Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Sticc Tower Defense, as the name suggests, is based on Tower Defense games. While the foundation of the TD system is there, the execution was poorly handled. For starters, you get a pick at the start of the game of using an Archer and a Melee unit, without exactly knowing what was the real use of them. Once you are in the map, and start checking it, it's a 3 way map that converges into a single road to the base. To make it worse, rather than "Waves" it's just a map of reinforcements EACH TURN for about 15 turns, which around the midpoint the map gets overwhelmed by a huge army of STICC. The worst part is however: the unit balance. Archers are pretty much useless (low damage 2-3 range and can't move) while Lumberjack and Gryphon Riders are unstoppable once they leveled enough. Also, the STICC wizard are much stronger than the archers, and can safely attack other units without the fear of retaliation, not to mention they deal dangerous damage. Another thing worth to mention is that you can block the main road with 3 units and just hold the ground by passing turns. And lastly, the final boss can be cheesed spectacularly hard by buying 4 damage items from the shop and sniping him from far with the recruiter. Despite the criticism, not everything in the project is irredeemable. The presentation was charming (I find stickmen kinda charming and these are indeed) and the unit recruiting part was simple, but effective. Overall, the game has charm, but the poor balance and lack of wave management does harm this entry more than it really deserves.
• I liked this submission a lot. In particular the pacing was great. It's clear that it was playtested a significant amount. Seemed like it ended right when I was starting to get bored, which is good. My main issue with it is that the tower defense aspect could have been executed better. The only units that felt like tower defense units were the archers, but they were easily the worst player units as they could only do about 1/3 of a single enemy's health per turn (even less in the later waves). In this sense I feel the submission became a bit too Fire Emblem-y and I don't think this is what the creator was intending. My strategy was to get the 3 pegasus knights and wall the enemies, much like a normal defense map in FE. I did think the moving boss at the end was a fun challenge. He was actually pretty threatening. There's been a lot of attempts over the years to make tower defense in FE. This is absolutely one of the better ones as it doesn't fall into the trap of becoming boring. However, it still feels more like FE than tower defense.
• It's a functioning tower defense game. Unfortunately, the execution isn't great. Because the enemies increase in power, making new units becomes pointless after a point so once you've got your initial set up, it starts transitioning into a not great FE Defend map. Tower defense is a decent idea for the engine, I'm just not sure this was the way to go about it.