TOM FRANCIS
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Desktop Tower Defense

A perfect Saturday-morning, still-slightly-drunk game. Like the Warcraft maps, you can only set up defensive structures, and your objective is to stop the influx of enemies from getting to the other side of your territory. They come from both sides at once, but they can neither pass through nor harm your defenses, so you can force them round a little maze to ensure maximum exposure to your turrets before they reach the exit.

This was my first attempt at a maze, in its early stages of upgrading. The choice of turrets – even once it was fully developed – was pretty guileless, but I think the maze layout is fairly efficient. I’d be interested to know what the most efficient one is. You can view the efforts of everyone in the high-score table, but the winners don’t shed much light on the combinatorial mathematics of the situation. They tend to be small mazes with two routes, and their creators presumably exploited the AI deficiency which allows you to fool them in to changing their mind about which route to take by repeatedly selling and re-building a turret that blocks the shorter route. Tricky to do effectively once they pour in en masse, but a less interesting challenge.

If you try it, submit your score afterwards and add it to the Pentadact group so you can see how profoundly you beat me.