Intro and Gem TD

Hi all,
    I'm Matt and I like playing games in my spare time. In particular, I am currently playing StarCraft 2, from Blizzard, along with some of the user made maps and game modes. I am currently in the Gold league for 1v1 games on the US servers, improved from last season's silver league. :)

Today I want to talk about a custom map called Gem Tower Defence (Gem TD for short), which is obviously a tower defence style game. The gamer is presented with an empty map with some strange markings on it. The dark markings are way points, which the enemy accesses in by following the path of light markings. The main gimmick mechanic is that the gamer can build only five random gems (towers) per wave and then picks one to keep as a useful tower. What happens to the other towers? They become rocks, which can be used to build a maze. Gems can be combined with other gems to form much more powerful gems, which can then be upgraded.

Gem TD features three game modes: Timed, Damage, and Swarm, each with their own objective and rewards although they all feature the same gems. Timed is a race against the clock to make it through all 50 waves, no bosses to worry about, just ten enemies per wave. I would recommend Timed mode once you have played the other modes a few times and gotten the hang of building a maze and combining gems. Damage mode is designed to test the effectiveness of your maze. As in Timed mode, ten enemies per wave except for wave 30 and 50, which become bosses. The wave 30 boss has a set amount of health and can be killed but the wave 50 boss has an infinite amount of health. Damage done against the wave 50 boss is how your maze is tested, more damage is better. Swarm mode is similar to Damage mode with the main difference being that each enemy in Damage mode becomes a swarm of five enemies in Swarm mode. Another difference is with the bosses, the wave 30 boss is replaced with a regular wave of enemies, while the wave 50 boss is a group of ten bosses with infinite health. This allows the gamer to focus on single target damage in Damage mode, and multi target damage in Swarm mode.

Gem TD is available on the US StarCraft 2 servers so, if you have a copy of StarCraft 2 and enjoy tower defence style games, I would encourage you to give it a try.