Rogue Tower Basics For Beginners

Q: What does putting towers higher do?
A: It not only increases their range, but also their base damage. You should always use higher terrain if possible.Q: Is there a downside to selling towers?
A: If they are level 1, then no. However, towers can be upgraded by paying money and they will gain levels over time naturally. Selling upgraded towers only returns the purchase price of the tower, not the value of any levels gained.

Q: How do priorities work?
A: The order in which priorities are put in does not matter. Each priority you set has a hidden value. For example, if you use Most Health + Most Armour, your tower will aim at whatever in range has the the most cumulative hitpoints of both of those. Progress is always implied. If there are two targets with the same value, then your defenses will shoot the closest to the tower. Check the section on priorities for more info.

Q: How do towers level?
A: They gain experience over time based on what they target within their range, even if they don’t fire. For example, this means you can control which stats will level on tesla towers for example even if they hit everything in their range.

Q: How do universities work?
A: They need to be next to an occult shrine. Those usually start spawning around level 25 and later, but they are not guaranteed to appear. Once you place a university, depending on your upgrades and the cards you picked, they will have a percentage associated with Health/Armour/Shields. You can also pay to increase the percentage on a particular stat. Then, every time you start a level, a dice is rolled for each stat and each university. If it succeeds, every tower will deal more damage of that type. It’s a potentially powerful mechanic, but it is essentially gambling and you could get unlucky.

Priorities are super useful and even if your turret isn’t actively firing, it affects which damage type they level for. Basically, they gain XP for what they target rather than what they damage. If they spent most of their time “looking” at health only targets, then that’s what will level.

Obviously, you also want your turrets to shoot at the things they’re good at killing, so here’s a few combinations that I like:

Anti-ram
Most Armor
Least Shield
Slowest

Quite straightforward. With things like ballista with slow arrows, this will usually cause them to focus fire too.

Anti-runners
Least Shield
Least Armor
Fastest

Good for killing weak enemies before they wander into some other turret’s range and cause that one to fire and go on cooldown for instance. You can replace the stats for something like least armor and least health later in the game when the fast enemies are shielded.

Generally I recommend focusing on one stat for maximum damage. Two can work for turrets meant to pick off stragglers but avoid jack of all trades if you can.

Feel free to suggest more clever combinations in the comments!

In the current state of the game, the only way to remove a card from your unlocks is to reset your XP. This not only locks everything, but also sets your XP to zero, so be careful. Any card you unlock (yellow background) can appear whenever you get a chest or upgrade in game as long as you have the prerequisites. This can quickly pollute your upgrade pool if you’re not careful. This can be mildly annoying to nearly disastrous if you’re going for certain achievements.

Tips:

• Focus on what the towers are good at when it comes to upgrading them. Ask yourself why you’ll want to unlock that tower in a game and if you’ll have other towers to pick up the slack in other ways. For example, do you really want to unlock armor and burn damage on shredders?
• The haunted house is pretty terrible. It has hidden upgrades, consumes mana, and takes around 5 to 10 levels to even pay for itself. Even when it finally pays for itself, it earns a pathetic amount of money. Avoid.
• The different damage over time upgrades are nicer than they look, but poison is probably your best bet. Poison can slow if you stack enough, and shields are a pain. Bleeding is nice for the extra 5% crit chance if you get the upgrade, though. The weakest is probably burn damage.
• Mana banks are quite good, though they are less efficient than siphons (125g per mana/s vs 100g). The main thing is they simply don’t require a mana crystal and the added maximum mana is pretty nice to avoid going from 100 to 0 with every shot if you invest heavily in mana towers.
• Universities are debatable. I’m pretty sure they unlock hidden upgrades such as 5% crit chance for all towers which is quite good, but their own pay off is quite luck-based.
• Mines are a similar case. The chance to repair and extra hitpoints are massive for carrying runs through leaks, but then again it might not be enough to save you. It is a single card though, so not the worst for polluting your deck of upgrades.

WIP

As the starting tower, they are very good and hard to beat early game in terms of cost vs DPS. However, they are single target, which is probably the main difficulty for the ballista only achievement.

Very good against health by default, can be upgraded to be decent against armor and shields.

Best upgrades for ballistas: slow, the first +1 to each damage type as it unlocks DOT upgrades for ballistas which makes the second half of the game so much easier to handle. You can skip if you have the corresponding DOT from another source, especially if that source is AoE.

Unlocked by default and very good AoE, especially with upgrades considering it doesn’t cost mana. Travel time can result in a shell going to waste if the target dies before the hit lands though.

Very good against armor, decent against health, and weak against shields.

Best upgrades for mortars: explosion radius. Range is a double-edged sword as greater travel time means even worse chances to hit properly. Other damage types are decent, especially if you are going for the ballista and mortar only achievement.

Although it was just nerfed, it is still a very good tower. The range is minuscule but it hits everything within it. Be careful, priorities matter for leveling. Consumes mana.

Very good against shields, decent against health, weak against armor.

Best upgrades for tesla towers: obviously, shield upgrades lend themselves to the tower’s natural strength. Unlocking one level of each damage type and using it to apply DOT is a valid strategy. Going for a high level tesla tower with extra crit chance and quality over quantity upgrades can still turn this into a bit of a monster.