Category: Tactics

Posted: 12/17/07 An expansion on the previous idea where instead of building up to down, you build down and out.

While illustrating [#067 - Stacked Fortress], I realized that I had inadvertently included more ground than I needed. Since the idea took place entirely above the earth, I only needed enough ground to indicate there was one. But then I thought, what if I used that underground for something.

Initially, I thought that perhaps you could build underground rooms using a second, upside down stack - but then my mind turned towards a little known game called NetStorm, and much more popular game called Dig Dug.

The premise of this expansion idea is that while all that fun stuff is going on above ground, there is something you can do underground as well. In a similar manner to how you get rooms, you also get little Tetris-shaped tunnels that you can build in the soil below the fortresses.

Placing a piece creates a tunnel immediately, and you can only build by connecting it to a pre-existing tunnel that linked to your own tower. Once the tunnels have been built, the little guys who then go through the tunnels both to attack the opponents they find as well as collect resources you have created a path too. Watch out though. If you build a tunnel into the underground lake, the tunnels will flood with water, killing everybody.

Like Dig Dug, building a tunnel under a rock will cause the rock to fall down through the tunnel, crushing anything below it and blocking passageways until units could either move the rock or destroy it. There would, of course, be a variety of different objects and shapes that could be affected this way for puzzle purposes, the most interesting of which is the opponent's fortress directly.

That's right. Dig out the earth from under your opponent and eventually the structural integrity of the foundation will give out, causing the entire fortress to fall down. This will cause significant damage to the rooms on the bottom as well as making certain types of rooms useless (can't fly a helicopter out into the dirt).