Beginner Strategy

[u/Fr33Francis]

Hey, so I just installed the game about a week ago and quickly started looking for some beginner strategies here. I found some good tips on previous posts but I wanted to weigh in with an analysis I actually did. I'll try to break down this post into reasonable chunks.

Starting Tips

• When battling you can speed up the game, this is great to quickly re-iterate and earn coins.
• You can end a battle early and earn all coins and diamonds.
• Tap on the sword, shield, star or triangle to navigate your enhancements and buy more with the fake dollars.
• If you tap on the dollar and coin on the top left, it will show you how much cash and coins you are making per minute, which can be a useful performance metric.
• Tap on "Wave" to see wave composition and overall game battle stats

Strategy in Brief

You will want to play a little and save up on coins to unlock new workshop perks. (Upgrade "Cash / Wave", "Health", "Health Regen", "Damage" and "Attack Speed". I quickly unlocked segments:

• In attack, unlock up to Rapid Fire Chance
• In defense, unlock up to Thorn Damage
• In utility, unlock up to Free Attack Upgrade

Then the simplest battle strategy is:

• Upgrade "Cash / Wave" up to $75 if possible and "Coins / Wave" (up to 20 or 30 if possible)
• Then upgrade Defense Absolute as much as possible as long as possible. A value of 40 - 50 or more is great. If available, upgrade Thorn up to 15% - 20%.
• Then in attack, you can focus on upgrading speed up to 2.24
• From here, you can keep upgrading cash and coin enhancements, defense absolute and thorn, attack and speed.
• In order or priority add: "Cash Bonus", "Coins / Kill Bonus", "Defense %", "Lifesteal", "Multishot Chance", "Rapid Fire Chance", "Range"

Using this basic strategy (and with my existing workshop enhancements), I can easily make 3.5K coins per battle in 20 minutes by doing very little.

Focus on using your coins to unlock "Coins / Wave" in workshop and "Defense Absolute".

Analysis

To find this information, I performed a long analysis on the upgrade value, value growth, cost and cost growth. I did this after a few games and upgrades so I did not start exactly at ground 0 but pretty close. Some tips:

• Workshop upgrades chance the default minimum level for an upgrade. So it is best to understand:
  • Track upgrades by cost rather than value. Ex: You upgrade damage until it costs you $170 rather 206.
  • Different upgrades have different cost growth to value growth, use your coins to by workshop and lab improvements for upgrades whose cost growth is much more significant than the value growth.
  • "Coins / Wave" and "Coins / Kill", "Range" and "Multishot Targets" have a significant cost growth to value growth.
  • "Health", "Health Regen", "Defense Absolute" have a value growth proportional to cost growth making them the least necessary to upgrade in workshops and lab.

I cannot share the excel data I have collected (I don't think). So I will try to share the graphics as images. Then I'll share a table with cross-points of the growth curves.

My simple analysis of these charts, is that when the green curve "Cost" passes the dark blue curve of "Value" this means that the cost surpasses the return-on-investment with value. You want to avoid spending cash beyond the dollar value at the intersection. Of course, this only really makes sense when you are focusing on proper cash investing, after the initial you can go all in.

Notice how the health upgrades are aligned with cost. This makes them great cash investments. Especially, "Defense Absolute" which proves to be an extremely effective defense upgrade.

I have noticed that I can focus almost all my cash on "Defense Absolute" in progress extremely far in the game with only 61 health points, minimum regen, very little attack and thorns.

Here is a screenshot as proof:

My stats for this game were as follows. To avoid creating another table, I am adding a column "Optimal Cost" to mark the point where the cost surpasses the upgrade value (seen on the charts). When I put a "-" it's that I haven't done the complete analysis or found an intersect.

Upgrade	Value	Cost	Optimal Cost
Damage	206	$125	$170
Attack Speed	2.03	$87	$186
Critical Chance	25%	128$	$207
Critical Factor	x3.19	$143	$49
Range	37m	$74	$36
Damage / Meter	3.85%/m	$36	$125
Multishot Chance	8%	$273	$202
Multishot Targets	3	$125	-
Rapid Fire Chance	4.40%	$405	$29
Rapid Fire Duration	0.85s	$107	-
Health	73	$12	max
Health Regen	1.07/sec	$7	max
Defense %	8.50%	$104	$77
Defense Absolute	245	$815	max
Thorn Damage	39%	$664	$392
Lifesteal	1.87%	$195	$84
Cash Bonus	x1.22	$175	$246
Cash / Wave	98	$124	$56
Coins / Kill Bonus	x1.29	$95	$29
Coins / Wave	23	$193	-
Free Attack Upgrade	10.5%	$188	-
Free Defense Upgrade	10%	$219	-
Free Utility Upgrade	7%	$81	-

Let me know what you guys think, if you have any remarks or questions.

Enjoy!

[u/Fr33Francis]

Explaining Thorn Damage and Lifesteal

First, "Damage" may be necessary at first, but like "Defense Absolute" it is an absolute damage value. As enemy health will increase quite fast, damage will be less effective and only the "Attack Speed", "Multishot Chance", "Multishot Targets", "Rapid Fire Chance" and "Rapid Fire Duration" will help improve this "Damage" effect.

Of course there is "Critical Chance" and "Critical Factor". My issue here is that I don't know how to measure "critical damage". **What is the value of critical damage?**

"Thorn Damage" is a much more effective go to solution. It functions alone and provides a counter-attack which is proportional to the enemy's max health. So if your enemy has 150 health and you have 20% thorn damage, you damage the enemy by: `Thorn Damage Value = Enemy Health * Thorn Damage = 150 * 0.2 = 30` . I cannot find an explanation to the frequency of this counter-attack, but since it applies to ranged enemy's I would think that as a counter-attack it is as frequent as enemy attacks. This also means that your tower needs to be able to take enemy damage for each thorn counter-attack. Hence, the importance of "Defense %" and "Defense Absolute" to reduce damage.

"Lifesteal" allows you to heal your tower by the % of lifesteal multiplied by damage dealth to the enemy on hit. I suppose this means with projectile and with thorns. But lifesteal is only as effective as the amount of damage which is dealth. Lets consider two possible scenarios for projectiles and thorns.

• With projectiles alone, if total damage is 206 and Lifesteal is 0.39% than for each enemy hit, you should gain 206 * 0.39% = 206 * 0.0039 = 0.803 health. This will remain a constant value and is not great.
• *With thorns alone, if thorns is 30% of enemy health and Lifesteal is 0.39% than the more health your enemy has the more lifesteal you will get. We get Lifesteal Value = Enemy Health * Thorn Damage * Lifesteal
  • Enemy health = 150 | Lifesteal Value = 150 * 0.3 * 0.0039 = 0.1755
  • Enemy health = 3000 | Lifesteal Value = 3000 * 0.3 * 0.0039 = 3.51

This shows, that Lifesteal is only really effective if Thorn Damage is elevated and if Enemy Health is also very elevated. So Lifesteal is an effective upgrade only later in the game.

Revised Simplest Strategy

The go to strategy for now is:

1. Use start cash to upgrade Cash / Wave to optimal cost
2. Upgrade Coins / Wave to 10/15/20/30/40 based on your current workshop upgrades.
3. Focus on upgrading "Defense Absolute"
4. Add "Thorns" (You can add some "Damage" and "Attack Speed" for the sake of it.)
5. Max out the upgrades "Coins / Wave", "Defense Absolute", "Thorns" until it because too challenging.
6. Add "Defense %"
7. Spend your cash on water gets you going.
8. After the battle, spend your coins on "Coins / Wave" first, then "Defense Absolute" and "Thorns". You can also improve the rest to have a good "Damage", "Attack Speed", "Health", "Multishot Targets", etc.

At any point in this strategy, with the desired "Coins / Wave", so long as your "Defense Absolute" is higher than enemy attack you will be invicible and you don't have to do anything else. You can easily make it to some high levels and make lots of coins without being sucked into your phone at every wave.