Bloons Tower Defence Battles (BTD Battles) is an online tower defence game made by ninjakiwi. In case you have never played it before, here’s a very simple walk-through:
1. Place towers
2. Send bloons to enemy to increase your eco (your income)
3. Upgrade towers
4. Repeat those steps until someone wins.
Of course, it’s a lot harder and strategical than this, but that’s the main idea. A big part of this awesome game is the battle arenas. This is not only where you make, and lose, most of your coins, but also where you compete in the weekly competition to earn additional coins.
There are many uniquely named arenas that each have a different entry price. As well as this, if you pay to become a member of the monkey club, which is more than worth it in my opinion, you get access to special club arenas which have fun rules and restrictions which enhance and vary the ways you can play. The rules in each arena change every 24 hours so you can still play low-stake arenas without getting bored. Other perks of the monkey club include early map access and 2x coins from the store, permanently.
The first arena, and one of my preferred arenas, is Bananza. In this rule set, all the bloons that you send to your opposition increase your eco double the original amount. As well, you start off with double starting cash and your default eco is doubled. This helps massively as you can send more bloons as your making more money than in other arenas. The thing I love about this arena is that because you make money faster, you upgrade towers faster, which means the game flow is slightly different as you have completely different towers. This also allows you to see the type of players both you and your opponent are (and you can learn strategies from what other people do). In other rule sets, you can end up with very similar game plans as you have to use cheaper towers that are still effective and most people tend to stick to certain towers. For me, this tends to get fairly boring.
One of the more difficult, but still fun arenas, is Random 3 (also referred to as R3). This one is fairly difficult because both players receive the same three towers which makes for similar strategies. That doesn’t seem too difficult does it? The difficulty kicks in when you realise that you and your opponent will probably have similar tactics and people tend to copy each other which means that you have to be careful with every move as one wrong move could mean that your opponent holds off the waves slightly longer. Another challenging twist is that you won’t always get strong towers. You could get garbage towers that have low bloon-popping potential. This is what makes me love this arena because you have to use weird tower combinations that you wouldn’t normally pick as they aren’t solid towers.
Another arena is Mega Boosts. In all other arenas, you get 3 Tower Boosts and 3 Bloon Boosts. The Tower Boosts allow you towers to double their attack speed for 10 seconds. The Bloon Boosts make the bloons that you send in the next 20 seconds move quicker. Because this is MEGA boosts, they need something cooler than just upgrading the speed of tower attacks and bloons so instead of just upgrading that, the Tower Boosts upgrade the tower on one upgrade path and the Bloon Boosts upgrade the bloons you send to the next bloon difficulty (for example: sending red bloons while having the boost enabled will turn the reds into blue bloons as they’re the next difficulty of bloon). Personally, I don’t really like this arena as it’s pretty much the same as classic rules because boosts don’t get used that much, but the concept is still very cool.
Probably my least favourite arena is Play with Fire. In this Arena, every rule stays the same but one core thing changes. Any bloons you send to your opponent, also get sent to you. I don’t really like this arena because even though it requires strategy and knowledge, which I like, it is quite difficult. Although, I don’t really like it, I still think it’s quite fun. This is because you always have to be one step ahead of your opponent because if you rush your opponent with bloons, whoever can hold off the most amount of bloons will be the one to win and if your opponent has better quality towers, you’re going to lose.
Possibly the most consistently tricky arena is Speed. This arena is called as such because that’s the whole idea: speed. All the bloons move quicker, you generate income quicker and all bloons can be sent TWO rounds earlier than normal. But what does stay the same? The tower attack speed. This means that quantity is sometimes better than quality as having a fully upgraded tower that shoots slow but quality darts isn’t going to as effective as multiple none-upgraded towers that shoot the same speed because more darts equals more bloons popped. I enjoy this arena as some of the more over-powered towers like the Ring of Fire, aren’t very effective.
These are all the different rule sets but there are more arenas because these can be paired.
By itself, my favourite arena is R3 because having to use weird tower combinations is fun and sometimes the mindset of players isn’t ‘who can be strategical and completely stop the bloons whilst rushing the opponent with bloons’. Sometimes your mindset is ‘who can let the least amount of bloons through while making the opponent let more through?’ which I like. Also, being able to upgrade your towers fully is fun and can make the game last longer rather than being over quite quickly.
When paired, my favourite arena is the R3 Bananza arena. Similarly to before, R3 is great because you use unusual towers but like other arenas, you start with little money and a low eco, so having Bananza in the mix allows you to be able to upgrade the random towers that you have to use.
So to conclude, I love R3 and Bananza arenas the most, and don’t really like Play With Fire. Also, as a fan of Tower Defences, this game is one of my favourites. If you enjoy tower defence and/or strategy games, I highly recommend this game. If you enjoyed this article and/or you wanna check out this amazing game, which you should, it is available for free on Steam and also available at ninjakiwi.com along with free to play versions of some other BTD games. The website version of BTD is no where near as good though, unlike the others.