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Its interesting seeing all of the They-Are-Billions-like games now coming out (Conan: Unconquered, Age of Darkness, Diplomacy is not an Option, also kind of Mindustry and Riftbreaker). They feel like a riff on tower defense games but also owe a fair bit of DNA to Stronghold.
One thing that strikes me is how it seems like a deliberate shift from a more difficult design problem to an easier one. Older TD games were about defense-in-depth via mazing, but the TaB-likes generally focus on hard-stop perimeter defenses.
Likewise, the aim of the early Stronghold games (back when they worked) was also complex defense in depth. Likewise the sieges in 2011's Shogun II, built around multiple zones and choke-points (a design CA keeps trying; we'll see if Total Warhammer III finally nails it).
It seems really hard to get defense-in-depth to work in a game setting; the simple states of game units tend to incentivize focused firepower ('killboxes'). That's striking because (as we recently noted: https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-i-the-trench-stalemate/ …) in actual warfare, D-i-D is often the way to go.
Instead of designing games that can handle the complexity of simulating defense in depth situations, it seems like the design trend is towards using the greater horsepower computers offer to just ramp up the numbers of units massively.
That's not to say the They-Are-Billions style defense games are bad; they're not. I played TAB and it was fun. But it seems like the genre of fort/castle builders never simulated actual fort/castle design very well and now seem to be moving further away from basic principles.
Maybe I should add a primer on some of the principles of historical defense design to the to-do list for the blog at some point (though I'd probably keep it restricted to the European tradition for the sake of my sanity).
For what it's worth, pathfinding-type games aren't hard, and eliminating it doesn't particularly make game design easier. Just plugin in an A* search algorithm, boom, good enough for a tower design game.
The tricky thing with maze games is creating interesting sequencing problems so it isn't just making the longest maze. Defense Grid did this well: some towers applied DoT effects, other stripped shields. Optimal design meant prepping waves before they hit the killbox.
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