Insurmountable Challenges

One of the best things about DTD is that it has a very long learning curve. In fact, this was one of the goals of the creator, Paul Preece, in the design game of the stage. In an insightful interview, he noted that “I also wanted to create as long a learning curve as I could.” He discussed this in terms of balancing the game, making sure that there was a counterpoint for every element of the game. “The most obvious example of this method is that nothing went into the game that didn’t have a counterpoint, for example the Typhoon Tower has easily the highest damage per second in the game but can be undone by ‘Group’ and ‘Spawn’ creeps, while Dart towers lap them up but have serious trouble with Boss levels, etc., etc.”

One of the biggest humps for me in my learning curve is the flying creeps. They just breeze past all of my towers, unencumbered by all of my clever mazes and towers. The worst is the flying boss creeps!

Hard to beat! I’ve managed to tame the flying boss by using a combination of a fully upgraded swarm tower and two snap towers upgraded two or three times. This method usually is successful because the fliers end up stunned long enough for the other towers to take care of them. However, in the 100 level challenge later sets of fliers are almost impossible to kill! But, that’s what life is about—perfect happiness, comfort, success are all impossible goals. Striving for things that we probably won’t achieve is an essential part of the human experience. If everything came easily to us, we would never learn or grow--for example, I would never have tried using the snap towers at all if it weren't for the flying bosses. We must always believe we can achieve more than the generation before us, rather than accepting the societal/economic conditions handed to us by our parents. Instead, we must preserve the hope that our generation can do better--we can make sure a few more people don't fall through the cracks of society, we can eliminate a little more of the racism and misogyny that cripple us, we can create art that is a little more beautiful, or truthful, than that of those who came before us. That’s what the flying creeps represent to me.

So, how do you end up killing the flying bosses??