Introduction



Gem tower defense has some rather unique particulars that are not often found in other tower defense games.

First of them would be the checkpoints. The road is but an illusion, bounding only fliers. Yet, you cannot build on checkpoints.

You also cannot build during the attack, so juggling is out(you can still remove a rock, perhaps to prepare for next turn or to make mobs cross the maze centre one additional time). However, with 5 gems placed in a turn maze can be built quite quickly while not sacrificing much offense.

Second would be the strong luck element in the game. The gems you get are randomly chosen, and while you can improve your chances getting a specific gem is often exercise in futility. Indeed, it can be better to choose your gems like Mahjong tiles, boxing in the possibilities – for this game does host the combinations of gems.

Though, when choosing gems, it is important to keep in mind that the enemy units have weaknesses that notably increase the damage dealt to them. The bats are always weaker than dwarfs and to Amethyst – or purple, as I call it in my head. Weakness varies among any of 7 colours. Other than that, the mobs are rather monotonic, with bats occurring every 4th wave and dwarfs always having the same weaknesses at the same time.

The rise of health in mobs is small exponential, differing among difficulities: easy, normal, hard, extreme and survival. There is armor too, but that is simple percentile damage reduction – not much different from extra HP, however anti-armor towers mean percentile damage increase.

Alas, by mid-game the mobs will get one additional statistic: Minimum speed, occurring around wave 17. This slowly increases along with their normal speed; gameplay-wise it is important to note that the fraction of normal speed increases over time, from around 25% to well over 70% and beyond – this greatly weakens all different slowing gems in the game, albeit there are two stunning gems.