Look! Teeny tiny little men! These guys are produced by the barracks building. They’ve got weedy guns, short range, and don’t exactly move very fast, but when you’ve got thirty of them standing in a line blocking the advancing gidrahs with hail of small arms fire they’re quite formidable!

Of course, the armoured gidrahs just trample on them and squish them. But you need heavy blasters for that anyway. I think I might have several different unit types available, generated at different speeds. These little basic guys are the grunts. I think a tank would be a useful addition to the player’s arsenal but I’m so enjoying the tininess of them maybe I’ll just give every 5th unit spawned a rocket launcher or something.

The number of little guys you can have depends on the number of bases you’ve got, which brings me to a small change I’ve made to the game so that the level begins with no bases – instead you place one where you want to place it (I imagine on the opposite side of the map from the gidrah entry points) and at that point the level begins. A base costs $500, and you’ll get the money back at the end of the level if it survives. While it stands each base awards you a good old fashioned score multiplier. Keep 5 bases on the go and you’ll enjoy a 5x score multiplier for massive points. Yay!

While I’m on about progress, I’ve put in another three buildings besides the barracks: the collector; the warehouse; and the autoloader.

The collector is a handy way of consolidating mouse clickery. Place a collector amongst a bunch of factories, and instead of having to click on all the factories individually to collect money from them, you can simply click the collector once, freeing up more of your time to panic elsewhere.

Place warehouses near factories to increase their capacity before they get full and stop producing.

The autoloader you plonk next to a bunch of turrets. As soon as any turret in range of an autoloader runs out of ammo, it will automatically reload! How handy. It is of course rather expensive.