A few weeks or so ago a couple of threads about the Towers on iClassic got me interested in checking them out. I’ve always really liked CastleWars on UN (which is pretty similar,) so much so that I entirely remade it when the old version broke. I used to play the towers back on facebook server when that existed as well, though I got bored of that server pretty quickly as it had a similar player count to UN but had less to do.
Anyways, I decided that I would go through and play all of the Towers on iClassic and write reviews for them. It took a while, and I had to do Sardons twice because it was edited a few days after I played it, but I finished last night.
I attacked each tower on iClassic by myself (unless otherwise specified) for exactly 30 minutes to get a feel for them. I’ve put each review in spoiler tags because it’s a lot of text otherwise.
By the way, here are a few notes that might help anyone who is confused by my ratings:
1) Imo a good tower is one in which Defenders have a slight (but not huge) advantage over attackers.
2) Imo if a single player can make a huge difference in the game by either standing still and not moving, or by standing still and slashing in one direction, that is a bad thing.
So without further ado, I bring those of you who are interested, the epic tale of Ph8's Tower Adventures. Deadwood
Spoiler
Deadwood (Held by Vintage): I decided to start with Deadwood as that was the tower I preferred to play back on the now defunct facebook server, because it was King of the Hill rather than slash the flag. That is not the case on iClassic. As I planned I was attacking mostly by myself against what started out as 8-10 people and ended up being more like 15 or so people by the time I finished.
Layout: I’m pretty sure that back on facebook server all players were warped out of the tower when they died. That’s not the way it works on iClassic. Defenders are warped to the room right before the capture point when they die. Attackers are warped all the way outside. It took me roughly 16 seconds to get back to the capture room after being killed. Starting from where they respawned, it took me around 6 seconds to get back to the capture room, giving defenders a 10 second advantage on respawn.
The tower itself is littered with choke points. There are narrow stairways and narrows hallways, which make extremely easy for the defending guild to lame or block. About 20 minutes into my run a few more people started attacking the tower and Vintage started to defend the stairs on the second and top floors. This made it near impossible for me to reach the capture room alive without liberally using arrows or bombs.
The capture area is tiny. The one bright spot for this is that every time I would swing my sword, I generally hit 2-3 people, and I got a ton of kills. The downside is that it makes dodging nearly impossible when there are 8 people up there all swinging their swords.
Verdict: Everything is too small or too narrow. Tower seems almost designed to encourage laming. Not recommended unless you just want to PK.
Rating: 2/10
Castle
Spoiler
Castle (Held by Soul of Ninjas): I did the Castle next. I was a bit hesitant going into this one, as I remembered it as being near impossible to take on the old facebook server. I was attacking mostly by myself (though someone named “Max” offered to help me towards the middle and I told him sure) and they had about 20 people in the castle counting their second guild (though half of those people were pretty much idle.)
Layout: The first thing I did was explore the entire castle. Most of the rooms in there are pretty pointless. I don’t really have an issue with that though I imagine it might make it a bit confusing for new players.
I have to say that overall the levels play a whole lot better than Deadwood. The halls are much wider, and the only area I encountered any significant laming or blocking was right outside the capture room door. One room that might have presented a problem because it is narrow is a nopkzone, and has weapons disabled, which was nice. The capture room itself is nicely sized; plenty of room to actually fight using skill. I particularly enjoyed picking off all the people who kept trying to idle in there.
The respawning, however, is even worse then at Deadwood. Getting warped out all the way to the bridge when you die as an attacker is pretty discouraging. From there it takes roughly 18 seconds to get back to the capture room. Defenders respawn in the room right outside the capture room (though fairly far away from the door.) It takes about 7 seconds to get from where they die back to the capture room, giving defenders an 11 second advantage over attackers. That’s only one second longer than the advantage at Deadwood, but it feels like a lot longer, especially when you have to talk to the annoying guard every time you want to get inside.
One more thing of note; the flag has 250 health compared to Deadwood’s 75, which seems like a bit much since defenders already have such a huge advantage. Max and I plus one other random were able to bring the flag all the way down to 173 before we died and were warped out, but by the time we got back they had healed it up to 250 again.
Verdict: Despite its flaws with respawning and the high flag health, it was fun to attack the tower. It felt to me like with one or two more skilled people we might be able to break through and take it, and that’s a feeling I never got at Deadwood.
Rating: 7/10
Swamp Town
Spoiler
Swamp Town (Held by Wicked): My next stop was Swamp Town. The first obstacle I encountered was actually finding the tower. After a few minutes of wandering around aimlessly I pmed my boy Chris and asked him if he would show me how to get there. He did so, and decided he would help me to attack the tower as well.
Layout: There is only one inside level in the tower before the capture room, and man, can you say narrow? It’s just a maze of narrow passages which eventually lead to the top of the tower and the flag. Fortunately, the guild of 15 or so people that was holding the tower, Wicked, weren’t taking advantage of their ability to lame attackers to hell. So that was nice. Despite that, it took me multiple tries to time how long it took for me to run straight from the attacker and defender respawn areas to the capture room. I finally managed it, and can say with relative confidence that it takes about 13 seconds from the attacker respawn and 7 seconds from the defender respawn on a clean run (you will never manage that though.) That is only a difference of 6 seconds, which is the lowest I’ve seen thus far.
One more thing to say about the narrowness. It is SO narrow that idling members of the guild that is defending the castle can often unintentionally get in the way of members who are actually trying to get back to the capture room. This somewhat offsets the blocking and laming. Somewhat.
The capture area on the top of the tower is fine, plenty of space to PK. The flag only has 100 health (why it would only have 100 and the Castle would have 250 is a mystery to me.) Even dealing with laming this gives you the sense that you actually have a chance of capturing the flag. In fact, we did steal the tower several times thanks to the fact that another smaller guild was also attacking. After we took it from Wicked the first time, most of their guilds members demonstrated the tenacity I’ve come to expect from graalians, and immediately gave up.
At this point the tower degenerated into chaos with different guilds stealing and losing it every few minutes. This lasted until a guild called Deviant showed up with a bunch of members. They started laming and blocking all over the place, and pretty much locked the place down. Luckily for me I was finished with my half hour, so I didn’t have to deal with them.
Verdict: Another fort that is built in a way that encourages laming/blocking. Not too bad though if defenders aren’t totally lame about it.
Rating: 5/10
York Town
Spoiler
York Town (Held by UFO): I headed right, right, and right some more and ended up at... whatever you want to call this place. York Town? Pyrat Bay? I don’t know. Regardless, Chris was still with me from our last adventure in Swamp Town, and we began our attack on the tower.
Layout: I said tower just now but I really should have said fort, because it’s build like a fort. There are three paths that lead to the center of the fort which is where you need to go to attack the flag. One of the paths, walking to the left and all the way around the fort, takes a good 20 seconds because you have to throw bushes out of your way. There is no reason to ever use this route. That leaves two routes that make sense. The shorter one does not require you to go inside. It is a bit narrow at the top and you can be lamed. It takes about 9 seconds to get to the flag if you go that way. The other route leads you through a very weird, dark, inside level with chests in it. It brings you out below the flag and takes about 11 seconds. It’s very unlikely that you will get lamed going this way. I usually chose the outside path, because not many people bother to lame at this tower because it’s so fast paced
Defenders spawn in a small inside level that leads to the top left of the flag. It literally takes 2 seconds for a defender to get back to the flag from their respawn. That gives them at least a 7 second advantage over the outside path people. Not too bad, but it seems like more since they are back almost instantly after you kill them.
The capture area is too small for my tastes. It’s not as bad as Deadwood, but it’s still pretty hard to do any sort of dodging and still manage to hit the flag at all. It was pretty obvious that a lot of people who were playing were just there to get kills. If you didn’t go after the flag and just attacked the people who were slashing the flag, you could get a ton of kills without taking much damage. The flag’s max health is very low, only 50 HP. I suppose that would be because the defenders spawn so close to the flag, and it seemed about right.
I should note that less than two minutes after we started attacking the fort, we took it from the guild that was holding it (UFO). They had the most members of any of the guilds who were there (are there were several guilds there) by far, and they took it back from us soon enough. They lost it a few more times while we were attacking, to us and to other guilds, but would always take it back within a minute or two. It’s not the sort of tower you can defend for long if your members go idle. That’s a plus for me.
By the end of my run I had determined that the best attacking strategy was just to either lame the door where defenders come out of from the left, or to spam my sword at the bottom left of the flag facing up to keep defenders contained to the area of the top left of the flag. When other people got the flag low, I would jump in and try to steal it at the last second.
Verdict: A bit too clustered for my taste, and it feels like it was made to appeal more to the casual type of gamer than the other towers I tried. If I were to start a towering guild, it probably wouldn’t be my choice of tower to play. But the thirty minutes I played it went by pretty fast. It’s fun, but it is simple fun
Rating: 7/10
Sardons
Spoiler
Sardons (Wicca): So, I review a tower a week ago and my review is already outdated. I was proud of what I had too. I blasted it for 700 words, called it awful, and rated it a 1/10. But it looks like iClassic’s staff agreed with me about one of its problems, and made some changes.
Layout: The tower itself is pretty big. The last time I was there, I spent my first few minutes working my way up the tower and exploring all of its rooms. I checked out the two empty spar arenas on the first floor, and then ran through the other mostly pointless rooms. At the time I was really hoping that I wouldn’t be warped all the way out of the tower when I was killed, because it would be a real pain to make my way back up to the top. That didn’t turn out to be the case of course; the game portion of the building is only 4 rooms. This time I just sped my way up to the top and got started.
There were three major problems I encountered last time I played to the tower. Only one has been fixed, but it was the worst one, thank god. Here they are.
1) Defenders respawn right next to the flag while attackers respawn 9 seconds away from it, giving the Defenders a 9 second advantage. This hasn’t changed and still sucks.
2) Everything is narrow, except for the room you warp into when you die, and that room has weapons disabled. The first room is a narrow zigzag. While I was playing, someone got frozen while in it and everyone had to way for them to get dced before we could continue playing, we couldn’t get past him. The second room has narrow paths that only allow one person through at a time, and contains laggy serverside spikes that are near impossible to avoid when you are in a hurry. When you are trying to attack a tower, you are always in a hurry.
Wicca, apparently unable to let go of the past, was doing their absolute best to block and lame literally everywhere they possibly could to take advantage of this issue. Often they would fail pretty hard, and it was funny really, annoying as it was.
3) The third problem has been fixed. Here’s how I explained it last time.
“The door to get up to the capture room is only wide enough to fit person. It is possible as a defender, (and this is what Rebellious was doing,) to walk out from the capture level and block the doorway so attackers can’t get in. If you do this with only 3 or so people and just allow yourself to continuously get killed in the doorway, since it only takes you about a second to get back to block the door after you are killed, you can pretty effectively stop anyone from ever getting through. You don’t even need to swing your sword. It even helps not to swing and just blink, especially if you have a poor frame rate. To be honest, 5 noobs using this simple strategy could defend this tower infinitely against 25 of the best players on graal doing this.”
This is now prevented for the most part. A staff member has added another spike that passes through the doorway on the bottom, so if a player tries to block the door they get hurt every few seconds. The path the spike takes is pretty long so they can still block it if they really want to, but they do so with the knowledge that in order to continue it they are going to have to keep dying over and over without actually inflicting any damage on anyone. Wicca mostly didn’t seem willing to do that.
As for the rest, the capture area is a bit small but not terrible, the flag health is 75 which is pretty reasonable. I encountered a really weird bug when I went up there the first time where I didn’t see anyone’s bodies load and it looked like I was alone, but that was probably just the facebook client sucking as usual.
Verdict: No longer awful. But still not good. At least it’s playable now though. Deadwood takes over as the worst fort.
Rating: 2.5/10
Snow Town
Spoiler
Snow Town (New Age Legacy): Well, this was a real weird one. Also just to throw this out there, New Age Legacy is the lamest guild I’ve dealt with yet, even though this fort makes it really hard to block and lame.
Layout: Let’s start with the levels cause they are the best tower levels I’ve encountered so far. The doorways are all at least two people wide, there are no major choke points, and the capture room is nicely sized. All towers should be this way.
The flag’s health is set to a reasonable 75. Unfortunately, this is another fort in which defenders respawn in the capture room when killed. Attackers meanwhile are warped all the way outside of the tower. It took me 11 seconds to get back to the capture room when killed, so that’s an 11 second advantage for the defenders. Though in this case, my count isn’t really representative of the real time. That’s because of the ice.
At first I thought that everyone in New Age Legacy was a speed hacker. Then I realized that no, the entire tower is actually iced...for people on iDevices at least. Facebook players don’t get the ice. So that’s a pretty major flaw right there. Might as well make it so facebook players can’t enter at all, and have an iPhone only tower to satisfy the OMG WE HATE PC players. Anyways, even if I did have the iced effect, I wouldn’t have been happy. I mean, I get it, it’s Snow Town, but I’m not a big fan of ice on graal in general.
Verdict: Take away the ice and change the respawn for the defenders, and this would be a great tower. As is, it’s really just sort of odd. Rating it even seems a bit weird, but I’ll do it...
Rating: 5/10
MoD
Spoiler
MoD (HALF BLOOD WOLVES): I saved MoD for last because it is the tower I am the most familiar with. It was the only tower on facebook server that constantly had people playing it, so I ended up there a lot. I even made a suggestion on the official Graal forums about ways to improve on it (http://forums.graalonline.com/forums...&postcount=696) and Stefan said he’d get his people right on it (nothing ever came of it of course.) I was happy to find out that iClassic’s version has been improved from the original version.
Layout: It’s as simple as it gets. Two levels. Make it through the first level and up to the top of the tower and the flag is right there. The lower level has a few single-player-wide stairways that people can lame on, and the entrance to the top of the tower itself is only one player wide so players can block it. You can usually use a bomb or an arrow to knock the people who try to block out of the entrance though, so it’s not too bad. If a guild was determined to lame it would probably be a problem, but it’s a better situation than the majority of the other towers I played.
Also helping the laming situation, the spawn has been changed since the facebook days. Defenders used to spawn right back at the top of the tower when killed, which meant they could walk right out of the door and block the second after they died, like what happens used to happen at God awful Sardons. Now they spawn in the back of the tower, where there used to be healing orbs (also removed, also a good change.) Attackers are warped outside of the tower when killed, and from there it takes about 5 seconds to get back to the flag. It takes defenders about 4 seconds to get to the flag. That’s only a 1 second advantage for the defender. This is solid.
The capture area is a decent size, though I wish it was a tiny bit bigger. Not a huge issue though. The flag has 250 health, which is a bit much, but isn’t awful since you can get back up to the flag so quickly. In my half hour of attacking the tower, the lowest the flag got was all the way down to 23 before HALF BLOOD WOLVES ALL CAPS all came swarming back.
Verdict: This is the best tower on iClassic, and the only one I really feel comfortable recommending. There are a few minor issues, but someone with a brain has obviously made some changes to the tower and it is much improved from the way it used to be.
I think it was just that our guild can't tower to save our life's.
It's not that. Shortly after 16 Graalians members failed at taking over Deadwood I went and took it with two other US members. Bad design is just bad design.
It's not that. Shortly after 16 Graalians members failed at taking over Deadwood I went and took it with two other US members. Bad design is just bad design.
Well there are towers that obviously just suck (Deadwood and Sardons), but I meant that some of them that are pretty cool and may have seemed worse just because the guild can't tower (Snowtown and York).
It's not that. Shortly after 16 Graalians members failed at taking over Deadwood I went and took it with two other US members. Bad design is just bad design.
I dont think this is poor design rather than "the element of surprise." Attacking with 16 people, the defenders become wide awake and active and actually try. When only 2 persistant people are attacking, the defenders tire out and think "meh, someone else'll get 'em" and everyone afks and its an easy take. I see this in other towers too. Some days ill get Castle flag in the double digits before SoN wakes up.
Imo, the only design that needs change is for castle & deadwood to have closer attacker respawns to balance the time it takes to get back to flag room a little more.
deadwood is fine but i think castle needs to move the respawn area closer..sometimes when i pk, i get people to 0.5 before i die. And the people defending castle tend to bomb themselves to get full health, which is a logical thing to do, but its a total disadvantage for the people attacking because by the time I get back in flag room everyone would have full health.
Perhaps suicides(or kills by your guild or allies... can they do that with bombs?) should put flag holders at the respawn point.
yaa.. can you also do this for all towers not just castle? Kinda annoyed when guilds make this a part of towering.. i think one of the worst cases is in sards where people can just run through spikes
anyway it would be nice if you make that happen..i also had a similar idea..everytime your death is self inflicted then your kills gets deducted by 1..i think that seems fair right?
It's not that. Shortly after 16 Graalians members failed at taking over Deadwood I went and took it with two other US members. Bad design is just bad design.
In our defense, it is nearly impossible to squeeze 16 players all going at the same time into the flag room since 4-6 can only hit. You also got those bomb/arrow spammers. Plus we are not all towers (US is made up of the elite)
US took over Deadwood quicker than Graalians did, compare their 15+ members online to our 4 members.
Learn towers. Only around 4 people can hit DW flag anyways. Like michael said, people awake when they see attackers, rather than 4 seemingly pkers. 15 members werent there, 15 were online.
can you also do this for all towers not just castle? Kinda annoyed when guilds make this a part of towering.. i think one of the worst cases is in sards where people can just run through spikes 