TD Difficulty Lab — Tower Defense Balance Simulator

TD Difficulty Lab is a local Tower Defense balance simulator built to test complete gameplay trajectories across waves, economy, towers, upgrades, paths and combat data.

Instead of asking whether one tower has enough DPS or one wave has enough HP, it asks a harder question:

Can realistic player strategies actually survive the level — and where does the balance break when they cannot?

We built TD Difficulty Lab while balancing KAPITOLE, our own Tower Defense project. The levels, towers, enemies, waves and economy shown throughout the tool come from the actual game development pipeline rather than placeholder test data.

Simulate complete strategy trajectories

Choose a level and a difficulty target, then run a Standard analysis.

TD Difficulty Lab tests representative player strategies across the complete level and measures whether the resulting success rate fits the intended difficulty range.

It also tracks problems that a global win rate alone would hide: blocking waves, trivial waves, economy failures, dominant strategies and underused towers or upgrades.

Quick, Standard and Deep modes let you choose how far the analysis should go.

See where the pressure actually breaks

A level can technically hit its target success rate and still be badly balanced.

TD Difficulty Lab analyzes the wave sequence itself and can detect patterns such as:

• front-loaded difficulty
• late waves that become too easy
• pressure stagnation
• individual waves that are too hard or too weak
• economy bottlenecks
• dominant strategies
• towers or upgrades with little practical utility

Waves that are not reached by enough representative strategies are treated as unknown rather than automatically classified as easy.

Deep Diagnosis

When Standard analysis identifies a serious problem, Deep Diagnosis expands the search.

It tests concrete changes against the simulated level instead of simply displaying generic advice.

Depending on the problem, tested corrections can include:

• starting economy
• wave rewards
• enemy counts
• spawn intervals
• pacing changes
• coordinated multi-parameter packages
• pressure redistribution across the level

Each proposed correction is simulated before it is offered.

You can inspect the expected effect, decide whether it fits your design, and only then press Apply.

Apply. Measure. Iterate.

TD Difficulty Lab is built around a simple balancing loop:

Analyze → Diagnose → Apply → Measure → Iterate

Applying a correction modifies the working project and automatically measures the new state.

Partial recovery is allowed: a difficult level does not need to jump from completely broken to perfectly balanced in one edit.

Undo and Reset let you experiment without losing the original project state.

One project through the PointClair TD pipeline

TD Difficulty Lab reads the shared POINTCLAIR TD PROJECT format used across the KAPITOLE Dev Toolkit.

That means the analysis can use data already produced by previous stages of the project:

TD Stat Lab → Wave Forge → Path & Placement → Combat → Economy → Difficulty Lab

When the balance candidate is ready, export the updated project and continue development without recreating the same data elsewhere.

KAPITOLE is being built with this exact workflow: the toolkit builds the game, and the game is used to validate the toolkit. This is the role defined for Difficulty Simulator in the production pipeline: cross-system simulation and diagnosis using real project data, while human playtesting remains the final authority. 

Local workflow

TD Difficulty Lab runs locally in your browser.

No installation. No account. No subscription. No server required. No internet connection required after download.

Your project remains in your own files.

Current version

TD Difficulty Lab V1.0.11 includes:

Standard and Deep analysis, representative strategy simulation, per-wave pressure analysis, tested balance corrections, Apply, Undo, Reset, Verify and project export.

Deep Diagnosis can take tens of seconds on complex projects because candidate corrections are simulated before being proposed.

The tool is a balancing aid, not a replacement for human playtesting.

A mathematically acceptable success rate or pressure curve does not guarantee that a Tower Defense level is fun, readable or satisfying in the final runtime. This limitation is explicitly part of our production method. 

Part of the KAPITOLE Dev Toolkit

PointClair is building KAPITOLE one production problem at a time.

Each reusable tool is first built for the game itself, then released as a standalone tool for other developers.

Difficulty Lab is the stage where the systems created by the previous tools finally become measurable as a complete balance problem.

The next objective is simple:

use the finished toolkit data to finish KAPITOLE itself.

Feedback

If something slows down your workflow or there is a feature you would genuinely use, let me know.

Real production problems are what drive the evolution of the PointClair tools.