Tips on how to beat hard

[Nodoka]

Any tips is welcomed >_>

[Gakm4]

Learn what comes out on each round and dont purchase upgrades until they are needed.
http://btd-5.wikia.com/wiki/Round

Build banana farms as early as possible to get more money from them. 2 2/0 banana farms are more cost effective than 1 3/0 farm.

Pay close attention to targeting. Two dart monkeys can go a long way with proper targeting. Snipers on strong 99.9% of the time. Bomb towers on close or strong. Engineers are good on strong or last as their sentries are always spawned targeting first. Boomers are very dependent on the track/placement due to the rotation of the boomerangs.


Dart monkey, boomerang, and engineer specialty buildings are some of the best for early game. They make the towers quite a bit stronger allowing you to have less towers and get more farms. Personally i like the dart money specialty the best especially for co-op.

Play co-op and observe the strategies other players use and take some of that to improve your own strategy.

A glue hose and arctic wind mix can take out a very large number of bloons but are ineffective against moab class.

Ninjas, wizards, chippers and any other upgrade that can knock bloons back can make regrow bloons alot worse.

Be ready for rounds Round 79 and 82.

4/2 chippers are great for moab class bloons.

There is more but this should give you a good start

[Starlit]

Carefully consider what your towers do and how they hit when deciding tower order, for instance, glue towers are best placed near the start since their attacks soak all layers and hence hitting before a split is best, moab class balloons are an exception to this. Bomb towers are designed to against large number weaker of baloons (unless x-3+) when they start countering moabs.

Don't be afraid to use special agents for your first few times, you will eventually have WAYYYYYYYYYYY too much money anyway.

Don't dive for heavy anti-camo early. It tends to be expensive and unnecessary. the first two camo rounds are worth 3 and 80 lives, a single weak tower such as 1-2 sniper or 0-0 spike tower can clear them on easier maps. Actually, I used never kill the first camo bloon until I went for impoppable. Economically its often better to just leave it go.

On a side note monkey lane is actually quite a bit harder than shipping express which is probably the easiest level imo.

[Torakusu]

As it is with any tower defense games, in the early stages, your job is to put down just enough towers to not let any bloons through while you use the remaining resources to start your infrastructure to get more resources. In most cases, it would be banana farms (there will be challenges where banana farms are not available and you'd have to resort to other means). Initially my preference were 2/4 farms, but with the intro of auto round start, I've since moved to 4/2 farms with specialty chippers or monkey farmers to pick up the bananas for me. What a lot of people also neglect are monkey villages. They increase your buying power and also gives piercing, range, and speed bonus to your towers with the appropriate upgrades. By the time I hit level 45-50 I usually have a 4/2 and a 2/3 village.

Next, know your levels. Particularly, know when the first camos are coming (24 for normal, 33 for fast track) and know when the first leads are coming (28). Outside of that, just note the high traffic levels.

Try to avoid dart monkeys. While they are cost effective early on, they're practically useless in the late game. And selling only costs you money. Focus on having a good mix of AOE units and high piercing units. As mentioned earlier, your high piercing units should have their targeting priority set to strong. Also, certain units work great together. For example, I like placing 4/2 boomers, 2/4 ice tower, and 4/2 tack shooters next to a chipper set to strong. Don't base your strategy on knockbacks or slows. Past level 65, it's nearly all brute force. But at that point, money shouldn't be an issue. The issue instead should be real estate you can put towers on.

[mike nuts]

if you play co-op there is a monkey in the top right corner that you can buy and upgrade it is very op

[Starlit]

Originally posted by Torakusu:

Try to avoid dart monkeys. While they are cost effective early on, they're practically useless in the late game. And selling only costs you money.

Dart monkeys are essential on some of the levels in advanced-extreme difficulty and are actually pretty good to squeeze you through to your first farm or two even without speciality if you are going that way.

Selling starts at 80% so its not a major loss to sell a low level dart tower and you can upgrade this amount with the premium? building so dart monkeys are pretty damn legit.

Also slows work pretty damn well, I mean, rounds 63 and 79? the triple lead rush and the ceramic rush, are much easier if you can slow them down for a pick off.

Something to bear in mind which isnt true in other TDs so much is that range increases are usually minimally efficient unless you hit a path at a much earlier/much later time. This is because the bloons come in a constant flow and your tower efficiency usually depends on the fact that it is attacking, not that its attacking the first bloon. There are alot of times this doesnt apply but for instance a 3-0 dart monkey performs almost as well as a 3-2 dart monkey on alot of maps

[Torakusu]

https://youtu.be/yFjd6Hcegtc

So here's an example of a Mastery Impoppable run on U-Turn. Not the only way to do it. It's like skinning cats - there's more than one way. You'll find your own once you're comfortable with how it all works. Note that at 4:53 I upgraded down to $9. Early on resource management is critical, every last drop counts. Also note that I exploited the crap out of the banana farms and the banana farmer (Bernie wouldn't had approved).
Slow is primarily of early game use. It'll get you through the level, but it doesn't address the fundamental issue - that there isn't enough firepower on the board. That is exactly what we're seeing there at 9:33 when I used the screen wide freeze from the ice tower.
Not too long after that, once I made all 3 farms 4/2, I changed to auto round start because I no longer needed to micromanage.
What I placed on the board was overkill to finish 85, but resource is no longer an issue either. Let me know if you got questions.

[Nodoka]

Thanks for all the tips everyone :>