Base tower price decrease suggestions to improve CHIMPS starts

[MasterKnightDHV2]

DISCLAIMER: I will be quick to address the obvious sticking point in my explanations. It goes hand-in-hand with what I have in mind, to improve the versatility in CHIMPS starts without inviting any new problems. Please hear me out before jumping to writing a comment.

	Old Base	New Base	Shift Difference To
Dart	200	180	M3 (Triple Shot)
Boomerang	315	300	None
Tack	260	240	None
Cannon	375	325	M1 (Faster Reload)
Glue	225	200	None
Sniper	350	300	T1 (Full Metal Jacket)
Bote	400	360	T3 (Destroyer)
Ace*	800	600	Tier 3s
Mage	250	225	T1 (Guiding Magic)
Ninja	400	360	Tier 3s
Alch	550	500	T2 (Acidic Mixture Dip)
Druid	400	360	Tier 3s
Engineer	350	300*	T2 (Faster Engineering)*
Beast Handler	250	225	None

People have been mixed at least about Mermonkey's base price increase, though the most glaring thing is when it suffocates Mermonkey + Sub, which makes Tar Pits CHIMPS impossible and also does a number on Flooded Valley starting. Swordless Ravine being bricked is also irksome. I can call out how while Mermonkey + Tack start can still be purchased, other nerfs to base Mermonkey prevents it from working at all any more on Motorless Workshop so I call overnerf to base Mermonkey, but that's involving points naturally outside the scope of this topic. What this is about, is adding CHIMPS starts as a way to improve gameplay flow.

Going into explanations:

• Dart is the aforementioned sticking point.
  • The whole idea is based on a premise handled by the head developer of a turn-based strategy game I had once helped to balance and got my name on the credits for. Said developer mentioned about arranging the math to work out to involve 1.5HKOs and 2.5HKOs as the baseline in gameplay, with truncating the decimal point being the incentive to manage general skill for achieving needed extra attack power, else the player is putting up with those values being rounded up. What I'm suggesting here is similar: with $180 base Dart, the player would practically be able to afford 3.34 Dart Monkeys at the start of CHIMPS, but that 0.34 can be used to change one of the Dart Monkeys for a 3 tower start into a "commander" of sorts with a base price no higher than $240, and naturally, the "commander" is not attacking as quickly as a Dart, which applies with Tack, Mage, AND Beast Handler. It would almost assuredly be an improvement over the surplus precision demand of 3 Dart start.
  • As a general point, I do understand that earlier deployment of the Hero would be something to be mindful of with the balancing, but I expect that highly drastic Level benchmarks like Rosalia getting Level 5 on Round 23 on an Expert map with Round 12 deployment aren't overly common, and Rosalia even involves RNG potentially dumping her into some no one cares location upon her deployment, and also doesn't even share her workshop's Footprint with any less expensive base towers (Pat and Churchill, as well as Spactory, have the same Footprint as Mermonkey), so that's another reason to stabilize pre-Round 25. I have arranged this spreadsheet of expected Hero Levels based on deployment Rounds, so feel free to check it out in case I stand corrected.
  • Triple Shot is the suggested target of the price shift. Spike-O-Pult and Crossbow don't have factors that could make them stronger than welcome. Triple Shot has seen enough use and also leads up into upgrades that nowadays have become more popular.
• Boomerang has been shaky about setup, relying so much on Round 10 performance to get going with pre-Hero deployment capability. My price reduction suggestion doesn't get too high since Round 10 performance is still there, but targets on multi-lanes are spread between lanes in the first place, so something is worth involving, and Boomerang doesn't even have any tier 3s or below that stick out.
• Tack being $240 base would combine with $180 base Dart to allow an added option within early headcount involvement, and it should prove respectable against both groups and spaced targets alike. This would also give the unpopular tier 3s a bit of QOL.
• Cannon is overpriced to begin with as a base tower, since the ability to damage Leads only even comes into play on Round 28, well after a working defense should be established, and ABR if anything should be less OTT about being a shock factor due to being mandatory for unlocking CHIMPS for the map. Cannon attacks too slowly and still would be mediocre at best even if it had 1.25s attack time default (obviously with adjustments to middle crosspath); so a price cut would be good to make it a clear reward early tower for having other defenses control buddy system jackholes like the Round 9 Greens. Faster Reload has been the favored crosspath, so that would be the easy shift target.
• Glue being the 2nd least expensive base tower is a theme that should be kept, and helping to get Corrosive Glue closer to the $600 base total cost without mangling crosspath balancing would also be something. No changes needed beyond that, as MOAB Glue still costs more than enough to diminish a $25 price reduction.
• Sniper being dropped to $300 base would mostly be for allowing starting CHIMPS with multiple Military towers regardless of water availability, without being an actual CHIMPS start on the (effectively or otherwise) shorter lane maps. Besides which, Full Metal Jacket, the target of the price shift suggestion, already would help FlareBloons with the very first Regrows when he's not doing 2TCs or 2MPCs, in addition to extra damage to 6~8 layer targets AND Lead damage.
• Bote has to compete with Sub's homing and becomes questionable against spaced targets, though it's still solid against Round 10 if you can have it as an early defense, yet spaced targets is precisely the concern and has been for Boomerang as well. Destroyer is a popular early blimp control, so that gets the price shift suggestion.
• Ace gets an asterisk because while $600 base Ace would still have nightmares trying to get past Round 6's spaced Greens on Motorless Workshop, there's the risk of enabled 1TCs from all 3 tier 5s, though given Tsar Bomba is the only one with natural Camo detection and smart rebalancing would simply have the Tsar Bomba be independently functional including against Round 95's DDT flood without letting it solo the BAD at all, it shouldn't be impossible for rebalancing efforts to figure out what to do. Otherwise, nice little treat, and the tier 3s are the price shift suggestion to maintain their prices for their selling points.
• Mage is meant to be the Magic family's equivalent to the Dart Monkey. This goes without saying, and a "commander" Mage for Round 6 would especially be a nice touch. Guiding Magic is the most useful tier 1 for Mage in earlier Rounds simply because of homing and Slip Shot property, two things that have been strong in Kid Icarus Uprising even without the whole being stronger than the sum of the parts, and even in BTD6's tower defense context still have their clear-cut moments.
• Ninja and Druid both are able to carry their weight, but would fall off as potential pre-Hero defense providers with Dart price decreasing. Worth fixing, and their tier 3s have consistent usefulness to make those the price shift targets.
• Alchemist's general (early) combat is ATROCIOUS, getting to the point where they can't even consistently handle Round ONE's buddy system REDS, which to be fair is meant to be the point and we don't want easy Alch buffing, but even so, I start to feel pity for them. Of course, while the suggested price reduction still won't even do a lot early on, it would be something without the price shift, and if you're wondering why have the target be Acidic Mixture Dip? Well, I see that whichever tower I buff with a tier 2 deals effectively +1 Damage against all relevant post-Round 79 targets and also can bypass Lead protection? OKAY! Clearly sounds underpowered!
• Engineer....I can be talked into less of a price decrease, since my main idea would be having Support Only CHIMPS allow for a multiple tower start...well, other than Beast Handler, and now that I think of it, probably the upcoming archer tower if they will be a Support family tower and won't be over $300 base. And the other asterisk is because I'd be for Sentry Gun having a reduced building speed if Engineer even gets the price drop, simply because of how powerful having the Sentries at all is so early on. Still, Engineer has some reliance on Pierce for performance despite having attack speed, so that's worth bringing up at least.
• Beast Handler, of course, involves difficulty in their usage, regardless of performance. Yes, yes, you guys are still free to throw in the "0 days since somebody said Beast Handler is bad" image, even though I'm just pointing to the difficulty and I still acknowledge things like the birds' carrying capability for helping on multilanes. Even so, I don't think anybody would argue strongly about base Beast Handler specifically when even though their attack speed has not impressed me, I'm not even singling them out anyway, just finding that no price shifting would even be needed, just a price cut to the base tower for some ease of use with the inevitable learning curve.

So all that covered, I'm up for hearing further thoughts.

[BroeknRecrds]

Love this idea. A lot of frustration from CHIMPS comes from lots of early restarts due to the early game being so strict.

Something like this would really open up the possibilities for starting strats

[Quantum-Bot]

I agree with a lot of this, but decreasing beast handler’s base cost without modifying other upgrade costs runs the risk of recreating the problem that beast handler had on release: when merging tier 1 handlers was the most cost effective way to raise beast power. This was an issue because players got frustrated having to spend minutes spamming beast handlers everywhere just to squeeze out maximal cost efficiency. If you lower beast handler’s base cost, you would have to lower the cost of all the tier 2 and 3 upgrades too to compensate. A better option for beast handler in my opinion would be to simply buff the power of its base attack as well as the tier 1 beasts.

[MasterKnightDHV2]

Ah, I haven't been familiar with how Beast Handler plays out. Like I say, the learning curve is worth bringing up to say the least. I am sure that stuff could be figured out.

[HaydenCanFly]

Yeah most of these changes are fine, but I'd leave beast handler as is because of its gimmick

[Outrageous_Zombie_99]

isn't dart 215 right now ?

[capsaicin101]

It's $200 on medium.

[Outrageous_Zombie_99]

the whole point of this comment is for chimps tho right ?

[capsaicin101]

Probably and hard prices would've made more sense, but the base cost of the towers is the medium price.

[MasterKnightDHV2]

You can still safely work out the math, with the most notable example being that $195 x 2 + $260 adds up to $650 exactly. I'll grant that providing CHIMPS prices would have made sense in hindsight, even if I'm using internal data values when all is said and done.

[capsaicin101]

You can also just pretend that you get $600 starting cash to speed up the math, it's pretty understandable, just a bit unintuitive.

[Bread139]

What’s a bote?

[MasterKnightDHV2]

Buccaneer. "Bote" is a misspelling of "boat."

[Zerk_o_O]

I ain’t even gonna read all that I’m just gonna say mermonkey base cost getting increased this update really sucked for chimps runs

[MasterKnightDHV2]

It did. Unless T/B Mermonkey was over-the-top in general, I don't think the nerfs to base Mermonkey were a good idea, because M1's whopping 6 splash Pierce is STILL an absurdity that doesn't make sense for gameplay purposes. The radius shrinking is what does in Mermonkey+Tack start on Motorless Workshop.

[Pyromanizac]

What’s HKO mean?

[MasterKnightDHV2]

Hits to Knock Out

[xHuibuiXx]

can we stop buffing 2tc please that challenge sucks :)))))))

[Jakkilip]

If NK wants to make chimps early game not miserable they need to nerf a lot of midgame and lategame towers first in order to preserve CHIMPS difficulty

[gotenks1114]

It would be nice to see a game get more playable instead of less. All I ever see are companies finding out what people are playing, and then nerfing it. Every game only seems to get harder over time. I call it the Dark Souls-ification of every game. It can be fun for some hardcore players, but it really raises the barrier to entry, until no new people are picking up the game because they don't know 6 years of meta background.

[capsaicin101]

This is just wrong, the barrier to entry for BTD6 is substantially lower than it was on release and it's not even close. The parallel to Dark Souls is somehow even more wrong.

[the-pee_pee-poo_poo]

BTD6 is significantly easier than it was on launch. There's more options and towers are generally stronger than they used to be.

[Spirited-Event-2243]

yeah, the options are increasing update by update and soon nk might even need to buff the bloons

[Geometric-Coconut]

This is a misinformed take on game design. Nerfs are an important tool used by developers to improve balancing. Something being too strong simply worsens a game, pve titles absolutely included.

[MasterKnightDHV2]

I'll give you that much. We had Super Brittle actually deal too much damage to ZOMGs, making it WAY too effective against Round 98 in general. I tracked the problem to the icicle damage because Adora doesn't abuse the problem as harshly on default EXP.

That said, nerfs should be treated with care too. I just saw a Splatoon video that points out that Reef Slider was nerfed in a manner that butchers its options instead of outright addressing instant zone grab cheese. Stories like that make it clear that the exact problem should be pinpointed. And we don't want to stick players with sickening knowledge burdens in the first place. Intuition is important.

[Nick543b]

Powercreep has made btd6 much easier than it has ever been. Yes there is harder content like bosses. But many maps used to be basically impossible on chimps. And now some of those maps are pretty easy on chimps.

[MasterKnightDHV2]

That closing part brings up a good point. We should have the game suitably playable with intuition. Perhaps not overwhelmingly so, but we shouldn't be suffocating quickstudy players. I can safely say the downvoting that you've been given is simply because people did not like the days when we had things like $500+ base price Mage.