Command Towers - does the resource bonus really work?

[MrStabby]

I love this game and have pretty much played it to death. I've noticed that the command towers don't really seem to give me a resource bonus though. I decided to test my theory on the map Standing Orders. There is a looping section of track in the middle of this map that you can place six towers in. If you put a command tower in the middle of this block of six and fill the rest with gun towers you can be sure anything they kill was within range of the command tower and you should get a very hefty resource bonus. I tried a few levels with the command tower upgraded to level 2 and a few levels without it. When I played without buying command tower I made sure I didnt earn any additional interest on the 600 credits saved by buying 6 gun turrets at the other end of the map, well away from the action. The resources earned from killing the aliens was the same with or without the tower but should have been 33% higher with it. Has anyone else noticed this or have I misunderstood how these towers work?

[iinweed]

I cannot see a difference in resources using these towers either. Bugged?

[cheepon]

They do provide extra resources, but either the tooltip or the effect itself is way wrong in the numbers. You get far less than 25 / 35 / 45%, in fact I would put the numbers closer to 2.5 / 3.5 / 4.5%. It may even be less. For example, swarmers give 10 points base, walkers 20, racers 30, rhinos 40. If you kill a pile of low rank beasties around a command tower, they'll tend to give you one extra resource point every few kills. (faster than interest, I did the tests with almost no money in the bank) I have killed one crasher (500 base points) around a level 3 command, and it gave me more than 500. It was at least 525, but my short term memory hiccuped and I don't know for sure what the figure was. It was the only thing left on the map. I'll test more when I get my patience back.

[shujaa]

Sounds like they misplaced the decimal point there! Although I suppose it would be far too easy if they really gave a 45% bonus on level 3.

Maybe this is intentional, so the slight extra cash is just a bonus, and you'll only really build them for stealth detection.

[Androsszit]

Actually it would seem like a waste of resources if all it did was give you 4.5% cash bonus and stealth detection, maybe a patch should be issued to fix this? I never use command towers because they seem kinda over priced and do very little....

[shujaa]

I find them to be essential on some maps to uncloak the aliens covered by Decoys, so that all your long range towers can do full damage.

[jeff]

Thanks to this post we've gone back and looked at the command towers.* I don't think we have a solid answer yet because in our tests we believe we've seen places where it does work as expected, and places where it doesn't.* It's obviously one of the harder towers to test and is not used as often in the game by most players.* We're looking into it and we'll see what we can find.* We do know it is always increasing the resources, but we have also seen that sometimes it increases them at a much lower rate than we expected.





Thanks much for calling this to our attention.





Jeff

[sarafoster]

Actually it would seem like a waste of resources if all it did was give you 4.5% cash bonus and stealth detection, maybe a patch should be issued to fix this? I never use command towers because they seem kinda over priced and do very little....

[MrStabby]

Since I posted this thread I think the command towers have been tweaked and you do see real benefits from them now (thanks guys for listening!). Although not essential to completing any level, if you want to chase the highscores on the leader boards you need to think about putting command towers down in your kill zones.

If a Defense Grid 2 is released I'd suggest the role of the command tower is reconsidered. If it increased the fire rate of towers within its radius of influence by say 5%, 10%, 15% per upgrade level you would have a tower seriously worth considering and it could be made into a strategic necessity on some levels.

On a side note, I love the new free levels, can't wait for the full expansion.