TD balencing

[Rammstein56]

Im trying to fiqure out a good way to balence my towers in my TD right now, so far i only got a few waves and the towers, but they arent very balenced i dont think. Anyone wana offer any advice or tutorials for balencing them :thup:

 

[Onnings]

Guess you could do it with some basic maths. Depending on your maze, you could calculate each tower's relative effectiveness based on their DPS. For instance, a tower with 700 range dealing 100 damage per shot with a 1 second delay, would be able to fire 8 shots on a unit with 200 speed moving past it (1st shot - in range (700) - second shot (500) - third shot (300) - fourth shot (100) fifth shot (-100) - sixth shot (-300) - seventh shot (-500) - eight shot, leaving range (-700)), dealing a total of 800 damage. If your first wave of monsters has, say, 2000 health, no armor and no special reduction from your towers attack, you know you'll need 2 1/2 towers to kill the mob in one pass.

Your map probably unleashes more than one mob per wave though, which causes your tower to fire constantly at progressing targets, not just the 8 shots on one mob. If your 10-mob wave spawns each unit with a 1 second intervall, each unit will have 200 range between each other. For your tower to deal maximum damage on one mob (800), it needed a full 1400 range, something which leaves the 2000 range between spawns plus the towers range of 700 minus the first target range of 1400 = 1300 range. 1300 gives time for one less shot, which means your tower now deals 1500 damage total over the entire wave.

10 mobs with 2000 health = 20.000 hitpoints.
20.000 hp divided on 1500 damage = 13.3.

The damage of 13.3 towers is needed to deal enough damage to kill off the entire wave of mobs. Of course, you'll need a little leeway, as some towers target 'dying' mobs, and pathing might break the theoretical shot efficiency, so let's say 15 towers is needed. Give the player enough money to cover for those 15 towers, and the first round will be based around him placing the towers properly.

The maze layout can greatly affect the tower efficiency, though. If you have a lot of corners and bends that allows your towers to fire for extended periods of time, you might want to add this into your maths, otherwise you'll be giving the players far too much gold.

More difficult factors to calculate are special abilities, but i'll give a few examples.

Random stun proc. Let's say one of your towers have a 10% chance to stun a mob for 5 seconds. This basically gives the tower (10% of 5seconds =0.5sec) more time to fire at its target overall, something which allows it a theoretical half-shot more. This increases its potential damage by 50 due to the extra time it can shoot at its target.

Slowing effects. Slow poison and its ilk also extends the time the tower can fire, just like the stun proc, only that this requires less math since it's permanent. Let's say your tower has a slow poison that reduces movement speed by 50%. This reduces the mob's move to 100, which DOUBLES your tower's theoretical damage against the mob. One thing to remember though - while the slow poison slows the target getting fired upon, it does NOT slow the rest of the mobs - the 2700 effective firing move distance your tower has will in other words be consumed by one mob instead of several, so the damage isn't actually increased - it's simply focused on one target instead of spread between several. Still, it gives your group of towers more time to focus fire targets down, so it's still worth a little extra - it's up to you to decide the value of it based on how much of an impact it'll have in your map.

Exotic abilities like Starfall or Lightning Shield or any other non-direct-damage based ability should be priced and balanced based on a calculation of it optimal damage against a theoretical average of targets. Let's use Lightning shield as an example - Lasting for 5 seconds, it'll damage all the targets around its primary target within a 250 distance for 100 per second. Since there's a 1 second delay between each mob in the wave, your Lightning Shield would be hitting two mobs tops - the one in front of and the one behnd the shield target, something which would result in (100 x 5 seconds x 2 targets) 1000 damage in total, or 200 damage per second.

Tower upgrades should be calculated based on how you've made it, really. If it's a pure increaes in power, simply calculate the increased DPS and compare it to how much damage it'd do to the wave it'd realistically be used in.

Anyhow, basically:

Total health of wave divided on a tower's potential damage plus abilities = towers needed for wave.

Base the player income (bounty from mobs or triggered money infusions) on how much he'd need, but depending on your map layout or how you want your map to be, set the ammount a little above the optimal number needed.

A good way to balance how strong your towers should be, is to figure out how fast the various towers should be able to kill each mob in the selected wave, and move from there. Do you want two towers to kill a mob in 9 total hits? Make sure his health doesn't exceed their 9-hit damage. Want your 10-mob wave to have 100.000 hp, but unsure how much damage your towers should be doing? Divide the number of HP on mobs, then further divide it on the ammount of towers a player should theoretically have at that stage, further divided on the ammount of shots the tower should be able to get in. Eg.

100.000 / 10 = 10.000. 10.000 / 15 towers = 666.6. 666.6 / 15 shots = 44.4 DPS.