Here's some stuff I've noticed while playing BMC, I figured it'd be useful to other players since most of this isn't well documented in the game. If you've found a neat thing you'd like to share, feel free! ##### General * Keep a MoabGraveyard mission handy as your BMC sandbox. Every tower is allowed, you start with lots of cash, and Moabs appear quickly. It's a great testing ground to confirm most of the tips below. * In BTD5, Moabs had 200 Hit Points. In BMC Moabs in City1 have 66% (132), while in City2 they have 80% (160). The 66% and 80% numbers surely affect all blimps, but it's not a quick test to confirm. * On wave 31, Blimps go back to their BTD5 hit points, and gain more HP and speed in later rounds. * On wave 31, Bloons stop dividing and ceramic shells go from 10 layers to 38 layers. This makes anti-ceramic upgrades (4/x Dart, 3/x Spac) better, and makes things easier for towers that get overrun easily (Ninja, Wizard, Sniper), but is weakens some upgrades (3/x Sniper since Bloons have 46 layers instead of 18, Glue because he doesn't slow Ceramics so he's slowing 8 pops worth of bloon rather than 84). * Some useful hotkeys are fast forward or start wave (spacebar), sell (backspace), left upgrade (comma or "<"), right upgrade (period or ">"). Every tower has the same hotkeys as in BTD5. The tower hotkeys can also switch buildings in the city view Upgrades tab. * The value of bloons decreases in later waves. Initially bloon value is a little over 100%, but after about 5 waves it'll drop to 100%, later it'll drop to 70%, 20%, and by about wave 28 onwards bloons will be worth 5% of their normal value. The exact rounds of the changes vary with CT Tier, tile difficulty, etc. If you're relying on 3/x Village or 4/x Engineer for extra income, it might be worth selling them in later rounds and replacing them with 2/x Vlilage or 3/x Engineer so you can recover most of the money spent on their expensive income generating upgrades. * DDTs count as Black (so no explosions), Lead (so no sharp bits), and Camo. 2/3 Spike Factory, 2/3 Sniper (kind of expensive), and Bomb and Buccaneer abillities work well without Village support, but using x/3 Village is a great solution. * Most projectiles and explosions do 1 damage, so good Blimp or Boss towers are those with fast attacks, lots of projectiles, or bonus damage. Examples include 3/x or 2/3 Tacks (while big slow targets pass over them), 4/x Ninja, 2/3 Bomb (the 2/x Frags do a few extra damage but only to one blimp), Spike Factories (especially x/3), Dartlings, Snipers, x/3 Ice (when it gets lucky), 4/x Ace, etc. * When the Bosses Blastapopulous or Vortex stun or slow one of your towers, you can cure the tower by upgrading or Overclocking it, or by placing, selling, or upgrading a neary Village. There will still be a stun or slow graphic on your tower, but it's attack rate won't be hindered. Blastapopulous always stuns the most expensive towers, so if you're placing 3/0 Tacks under a Village, Blasta will stun the village (but the village doesn't attack anyways). * The Bloon Beacon and Monkey v Monkey attacks land on the tiles with the lowest cash reward, so if you're playing MvM then make sure to capture any really tough tiles before something terrible lands on them. * When you complete a tile, you get $1 for every life not lost ($2 on Hardcore), so the Cuddly Bear item (+20 Lives per use, max once per round) from City2's ZZZZOMG mission can give you a lot of city cash (for me it's usually worth an extra farm or two). * Besides Camo Dust, all items found in treasure chests are found in City 1. * When a tile is worth about $750, there's a very good chance that the first Moab will be on wave 6, the first BFB on wave 14, and the big threat of the tile (ZOMG, DDTs, BlimpPack) on wave 22, at around $840 those things appear one wave earlier (e.g. wave 5 Moab). This depends a bit on wether the track is considered hard (e.g. Mirage Desert, YMY Forest, Totem Poles Jungle) or easy (e.g. Flower Grass). ##### Dart Monkey * The +X% Pierce of BlessedDart or MonkeyKnowledge only means +1 Pierce every few attacks. For example, if you had +20% Pierce, then your 3/0 Dart would pop up to 18 Bloons for 4 attacks, and up to 19 bloons on the 5th attack. * The x/4 Fanclub Ability says it'll transform the nearest 10 Darts, but it'll actually transform the first 9 Darts (regardless of position), and the x/4 Dart using the ability. Since it's only the first 10 that get transformed, you can't make a few x/4 Darts to transform dozens of Darts. This ability has some other bugs mentioned in the Kongregate BMC bug thread. ##### Tack Shooter * 4/x Tack can hit up to 60 targets per attack, and will ignore other targets after that cap. * 3/x Tack attacks slower than 2/x, while x/3 Tack attacks faster than x/2; 2/3 Tacks attack almost exactly twice as fast as 3/2 Tacks, but the Blades are more likely to hit things and they have +1 Pierce. * x/4 Tack ability's Blades will never damage Camo, Lead, or Frozen bloons, even with x/3 Village support. These Blades seem to hit any number of targets. ##### Sniper Monkey * 0/0 Snipers can pop Frozen bloons (1/x upgrade not needed), 0/3 Sniper can pop Leads (1/3 not needed). * Snipers are the only tower that is never restricted. * x/4 Sniper ability is the only non-farm method of generating income that doesn't decrease in later waves, so it's pretty mandatory for Temples on farmless CTs. You make more money the longer you delay each round. Stall bloons by overlapping 1/1 Ice towers and stop ZOMGs with Overclocked 4/1 Snipers under 2/x Village, in either case let only 0/4 Snipers pop things and the rounds will take a long time to pass so you can call in lots of crates from each 0/4 Sniper. Each crate yields $500 to $1499. * 4/x Snipers hitting the same Blimp at the same time won't stun the blimp any longer, so try to keep the Snipers firing out of sync. You can bring them out of sync by upgrading one, Overclocking one, or by placing, selling, or upgrading a Village near one of the Snipers. If you just kept some Snipers under 2/x Village while some others were under no Village, then they'll rarely fire in sync (maybe keep some as 4/0 with some at 4/1 in both Village cases). * An Overclocked 4/1 Sniper under 2/x Village will completely stop a ZOMG (you might also need some MK ranks for Sniper attack speed). It's not too hard to Overclock a few 4/1 Snipers under a 2/x Village to keep a few ZOMGs all stopped (just try not to Overclock them into being in sync). * If two Snipers are firing in sync and shoot at the same target, then the Bloon will first be split into lesser bloons by one of the Sniper shots, and the other Sniper shot will be aimed at the first of the lesser bloons (so two Snipers targeting Strong isn't very effective if they're firing in sync). ##### Ninja Monkey * x/3 Ninja's bomb can hit up to 60 targets of any type. * x/4 Ninja's ability slows everything that has entered the screen within the last few seconds, and everything that enters for the next 15 seconds (the ability description is closest to the truth). Sabotaged Blimps will burst into lesser sabotaged blimps and Ceramics even if the ability duration is long over. * When using 4 x/4 Ninjas to slow everything permanently, it's a good idea to have another ability around that you can use as a clock. I like using x/4 Sniper's ability because it's cooldown is 60 seconds, and when it's recharged 0%, 25%, 50%, and 75%, I use x/4 Ninja Sabotage. x/4 Spac Storm is another good ability, the spikes last about 8 seconds so if you have 8 Spacs and use the ability whenever the spikes start fading, then use Sabotage after every other Storm. ##### Bomb Shooter * 0/0 Bombs can hit up to 40 targets, 0/1 hits up to 50, 0/2 hits up to 55 targets. Every explosion of 3/x Bomb has these limits, so every attack could potentially hit about 400 targets (some large targets might get hit a few times). * 4/x Bomb can pop Black and Zebra bloons without MK or Village support. * x/4 Bomb ability can hit Camo targets without Village or MK support. The damage this does to ZOMGs can cascade down to lesser Blimps similar to how a Sniper's shot pierces layers, if you time it well then you can Assassinate a low wave (less than wave 31) ZOMG so that it is removed completely. This ability seems to do 400 damage to Bosses (i.e. you earn $400 per use). ##### Ice Tower * Frozen Black bloons seem to protect some nearby bloons from Mortar, Bomb, Pineapple, and Wizard explosions. x/2 Mortar's BurnyStuff can still affect frozen Black bloons, but might only be applied to one of them at a time. * This tower can hit any number of targets in range, while most area effects in BMC can only hit about 40 to 60 targets. * When under an x/3 Village, a 2/x Ice tower will attack Blimps (it'll just do 1 damage, and maybe mess you up if you were hoping to quickly free the Ceramics falling out of a Moab). * Bloons frozen by x/3 Ice will not break into shards if those bloons are also being slowed by 3/x Ice (so don't pair those two Ice types together). * 3/x Ice will never slow Camo bloons even with Village or MK support, but bloons frozen by 4/x Ice will freeze Camo bloons on contact, and those camo bloons will move slower when thawed (proably requires 4/1 Ice). * x/3 Ice has a hidden freeze-duration boos (0/3 will freeze for the same duration as 1/0), so 1/3 Ice can permanently freeze bloons without the support of MK, Village, or Shard of Everfrost. x/3 Ice shards will pop Frozen but not pop Lead bloons, but 2/x Ice will pop them, so 2/3 Ice for the win. 1/3 Ice can be handy if you want to save up the Bloons to form a ShardBomb (set it off with Mortar or x/2 Dartling). * The radius of a 0/0 Spike factory and a 3/x Ice are the same (after some ranks of Ice MK that increase radius, you might want to compare to a non-spac tower such as Wizard or Bomb). This is handy to consider when trying to place a 3/x Ice so that the outer few pixels of his slow effect are able to slow bloons without freezing them (about the middle of a bloon needs to be in range for it to be frozen, but if almost any part is in range then it'll be slowed). Slowing without Freezing is very handy when pairing with towers that can't pop Frozen. ##### Boomerang Thrower * The spinny blades of 4/0 Boomer can pop Camo, Leads, and Frozen without Village or MK support. They seem to pop any number of things, and do at least 1 damage per blade per rotation (it's hard to test, but they might do 1 damage each per quarter rotation). * 3/x Boomerang can hit up to 40 targets, 2/x hits up to 12. ##### Monkey Buccaneer * You get no income from the Blimps removed by x/4 Bucc. This ability can be especially useful on very high waves were Blimps have very high hitpoints. ##### Monkey Ace * x/3 Ace gets a pretty big attack speed boost. He's not that bad really, but not as easy to use as 3/x. * 4/x Ace's missiles do 2 damage each and pop Black and Zebra Bloons, so 4/2 Ace is able to damage DDTs without Village Support. ##### Mortar Monkey * There is a delay between Mortar firing and the explosion at target. The delay is based on the distance between target and Mortar. With two Mortar, one next to target and other very far, they fire in sync but explode nicely out of sync. * 4/x Mortar pops Black and Zebra bloons without MK or Village support, this seems to hit about 100 targets, but any other mortar hits up to 40. * x/4 Mortar ability stuns both Bloons and Blimps (description is incorrect). It's the only thing that stuns DDTs (about 1 second, other blimps stunned as if by 4/x Sniper). * x/4 Mortar is one of very few x/4 towers that is noticeably stronger (triple attack rate) than its x/3 tower. ##### Dartling Gun * If you right-click the game screen to open the Flash menu, the game ignores your mouse cursor so you can move it away (maybe open a new tab or minimize the window) without affecting the dartlings. Handy to "leave" the cursor over your farms while you check email or something. * 4/0 Dartling can damage any type of target, and doesn't seem to have a cap on the number of targets, so 4/2 and 4/0 are exactly the same. * x/4 Dartling is one of very few x/4 towers that is noticeably stronger (triple missiles) than its x/3 tower. * x/4 Dartling ability fires a missile at each target (potentially more than 100), and it launches them 5 times per use (about 2 seconds between launches). ##### Spike Factory * The track pixels a spac's spikes can land on are chosen when the spac starts its first round (i.e. the number in the top right changes while the spac is in play). If you place or remove a 1/x Village later then the spac will ignore newly reachable track pixels, or it might throw spikes to track pixels it can no longer reach. * The explosions of 4/x spac remove 4 layers of bloons, and apply Burny Stuff similar to x/2 Mortar (pretty hard to tell if it's exactly the same burny stuff, since the bloons tend to pop immediatly after). * If a spac can't reach the track, it throws spikes to the right. If you upgrade the range of the spac via 1/x Village in a later round, and it could then reach the track, then it will still throw spikes to the right (but they can land a little further away now). * Blimps travel over tunnels, so if you can lay spikes on top of the tunnel, then they'll pop the blimp and let the Ceramics fall down into the tunnel without removing any spikes. * +1 Pierce effects increase the size of the spike piles and spiked balls by 1 (you can even count the nails in the spike piles to confirm). * There are many tracks where a starting section of the bloon-path crosses or comes very close to and ending section of bloon-path. It's very effective if an x/3 Spac's spikes are placed on the later section of path so a Blimp in the earlier section might brush up to the spikes and pop, releasing their ceramics to continue along the earlier section of path instead of crashing into the rest of the Spac's spikes. Eradicate those relased ceramics before they reach the spike piles on the later section. * x/3 Spac spikes only do double damage to Bosses (i.e. If the pile has 12 spikes then you will get $24 from damaging the boss, so you did 24 damage), which is still very good. ##### Super Monkey * 4/x Super's beam shots do 3 damage, and receive +5 damage for every $30k spent on Glue, Ice, Wizard, Mortar/Bomb, or OtherStuffs, the shots receive +4 damage from $10k spent on one of those categories. The missile attacks of Temples do 2 damage each. * 0/3 Super can pop Leads and Frozen. * x/4 Super's ability can't hit Camo bloons, even with Village support. * 1/x Super attacks do 1 damage to Blimps despite looking like 2 projectiles. * 2/x Super attacks 50% faster than 0/x and 1/x, and 2/x Supers don't seem to benefit from 2/x Village, x/4 Engineer Overclock, or Boosts (they already attack as fast as anything can). ##### Monkey Apprentice * x/3 Wiz's little fire puffs can only hit 4 targets. Use these with x/1 or x/3 Village, or with Activated Ability MK Rank 4 (+1 Pierce) to increase the targets to 5-7. * x/4 Wiz's Phoenix is very useful for Consecrated Ground mission because when the going gets tough you can summon a bird, and then sell and remake (AKA cycle) the wizard to summon another bird. Keep repeating that until the going gets easy, each bird only costs about $1.5k. For me, about 4 birds (along with 3/0 Super, and a 0/3 Wiz) was enough for the BFB and whatever else appeared with it. ##### Monkey Village * x/3 Village adds another +1 Pierce over x/1 Village (so x/3 gives +2 Pierce total). * Villages do not boost one another aside from the discounting effect, so you need a 4/2 Village if you want that 4/x Village to target Camo bloons, and a 4/x Village doesn't seem to reduce the cooldown of x/4 Village. * 4/x Village's laser removes 2 layers per attack, and probably attacks as fast as a 2/x Super (so they do about the same damage as a 2/3 Super but to only 1 target and they cost more and have less range) * Overclocking a Village with x/4 Engineer increases its radius by about 20%. ##### Banana Farm * Rank 3 Monkey Knowlege (+1 Banana for 2/x Farm) applies to all Farms that aren't 0/x or 1/x (e.g. you get another crate from 4/x, and your 2/x Banks generate a little more cash during the round). * Rank 5, 10, 15 Farm Monkey Knowlege gives you bonus money based on your unspent money as long as you have at least one x/3 or x/4 Farm in play at the end of the round. The more money you've saved up the bigger the bonus (if you're saving up for Temples, it's common to have over $1M unspent, so a 2% bonus would give over $20k). A nice Math-fact for Compound Interest of X% is that your money doubles every 70/X turns (so $1M would become $2M after 35 rounds at 2% or after about 12 rounds at 6%, even if you weren't collecting money from Farms or popping stuff). * x/4 Farm upgrade is the only Tier 4 upgrade that needs no Special Buiding, and the only x/4 tower with no special ability. * Overclock does nothing for Farms. ##### Monkey Engineer * Foam patches can't land on Frozen bloons (the Foam is wasted), and is removed by DDTs (but at least the DDT lost Camo), but x/3 Village removes these limitations (it also lets the Foam damage everything instead of just Leads, which adds up to about 4-5 damage per 3/x Engineer to all targets, which is really great for the price). * 4/x Engineer Traps yield double the value of the trapped bloons when you click on a blinking trap, so although the trap might have been worth $500, only $250 of that was bonus income, which is still pretty great especially if you can fill the trap more than once a round (it fills from about 200 pops worth of Bloons, but if the bloons appear on top of the trap (e.g. a Moab pops on the trap from well timed Road Spikes), then those bloons might get caught too). The value bonus of Traps will stack with 3/x Village, so if you combined those on a stage with bonus pop-value (like Beacon's +100% or Dreadbloon's +50%),you can get a lot of cash (the best I've seen was about $2400 when a Moab burst on top of a Trap so I guess all 4 ceramics managed to get caught in it, it was a Beacon tile, with 3/x Village in play) * x/4 Engineer ability, Overclock, doubles the attack speed of a tower, but some towers already attack as fast as they can (like 4/x Ace already sped up by MK and 2/x Village, or a 2/x Super). * There is a bug with Overclock where if you end a battle after selecting the Overclock ability but before applying it to a tower (your mouse cursor shows the wrench), then the first tower you place in the next battle will be Overclocked. Moab Graveyard makes this pretty easy to confirm. ##### Road Spikes * If there's a nearby village, then Road Spikes are discounted like anything else, but they won't pop Lead/Frozen when near x/3 Village. * These do 11 damage per pile, and are very handy for testing the number of hit points in a Moab in Moab Graveyard. * A great strategy for early Moabs (wave 5 or 6), is to weaken them but when they're low on HP, let them continue until they pass over an Ice tower, then use a few Road Spikes to pop them so that all of their ceramics are caught by the Ice tower. This buys you lots of time to deal with the ceramics (maybe x/2 Dartling, x/2 Mortar, 2/x Glue, Snipers, 3/x Wizard, etc). ##### Pineapples * These can pop camo bloons, so are one of the cheapest methods of dealing with CamoLeads, as long as you aren't expecting to use many Pineapples. * If there's a nearby village, then Pineapples are discounted like anything else, but they won't pop Black/Zebra when near x/3 Village. * If you have Activated Ability Monkey Knowledge Rank 4 (+1 Pierce), and that effect is active, then Pineapples explode on contact. Once you get comfortable with trying all the things, and you feel like you've got BMC figured out, consider trying the Edge Race: make a new account and see if you can capture a tile from the edge of the map before city level 15 without using Crates, Special Items, or Bloonstones (i.e. Boosts, RedHotSpikes, starting with extra cash). It's pretty challenging, and an interesting way to approach things (which upgrades give the least XP, which buildings let you attempt the most tile types, etc). Feel free to relax some of those "rules" for your first few times until you want to make it a bit more challenging. Another neat play style is to capture tiles only if they fit a pattern, like a spiral (i.e. you capture 1 tile from the first shell (Reds), then almost all of the 2nd shell (Greens), 1 tile from the 3rd shell (Pinks), then almost all of the 4th shell (White/Blacks), etc), two-armed spiral (a bit easier since if you get blocked by a tough tile or Mission then you can capture along the other spiral arm for a while), or maybe a Spider Web (easier start since you'd capture 8 Reds, 8 Greens, 8 Pinks, etc, but you'll be into Blimp tiles fast but at least you can tackle the easiest of 8 options each time). If you liked learning these bits about BMC, then consider taking a look at a post Lifedrainer wrote a couple years ago: https://www.kongregate.com/forums/3765-bloons-monkey-city/topics/603434-everything-you-need-to-know-to-make-your-bmc-stay-a-little-easier

If a non zomg tile has 29 or 30 rounds, that tile will have at least 1 zomg at the end of the tile along with the ddts, moab bunches, or bfb bunches.

The AC gets double boosted from overclock. Both the # of planes and the # of projectiles per plane are increased.

neville u must be dumb a non-zomg tile wouldn't have zomgs or ddts unless it showed the zomg before attacking

Thanks for the tips!

@Falconnaissance - Thanks, I doubled checked and agree that Overclocked 4/x Boat launched planes faster and that the planes also attacked faster (a bit hard to tell with their forward guns, but very clear with their little bursts of darts). In my test, I put two 4/1 Buccs side by side and Oveclocked only one of them, and then compared planes. @Neville00 - Thanks, I checked on a 28 wave MoabPack tile and a 27 wave DDT tile, and depite the attack screen showing a ZOMG and then DDT as the stongest Blimip, no ZOMGs showed up. I'm content with that test, but I suppose I could look around and see if I've got a 29 round tile around and confirm that the ZOMG shows up :)

Really usefull informations here. Thanks alot for that :)

Hardcore mode is the easiest way to get easy money and bloonstones, if you have a choice, always do this. On MvM, you can enough bloontonium to send a lvl 40 an attack if you are lower than that.

Each spike pile from Spike Factory seems to last for 60 seconds. I used x/4 Sniper ability cooldown as a clock, and timed the duraction of a single pile from 0/0 Spike Factory and a single pile from 2/3 Spike Factory. They matched, so I think the piles from all upgrades last 60 seconds (piles from the ability seem to last about 5 seconds).

This should be pinned at the top.