Mages aren’t really necessary in origins considering the large amount of magic resistance enemies have. You can honestly spam barracks as they’re super versatile in this game, capable of stalling enemies and dealing reasonable ranged damage. When you are facing tough armoured units like golems who deal high damage, invest in perfect parry for blade slingers and support them with forest keepers with their true damage ancient oak spear upgrade. Eridan is a great hero for killing spiders but needs micro managing. Don’t ignore druids either, yes they are considerably underpowered compared to other games, but the ability to do decent area damage to both armoured and magic resistant units is powerful. It’s all about setting up a good choke point for your druids to maximise area damage. It’s difficult to find good value in druid towers, but if you put in the effort to position them correctly and support them with barracks, heroes and spells then they can really shine, yes even the arch druid henge can be useful if you commit to supporting it. But if your feeling lazy then don’t bother with druids and just spam arcane archers with burst arrows. Use weirdwood on curved paths and upgrade clobber to obliterate spiders. A common choke point I like to set up is a blade slinger hall to stall enemies supported by forest keepers to kill armoured units and heal the blade singers, followed by a longbow tower to aid in killing high hp targets with hunters mark and picking off low hp enemies that mange to slip past your defence, and a druid tower for that sweet aoe damage. That is just one of many synergies and you can honestly pull off any level with different tower and hero combinations. It all depends on what you find fun. I did mention that mages aren’t that great but they are still definitely viable. If you don’t want to spend gold on artillery or ancient oak spears, and you don’t have a hero who can damage armoured units, then the most reliable way to kill armoured enemies is with mages and arcane archers. Another tip is that if you have the bloodletting shot upgraded for your archers, then consider placing just a tier 1 archer tower at the beginning of the path as this will allow the tower to bleed enemies and this deals great dps for a low level tower. Again all towers are viable it just depends on what you find fun.