Armour, Shields and Flyers

Most lost games are not lost to numbers. They are lost to one kind of enemy that your towers cannot handle.

• Armour
• Shields
• Flyers
• Special cases

Armour

Armour soaks up small hits, so towers that fire many weak shots lose most of their damage to it. Who carries it, lightest first:

The answers:

• Sniper Tower: huge single shots (150 damage at level 1) from very long range. Put it on high ground with a clear view, and remember it cannot hit enemies within 4 tiles of it.
• Missile Silo: an armour specialist, and it hits air too. Build two or three side by side: each one gives its neighbours +25% damage, +20% fire rate and +10% armour damage.
• Railgun Tower: one charged slug through a whole line of enemies. Aim it down a long straight.
• Laser Tower: its beam strips health, armour and shield faster the longer it holds one target.
• Magnet Tower: tears the armour off enemies near it, presses the scrap into slugs and fires them back. With no armour coming in it runs dry, so it shines on armoured waves, and it leaves them bare for your Cannons.
• Acid Tower, SawBlade Tower and Cluster Mortar also cut through armour, but only on the ground.

Shields

The Hexguard (80 shield) and the UFO (30 shield) carry shields that must be worn down before their health goes. Chains and beams do this best:

• Lightning Tower and Tesla Tower: lightning that jumps between enemies, strongest where they are bunched up. Enemies the Lightning Tower has shocked draw more chains.
• Laser Tower: a beam that gets stronger the longer it holds one target. Let it finish what it starts.
• The Sniper Tower and Railgun Tower are good against shields too.

Flyers

Razorwing, Drone, Bug, UFO, Raider and the Blimp Boss fly over the path. The Triangle UFO (from wave 20) is worse: it ignores the path and flies straight from the entrance to the base, so towers lined up along the road may never see it.

Ground-only towers cannot hit any of them: the Acid Tower, SawBlade Tower, Cluster Mortar, Water Pump, Gravity Well and Portal Tower. Every other tower that attacks hits air: mix in Cannons, Cold Snaps, a Missile Silo or a Helicopter, which lifts off when a wave starts, reaches enemies other towers miss and lands when the wave is over.

• Tips
• For the Triangle UFO, put air defence round the base itself, where every flight path ends.
• The Drone Hive's drones chase a target well beyond the tower's own range: good for finishing flyers that slip past.
• Count your anti-air before wave 4 and again before wave 20. Those are the two jumps.

Special cases

• Inferno: slows and freezes do nothing to it, and its fiery aura clears them off the enemies around it, so Cold Snap does little near an Inferno. The Water Pump is built for it: it only targets Infernos, stands on a water tile, and gets stronger for every water tile next to it. One hit puts an Inferno out for good. Kill Infernos first in a mixed group so your slows work on the rest.
• Domeguard (from wave 25): gathers enemies at the entrance, then raises a bubble in front of your strongest point and carries them through for 10 seconds while ground towers' shots bounce off. Only planes get in over the top, and their shots ignore its armour. When it dies, everything inside dies with it.
• UFO: it stops over armour plates knocked off onto the path and turns them into new Clankers, as strong as the wave the scrap came from: old scrap makes more but weaker ones. Kill it quickly on armoured waves.

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