This second towering article (oooh :p) in the series about the "The Notum Wars" will discuss the Personal Towers and the Service Towers. The Personal Towers are the ones you can place in the land control areas, around the controller, and the Service Towers are a smaller, drone-like tower that you can basically place anywhere outside.
Let us start talking about the Personal Towers (PT) first.
There are three major types in this tower category. They fulfil different purposes, and our goal is to make the organisations think strategically, and tactically, regarding their placement.
These tower types are:
- Guard Turret Towers - These towers fire shots at opponents. You can see their range on the map.
- Guardian Conductors - These towers give beneficial skill bonuses to your friends, or negative skill bonuses to your enemies. They have a quite large effect range, and you can see this on the map.
- Special Towers - These towers do special things to your opponents. There are basically three examples in the game right now: Dropping enemies out of flying vehicles (Yalmahas), kicking enemies out of sneak mode, and disabling the enemies from using normal recharge equipment.
There are rules for placing these towers: First of all, you can only place them in an area owned by your organisation. Secondly, the Quality Level of the tower has to be within the level range of the player. (This follows the rules for controllers as well. See the previous article.)
Also, there is a limit to the number of towers you can have as a player. These are:
Level 15 Level 75 Level 150 Level 200 1 Tower 2 Towers 3 Towers 4 Towers
There is a limit to the maximum number of towers any one area can have. Today this is 60, but (disclaimer!) this might change with the balancing we are currently doing.
The fourth restriction is for overlapping effects. The rule here is that the maximum number of overlapping effects there can be in any given place are three. This is per tower type. So there can only be 3 overlapping Guard Turret Towers, 3 overlapping Conductors etc.
To visualise this, I have made this example:
Let's say your organisation has placed three towers like this: (The blue circles are the effects of the towers – the black stars).
Now adding a fourth circle to this cluster, what would happen? Look at these two examples:
As you see example 1 is illegal. Here, a 4th tower is added in a place where its effect overlaps with the effects of the three other towers. Take a look at example two for the correct, and legal, way to place the towers.
We have done this to add a bit more tactics and strategy to the placement of towers. If you were allowed to put 60 towers on top of each other, they would of course be extremely effective: very focused fire power! This is not really fun, though.
Why would I want a specific tower?
One of the major reasons why you as a player will select building a particular tower is the skill bonuses you obtain from them. In addition to the Org. advantages and the area effect bonuses from the towers, you get personal bonuses as long as the tower is still standing. These bonuses exist on all playfields – no matter how far you are from your towers.
As a general rule these bonuses will add around 30 points to any given skill at QL 200 and 50 points at QL 300. (The Quality Level 300 towers will be in the game from now on, even though it is very unlikely you will be able to build them before the Shadowlands expansion pack. On the other hand, you never know. The players (you) never cease to amaze us :)
Let me give you some examples:
Guardian Conductor of Life
It is available from QL 10 to QL 300 and a very popular start-up tower.
Skill bonuses: a 50 hit-point bonus on QL 10, 750 hit-points at QL 200 and 1500 hit-points at QL 300.
As you see, having one of these will be very – very useful. In addition this tower gives an area effect bonus to HealDelta (a stat that defines how much health you regain when waiting) in the area around the tower. This is 15 at QL10, 175 at QL 200 and 250 at QL 300. (NOTE! All these stats might change before we go live. It is all under constant balancing…)
This tower also shoots a little at enemies. (They all do, albeit to a different degree!)
Massive Cannon Turret
This is most likely also a very popular tower. It is available from QL 40 to QL 300. It has a much more powerful attack and increases the following as personal skill bonuses:
Both Material Metamorphoses and Biological Metamorphoses will be increased with 5, 30 and 50 points at QLs 40, 200 and 300. Possibly the most popular doctor tower? (They use these skills for healing.)
All skill bonuses interpolate of course.
Can someone remove my tower?
Yes! The rule is that someone from your organisation can (as you can) target your tower and type /tower terminate. The requirements to be able to do this, is to be of same or higher organisational level as the owner of the tower.
The reason for this is to enable the organisation to function – build and grow - even though someone is logged off. It would be a shame if a good piece of real-estate would be lost because someone became inactive for weeks. The person having his/her tower removed will get a message in the chat when he/she logs back on telling when, who and where the deed happened.
Other players from other organisations can also remove your towers, but they will have to do it the hard way :p The towers have a lot of hit-points, and it should not be possible for anyone but those in an opposing organisation to attack them and do some real damage. It is of course an advantage having your tower sitting close to the middle – near the controller.
Now, that should cover the basics. Let's move on to the:
Service Towers – the soloing alternative
The service towers – very basically – function like stationary pets. You create them, they fire at opponents, but can take virtually no damage themselves. You can buff them like pets, but they all the damage they do will divert the hate onto the owner – so use them at your own risk. It should never be your tank!
You control the Service Towers by using "/tower (commands)". Today "/tower attack", "/tower terminate" and "/tower behind" works.
You can still have pets while controlling an active Service Tower. Theoretically, a Bureaucrat can have 3 pets (1 droid, 2 charmed) and one service tower at the same time.
You can not build these puppies inside, though.
The Service Towers will also, from time to time, send out a pulsing nano that gives you some short-term benefits to your attack rating and other stuff. The idea behind these towers was that players could use them to set up "temporary camps" where they could pull monsters and increase their chance of success. All the damage done by your Service Tower counts as damage done by you, or your group if you are in one, when it comes to dividing XP.
The Service Towers can be bought in the shops up to QL 50. After that you will have to build them using trade-skills. The instructions are found in the same shop, so it should be easy to figure out what to do. To actually build them you need, among other requirements, to be of at least the same level as the Service Tower. The other build requirements are found within mechanical engineering and matter creation.
That's it on personal towers!
Hope to fight you for Notum very soon!
Gaute Godager
Game Director Anarchy Online