Good morning, I hope everyone's porridge was just right.
It's been a bit of a tedious week, fixing and improving little bits here and there. I spent a lot of time troubleshooting a bug where the pathfinding system would suddenly stop working mid game. It turns out that one of the towers, the Oat bag Barricade was, on construction, adding itself twice to the list of towers that enemies use for choosing their target. When the tower gets destroyed, it removes itself from this list, but because it was in there twice, it would only remove one instance of itself. The AI units would as a result target the tower that was still in the list, but not on the map, immediately realise it didn't exist, return to their idle state, only to target the non-existent tower again. Each time a unit enters its idle state, it updates the pathfinding graph so that other units would path around them, but because the bug meant that units were constantly entering and exiting the idle state every frame, the pathfinding thread got overwhelmed with more graph updates than it could handle. I have to say, I'm quite relieved to have that one solved.
Anywho, let me tell you about the Oat bag Barricade and the Golf Clubs.
The oat bag barricade, unlike the other towers, doesn't provide any additional offensive capabilities. Instead it functions the same as cover that you might find in the level, with the difference that it can be placed wherever you like, and that it can be destroyed. The oat bag barricade is more effective as cover than most cover you'll find in the levels, because it is taller. It has room for two Scotsmen, and can be placed more cheaply than any of the other towers. They can also be useful for walling off areas to direct enemies to take more dangerous routes.
The golf clubs serve the same role as they did in the first game, sniping enemies from long distance before they get close enough to attack. They fire further and more accurately than any other tower in the game. However, they provide no cover for the user, and find it harder to hit faster moving targets. They do have a decent fire rate, thanks to the automatic golf ball dispenser, and have an average cost.