Breaking the tower

March 24, 2009 12:28 PM

In the mood for a light realtime strategy game? Try Breaking the Tower. It's quite a bit like Settlers, but it's more streamlined.
Runs in the browser, requires java
posted by boo_radley (27 comments total)

Hey, this is pretty cool. And I love being able to yell at my monitor, "WORK, you peons! Put your backs into it! Build! Cut down those trees!"
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:17 PM on March 24, 2009

Oh, this is clever. Seems the deforestation leads to armed conflict! Not at all like real life.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:35 PM on March 24, 2009

NO pause button???
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 1:39 PM on March 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

Crashed my browser, HARD, after about 60 seconds of gameplay. Tried it again, same result.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted...?
posted by rollbiz at 1:39 PM on March 24, 2009

Its like having an ant colony of workers with ADD: "Oh whats this building... I'll do that now". Nifty
posted by DetonatedManiac at 1:48 PM on March 24, 2009

I'm not having any issues here. Maybe it has to do with what version of Java you're running?

Also, I like being able to set up a few barracks, a residence, a farm, a mill, some masons and a treecutter, and then tab away from this, come back and find some new stats, which changes the gameplay. It really is pretty interesting how the armed conflict increases as resources are depleted, so you have to create more warriors, requiring more food, timber and stone, depleting more resources, and so on.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:49 PM on March 24, 2009

I tried it in both Firsfox and Safari in OS X. Is time supposed to move forward? It lets me build the outlines of a few buildings, but nothing happens.

Is it just me?
posted by MythMaker at 2:04 PM on March 24, 2009

Myth: Same here, same browsers, OS X.
posted by The Bellman at 2:06 PM on March 24, 2009

Is there a way to destroy the tower? I've got my guys swarming all over the place and killing black dudes, but they don't seem to be doing any actual damage to the tower itself.
posted by daniel_charms at 2:09 PM on March 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

Hint: Think about what the tower is made of... :)
posted by the other side at 2:11 PM on March 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

Apparently, it's made of win.
posted by daniel_charms at 2:13 PM on March 24, 2009

Ahh, I get it now. Come on little guys, CHOP CHOP! Nearly there now!
posted by daniel_charms at 2:29 PM on March 24, 2009

To destroy the tower you need to treat it like a bunch of rocks. At the end I sold off everything and put a much of stone collecting buildings near the tower. I had 100+ men and 35 warriors cutting down the tower. Probably not the most efficient way to do it.
posted by geoff. at 2:36 PM on March 24, 2009

I can't help but think of easter island.
posted by wayofthedodo at 4:35 PM on March 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

Man you wouldn't think to look at the island but by the end there are simply not. enough. trees.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:57 PM on March 24, 2009

I was pretty proud of having killed the tower in an hour and a half - taking my time to build a strong agricultural base and a high birth rate, then building the military industrial complex, razing forest to make way for merciless tower-plinking masonries. And then I saw the high score was something like 20 minutes.

One thing that helped was [spoiler].
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 11:25 PM on March 24, 2009

Pretty straightforward but very satisfying. But I chose to play after the inevitable win and tried to breed my way into the books. At 420/480 peons the game went from trudging along nicely to extreme lag in the blink of an eye. Anyone else?
posted by mnsc at 6:35 AM on March 25, 2009

what's interesting about the game is that, during the combat with the forest druids, wood is limiting, but afterwards, the unrenewable rock resources (since you lose 25% per building with each building sold) become the limit.

It's funny, i built 15 planting houses and have two wood cutting stations, but most of my 200+ peons are still chopping trees
posted by eustatic at 9:43 AM on March 25, 2009

The best thing about this game, is that after playing for a while, you come back to mefi and the fonts look like silky smooth liquid bliss.

great game though, totally worth it.
posted by Submiqent at 8:34 PM on March 25, 2009

I had a lot of trouble with my browsers freezing up after ten seconds; I google'd around, and someone on Jayisgames.com edited the Javascript so as to, uh....something about run time as opposed to floating logic? The flux capacitor? I am not sure, and obviously I can't assure you that the following link won't turn your computer inside out, but here is the corrected version of the game, as a downloadable .jar file.

It is an awesome game.
posted by 235w103 at 10:52 PM on March 25, 2009 [1 favorite]

I had the same issue described before with a hard crash on OSX. Anyone been able to run this on Mac?
posted by heathkit at 11:00 PM on March 26, 2009

Heathkit- yeah, I had the same problem. Download the .jar file I linked to, and you can play it just fine.
posted by 235w103 at 11:05 AM on March 27, 2009

The .jar file also works great in Linux with
java -jar /breakingthetower.jar
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 3:23 PM on March 27, 2009

23:53 is my best time so far.
posted by garlic at 9:28 PM on March 28, 2009

Are you serious? I can scarcely break the half hour mark. Got 30:52 last night.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 3:41 PM on March 29, 2009

Marisa: I think it's mostly down to pure dumb luck. In my latest game (and the second one I've won), I was probably pretty close to doing it under 20 minutes, as the way to the tower was mostly open and the black dudes all stuck on the beach on the northern side of the island. Unfortunately, my dudes decided they were too cool to hang around that far from the farms and it took me like 15 minutes to persuade them to go anywhere near the tower. In the end, I managed to destroy the tower in 32:20 - not too bad, but still nowhere as good as I had hoped for.
posted by daniel_charms at 2:24 PM on March 30, 2009

That sounds about right, daniel_charms. When I was first starting out, I was very deliberate about planting farms (the key to people), building population, good surpluses of wood, stone and food, no more than half the population as warriors (they don't build things or tear down the tower as fast as peons) before embarking on making a run for the tower. All this is impossible to do under 30 minutes. Going for lightning strikes straight for the tower can yield better results, but damned if enemies don't pop out of the tower any time a peon plinks it. I think the key is the element of surprise, and being sure you have plenty of peons to go around.

I can't believe this game is only like 75K. You could probably put it on your phone, if that didn't render the people too small to even see.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:36 PM on March 30, 2009