Tired of saving the boring old realm or your boring old castle in your spare time? Expand your defense capabilities by saving your computer from possible threats instead, in Install-D, a slick tower defense game by Colin Towle and John Axon. You get to place towers wherever you like, and if (like me) you spent hours and hours of your life on Desktop Tower Defense, you'll already be an expert at building an effective maze out of your towers. Click (or use indicated keyboard shortcuts) to chose which tower you'd like to build, then click on the board to place it. Dotted lines indicate the path the threats will take, and how their movement will change with your placement. The goal is to keep them from reaching the data center.
As you progress you earn stars and memory space, which allow you to purchase upgraded programs with new abilities for your towers, as well as unlock bonus stages. Stars are awarded according to how many points you earn, and you can always go back to previous levels to try to up your score by sending waves in early. Once you have more than six tower types, you'll have to choose carefully which ones to bring into battle. Take note of what creeps will be appearing in the round, and the cost to build specific towers before choosing your final arsenal. Certain towers are better in certain situations, and if you only bring the highest tier towers to battle, you may not be able to afford what you need.
Make no mistake, Install_D will put your strategy skills through the gauntlet and back again. It's very challenging to get all the stars on each level. Deciding which upgraded towers are needed for each map is key, and it may take you several tries before you find the perfect mix of towers to destroy the glitches before they destroy you. There are over 40 maps and you can eventually unlock 30 tower types, which will keep you enjoying the vector graphics and demanding gameplay for many hours.
Is it possible to have
both the ping tower and the web portal at the same time?
I want to use both for different purposes
Sadly, it's not possible to use more than one tower from each category. I found it difficult to not use the ping tower for mazes, so I didn't get to experiment much with the other white towers. Though it looks like a recent update lowered some of the costs, so it might be more feasible now.
The proxy comes very close to breaking the game, since if you sell it and then put a new one down, say, at the very beginning of your maze, EVERY enemy on the board treats it as a new target. So you can basically spawn all the remaining waves and then just force them to ping-pong back and forth between near the end and the beginning of the maze, killing them all.
Granted, it doesn't sell for full-value, but by the time you can afford a proxy you're probably gaining data fast enough for it not to matter.
@Kimberly That's a shame - It would have made the game so much more fun if you could use more than one tower from each category
I wish there was an explanation for the "shield multiplier" bonus. How in the world is that calculated?
Hi, thanks for all the feedback everyone.
I've made some changes to the game to hopefully answer some of the problems that were spotted with the original build.
The newest version of the game fixes the bug Xindaris found where selling a tower immediately renewed the cooldown (thanks so much for spotting this, you were the only one to find it ;) ). Cooldowns are only supposed to be renewed if you sold a tower within a few seconds of building it so that it doesn't penalize you for missclicks. It wasn't supposed to refresh it at any moment in the game.
I've also adjusted some of the costs of 2 other towers, to target the issue where players had no decent alternative to the Ping tower for mazing. The Ping tower is still the king of mazing and that's where I want it to be but now the Buffer tower (tier 2 blue) costs 3 and the Decompile tower (tier 1 green) costs 4 which should allow for more variety when choosing your white tower.
I've also changed the Shield Multiplier to Server Safety Bonus. Hopefully to indicate that the less hits you take on your server, the better the bonus you get (bonus is x1.25 for no hits, x1.15 for 1 hit, x1.05 for 2-4 hits, no bonus for 5+ hits).
Hopefully these changes help with balancing and open up more builds for people to try out.
Thanks again!
Thanks, Colin! I'll have play more and try it out!
I really wish someone would create a walkthrough for the yellow stars and challenge levels!!
It's too big for my screen and I can't shrink it... I don't like when games just cut off edges instead of shrinking with the screen.
I can't figure out what to do in order to get the different stars. I can't find anything in the game that says what they do. Am I missing something? If not, there really needs to be something explaining what the different stars mean and how to get them.
Overall this is a fantastic game!
Update