snapping, which would basically be a toggleable option in your TD settings. When applied, whenever you put a tower in a designated space (one of the checkered spaces), regardless of what block you focus on, as long as it is within the boundaries of a specific checker space, then it will place your tower directly in the middle. This could possibly (and probably would) also work with the larger 5x5 towers. This ensures the entire team can maximize the given space and not have to constantly pester you to remove a tower because it's taking up 2 spaces. Again, this will be a settings option (and not just something that you can't turn off), and possibly could be set to on as a default setting.
Adding onto allowing teammates to change your towers, perhaps there could also be a setting to let you allow or prevent teammates from snapping your towers to the default checkered spaces, so your teammates can quickly fix a tower's positioning if you accidentally place it 1 block too far to the left.
Another nice feature might be mass tower selection/bulk tower selection. What this means is basically a way to let you place multiple towers at once, perhaps giving you a very slight discount for buying in bulk or simply just letting you place multiple towers, effectively saving your time without giving you any discounts. Basically, maybe you have some sort of tool in your inventory that lets you select a region of checkered spaces, and then you can right click on one of the spaces that are currently selected to enter the tower menu and then select the one type of tower you want to place in all the selected spaces. This tool/feature could probably also work with tower upgrades, and if you ran out of coins, then it would upgrade all the towers as possible with the current amount of coins you had at the time (you could also go into settings and change a setting that would either let you do a partial bulk placement if you didn't have enough coins, or you could choose to either only let you bulk place towers if you had enough coins or maybe even queue a bulk placement until you had enough coins.
In terms of being able to select both 5x5 and 3x3 spaces, maybe you could pick a tower type for the 3x3 spaces that you selected first, and then a tower type for the 5x5 spaces next. If you chose leach for all the 5x5 spaces, then it could probably also let you pick a different 5x5 tower for the rest of the 5x5 spaces.
Perhaps the spaces being selected could have a visual rectangle showing what spaces are selected, which would help if you forgot which spaces you selected. I imagine there would probably be a confirmation message as well, as if you accidentally wasted all your coins on a bunch of archer towers, selling them all would take a long time and also would cause you to lose a ton of coins. Perfectly segwaying into the next bit, perhaps this bulk selection system could also let you mass-sell towers, although not letting you sell other players' towers (if the setting was disabled) and also prompting you before mass-selling.
Also, sometimes when you shift-right click a tower to quickly upgrade it, it will prompt you to select an upgrade path first (this might just be a bug). Maybe you could choose your default tower upgrades in the settings menu, or choose to take the cheaper path if you didn't have enough coins for the 2nd one, and then take the other more expensive path when you had enough coins. Or, if you only owned one of the point upgrades for a tower, you could let it prioritize the upgrade paths that you had fully unlocked first.
Adding on to this already massive suggestion, it would be nice to have some more QoL features in Tower Defense (although this strays off of the "advanced tower placement" idea). For one, when sending a mass wave of mobs but on cool down, maybe you could queue your mobs to be sent when you can send them (this could be a toggleable setting, if turned off, then it would act like how it is now), and if you ran out of coins, then it would send the mobs only when you got enough coins, or prompt you that you ran out of coins and would ask you if you still wanted to send them, or cancel the queued-up troop order.
When sending mobs, you can also only see the amount of mobs being sent and the cost of sending the troops, but it might be also nice to see the total EXP output of sending your troops to war. Basically, it would add up the total xp and then tell you the total amount of xp you would get if you sent the mobs out on their strategic mission to obliterate the other team's fortress.
During the game, it might also be nice to see who owns the tower you are looking at or all the towers in general by putting the tower owner's username right under the tower name. This could also probably be toggled in the settings, although this might be redundant due to how you can see the tower owner when right clicking the tower.
At the end of the game, maybe you could stick around a bit and see total statistics of the match (maybe showing the players who sent the most mobs, placed the most towers, dealt the most damage to the fortress, etc. but not giving them any extra rewards - or maybe they could? It would also show you your own personal stats and your team's stats.)
Also, maybe when waiting in the TD lobby, maybe you could read up on some example strategies for Tower Defense or learn about all the towers, giving you something to do while waiting for others. Or, there could be some minigames/things to do added other than do the parkour (although the wait times are relatively short now, so this isn't that big of a deal)
So, that about sums up my giant list of suggestions for Tower Defense, and although things are perfectly fine at the moment in TD, these changes might make the overall player experience a bit better and give players a way to be a bit more faster/efficient while playing and strategizing. Thanks for reading, put any criticism or opinions in the comments...
-Possibly Noodlesticks
TL;DR (or "Noodle made his 'essay' too long and I don't want to read it but I still want to know what it's about")
I have proposed a bunch of new features to make a player's Tower Defense experience a bit better, all of which mostly focus on QoL fixes:
- Option to let teammates upgrade/sell your towers
- Option of using tower snapping/letting teammates tower snap your towers (towers snap to the grid automatically)
- Mass/bulk tower selection (to place, upgrade, or remove multiple towers)
- Visual rectangle to show your tower selection area (goes with the previous suggestion)
- Ability to set your default upgrades for tower quick-upgrades
- Ability to queue mass tower placements or troop orders (waits until you have enough coins / when cooldown is over)
- The ability to see how much EXP you'll get from sending X amount of mobs (QoL change)
- Option of being able to visually quickly see who owns what tower (QoL change)
- End-of-game statistics (to see how you did or how your team did)
- Tower Defense lobby additions (a detailed "Tower Defense Guide to read and/or other things to do while waiting, this isn't really needed at the moment though since wait times are relatively short)
(Side Note: I might attach some mockups of GUIs or other features that I suggested, but I don't really have the time to do that at the moment. However, I might get to doing that later, if a visual would greatly help with understanding each of my suggestions. Also, congrats, you read this side note even though you didn't really need to!)
now that I think about it, what would tower offense be like? Would it be the opposite of tower defense? hmm....
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