Keys may be the most important resource in the game. This is a strategy for maximizing key earnings. However, you'll be dissapointed to find out, you'd be best starting fresh... Premise: The best way to earn keys is that 1 spawn = 1 kill, with extra spawns costing as little as possible. If, like me, you may have had this right as you hit wave 500.. but that quickly stopped. Why is that? Dynamic scaling. So in simplified terms: n = max wave d = your total dps (like rain of fire II calculates off of) x = boss health y = gem/scroll costs so, you end up with something like this: (x^n / d) * y = scroll/gem cost per kill. Notice how it's both exponentially scaled (more spawns to kill) AND more costly to spawn? Ouch. So, quite simply, you want to start a fresh game, hit wave 500, and never push any higher. Especially avoid leveling your gold find towers (especially the god) and your towers that have high single target damage. You will want to end up with 3 sets of towers: Set 1: Gold farming set. This set shouldn't even get close to approaching level 500. This is your afk set. You want to arrange your towers so short range is first, mid range is second, long range is third, and your god is last. Or (alternatively) least damage to most. The idea here is to try and stack gold multipliers. I haven't tested enough to find out which configurations lead to the most gold overnight, but either nets me a lot. Keep in mind, even if you leave all these towers at level 1 (and you should), tournament cards/auras/research/tier ups/collections/ad-rwards, will keep increasing their dps, so don't assume that their dps will stay unchanged. Set 2: Towers you don't use on a regular basis. These are your towers for hitting level 500. Once you achieve that, you don't use this set again. Set 3: Your DPS towers. These are your normal set for the typical strategy, except replace God of Wealth with another tower. These towers you *only* use for the challenge map, and defeating bosses. I recommend leveling one much higher than the rest. (God of Might is my choice since fastest attack speed). That way, you generally only have to swap one out for defeating bosses. I recommend also using the mythic Power Shot III and or Pierce Shot III, as they'll help defeat Challenge bosses that have really annoying abilities (Zulrajas doesn't get slowed by towers. One teleports, and one heals itself if it gets below a certain threshold, which can be bursted through). Also, if you aren't going to buy all the bundles, or really want to maximize this strategy, avoid buying double damage. Long term, you spend $2 extra if you buy it seperately. Double gold is still useful early on. So, the strategy goes like this: Hit wave 500 with your "discard" tower set. Intentionally lose by removing towers. Whichever tower type you have the most of, leave for last (once they're the only towers left, a shield bubble will make you lose). Immediately swap to your gold farm set, which stays out 99% of the time. At low wave numbers (you want a buffer between your max wave and where you're at), swap to your dps tower(s) and run bosses (epic boss / challenge boss). Spending scrolls and gems to buy more spawns until you're out. Ignore tiering up your heroes for now, step 1 is farm a ton of keys. After you're done, swap back to your gold farm set. Rinse and repeat whenever you fight bosses. Playing a moderate amount (with having the game on afk most of the time), it's possible to farm 10 keys a day. I'm sure you could get much higher if you played a lot. Use your gold to level up your "Power Spells" which don't affect the dynamic scaling of bosses. This will also make it easier and faster to kill challenge bosses, especially Zulrajas, who is immune to your tower's special attacks (spells), but affected by your "power spells." Also, save some gold to level up your dps heroes. Pull out your dps towers for challenge map, it doesn't affect scaling. Don't worry about getting high ranks in tournaments (for now). Of course, go far left in the skill tree, to max Bounty Hunter ASAP, to get more keys, before anything else. Once you have farmed enough keys to satisfy you (for pretty much forever, keys are very hard to get after you stop this), return to the normal wave pushing strategy. As a note, it's 5000 gems and scrolls to get 3 more challenge boss spawns at wave 500, with 1 Trillion health. Compare that to 10,000 at wave 700 with 5 trillion health... Q/A Q. What about gold? Don't I care that higher waves give more gold? A. You will earn far more gold if you get tons of keys and put them in "Coin Lover." Q. What about tournament cards? Won't I be missing out? A. Once you finish farming keys, your max wave will explode, which will get you into top ranks in top brackets, earning you more rare cards long term. Plus, you will still grow for awhile from tournaments. Q. Doesn't the extra gems/scrolls balance out extra challenge costs? A. Not even close. Q. It only takes me an average of X times to kill a challenge boss, is it really that much better? A. Well, if you take 1, divided by X, that's the percentage of keys you are getting compared to this strategy. Q. This doesn't seem as much fun to me. A. Sorry, I can't change how the game works! Q. But I already spent X dollars! A. Well, it's $48 to buy all the bundles again. and $49.99 to buy 150 keys. So if you want to use this strategy to farm more than 150 keys (+ any keys you have already bought + any keys you have already earned), it's worth it. If you've already got tons and tons of keys, it's not worth it. Q. Can I have multiple games going? So I can try both strategies at once? A. You could have one on kongregate and one on your phone. Or multiple android accounts with multiple emails and using Bluestacks. Or multiple kongregate accounts and multiple emails. I wouldn't normally condone this, but there's no way to "support" your other accounts (cheat) and I'm sure the dev isn't going to turn down extra purchases... Just don't be advertising the fact, and you'll probably be fine. Q. Can I start fresh with my current purchases? A. I don't know of an easy way to start over (like some games have). You could maybe try asking the dev, but there's no support email in game...

I think a lot of what you say makes sense but you make it sound more complicated than it needs to be. Perhaps because you're trying to convince people who are already way in to the game to start fresh. I saw the spreadsheet with the increasing cost to spawn bosses (and noticed the difficulty of killing those bosses right when I hit level 500) and decided to camp here and get as many keys as I could right off the bat. From that viewpoint, the advice I would give to new players is: 1. Work your way up to level 500 however you feel like. Try to selectively level your most powerful towers along the way and leave your old ones unleveled as you surpass them. 2. Once you get to level 500 farm for gems/scrolls. The best way to do this AFK is to level up your god of wealth as high as possible and place him first. Keep a couple of mid-level towers of melee/magic right behind him to finish off enemies with green shields. As your DPS boosts improve, keep switching these back-up towers to lower and lower DPS towers so they reliably fail in the mid 400s. Your AFK fails will come from mobs with green shields since your god of wealth will 1-hit pretty much everything else. This way you max your farm speed from gems/scrolls by churning through levels as quickly as possible. 3. Use gold to level up your top tier towers which you switch to when you summon your bounty bosses or for challenges. Save all your gems/scrolls for summoning (and the 2x speed of course which you should keep running as much as possible). Keep your max level as low as possible for cheap spawns (even going from 500->600 max level results in half as many spawns for the same number of scrolls/gems) I"m not sure why in your strategy guide you talked about your never again set of towers. I usually play AFK and my best towers were originally my backup towers right when I hit level 500. Eventually my backup towers switched to ultra-rares, rares, uncommons, and eventually commons. Controlling your backup DPS is a great way to titrate where you will fail from those green-shielded mobs when you are AFK. Right now I have a rare melee tower (gladiator) at level 25 with 2.5m DPS and a common magic tower (druid) at level 25 with 4.98M DPS as my backups. With them following my 525 god of wealth they usually lose to a shielded mob around 500-520 (about 30 levels below my max wave since I once got distracted while my high dps towers were in place) You also recommended a gold farming set with your low level towers arranged from least damage to most. I can't speak to if this actually provides better gold, but that seems counterproductive since the main point of grinding at level 500 is to get keys and for that you want to 1-hit as many enemies as possible to get to the next boss/chest that drops gems/scrolls as quickly as possible. My question to you is how long is it worth grinding keys for? I've been here for ~5 days and have maxed out all my skill tree and have the 4 infinite DPS boosts up to ~38 each. At this rate, I'm getting ~30k gems/scrolls per day which equates to ~40-50keys/day. My DPS is now high enough that I don't even need to switch towers to kill the bounty boss (my god of wealth does it within a few hits). What's your recommended level for the DPS boosts before letting loose and pushing your max wave?

jesus. I feel like ive lost brain cells reading this. Hopefully you are not following your own "advice" , as it is purely detrimental to progression in this game

What i want to know .. is why you have to have a bunch of crazy strategy just to farm keys which should be a normal game feature.. why do I have to halt game progress just to get what should be something obtainable by normal playing.. to have to do all these crazy strategy just to get keys is stupid... with no way besides pulling towers or intentionally making/leaving weak towers is bullcrap... im at the point where I need to farm keys.. game has auto idled me to wave 600 and I am not going to make a new game.. so basically my game is now over as I am not doing all the stupid BS needed just to get keys.. I have 1 key after 3 weeks now.. so yeah.. game is done for me

The health get up everytime you beat the boss, so I think this kind of guide is pretty much stupid. I'm currently at wave 8k+++ and maxed out everything with Skills. Also got 25 levels for each DPS. Nothing to worry.

My observations on earning keys... You want each bounty boss to yield as many keys as possible. Use your first keys to earn the Bounty Hunter upgrade to get two keys per boss. Use event tickets to earn the Bounty Keys upgrade to get three keys per boss. You want to be able to kill every bounty boss. Their strength is based on your max wave. If you increase your hero's DPS and abilities while keeping your max wave low you will have no trouble with a 100% kill ratio. Keeping the max wave around 500 works (and I did that for three weeks), but I found that there was not a lot of difference in bounty bosses earned as I increased the max wave 2000. Spawns were more expensive but resources were earned faster. I got 30 keys/day at when the max wave was 2000 and closer to 40 at wave 500. The previous posts scared me as I expected a huge drop off in keys as the max wave increased. There was some reduction but not really dramatic. After you max out the keys/boss, I recommend earning the Master Ranger and maxing out the Love of Loot. It increases the scrolls and crystals dramatically and with max wave 2000 I earned 72 keys in a day. Always keep your God of Wealth as the first hero on any map to max gold earnings. That tower will kill everything except enemies in green bubbles and you can put one or two supporting heros (and the Master Ranger) behind it that fail at a max wave that you like. Gold's Glory is a nice Master Ranger upgrade that helps with gold earnings.