User:Cisz Helion
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This is the article I submitted for wikipedia, which got deleted. I provide it here to make it accesable for the deletion review process.
Element Tower Defense (Element TD) is a Warcraft 3 custom map mod based on the Tower Defense gametype. It features uniquely themed towers and wide variety of strategies. The objective is to survive through 60 levels of enemies.
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[edit] Distinguishing Features
Element TD is based upon the theme of the elements. It features 6 of them: Light, dark, water, fire, nature, and earth. The creeps have elemental armour (eg. there are earth worms or light wagons) and the towers do elemental damage (eg. the laser tower does light damage, while the ice tower does water damage).
The elements are strong vs one and weak vs another element[1], so they are arranged in a circle:
light > dark > water > fire > nature > earth > light
So if the player builds towers with fire damage, they will be strong vs nature, but weak vs water. As a result the players are encouraged to mix different towers and there is no "best tower".
The player is given access to the selection of elements every fifth level, which can be used to build or upgrade towers. For example, after the player has aquired fire, water, and dark, he is able to build the following towers:
-Fire Tower
-Water Tower
-Dark Tower
-Fire + Water: Steam Tower
-Fire + Dark: Magic Tower
-Dark + Water: Poison Tower
-Fire + Dark + Water: Acid Tower
There are 6 single element towers, 15 dual element towers and 20 tripple element towers on Element TD. Most of them have special properties like armour reduction, slow, stun, and many more.
Another typical feature of Element TD is the interest rate. Players are awarded 2% of their cash as interest every 15 seconds. In most rts games, including most custom maps, there is no point in massing money. Unspent money equals less units/buildings and should be avoided. But on Element TD the players are encouraged to build just enough to bring down the wave and keep as much cash as possible. This leads to precisely calculated building. Even more, some towers (and in certain cases all of them) can be sold without a financial penalty. This encourages selling towers as the 15th second aproaches and rebuilding after that. (In version 3.0 there is an interest timer.) This leads to a very busy early game, since the players are hectically microing to get extra reccources. A good player will make about 10% gain on his total net worth by playing well with interest, compared to a less skilled player on the same difficulty and with the same elements. All in all the interest system of Element TD rewards skilled players.
The way the next wave is started is a typical feature too. On many TD style maps the next wave gets released after the last player finishes it. So faster players are punished for beeing good, they end up waiting. And since they don't get interest on most of the maps, there is neither a reason to build less towers (and getting slower, but richer as a result), nor anything good about waiting time (which at least gives you extra cash with an interest system). On Element TD the next wave gets started after the first player finishes the current one. So it's possible to flood the opponents with two (or even three) waves in short succession. This technic is called "spamming" and is considered rude by quite some players, as many of them don't play the map very agressive or competative. Technically the spammers have a point, because it is a survivor map after all. But beeing polite to other players, as demanded by the other group, makes sense too.
[edit] Popularity
It's hard to determine the popularity of a custom map on battle.net, as it is hard to get statistics, but there are some indicators:
The map was a spotlight map on battle.net [2] and is featured on battle.net's map vault[3] (in version 2.5).
It's among the top downloads on epicwar.com[4] and easily the most downloaded tower defence there. (3.0 had over 70.000 downloads in the first 3 1/2 months.)
It has inspired two flash game versions.
It is likely that in the world of tft custom maps Element TD is one of the more important.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.eletd.com/1element.html The strengths and weaknesses of the element types on www.eletd.com
- ^ http://www.battle.net/news/2006-mod.shtml Element TD is a battle.net spotlight map
- ^ http://www.battle.net/mod/mapvault_archive3.shtml Element TD in the Battle.net map vault
- ^ http://www.epicwar.com/maps/7519/ Element TD on Epic War
