E.R.A. [TD] - by Illumesoft

[Corey.G]

Originally Posted by JJay

E.R.A is one of my favourite tower defence games. I love the way you build up your hero and towers during the campaign.

Thanks for your feedback Brendon, I will be posting some strategies and answering your questions very soon.

Originally Posted by Alister

Wow can't wait for that update to go live!!

Me too, but it's gonna take a while as for now, we are working on so many things.

Originally Posted by Pony

Reading this thread from start to finish was pure joy. I am totally blown away by the feedback from the developers (Go Corey!) and even more so by the frequent amount updates released in such a short time period.
The game sounds really serious and so do the developers. It's like they don't even sleep until this game is to everyone's satisfactory.
I cannot wait for the lite version and even more so for the iPad 3 Retina update, but I am very much on the fence to just buy the whole thing right here and now after reading all this.

Kind regards and keep it up,

From a Dutch casual TD player.

Rumor has it the lite version is NOT far off at all!

And I love the saying " It's like they don't even sleep until this game is to everyone's satisfactory.", haha, knowing that lots of people are now paying attention to this game is a big motivation to our team here.

From a hardcore TD player/designer.

Originally Posted by Hero211

This game would be amazing with iPad 3 retina support please update!

This will be the next major update, the challenge is in the maps since we're gonna have to repaint each of them, we are now playing the half-retina version in house with towers and creeps fully updated, looks quite sharp indeed!

[Corey.G]

Hi folks, just want to talk about the Endless mode here, since we now have more and more gamers playing this mode, we feel it's necessary to share with you this.

Starting from V1.0.4, we are introducing Non-Repeating “Endless Mode”.

This without a doubt is the most challenging mode. In most other tower defense games, you’ll notice the waves of creeps are repeated, for every 10/20 waves you will see the same creeps over and over again swarming your base.

We want to do it differently. We don’t want any more sitting around and hitting “Speed up” once you have your maze all built up, we want intensity and fun, we love the feeling of looking out for the special creeps and perfecting our tactics gradually, and the huge achievement once my strategy is paid off.

So, what’s unique about the Endless mode in E.R.A is, almost EVERY wave of enemies is new and hence delivers a non-repeating variety of creeps that maintains the intensity and fun.

This may sound a bit contradicting and you may ask in what universe can you design endless waves of different creeps?

Well, here is the secret recipe that made this concept possible:

We have to manually assign over 500 waves of creeps in the first place, each one of them is engineered according to several elements:

√ the nature of map;
√ the different combat style if possible;
√ the new creeps we want to introduce (most likely new creeps are introduced in every new Endless map);
√ along with other factors that might influence the gameplay;

now you understand why it takes huge amount of time to design just one Endless level.

And after 500 waves or so, we include a variety of random creeps that brings a totally different dynamics to the game.

We are still in the process of evaluating how this model works, and we are quite excited we do it differently to other TDs.


If you consider the facts that we have fixed path, open field maps and even a combination of both, and you add in over 30 kinds of unique creeps on top of that, together with 8 advanced abilities of 10 Forces plus 3 Hero units with 8+3 different skills, this Endless mode is MASSIVE, and that’s the idea behind this game --

You could basically consider the entire Campaign being a tutorial which gets you familiar with the gameplay, and once you finish the Casual Campaign and prepared yourself with all the upgraded Forces and Hero, the real game has only just started and is waiting for you in the Endless mode.

That said, it doesn’t mean we’d only bring new Endless levels in the future updates, we will also design Campaign levels including new creeps and so on for gamers who love the feeling of completing a defined task. And that’s what I’m referring to when I said this game doesn’t require IAP to win, you are supposed to unlock all the abilities towards the end of Campaign, instead of at the beginning, and we have toned down the difficulty of Casual Campaign to make sure it happens.

So another reason for unlocking abilities towards the end of Campaign is, even for Endless mode, you won’t have enough starting crystals to go crazy on upgrading advanced Forces and thus making the game less fun; you still need to learn how to use the basic Forces to survive the first few waves and accumulate interest to be able to upgrade advanced Forces and/or enable extra 3 levels of upgrade. This is another feature in Endless, besides you have access to all your Advanced Forces, you also get 3 extra levels for Force to upgrade to (noted in orange cubes), these are quite powerful and expensive, and you can basically think of them as lv6,9,12 of the Force, give or take.


I hope this wrap-up cleared things a bit, and I will be seeing you guys in Game Center where your record is up there with the rest of the world!

[RodmanSan]

Sounds very impressive Corey....thanks for the update....can't wait to try that out...!

[Corey.G]

Hi guys,

V1.0.4 is out now!

If you are running iOS6 on your iPad, it only takes less than 30 secs to update

If you were unable to continue Campaign in previous versions, please select "new game“ when tapping the center map in Campaign mode, everything should be fine and you won't lose any saved progress or Intrinsic Energy.

√ Difficulty for Casual Campaign is re-balanced;
√ Leaderboards added for some challenging Campaign/Quickplay levels;
√ Improved memory consumption, sound effects and game UI (You can use two finger tap to quickly pause/resume game).

Enjoy!

You can also visit our forum for strategy guide, which supports a ton of different languages

[tabs]

Originally Posted by Corey.G

Hi guys,

V1.0.4 is out now!

If you are running iOS6 on your iPad, it only takes less than 30 secs to update

If you were unable to continue Campaign in previous versions, please select "new game“ when tapping the center map in Campaign mode, everything should be fine and you won't lose any saved progress or Intrinsic Energy.

√ Difficulty for Casual Campaign is re-balanced;
√ Leaderboards added for some challenging Campaign/Quickplay levels;
√ Improved memory consumption, sound effects and game UI (You can use two finger tap to quickly pause/resume game).

Enjoy!

You can also visit our forum for strategy guide, which supports a ton of different languages

Thanks for the update! No wonder the game updated so fast I thought there was a bug. Kept checking app store updates to see if it did update.

[syntheticvoid]

Yup, thanks so much for your continued support! Any chance you're working on a better English translation? If not, I'd love to volunteer... I re-did the translation for Gene Effect's mission logs... =o)

If you'd like me to, feel free to send me a PM. =oD

[Corey.G]

Originally Posted by tabs

Thanks for the update! No wonder the game updated so fast I thought there was a bug. Kept checking app store updates to see if it did update.

Yep, everything is stable now, and the game runs even better on iOS6.

Originally Posted by syntheticvoid

Yup, thanks so much for your continued support! Any chance you're working on a better English translation? If not, I'd love to volunteer... I re-did the translation for Gene Effect's mission logs... =o)

If you'd like me to, feel free to send me a PM. =oD

Thanks for the offer man! I will PM you to discuss it.

P.S. If anyone is interested in helping us translate the game to other languages, it would be really appreciated by all of our team and other gamers too. I always think gamers have better understanding of the terminology than translation companies, so please get in touch with us to discuss it in details.



And we've just received a couple of reviews, if anyone is interested:
http://www.squidoo.com/best-tower-de...odule161897642

If you are good at German --
http://ireviewt.com/index.php/2012/0...r-a-td-review/

[Corey.G]

Finally, the lite version has arrived:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/e.r.a-td-free/id557787686?ls=1&mt=8

If you are not seeing it in your own store, just wait for a while and it should be available very soon.

[Corey.G]

Low bandwidth Version | Pop Up

[Hero211]

Do u have a time frame for when the iPad 3 retina update is releasing?