Hello there.
After some years in this game, I have decided to put together a guide for new players, that might get the game less frustrating for newcomers.
You might want to skip the general Stuff to the part where I explain how to get to Wave 70 and beyond.
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GENERAL
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Know your towers. To form a strategy, you need to Red the description of the towers carefully. Every Tower has a strategical value, even if you don't see it at first.
Kill the first challenge. It is possible. Just stash your tower cards until wave 7, then put everything on the field as the challenge spawns. This will get you some items and/or potions and therefore a good starting boost for the coming rounds.
Use one main tower (carry). Splitting exp and kills between towers is a bad idea and will get you stuck at some point most of the time.
Transmute, transmute, transmute. You have to transmute your Potions at the beginning. Just trash everything except yellow potions and blue water of live. Why? One of the most important things at start is getting your item chance up. This will lead to even mor potions, better items and for that a higher survivability.
Placement. Where should your carry tower be placed? This depends on what endgame tower you want to use. Check the range of that tower. Add the range from Helm of Hades and search for a place where it will have the most path to attack.
Support? Yes, please. Some strategies will need a specific support tower to get the most out of it. To be more specific: A darkness carry will need the Abyss King and you will want Stonecutters Temple for a Metropolis carry. Add this to your list: will my carry need a specific location? Keep that location free for it (or put ganesha on it, will explain that later.
Replacement. Every tower keeps items and consumed Potions when you replace it. Make use of that.
Auto wave is your friend. The impatience set will thank you for the saved seconds. You might even be dependant on this set for specific strategies.
Try new things out. When you have your personal strategy, you will want to improve it. There will always be some tiny thing to get a bit more out of your strategy, try new things out. Keep the stuff that works and leave the stuff that didn't.
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Early Strategies
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Now real talk. How does a newbie beat this early game thing?
First of all, you will need a viable beginning strategy. I will put the two (in my opinion) easyest up here. These are just for the early game part and will be replaced by better towers.
1. Wolves. They are many peoples favourites for a reason. These towers support each other, and most importantly your carry/main. I will not put the description up here, you can easily read it ingame.
-Beat the first few waves with a rabbit or dandelion, put it where your main carry will be.
-Build 1-2 Wolves behind it, preferably where they can't steal kills in the first few rounds.
-Switch rabbit/dandelion for a wolf.
-Plaster the rest of the field with Wolves to boost your carry.
Only your main/carry will get items and potions, the other towers are just to boost the main. They will gain levels and this might come handy, but your carry is the only important tower in the beginning.
Why use the wolves? Their ability to boost one specific tower and level the others meanwhile is unbeaten in several ways. You can bring up Ganesha easily and will have a sturdy main tower without using much potions.
2. Guards
Guards have gotten a similar ability (in regards of leveling) and are also able to boost each others damage. I prefer wolves myself because of the high crit chance.
-restart the game until you have at least two guards in your starting hand.
-Place your first guard where your carry/main will be. Place every guard you get in range of the first. Start at the point that is farthest from the spawn point to prevent kill stealing.
-place training holograms in range of your guards.
Why use guards? As said above, I prefer the wolves because of their high crit chance, but these guys can get you pretty far. You can even swap your carry for a templar at some time, but he will stop getting exp from the holograms that others kill.
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MULTICRIT
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So, you have put up your first defenses, rookie. Nice, but what is that? Mobs get past them? You reached wave 100 and lose? What happened?
We got ourselves past wave 70 or even 100 and still get crushed. Why is that?
The answer is pretty easy: Multicrit.
At some point in the game your damage %, critdmg and critrate will not keep up with the increasing wave HP and Armor. You will need multicrit.
What is that? Simply put, with multicrit, crits can crit. Critception.
How does that work?
For every +multicrit, your crits can crit again, but with an always decreasing chance. This is why we will need a crit rate beyond 100% at some point.
Without multicrit, no cookies for you.
So, where can I get that stuff from? - There are different ways out there.
Tower: Manitou will give Multicrit to towers in range.The Dark Forge will give you the Blade of darkness.
Items: Excalibur, Sword of darkness (Dark forge) , Frozen heart (careful, decreases crit rate), Specral daggers, Eldritch Pearl.
Hero: Lord Roderick
Potion: Tears of the Gods, Critical Dust (transmute epic stuff and hope)
You might not have some of these yet, but some are available all the time. Check your wizards cards, if you are not sure.
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Luck
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20% Luck. What the heck does that even mean?!
Luck is an easily overseen start in the game. Simply put, if something has a chance for anything to happen, luck will increase that chance.
Examples:
-Mrs. Jilly has a chance to instantly kill a target. Luck will increase it.
-Holgar the Horrible has a chance to produce mead. Luck will increase the chance. (this will come handy later)
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HANDY SUPPORT STRATEGIES
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This section will contain some side-strategies that might support in some way or another.
1. Yggdrasil/Wedding Rings/Cthulhu combo:
Cthulhu will make potions splash. (Also decreases the effects by 30%) The Rings and Yggdrasil duplicate potions for other towers. In combination this means:
Build Yggdrasil next to main/carry (same applies with any other tower plus wedding rings). Now, If you feed Yggdrasil (or the other tower) a potion, it will
a) Be duplicated for your carry
And
b) Splash to your carry.
This means (with a 30% decrease from Cthulhu) 140% Potion effect for your carry.
2. Snore Fox
Potion effects stay when you replace a tower. Make use of it. Duplicate Potions. Splash them. Replace the consumers with rabbits. Let the fox eat them and concentrate this nightmare of a chemistry set on one tower. Profit.
3.1 Ganesha/Wolves/Guards
Ganesha receives a level up every time a tower in range levels up. Make use of the Wolves ability to level up without doing much, the same applies to guards (remember, combine them with training holograms). You get a free lvl 99 tower in no time.
3.2 Ganesha/Acolyte of greed
You want items? Like really, really many items? Loads of them?
Save all your dropped Acolytes. Build Ganesha and let him level up. Replace him with the Acolytes and watch literally shit loads of treasure Goblins run into death.
Beware! These are tough little guys, you will have to kill them to get your goodies.
4. Impatiences Wrath
Need some attackspeed for your support tower? Skip every wave countdown and equip it with this set. It will give a ton of Aspd if you skip every timer. Auto skip is your friend.
5. Mr. Iron
Your trustworthy swiss army knife. Mr Iron is a wonderful support tower. His ability to consume items and retain their stats makes it possible to get his luck incredibly high (or low) . In combination with proc items like Painting of solea or a pocket thief snow globe, you can build a money/ XP farm. Just add a training hologram and the useless machine and he won't even be dependant on mob spawn. This leads us to the...
6. Useless machine/training hologram combo
The hologram spawns a creep every round.
The useless machine puts damage to 0.
Let a tower indefinitely attack the hologram with no damage and solea or a pocket thief/scientist snow globe to get XP or Gold for free.
To be continued...
