This guide was made to help new players get into the game a bit easier. I’m explaining the basics of the game so that you as a player can enjoy a good tower defense game.
Contents
Introduction
All credit goes to LForward!
Welcome to Defense Task Force, a Sci-Fi Tower Defense game for PC. Your role as commander is to defend the platform that’s built to harvest energy and power earth. Defend against infinite waves of creatures and extract energy to sustain power for your crew.
The campaign features 20 sectors located in 5 different regions, each of those sectors will bring in a new challenge for you, commander. As you start harvesting energy on Delta Atheni, waves of “Kraken” emerge from the ocean. They’re coming to protect their property. Use your resources wisely to extract as much energy as possible.
Energy
Energy is the main resource of the game. You gain energy by defeating “Kraken Units”.
Ingame Energy is used to deploy basements & towers, it’s further used to upgrade existing towers & boost them (see more about upgrades & boosts in chapter “Research”).
1% of all the energy gained is being extracted to your base. You can now use the energy to purchase new towers, upgrades or boosts in the research menu. Additionally you should always keep some energy to unlock new missions & blueprints.
Blueprints
Blueprints are the heart of your strategy, they distinguish in the amount of towers you can place, as well as the ability to build different mazes. Higher cost blueprints will have way more option than the low cost blueprints. They very first blueprint “Zero Cost” is always free so you can never get stuck.
Before starting a mission you will be asked to select a blueprint. In the beginning you have 3 blueprints to choose from, one of them is always free of cost, the other blueprints will need to be researched and every blueprint also comes with a unique cost.
Blueprints need to be researched once, while “Zero Cost” is free to use, all other blueprints will cost between 15 and up to 125 energy for the most extensive one. Once you start using the more advanced blueprints, you’ll never want to go back, trust me.
Research
As mentioned earlier, energy can be used to unlock new towers & upgrades, every tower can be upgraded up to Level 3, at the very beginning you have only 3 towers unlocked: Machine Gun, Cannon & Fire Tower. Your goal is to research a different set of towers so you are prepared when the enemy is modifying their strategy.
There’s 10 towers in total, every single one of them has strengths & weaknesses, if you want to know more about this, check “Towers” for more info about the unique abilities of towers or “Encyclopedia” for info about the waves you’re defending against.
When a Level 3 tower upgrade is unlocked, there are multiple other options that you can research, these are called “Boosts”, they do not apply directly, instead you can purchase them after a tower has been promoted to Level 3 ingame. This is extremely useful when you’re about to reach the tower limit ingame as it allows you to put extra value in your defense.
Furthermore you can also unlock upgrades for your extractor, which include more starting energy, more extractor hitpoints or an upgrade to your Auto-Defense System.
Account Level (XP)
To unlock certain upgrades for towers or additional blueprints you may need to level up your account. Leveling your account is simple and very easy to understand. For every wave that you beat on a certain sector you will gain Experience, this EXP is bound to this one mission so if you do a mission and beat 20 waves, you will simply gain 20 EXP, if you do the same mission again and beat 40 waves now, you will only gain an additional 20 EXP for a total of 40 EXP. When leveling up your account, it makes sense to rerun an old mission to gain more EXP.
Towers
Every tower has something that he is good for, but something else where he lacks. This chapter should give you an idea on what you can do but in the end it’s up to you to develop the ultimate strategy.
Machine Gun
- A pretty basic tower, all around definitely not the worst but because of its low cost it often doesn’t scale that good into lategame. Main weakness are boss creatures, they may have a more advanced armor that can withstand the attacks of a machine gun tower.
Cannon
- The “big brother” of the machine gun tower. More damage but much lower attack rate. In general a much better lategame scaling than the machine gun. Purchasable boosts can enable this tower to stun its target.
Missile
- More range paired with a small explosion radius, yes you guessed right, this tower is the natural enemy of weak mass creatures, only deficit of this tower is the long cooldown between attacks.
Proton Pulse
- A powerful tower with a beam weapon, attacks will bounce to secondary targets, overall a good allround tower that has a lot of potential with a variety of boost options.
Plasma Beam
- You’ve always liked beams? This tower deals more damage the longer it attacks the target. This makes it very effective against enemies with a high healthpool.
Fire
- Burn them, burn them all! The fire tower does continuous damage against large groups of creatures which prevents them from recharging their shields. Good earlygame, but except for the shield-suppression rather on later stages.
Space-Time
- Indispensable for every advanced defense. This tower does not deal any damage, instead it slows down the movement speed of all creatures in range. Very effective in combination with… well almost everything.
Tesla
- My personal favorite tower as it helped me a lot to get through the first missions. This tower has a chain lightning attack that doesn’t lose power on every jump. This tower is good at dealing with the first boss of the game but lacks effectiveness against large groups or strong single enemies, it’s just good for everything in between!
Toxic
- No game is complete without a little bit of toxicity, wait that doesn’t make sense. This tower allows you to deal damage over time to enemies in range, this effect also slows down the recharging-rate of shields.
Sniper
- My personal favorite when it comes to leak-catching, this tower offers the highest damage combined with the highest range in the game. You will have to get used to the long recharging rate though.
Hotkeys
If you don’t want to lose out time on selecting towers and navigating around the map you should internalize the hotkeys used in Defense Task Force. They’re simple and easy to remember.
Navigate on the map with WASD, alternatively you can reassign this to the Arrow Keys & rotate your view with Q & E.
Towers use the hotkeys located from 1 to 0, with the machine gun tower starting at 1 and the sniper tower ending on 0.
Increasing or decreasing the game speed can be down with Page Up & Page Down.
Got it? Nice, because that’s all you need to know. Now you can concentrate again on the best strategy to save our planet.
Mazing
You may not be able to use all the tower spots on one blueprint. This is simply to allow mazing and to encourage creativity. Mazing allows you to create a path for the enemy creature. They will always follow the shortest path to the extractor so make it as hard as possible for them!
Advanced Blueprints allow you to literally send them through hell!
Priorities
Towers can not be controlled manually, but instead you can give them priorities on what they should be focusing on, the options can be “Strongest” or “Weakest”, “First” or “Last” “Fastest” or simply “Random”, this helps maximizing the damage. Your towers in the back should be attacking “First” for example so they focus on catching the leaks instead of attacking something else.
High damage towers like the sniper tower should be attacking “Strongest” instead so they don’t overkill any weak creatures.
Encyclopedia
If you want to check out stats of enemy creatures or gather information about your towers it is worth checking the “encyclopedia” tab. This is the best source of information if you’re struggling against a certain type of enemy, it allows you to check their strengths & weaknesses. At the same time you can also check tower stats & abilities here to develop new strategies.
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