A game about where, not how fast
Tower Defense asks for no quick fingers. The enemies always walk the same road at the same pace, and your towers aim and fire on their own. Every decision is about placement and money: which square, which tower, and whether the next coin goes on a new tower or a better one. A game is twenty waves long, and the choices you make before wave 5 decide a lot of what happens on wave 18.
Read the road first
Before you build anything, look at the map. The road enters on the left and ends at your gate, and every bend in it is an opportunity. A tower on the inside of a corner reaches the road on two sides, so it gets roughly twice as long to shoot at everything that passes. On the Meadow there are several U-turns where one square covers three stretches of road; on the Dunes there are only two corners, which is a large part of why Hard is hard.
Trees, rocks and ponds block a few squares on each map, so the very best spot is sometimes taken. The next best is usually one square further along the bend.
The four towers
- Archer, 50 gold. Cheap and quick. Two Archers on a bend hold the first three waves on their own. Armour takes a few points off every arrow, so they fade against Brutes.
- Cannon, 80 gold. Slow, but every shell bursts and hits all enemies close by. It is the answer to Swarmlings, which come in long, tight lines, and it gets better the more crowded the road is.
- Frost, 60 gold. Barely scratches anything, but it chills the enemy it hits so it walks slower for a couple of seconds. Everything near a Frost tower gets more shots in. At level 3 its bolts chill a small area.
- Ballista, 110 gold. The longest reach and the heaviest bolt, and the bolt ignores armour. Brutes and the Warden are what it is for.
Who is coming
Walkers set the pace. Runners arrive on wave 3: fast and fragile, they slip past slow towers, so make sure something quick covers the end of the road. Swarmlings arrive on wave 4 in crowds of a dozen or more, which is the moment for a first Cannon. Brutes arrive on wave 5, slow and armoured, and the first Ballista should be up by then. The Warden, a boss, leads waves 10, 15 and 20. Every wave's enemies have more health than the last, so a defence that held easily five waves ago will not hold now without upgrades.
Upgrade or build?
Each tower has three levels. An upgrade adds damage, reach and speed, and because the tower is already in a good spot, upgrading is often the better buy than a new tower in a worse one. A rough rhythm that works: build until you have four or five towers on the best squares, then alternate between upgrading the busiest one and adding one more.
Selling returns 70% of everything spent on a tower. It is worth doing when a tower turns out to be in a poor spot, or when you would rather have a Ballista where an early Archer stands.
Targeting
Every tower starts on First: it shoots the enemy furthest along the road, the one closest to getting through. That is right almost all of the time. Switch a Ballista to Strongest before a boss wave, so it spends every bolt on the Warden instead of on the Swarmlings around it.
Lives and levels
Most enemies cost one life at the gate, a Brute two and the Warden five. Easy starts you with 20 lives and 220 gold on the Meadow, with slightly weaker enemies. Medium is River Bend with 15 lives and 200 gold. Hard is the Dunes, with 10 lives, 180 gold and tougher enemies, where a single Warden leak takes half your lives.
The most waves you have cleared and your wins are kept for each level. A good first goal is to reach wave 10 on Medium; holding all twenty on Hard is the real test.
