Kingdom Defense

Tower-defence games share a skeleton. Enemies advance along a fixed route, you hold limited resources for placing defences beside it, and then you find out whether what you built was enough. The interesting part happens between waves, when you choose between adding another position and improving one you already own.

Two principles carry across nearly every game of this type. First, a tower covering a bend or a narrow stretch outperforms the same tower on a straight run, because targets stay inside its range for longer. Second, upgrading an existing position usually beats scattering weak ones across the map, since concentrated damage can stop a heavily armoured enemy while spread-out damage frequently cannot.

Grasp those two and any defence game becomes quicker to start. We keep this one on the management shelf at My Urban Eatery beside the command titles, because both are measuring the same thing: putting limited resources in the right place before the pressure arrives.