How to play Tower Defense - placement basics for waves of creeps :)

This is a very lenghty explanation.

Expand to get informed. :)

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Many people will tell you that you should place your towers in a way that they cover a lot of path. I call this placement long pass, as the creeps take long to pass that tower.

But as you can see in this video, in many ocasions it is better to place your towers in a way that the creeps pass by several times. If they pass by 2 times, I call that a two pass. In this video it's even two-and-a-bit, like maybe 2.2 pass. :)

As you can see, the long pass leaks 25, while the two pass leaks only 13 ( that's about half of the leaks).

This build has certain limits:

-If the the wave is very short, as maybe the creeps come in a dense group, or you are facing a single creep, long pass is better.

-If the wave is very long, so the tower ends up with creeps on both sides, the two pass advantage is lost. You could argue that both placements give a tower that fires constantly in this case, but long pass is slightly better, as the tower can fire longer at the same creep, making it more likely that some of them get actually finished off. ;)

-If you are facing changing wavelengths, as some waves are only a single boss, and others are an endless stream of creeps, you might want to have some towers on long pass and some on two pass. (A hybrid build.)

-Two pass is slower than long pass, so if you don't mind spending extra ressources on more towers, and you are in a hurry, like playing a multiplayer td with a racemode (the warcraft map EleTD or MPDTD for example), you might need to finish the creeps in one pass. (It is theoretically possible to create a td in which the fastest two pass is faster than the fastest long pass, but it results in a weird layout and I don't recall playing such a map.)

So for a two pass to work, the following has to be the case:

-The wave lenght is long enough (longer than the difference between the coverage of both placements).
-The wavelenght is not too long (there should be a pause between the passes, or at least only a short time with creeps on both sides).
-There are no very strong bosses or strong long waves.
-You have enough time to do so, as two pass is slower.

If you succesfully pull of a two pass placement, it can result in a more cost effective use of your towers.

So next time someone tells you to maximise coverage, you know it's not the whole story. ;)

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• tower
• defense
• placement
• guide