"Orcs Must Die!" Catch-All

Anyone on the fence about this game should just pick it up, it's ridiculously cheap at the moment.

Along with Dead Island, this is one of my surprise favourites of the year, it distills the essence of trap laying down into a tower defence like structure that feels right from a narrative perspective, it's surprisingly deep and it's a lot of fun to boot. The orcs feel a lot like the zombies in Left 4 Dead, just the right difficulty that you can take them down in waves and feel like a badass, without them being impotent either. It's even pretty funny at times!

It gets 5 dismembered orcs out of 5!

Edit: Plus, and this is important... it's not Zombies Must Die, thank goodness, because it so easily could have been. Orcs was the right choice, lets hope it rubs off on all the other developers.

Someone gifted it to me. Figure I'll tag the thread for after I get started playing.

I'm a sucker for action/tower defense. This game is done really well. Headshots matter!

I seem to be beating quite a few of you that I am steam friends with. STEP UP YOUR GAME LADIES. My best ranking seems to be 925, on level 4.

Wow this thing is fun!

Also picked up in the sale. Problem is my leaderboards are a bit lonely. I hope some of you don't mind if I send some Steam friend requests?

Thoughts on the DLC packs?

Rezzy wrote:

Thoughts on the DLC packs?

They're what, $1 today ? just buy them

Stele wrote:

Wow this thing is fun!

Yeah, I wasn't too enthused with the demo, but picked it up for this sale price, and turns out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would be. Some of the things the Orcs say to each other when they're coming in are pretty funny.

kergguz wrote:

Also picked up in the sale. Problem is my leaderboards are a bit lonely. I hope some of you don't mind if I send some Steam friend requests?

Hit me up. My Steam ID is in my signature - that's the red line of words below this text. Click 'Steam ID' and then send a Friend invite. We will then compare scores. Oh yes. We will compare scores. /insert evil laugh here

Strangeblades wrote:
kergguz wrote:

Also picked up in the sale. Problem is my leaderboards are a bit lonely. I hope some of you don't mind if I send some Steam friend requests?

Hit me up. My Steam ID is in my signature - that's the red line of words below this text. Click 'Steam ID' and then send a Friend invite. We will then compare scores. Oh yes. We will compare scores. /insert evil laugh here

Why do I get the feeling this is going to leave me feeling wholly inadequate? Cheers- I'll send a request after work.

About the game- this is the first time I've ever really looked in on the tower defence genre, and I'm surprised how much fun I'm having. Can anyone recommend other similar titles that I can progress to after I've had my fill of orcs?

kergguz wrote:

Can anyone recommend other similar titles that I can progress to after I've had my fill of orcs?

Maybe.

Bye, bye.

Sanctum is almost the same, but with coop. Set in more of a sci-fi feeling universe.

Dungeon Defenders is similar FPS/TD/Coop, but also has a ton of loot and leveling up of your character.

kergguz wrote:
Strangeblades wrote:
kergguz wrote:

Also picked up in the sale. Problem is my leaderboards are a bit lonely. I hope some of you don't mind if I send some Steam friend requests?

Hit me up. My Steam ID is in my signature - that's the red line of words below this text. Click 'Steam ID' and then send a Friend invite. We will then compare scores. Oh yes. We will compare scores. /insert evil laugh here

Why do I get the feeling this is going to leave me feeling wholly inadequate? Cheers- I'll send a request after work.

About the game- this is the first time I've ever really looked in on the tower defence genre, and I'm surprised how much fun I'm having. Can anyone recommend other similar titles that I can progress to after I've had my fill of orcs?

Don't worry about that. I just started playing.

If you have a console, Double-Fine's Trenched is kind of similar, although I think Orcs Must Die is much better.

I think it's important to point out that Orcs Must Die isn't tower defence per se, it's more of a trap defence game. The distinction is subtle, I'll admit, but I feel that it's certainly an important one, and one of the reasons I enjoyed OMD over other games like Sanctum or Dungeon Defenders. It reminds me more of setting up traps in Dungeon Keeper than placing towers in something like Defence Grid, only cranked up to 11 and made into a full game.

If you don't like tower defense games much, but you're the sort of person who got a kick out of making intricate traps in Dungeon Keeper, you might find something to like here.

Yeah I definitely get more kills than my traps every map.

Headshot, headshot, headshot...

So fun!

cyrax wrote:
kergguz wrote:

Can anyone recommend other similar titles that I can progress to after I've had my fill of orcs?

Maybe.

Bye, bye. ;)

Yeah, try and work your way through everything in that thread and you'd probably not see the light of day for several weeks.

Feel free to friend me up as well for orcish leaderboardness, profile link's in the sig.

I get mostly combat kills at first, but by the end of most maps, the vast majority of dead orcs are from traps. It's just a matter of accumulating enough cash to get a really deadly combo set up. On some levels, it gets to the point that I can find someplace to sit and work on my nails while the orcs get exsanguinated/eviscerated/pureed into a nice chowder.

I have yet to do well on the very last level, though. I've finished it, but only just.

My problem on the last level is the giant wave of just ogres that comes in. I simply don't have enough power to deal with them all at once so I end up getting 3-4 skull ratings. I suspect I need to keep the spiked logs for the last wave.

Just finished it (360) and holy cow was this a lot of fun. I will be definitely heading back through the game later on to try to get 5-skulls across the entire level. Not sure that I will play nightmare mode though. Finding the ideal placement of traps was a whole lot of fun, and I think that, as I go back through the levels, i will be able to 5 star a lot of them a lot easier with more traps available.

Tamren wrote:

My problem on the last level is the giant wave of just ogres that comes in. I simply don't have enough power to deal with them all at once so I end up getting 3-4 skull ratings. I suspect I need to keep the spiked logs for the last wave.

I think that a nice suggestion for the last level would be to channel the mobs up the side-pathways where you can put lots of arrow traps on the walls, spike traps on the floors and auto-ballista traps on the ceiling. I am not sure if you can fit the barricades to do that, but it might be interesting to try.

A way to start off and ensure you get lots and lots of $$$ is to put the coin increasers on the floors in front of each door and arrow traps on the walls. That ensures that you will get a nice amount of income right off the bat. Also grab the upgrade that gives you more income from traps/guardians. Once that has been done, it is just a matter of placing the barricades to force them through the path that you want. I *think* that you might be able to force them all through one set of stairs, and make the path to get to those stairs a complete and utter deathtrap.

In my experience you can narrow a path down to one tile but if you try to make them take big detours they will just start to attack it.

In that level, there's huge squads of bomb kobolds that attack your barricades, so maintaining a narrow path is fairly difficult.

Normal creatures will not attack your barricades as long as there is one path that's at least two squares wide all the way to their chosen portal. No matter how long the path is, they'll walk instead of attacking. They will only attack if there's no path, or if the path is only one square wide. This is important to 5-skulling some of the later levels.

Bomb kobolds, however, will head straight for barricades and blow them up. They're not that common, but in that last level, there are huge swarms of the little bastards.

I 5-starred (skulled?) all the first area maps. Been trying to just do it as I go. But after I keep getting new traps every level, I realize that I can probably go back and get even better scores and move higher on the list.

Also that DLC alchemist's satchel pack is ridiculous. Feels like a free exploding barrel. Well, free as in mana, which recharges instead of $200 cash that you can spend for traps instead. I felt bad using it on a couple levels, but as things have started to get tougher in area 2 (maps with 2 rifts to protect), it's become almost a necessity.

Then again, there's about 3-4 traps that I have still yet to use. So maybe I just haven't found the best combo yet. But it seems like I'd be silly do any map without my bow, sword, spike trap, slow trap, and barricade. And throw in that satchel, and I only have a few spots left to play with then. I've also found archers to be ridiculously useful. I beat the first flier map with just archers and no special flying towers because I didn't notice there were fliers when I started. But even when I redid it for 5-skulls, I think I would have probably been ok without the flying towers. Once I got weaver access, giving my archers fire arrows makes them even more deadly. Although sometimes I'd rather have fire arrows myself.

Anyway, there are clearly a lot of ways to play and a lot of options to build. On most stages so far I have been able to reroute enemies into a single path. But there was one where I couldn't find a way to do it. Opposite doors on sides of two crystals with a teleport in between. I had to just set up two defenses there. Just looked, map was Sludge Hole. Really didn't enjoy splitting up my defenses and time, and I didn't 5-skull it. Same thing on the very next map, Chaos Chamber.

I love when I can line the walls with arrow traps, put sticky traps on the floor, and the smoosher traps on the ceiling.

Stele wrote:

But it seems like I'd be silly do any map without my bow, sword, spike trap, slow trap, and barricade

It's funny, but I never use barricades, and very rarely use anything except the crossbow in terms of personal attacking. My favourite thing to do is use the slow traps with the giant swinging maces; those are super expensive but really effective.

I've beaten the game on regular mode. Nightmare is a lot of fun, but it's telling that I earned the "Skin of Your Teeth" achievement on the third or fourth level on nightmare. Stupid ogres.

Also, upgrades archers with fire arrows rock. I don't think I've ever bothered with any of the upgrade trees that weren't trap-based.

I've been experimenting with the other two upgrade paths. The elemental tree is all about personal damage. It makes the mage very powerful, if you attack enemies the moment they step out of the gate you can easily handle a wave by yourself. That seems to be the point of the elemental tree, spend all of your money to lock down one side of the map and just rambo the other end. Steel weaver is pretty straightforward, better traps + more traps. The knowledge weaver is where things get interesting, I'm still trying to figure it out.

By buying the dlc along with the game I wonder if I've robbed myself out of a better game experience...Alchemist's Satchel + Mana Well + upgraded tar to slow & group the enemies up = mega slaughter.

If you activated that before playing the original campaign then yes. The original set of missions are very good at pacing the upgrades you get per mission.

The most effective method of killing orcs by far is to slow them down while moving over instant death traps. This also happens to be the worst method of getting a high score.

Well, I'm getting pretty high scores by grouping orcs up and bombing them. It's a good combo when you kill 30 of them at once. Unless there's a better way to score?

EDIT: Did some reading in this thread...what I meant was not "combo" but "killstreak." I guess I'm not playing it optimally for score, but that's okay for now. I'm sure it will get harder and my slow + alchemy bomb strategy will get less effective. Unless they meant for it to be a god combo to have fun with after you beat the game.