Some questions here about scoring, and maybe a little discussion.
After playing the game for a few months, I figured out rushing the next wave, and that seems to be a major part of the score. After playing with selling towers and reading this board, I think I understand how the gold bonus works at the end (more gold = better, but selling a tower isn't worth it), although it seems like the difference between buying an upgrade with the gold and not buying an upgrade is minimal. There's the gold bonus mid game, every certain number of seconds, I suppose, at least until the last wave starts. There's a consistent score for killing a mob. Anything I missed?
The thing that gets me is that even with minimizing the amount of gold I used, it doesn't seem to improve my score by much. Is my biggest problem just not being able to tap the wave bar fast enough? If I can make a suggestion here, I think it's awesome that score is broken down the way it is at the end, but I'd like to see more explanation of how much of the base score is from killing mobs, how much from rushing, how much from anything else that might be contributing. I'd also like to second the suggestion I saw in one of the other threads about setting up an easier way to view high scores than beating a level.
Anyway, thanks for a great game! Top scores or no, I've spent more time on this TD than any of the others, so you win.
Thanks for the input. And yes, most of what you've said are things I'd like to improve.
There is a post here (somewhere) that breaks down the scoring.
Basically, to get a high score, you will want to do the following:
Maintain at least 250 gold as much as possible to maximize your interest. But after the last wave starts, feel free to spend it. Don't sell at all... you will get points for the value of towers at the end in the gold bonus portion. Rush at the *beginning* of every wave. Complete each objective. WRONG: And, I think... upgrade towers to level 6. You get 500 points for the 5->6 upgrade, which is points from nothing. :WRONG
the interest is every so many seconds, something like 15 seconds until the last wave (in version 1.2 at least, interest stops when the last wave starts)
Btw, according to my research and somethings pointed out in the other thread, DO NOT UPGRADE towers unless you have to. You will be cutting into your points. I was wrong about that part of the strategy.
I've gotten my high scores through reasonable play and an in-depth knowledge of the scoring system. Mostly the latter.
The advice given elsewhere to save up to 250 goal to maximize interest is usually wrong. Rushing all the time is much more important. You might get 20 interest payments at 25 dollars if you are lucky - worth 5000 points - yet you can get that same total from a few rushes. Overall, rushing may get you > 100,000 points on some levels, so you absolutely want to ensure you are rushing all the time - collecting gold is secondary.
The towers are relatively balanced in terms of DPS - which is important for surviving a level, but they are absolutely not balanced in how much in terms of "score" they cost you.
So here is the recipe to getting high scores:
1) Figure out how to beat the level without losing a life, while getting all the goals (usually - there may be rare cases where it is more valuable to lose the points for a goal since you can get more points from the gold/time saved). 2) Figure out what arrangement of towers allows you to just beat the level (without rushing) while considering the *point* cost of the towers, as opposed to the *gold* cost of the towers. 3) Now build more *point* efficient towers, especially at the beginning, so that you can rush as fast as possible. How the "rushing curve" works depends on the difficulty. In the easier levels, you'll find that you can rush almost non-stop, either right from the start, or after a short build up. In the more difficult levels you may only be able to rush selectively at the start, and not really starting rushing until part way through. 4) Rushing at the end is usually not effective - you'll have to build many strong towers to rush up on the last few waves (unless you already way overbuilt) - it's better to save the gold at that point (towers build earlier, however, allow you to rush many waves over the course of the game - and you get the same points for rushing later waves than earlier). 5) Experiment with different builds, and different intensities of rushing. 6) Right at the end, spend all your gold on L3/L4 arrow towers. If you run out of room, use L5, L6 arrow towers, in that order.
It's (6) that makes the scoring mechanics badly broken, and the main reason for my high scores far above the #2 player in most cases.
:( I really really really didn't think this all out did I? I've never liked scoring games, I'm more of a fan of "completion" games. So it is obvious I didn't plan this all out.
Is there anything I can do to "fix" the scoring, but not have to wipe the scores again? I mean, can I bump up something to make it possible to beat the existing scores, but at the same time remove the broken mechanic?
Heh... as a member of the "got my name on the #1 high scores of all time" club (General Disarray), I didn't want to share that detail... but yes, the highest conversion of gold -> points is a Level 4 arrow tower, and Level 3 is almost as good. Saving 1 gold gives 10 points at the end...
But a level 4 arrow tower costs 48 gold (intial + upgrades = 5 + 6 + 12 + 25 = 48), and gives 936 points (tower and upgrades = 0 +100 + 200 + 300, plus re-sale of the tower at the end = 70% * 48cost * 10 points per gold = 336 points). This is a ratio of 48:936, which equals 19.5 points per gold. L3 arrow towers cost 23, and give 300 + 161 (points for gold refund) = 461 points, which equals 20.0 points per gold (close, but less than L4 and wastes twice the real estate).
Clicking the upgrade from 4 -> 5 costs 55 gold, and gives 400 points... plus the refund of 70% of 55 = 385 points, so a total of 785 points for 55 gold. That's only a ratio of 14.3 points per gold, so a better way to spent it is on more L4 arrow towers.
I was kinda trying to keep this gem to myself, but I know I'm never going to hold *every* #1 spot, with optimizers like Bee on here... and since my wife has already seen me take the "#1 of All Time" slot a bunch of times, I figured I may as well share the analysis!
Well, the arrow trick at the end is unintuitive, and imo not ideal, but it doesn't represent a huge increase in the score (maybe 5 or 10% more than other people, as far as I've seen) relative to rushing, which gets you a higher score than other people by more than 30% if they don't rush at all. If you double the amount of points received by rushing, and then fix tower scoring so saving is ALWAYS better than building, the new high scores will be more than the previous ones.
Yeah, I decided to share the broken mechanic because I like a fair fight, and it is fun to play the levels with a challenge. As it was, I only had to do "decent" on the level, and use the build-all trick to get #1 by a large margin on a number of maps. Even maps where I screwed up and let an enemy escape (losing 10,000 points or whatever) I would still get the top score with that trick (I've noticed that Jim has beaten many of my scores now with this trick under his belt).
The problem arose when the points/gold was dropped down from 25 to 10. It was then that the bonuses for leveling towers became worth more than the gold. So you could always put gold back up to 20 points or whatever, so at least even the most efficient tower is not worth building. The issue though, it is still leads to boring, unbalanced play. Let's say a level 4 arrow tower gets you 20 pts/gold, and gold gives you 25/pts per gold. Sure, in terms of raw points, building a bunch of useless arrow towers at the end of the game isn't going to get you anywhere - but in term of actually killing mobs, a L4 tower which only "costs" you 5 pts/gold is going to be unbalanced compared to the more expensive towers, which are balanced against DPS/cost, not DPS per points.
That is, the best strategy for many maps will still be to build a ton of arrow towers, more than you would build normally, since they don't cost you as many points for the same damage. The underlying issue here is that the "upgrade bonus" of 100,200,300... is not proportional to the tower cost, and is quite substantial.
Ideally (if we didn't have the issue of existing high scores) I wouldn't give any points for upgrading a tower - that is an unnecessary complication. People upgrade towers simply because upgraded towers are better (sometimes) - they don't need an extra incentive to do it. Score the things that actually determine performance - how much you rush (if it wasn't scored, would you ever do it?), how many enemies escape (if it wasn't scored, would you care?), how much gold is left (if it wasn't score, would you conserve gold at the end?), etc. The bonus for building towers, and upgrading towers is unnecessary (but the bonus for the sell price of towers remaining is useful to avoid the sell-everything-at-the-end annoyance).
Since you asked for a solution that keeps the existing scores intact (but doesn't allow them to dominate scores under the new model), I'd try this:
Bump up the point/gold ratio from 10 to 25, which puts the point value of gold above the point value of the L3 arrow towers at 20.43 pts/gold. This eliminates the desire to build crazy L3 towers everywhere.
Make the upgrade bonus proportional to the tower cost, normalized at 1.0 for arrow towers. So, for example, to upgrade an arrow tower from 1->2 costs 6 gold, and a fire tower costs 12 - so the fire tower should get a (12/6) * 100 = 200 bonus for this upgrade. This (perhaps imprecisely) removes the bias towards arrow tower due to the constant upgrade costs across tower types.
The main issue here is that many scores will shoot way up with the increased bonus for more expensive towers - it isn't possible to: (1) remove the bias towards towers, (2) ensure that current scores aren't impossibly high (3) ensure that current scores are still competitive. You can pick an (2). I'm assuming you'll choose to give up (3). However, this is pretty much the same effect as a score reset, so you might just consider going to the simplified model (no upgrade bonus) and then multiply the final scores (or increase something like the gold/rush bonus) by a value high enough that the new scores are higher than the old. At least people's name will still be on list somewhere in that scheme :).
I actually have stopped playing, due to many unpredictable scoring outcomes, as well as the not-so-obvious effect of spending gold and making more towers to get a higher score.
There should be a minimalist approach to scoring I would think. less towers, less gold spent, winning with exactly as little as you can put on the field.
I have spent many hours playing for high scores and would continue to do so, even after a score wipe, if it is necessary.
Bee, very well put! Specifically: no incentive needed to upgrade towers. Adding to the value of remaining gold promotes frugal spending, more saving, and more strategy.