Kill Ten Rats

Continuing further in Prime World: Defenders has answered some questions.

Yes, the rarer towers are unambiguously better than the basic ones. Early on, my mostly upgraded wooden tower was boring but practical. As a great lover of DoTs, my fully upgraded poison tower is awesome yet practical, but the better towers are generally of the rarer rarities, and they can be upgraded further from there. I am told that the dragon tower is especially excellent for the mid-game, but I have yet to find that card, instead finding multiple sun and lightning towers (crushing individuals and groups, respectively).

Yes, the later levels are balanced around a resource grind. You must complete side missions to collect and upgrade cards, or else your numbers are not big enough to complete the main maps. There is a daily login prize for some reason (currently disabled by bug), so you could theoretically just wait instead of grinding, and you will be ready for those later maps sometime in 2015.

This game reinforces the critical importance of threshold values. An attack that does 50% of an enemy’s hit points is worth about as much as an attack that does 90%. Not exactly, because you can mix heavy hitters with fast or AE attacks, but there is a huge difference between 99% and 100%. This is where the better towers and upgrades become critical.

Oddly, the game has some anti-farming code. I found the 4th boss trivially easy and repeated it to see how quick I could complete that map. The 4th boss is now worth 0 silver and 0 xp. You are supposed to farm, but you are supposed to farm the random missions. I have reached the point where I need to farm the easier random missions to beat the harder random missions to farm rarer cards to beat the main missions.

Hmm, maybe I just need that much farm for beating it cleanly. I am caught in the circle of farming. Back to the regular mission chain! [Update: nope, needed a little more farming. On tower defense, the margin between “can’t beat it at all” and “can beat it 100% perfectly” is small.]

: Zubon

I am about half-way through the campaign of Prime World: Defenders. It is tower defense with collectible card game elements, which sounds like a game designed for me. Tycho at Penny Arcade has similar gaming tastes, so his recommendation convinced me to pre-order before a really good sale. And hey, pre-ordering gives you a little sale plus some little bonuses.

If you like tower defense, you will like Prime World Defenders. It has minimal mazing elements, mostly choosing which towers to build and (slightly) upgrade along fixed paths. Enemies and towers have the standard mix of air/ground, fast/slow, groups & splash, stealth, healing, etc. You have spells (1 until you buy talents) and no hero unit; this is not action tower defense like Orcs Must Die! or Dungeon Defenders. You can buy talents to improve overall effectiveness.

The collectible card mechanics are the non-standard element. It operates at three levels. First, towers and spells are cards. You get the basic cards as you progress, and there are rarer cards to be found. Having found relatively few, I do not have an indication that rarer towers are absolutely better, but they can be upgraded further. Upgrades are the second level: you can recycle cards to level up other cards, and artifact cards have no purpose except to recycle for larger values. Evolution is the third level: you can recycle duplicates to level up a card in a slightly different way, which unlocks the ability to upgrade the tower on a map. Towers therefore have two level counters: towers can become permanently stronger, and then within each map you can pay to make each a level 2 or 3 tower.

This advancement is both good and bad. To me, in terms of quality of play, it is on balance bad. It makes balance difficult, because the same difficulty does not work for fully upgraded towers and fresh-from-the-pack cards. My one fully upgraded tower minces enemies, and I cannot imagine how devastating a fully upgraded rare tower must be (unless that balance went badly in another direction and it is not worth finding and upgrading them). It is hard to get a satisfying challenge under these circumstances; you do not know if you have good strategy or just good numbers. Difficulty is so far aimed low, so you can complete the levels despite poor strategy or low numbers, and you can go back later to complete them with no leakage and/or either achievement. I like that this also allows you to play around a bit more instead of looking for the One Strategy that meets highly tuned difficulty.

If that is good grind for you, you will love this. There is procedurally generated content so you can get some variety in map layout and enemy composition, and you could spent weeks collecting and upgrading towers. If you would prefer to skip leveling and have all the content tuned for the level cap, Defense Grid will probably be more to your liking.

: Zubon