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Robo Defense

I was hoping to find strategy hints here ... with little luck. So I'll make a start with mine:

Which towers?


Land units are easier to keep at bay than air. You can deal with land unit with rockets and rockets also help against air, so rockets are my main weapon against land units (they are also pretty strong against land units, I think the game is a bit unbalanced there).

SAMS are the main defense against air.

Gun towers are required at the start of a game against land units. They get swapped out for rockets starting from wave 30 or so.

Slow towers are essential to both air and land defenses.

Teleports are required to get perfect games and help a lot in all circumstances.

Tower Placement


Your cash is limited so you must maximize the effect of each tower. There are two keys to achieve that.

Place towers so that the bots must follow long zig zag paths from one screen side to the other. Gun tower's effect is thus doubled in the beginning, rockets can reach four such paths each.

Slow towers are placed so that all fast units (air and land) are always slowed. While in the first waves armour is hardest to stop it is speed in later waves. Armoured units can accelerate a bit between slow towers, fast units must not. Slowtowers reach two paths in the zig zag pattern so they only have to be placed in every 2nd row. Their spacing depends on how far you upgraded them. It is essential that slow towers are in the paths of air units. You may have to find a good compromise here.

SAMS are usually best placed in the center of a map. First place them where they intercept air units on multiple paths (if applicable), then place the one that concentrate on single paths.

Teleports are placed in front of the exits so that they catch air units.

Gun towers are placed to channel land units into the teleports. Slow towers are placed along the teleports to slow units there (see below).

Breaking the waves


Start building the zig zag from gun towers and slow towers. In the beginning a units maximal progress depends mostly on its armour. Tanks are the first hurdle, they appear around wave 10. When the zig zag is long enough to keep them contained, save money for the next hurdle: first air unit appear from wave 15. If you can spare the money before wave 15 build rockets that will be converted to SAMS later but also cover the zig zag now. By wave 15 you must have sufficient reserves to place a teleport in from of whichever exit the air unit will take.

From then on you must always keep a reserve to place additional teleports (up to five in a row or so) or at least replenish them. The slow towers beside the teleports give you a bit more time to replenish teleports while a wave crashes into your teleport row. That way 3 teleports can zap 10 jets back to the start (if you are fast and the jets not to closely lined up).

The next steps are building a SAM, finishing the slow tower placement, upgrading the slow towers in the zig zag, swapping out strategic gun towers in the zig zag for rockets and upgrading those rockets (upgrade before swapping out more).

The end configuration is about the equivalent of three vertical lines of fully upgraded rockets and slow towers, rows of four or five teleports in front of each exit slow towers in the air unit paths and beside the teleports and 20 or so fully upgraded SAMS (placed to also extend the zig zag a bit).

The art is balancing everything. If no land units never run into you teleports you invested too much into land defense, same for air. Strive for perfect game, it pays well and it's your only chance to see the Titan (you always see it in higher levels when you're perfect at wave 70 ... or 80?).

Upgrading

Upgrade SAMS/rockets to the max first, then build/swap more.

Focus your rewards in Rockets/SAMS/Explosives. Also spend some on gun towers, slow towers, cash and health. Obviously yu have to unlock the teleport to use my strategy.

Earn achievements, it pays well.

Enjoy!
 
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I'm on to level 33 and am completely addicted. Like, it's getting in the way of doing real-life things.

Probably the most interesting part now is beating all the challenges. Courtyard on the higher difficulties isn't an easy thing.

Strategy-wise, I try to place my rockets three deep, which is their maximum reach. It's less feasible on three- and four-pathway maps, but still worthwhile if you can route everybody down the same path.

I have a hard time getting perfect scores on levels higher than 15 or so unless I get teleports by my entrances quickly; it's too hard to shoot down aircraft early in the round.

I'm realllllly hoping for an expansion. I'd pay $5 or $10 for another set of maps and units! But whatever the devs do, let's just hope that any update/2.0 gives us credit for all the rounds we've already played!

Edit to say, I've apparently beaten the Titan, but I didn't notice! I have a habit of putting it in fastforward at level 80 and setting it aside... that's my only hope to be productive.
 
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I take a completely different strategy that what everyone else does here... I started with the simple straight zig zag'ing and moved to a more effective diagonal zig zag... and have since moved to a straight line attack.

On 100+ levels, in the squares just below the entrance/exit, I alternate between rockets and guns, all the way to the end, without upgrading at first... that is enough to hold off the first waves while I build cash to buy more towers.

Next I install and fully upgrade slow towers in the squares just above the entrance/exit, leaving 3 spaces in between each slow tower.

Next I begin filling the spaces in between the slow towers with rockets, while upgrading the guns below the entrance/exits

Next I fully upgrade all rockets currently on the map.

Then I start adding SAMS and mortors above and below my two gun lines.


That's it... I have made it past level 100 beating each level with 0 loss with this strategy, without using teleports and mines.


My strategy on the lower levels is a bit different... I stack towers three deep above and below the entrance, extending 6 or so wide. I space slow towers on top with two square between them. filling the rows just above and below with fully upgraded rockets. the second rows just above and below I also fill with rockets. The thrid rows above and below, I alternate SAMS and Mortors. I toss a couple teleports just outside the view (if you are scrolled all the way to the entrance) to catch the occasional straggler that makes it past the defenses... This strategy worked great until about level 50ish, which is when I modified to the strategy above.
 
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I ended up buying the game. It is fun and I see it being played a bit specially when I am bored. One of things I would like to see is some graphics for the flame tower, mortar, and the upgrade after mortar (name escapes me as I type this). Right now all I see are little yellow, red, and pink squares.


When selling and trying to switch out the guns you sometimes misplace them due to how the touchscreen is. You should have like a 2-3 second period to undo a mistake like that due to the touchscreen. I am not sure how to implement that except by doing like an undo period of a few seconds.
 
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Count me in the addicted camp. It's kind of become my mission to see how may levels there are to this game. I just finished 590 on the basic. I'm averaging about 13,000,000 points per game. One thing I do is watch closely when wave 100 begins, as soon as the 10 dollar guys start streaming out, I go back to slow mode and start selling SAMs as fast as I can. If wave 100 happens to have no aircraft, I've managed to sell everything except one upgraded rocket tower, and one teleport tower. I think I ended that game with about $4000 dollars in the bank. At the 500+ level that gives you an extra remaining cash bonus of around 4,000,000.

Until I came to this site and figured out the darn teleport towers I had been stuck getting past level 400. It was real frustrating to die out of a game on wave 99. Since I started using the teleports I haven't finished with less than 35 lives and even managed a couple perfect games in the 400s.

I don't use anything other than guns, rockets, sams, slow towers, and teleports. My usual setup takes the bad guys straight up, all the way across the top, all the way back to the start, and then another straight shot back towards the exit. I line up 5 teleports at the exit and do my best to get two complete rows of sams across the bottom of the flight line. At these higher levels, I'm usually still upgrading on wave 99. Wave 100 is the selling spree.
 
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I'm with bhmadsen: my zigzags go lengthways. This way I can have huge unbroken rows of SAMs to stop the planes.

With lengthway zigzags, to get the most out of your weapons, one of the walls of weapons must be double-thick. I generally make the double-thick wall one of the middle ones, and have mostly SAMs and rockets in it, because they have the range to hit both sides. Slow towers go in the other walls, because they'd be half-wasted in a double-wall.

With lengthway zigzags, there are fewer turns, and so there is less wasted space needing to leave a path for the enemy to get through.
 
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I just finished level 610. Only lost three lives so that got me a remaining health bonus of 4.5 million. Managed to sell all but five towers and got another 4.6 million for the remaining cash. All told, just over 17 million for that one game.

Has anyone reached the end of this game? I'm guessing there are at least 1000 levels.

I need my life back!
 
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Seems to me that most people think there's an end to this, but I'm pretty sure there isn't. I mean, the HP on the enemies and the number of enemies could go up on a scale based on the level you're playing. I don't think you all will ever find an end to this.

I usually just make a zigzag pattern out of rockets and line up teleports at the end... but right now I'm trying a different strategy to see if I can use Artillery/Mortar to handle the ground units for awhile so I can build SAMS at the back end of the map. We'll see how this goes.
 
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I just bought this game and I'm having fun with it. Do you need to start with gun towers at first? I'm getting to the point my gun towers do almost no damage, but I don't have upgraded starting money to the point that I can build all rocket towers to start out with. So I guess I will need to use some upgrade points on guns? Just wanting to see what others have come up with.
 
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I just bought this game and I'm having fun with it. Do you need to start with gun towers at first? I'm getting to the point my gun towers do almost no damage, but I don't have upgraded starting money to the point that I can build all rocket towers to start out with. So I guess I will need to use some upgrade points on guns? Just wanting to see what others have come up with.

Well, there are two main tower types... guns and rockets.

Guns are a cheap answer to the early-game waves. Upgrading these will be *VERY* helpful if you have a problem getting set up.

Rockets are a slightly-more-expensive answer to enemies, but they can handle the mid and late game. I'd upgrade these if you have a problem with mid/late game.

Figure out where your problem is and upgrade accordingly.
 
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I don't know about buying the full version. Just finished level 10 on the free download. The first 9 went ok, but after spending three days to complete the tenth level all I can assume is the full version must be a real PITA. What comes at you and when appears to be random, so there is no way to devise a strategy to win a level once you get to the harder ones. It really comes down to luck and spending a lot of time experimenting with different layouts. It would be nice if the game got gradually harder. Maybe that's what you pay for in the full version, but if each level takes 3-4 hours to figure out, I don't have 400 - 500 hours to spend on it to complete all 120 levels.
 
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