My fault, too, Art -- the iPhone thread kinda got hijacked for everything, and I wasn't careful to specify that it's the iPad version that just got updated. We're putting together then iPhone v 1.2 patch (which will have all the iPad stuff) now, but it's not live yet. Glad you like the new cards and levels. And yeah -- I also love/hate the "remove cards" behavior. In testing, we realized that we were starting to have things like "75% archer range reduction!" to counteract people with huge ranges ... but it meant that people who *weren't* totally crazy in range suddenly had these tiny, tiny ranges ... and things like that. The hope is that we can use the "negate card" effects to penalize people more evently, whether that's in range, or money gathering, or damage dealing, or whatever. Glad you like the new foil look -- our old "gold" was pretty pathetic, and we wanted something that truly told you when you had an awesome card.
Sorry about that -- it's because we were actually planning on doing two things, and only got one. So - yes, at some point, we'd like to either do a 4th difficulty setting for any level ("uber master," so to speak), or do like Kingdom Rush and some others do, where you can play the same levels, but with a twist (like "only 1 life!" or "it's a stream of a zillion gruffs!" or whatever). We didn't get that set in time for the update, and didn't want to hold it back any longer. Instead, we had some other levels that we had balanced to be "Prestige," or more simply, "really hard" -- they're designed for players who have advanced decks, and they throw more difficult monsters and spells at you. They basically *assume* you have long range towers, and extra money, and better damage dealing, and whatever, and then attempt to overwhelm you regardless. For the little number that shows up on the accounts screen, it's not really very useful, but it shows how many maps you have completed in the single-player campaign. It's a very rough "how good is this account" description. Honestly, we'll probably change that display in a future update to give you a better sense of what your account actually has.
my question is WHERE ARE THESE PRESTIGE LEVELS!?? how do you play them, where are they? at the end of the campaign? And what are these remove cards you and shaymon mention?
Ah, sorry about that -- missed the forest for the trees, in the questions before. The prestige levels are scattered around the main map, and look like flaming stacks of skulls. One level from before was tweaked and rechristened a prestige level, and then we made several more. Some (like Desert Forge and Pristine Ford) are in the bottom-left, some are mid-bottom, and one is near the end in the haunted area. They should all appear by the time you're, say, 2/3 of the way through most of the normal levels. The "remove cards" are a new type of offensive spell that cancels out effect cards you have. Several of the prestige levels use them -- so if you're playing an Archer-based deck, you may see the enemy cast "Nullify" and it'll show that it cancelled out your extended range. Of course, if you're playing a deck where all your benefits are directly integrated into your buildings or troops, then you're immune to that sort of attack.
ahh, so physical cards are not actually 'removed', its effect is just canceled for that one battle. i think what my problem in not knowing all this stuff is that i just haven't played that much. it's not that i don't like the game, i want to stretch it out so i can play longer and not finish it all in a day like that other guy reported.
First of all congrats on your daughter. Then a big congrats on your game. My initial disappointment about the KR similarities were soon blown away by the pure awesomeness that the card system is. With all the customization options it's now easily my favorite TD. Just one thing that annoyed me: don't say we can combine same cards and get that same type if it's not true. I combined my only two level 1 barracks and got something different. No barracks anymore for me :,( the same goes for my archers (yes, I made the same mistake twice. It happened with the patched version. Or did I misunderstand something?
that's because the child part doesn't last long. before you know it they'll be getting tattooed, smoking dope, and riding motorcycles.
Thanks, Artvarg! We do like our new little girl; now I just need to catch up on sleep again, or my brain will be too fuzzy to actually code. Thanks also for the kudos on the game. We're really happy with how the card system turned out! For the combining cards, there are two caveats: the first is that it's only in the iPad version 1.3 that's live now. The iPhone version, or earlier iPad versions, don't have that set yet. The other thing is that the base cards need to be identical: if you have a "Level 1 Barracks" and a "Level 1 Brute Barracks" (or "Level 1 Barracks with Archer" or whatever), those won't combine exactly. Other than that, they *should* combine exactly, so it's a bug if they don't! Oh, and one thing we have now -- if you get any issue like that, if you want to use the little envelope icon on the main page, we can send a batch of gems to your iPad, so that even though your card is gone, we can get you some cash to replace it. Hey, that just made me think -- for the next patch, I should put in the ability to actually send you guys cards. Not only would it let us replace cards in times like this, when it gets lost, but we could theoretically make a "Touch Arcade Awesome Helper" card that has two archers standing on a Death Mage tower, or whatever, and then be able to send it just to you guys. Anyway, it's worth my thinking about...
We have a five-year-old boy and a seven-year-old boy, so she'll at least have big brothers to look out for her. But yeah, I expect the tattoos and cigarettes to show up when I blink my eyes. ;-) Hopefully at least it'll be a video-game tattoo?
doesn't appear to be the current trend but maybe kids will smarten up by the time you have to start worrying about it.
I have also combined two identical cards (lvl 2 artillery or whatever for example) and had a different outcome. I actually don't mind so much though as it forces you to think of a different strategy when your last low level card gets wiped. I liked the old way of combining as it constantly forced you to think outside the box but thought you should know it is probably a bug.
Thinking about this some more; I would actually love an option to 'randomize' the combining of cards. Or even just some way of taking the certainty out of combining as it makes it too easy in my opinion to make an awesome deck. I honestly have played quite a bit but maybe not enough to comment on the overall balance of things, but now it just seems too easy to find one tactic that works for every scenario.
I haven't managed to catch up on sleep in over a year after our sons birth. So tell me your secret, if you succeed. I'm on 1.3 on the iPad (you still didn't send me the iPhone code I think I used completely identical cards, but I'm not sure anymore. Will try some more. Is there a way to resell towers? If not please considere including that in a future patch. Is the deck sized capped or do I just have to spend astronomical gem prices to expand it?
Our biggest fear originally was that the more known-combining would make things too easy, especially since during testing we can just generate, say, 4 L2 archer towers and combine them, then make 4 more, and combine them, and suddenly we rocket up the card power scale. When we played through, though, it really seemed to not unbalance things the way we feared -- partly because sometimes you'd get a card that you really love (like a building with 75% build cost, or whatever), and so you don't just immediately combine it, even if you have an identical card that would theoretically boost it up to be more powerful. Still, if people are finding it makes things too easy, we can certainly tweak that. In the meantime, we're also just looking to keep adding more content: entirely new levels (probably Prestige levels to give advanced decks a challenge), a 4th "uber" difficulty setting, and variations on the maps with more challenging foes, etc. ... hopefully, even if you start getting powerful decks, we can make things that aren't too simple to get through!
Yeah, I don't think I have any secrets to that, either. For our first two children, I just vaguely remember this hazy grey period that I eventually emerged from. Meanwhile, I'm just getting to work at 1:00pm today after being on baby duty until 4am. So ... she's an awesome little girl, but oof, yeah, the tired. There isn't a way to resell towers yet, but we'll look at it -- originally we found that people rarely used it, and it just made one more UI button to clutter things up. But it certainly can come in handy from time to time! (Oh, and -- Artvarg, I'm sorry I didn't send you a code for the iPhone version. If you e-mail me at [email protected], I'll send you one immediately!) For deck size -- yeah, you're never completely capped, but the cost goes up by about 25 gems every time you use it, so eventually it just becomes incredibly painful. I think my most advanced decks have around 3,200 points of space available.
This may be a stupid question but for the life of me I can't figure out how to do the following or perhaps it's not available via Game Center. How do I look for "friends" to add that like to play this game so that I can check if their online and enter Ben's Battlegrounds...so basically just trying to figure out a way to locate players of the pocket edition of this game. When I go into Game Center their are recommendations but those recommended are because of a different game or in my contacts list on iphone. Comment: developer this is an amazing game and by far the best tower defense game ever played! Thank you! Also, the game on pocket edition on occasion will just randomly quit instantly causing me to restart the game...bug fix request for future patch please. Have iphone 5s with latest iOS firmware. Additional questions: When will latest update for iphone be sent to Apple? I know one was recently released for iPad.
For Game Center stuff -- as far as I know, there's no interface that Apple gives us to let you do that, even though we'd totally like to. I'll double-check that, though, because it would be very nice to add. Or if you have any other game that seems to do it right, please let us know and we'll try to check it out and make sure we can do the same thing! Meanwhile, I'm glad you're enjoying the game. Thanks! I think there are still some memory issues that can hit the iPhone version; we're continuing to optimize the memory usage for the next patch, to minimize that. For dates -- we're hoping to release to Apple before Friday of this week. Last time around, they took less than a week to approve the iPhone update, but more than a week for the iPad update. So ... roughly a week from Friday, give or take a couple days, would be my guess.
Your awesome and thank you so much for responding! I tell everyone I can about this game...truly a blast!
