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J
- The Juggernaut:
- The final upgrade for the Dart Monkey's tier 1 upgrades in BTD5 as well as the 4th upgrade of the first path in BTD6 is called Juggernaut. As the name implies, it's an unstoppable large spike ball that hits through all Bloons in its path before despawning (up to 104 bloons), including Leads and Ceramics. In the sixth game, it can be upgraded to the Ultra-Juggernaut, which shoots even larger spike balls that can split into multiple Juggernaut balls.
- The ZOMG. You can't nuke it without a First Strike Capability, but must destroy it with 4000 hits.
- Lead Bloons if you don't have appropriate defenses—not even a whole map of Aircraft Carriers can scratch it. However, just one explosive will do the trick.
- The BAD. It has seven times the health of a ZOMG by the time you encounter it, moves at the same speed as one, and can't be slowed or stopped.
- The Bloonarius Boss bloon, like the BAD, can’t be slowed or stopped (and at high levels has even more HP than a BAD). You also have to face it five times.
H
- #HashtagForLaughs: The expert map #OUCH in BTD6 is actually shaped like a # sign. Each line is a path for Bloons, making four relatively short paths. Let's say the name and difficulty are appropriate.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Zebra and stronger regrow bloons (up to ceramic) pop into two bloons that will each regrow into two of the original bloon, which can then each be popped and allowed to regrow into four of the original, and so on. A monkey with an ability that sends bloons back can allow them to multiply indefinitely, until the point where the bloons become dense enough that the ability can't affect them all, releasing a rush of high-level bloons past your defenses.
K
- Kill Sat: The Bloonsday Device, one of the Special Agents in the fifth game. When placed on a map, it can perform an activated ability that summons a laser beam strike that can be guided with the mouse to fry any bloons it touches.
- Kung Fu-Proof Mook:
- Lead Bloons are immune to sharp objects but are vulnerable to explosions and energy-based attacks like lasers, plasma, fire, and magic.
- Purple Bloons are the reverse—they're immune to energy-based attacks, but are vulnerable to sharp objects and explosions.
- Black bloons take no damage from explosions, white bloons can't be frozen, and zebra bloons aren't affected by either. The ice immunity is a bit of The Artifact since these bloons were introduced when Bomb Shooters and Ice Towers were the only explosion/freezing sources in the game; by the fifth game, many towers can produce explosives but freezing is still exclusive to the Ice Monkeys, meaning that black bloons are much more intimidating than white ones.
- DDTs combine the traits of Lead, Black and Camo bloons. They can only be damaged by glue, ice or magic attacks—and none of the towers with that kind of attack can detect Camo bloons without upgrades. That makes DDTs immune to every unupgraded tower that is not supported by a nearby Monkey Intelligence Bureau.
L
- Later-Installment Weirdness: In earlier Bloons TD games, almost, if not every non-Freeplay round had a pre-round comment, explaining the kind of Bloons that will show up next, useful game tips or mere trivia. BTD6 has by far the least amount of Pre-Round Comments. Even putting regular and Alternate Bloons Rounds comments together, they are still less than the amount in BTD5 alone.
- Level in Reverse: BTD5 and BTD6 feature a Reverse Mode modifier to make bloons go from the exit(s) to the entrance(s). In BTD6, the bloon send order is also reversed.
- Lightning Bruiser:
- Ceramic Bloons can take a lot of damage to pop, but unlike the understandably slow MOABs, BFBs, and ZOMGs, they are fast. They take 104 lives when they leak, which is a One-Hit Kill on Hard and a two hit kill otherwise. Super Ceramic Bloons in BTD6 only leave one child bloon, but they have six times the health of a standard Ceramic. And they can be Fortified for double health as well.
- The Lightning Bruiser equivalent of the MOAB-class bloons is the DDT that debuted in Bloons Monkey City, which is slightly tougher than the basic MOAB, while being drastically faster and having an immunity to sharp objects and explosions. It is zig-zagged in that by the rounds they start appearing, everything below a ZOMG or a Fortified BFB is very easy to pop, but DDTs are very difficult to hit in the first place as inadequate Camo countermeasures can make them leak before the player can react.
- All MOAB-class bloons become Lightning Bruisers later on, because the bloons eventually start to speed up, so you might encounter ZOMGs that are as fast as pink bloons!
- BTD6 introduces the Fortified trait that puts Ceramic and stronger bloons into this territory, as their health is doubled, making them exceptionally tough, while moving as quickly as their regular versions.
- For the monkeys, we've got the Super Monkey: it fires quickly, has good range and kicks a whole lot of ass. It becomes that much more powerful and awesome when upgraded.
- There's also the Spectre, which fires darts and bombs at an alarming rate.
- Limit Break:
- Super Monkey Storm for the Monkey Beacon in BTD3 and 4 wipes out all non-MOAB bloons in one fell swoop, but costs $1,000 per use on Medium; not to mention it has a rather lengthy cooldown in 4. Interestingly, this becomes a special agent that in 5 that costs monkey money to use once but can damage MOAB-class bloons. It used to be able to One-Hit KO ZOMGs before a nerf that merely made it damage them. As an agent, it also has no placement cooldown, meaning you can spam as many as you can afford if you wish.
- Every tower in BTD5, bar the Banana Farm, has an activated ability that is unlocked with the 4th tier upgrade on the right path. Most abilities can be used right away and all are free to use once unlocked. Like BTD4's Super Monkey Storm, you still have to watch for the cooldowns; rapidly buying and selling towers for their abilities here can circumvent the cooldowns, but also drain your cash rather quickly.
- BTD6 puts activated abilities on the fourth tier of the middle path for most towers (the Super Monkey also has an ability on the third tier of its bottom path), with the fifth-tier middle upgrade either upgrading the ability, adding a new one, or providing a related buff. It gives even Banana Farms an activated ability, which grants you a loan which you have to pay back.
- Also in BTD6, Hero Units also have two to three abilities, one unlocked at level 3 and the other at level 10. A few heroes have three abilities, one of which is unlocked at level 7.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: Early versions of BTD6 would have a loading screen longer than a minute before the game starts.
M
- Macross Missile Massacre:
- In BTD5, the Bloon Area Denial System upgrade of the Dartling Gun fires a spread of three missiles with the rate of fire of a Gatling gun. Alongside this, the tower has an activated ability that shoots out two waves of 50 missiles.
- Replacing the Bloon Area Denial System in BTD6 is Rocket Storm, which only has a single stream of missiles, but makes up with a longer lasting and more powerful swarm of missiles when the ability is used. These missiles are upgraded into mini-nukes if the Dartling Gun is upgraded to M.A.D.
- Magikarp Power: As a rule of thumb, towers which are unreliable when unupgraded end up having the best upgrades:
- The Tack Shooter. In the beginning, they really Can't Catch Up, since they shoot in an AoE spread instead of targeting. Once you unlock Ring of Fire or Blade Maelstrom, however, they're very unlikely to miss most things and have heavy strength, and the sixth game lets it become The Tack Zone, one of the most reliable fifth-tier towers available.
- The Monkey Apprentice starts out with the same power as a Dart Monkey and more than twice as expensive, but once it gets the Lightning Bolt spell it can demolish clusters of bloons, Camo or not, and once fully upgraded it casts enough types of spells to do the work of four towers at once. BTD6 lessens its ability to spam spells but buffs each path with useful abilities like rapid-damaging walls of fire, a camo-decloaking energy wave, or just buffing the standard magic blasts to being MOAB shredders.
- The Monkey Ace and Boomerang Throwers are sort of random and will rarely hit more than a couple bloons unless they're lined up right... until they're upgraded with either homing shots or enough dakka that nothing can get past them.
- Dart Monkeys in BTD5 are just starting towers like in previous games, but their Super Monkey Fan Club ability can turn a cluster of them into a powerful force. BTD6 gives individual Dart Monkeys more potential to stand out, with their inexpensive fifth-tier upgrades like Ultra-Juggernaut and Crossbow Master being pretty useful for at least the main 80 rounds.
- Glue Gunners. They start out doing nothing more than slowing single bloons down for a brief period of time, but the tier 5 top path shreds the notorious super-ceramics, the tier 5 middle path mass debuffs bloons to make them take more damage, and bottom path tier 3 cheaply slows MOAB class bloons down noticably; and if you save up enough for the bottom path tier 5, MOAB class bloons are practically stopped dead in their tracks to the point that even DDTs are reduced to an absolute joke.
- Even Monkey Village joins in the fun for its left upgrade path, which gives its radar a deadly lightning attack that does a lot of damage. This was changed into Primary Expertise in BTD6, but it's no less deadly, with its Mega Ballista being one of the strongest single projectiles in the game.
- Grandmaster Ninja and Master Bomber are expensive tier 5 ninja monkey upgrades that start off doing not much work for their stature and price, being ineffective against most mid-game and late-game rushes in general. That starts to change when Shinobi ninjas are spammed around them, which grow nearby ninjas' attack speeds exponentially, turning Grandmaster Ninja and Master Bomber into effective killing machines capable of ripping through late-game blimp rushes with only a little extra support.
- Meaningful Name:
- Churchill, the tank-driving hero in BTD6, is named after the Churchill tank.
- Benjamin's focus is on getting you more money. "Benjamins" is a slang term for US $100 bills, which feature Benjamin Franklin's portrait.
- The word "Sauda" means "fight" in Korean, and the hero Sauda is a swordfighter with a Korean-inspired design.
- Marked Bullet: The Spectre's artwork in BTD5 features two mortars marked with "TO: BLOONS; FROM: ACE".
- Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Geraldo doesn't have active abilities like the other heroes. Instead, he runs a shop and sells a variety of item for cash. His shop stocks a whopping 16 different kinds of wares, which include various traps and temporary buffs, miniature arrow shooters, fertilizer for your Banana Farms, a Quincy action figure that goes up in value over time, a genie in a bottle, a potion that restores life and resets cooldowns, a totem that grants Paragon power, and a Killer Rabbit.
- Meta Power-Up:
- From BTD4 onwards, the Banana Farm and its upgrades allow you to obtain more money by various ways. It doesn't contribute directly to bloon-popping, but the extra money it generates can be used to buy more towers and upgrades.
- In BTD6, the "Mo' Monkey Money" knowledge lets you get more Monkey Money for clearing a map, thus letting you unlock heroes or other Monkey Knowledges faster.
- Metal Slime: The Golden Bloon in BTD5 and BTD6 only appears on a few maps every day, moves incredibly fast, and is hard to pop. Destroying it will reward you with some free Monkey Money.
- Meta Multiplayer: The Contested Territory game mode is a team game mode where teams are put in a grid map consisting of various maps and compete to see who can control the most grids. Players can take another team's territory by beating their high score of different tasks like least amount of upgrades or fastest boss kills.
- Metropolis Level: In Bloons Tower Defense 6, one Advanced map is called High Finance. It's set in a city with a lot of under-construction buildings. If you pay some in-game money, you can finish them and place towers on them. The Bloons follow a road path in the shape of a dollar sign.
- Mighty Glacier: With the exception of the DDT, all MOAB-class bloons are extremely slow at first (Red bloons are the same speed as a MOAB; the rest are even slower), yet much tougher than Ceramic bloons—they get even tougher (and faster) the further you go on Freeplay mode.
- Missing Secret: The "Encrypted" map in BTD6 was promoted as having a big secret behind it. Between the intriguing ancient-style design and the title, fans were quick to experiment and try to figure out what the secret was. However, nothing ever came out of this. The map's only gimmick seems to be the panels that only a certain tower type can be placed on, but that's rather obvious. Exactly what the secret is on Encrypted, if it isn't the panels, remains unknown.
- Modular Difficulty: The Challenge Editor in 6 has options to change nearly anything about how the game plays. Which gamemode is used as the base, bloon speed, which towers are available, how many towers you can place, how much money you can spend, how many tiers you can purchase, how many lives you have, whether or not all the bloons are regrows, whether or not all bloons are camo, and the regeneration rate of regrow bloons can all be modified, just to name a few.
- Money for Nothing: Averted with the in-game cash, which is reset for each game and is needed to place towers, but played straight with Monkey Money, the permanent currency. In BTD6, after you've bought all heroes and skins (which are permanent purchases), there's nothing to spend Monkey Money on except buying Powers and Continuing games. Even then, Powers are dirt cheap and not used that much, while the game isn't hard enough to require many Continues. Just to seal it in, many custom challenges as well as CHIMPS mode disables both Powers and Continues. Race retries and later higher-tier monkey knowledge were then made to cost Monkey Money as another attempt to further deflate the Monkey Money supply. Boss Bloons seem to have finally given Monkey Money an effective sink, being both a useful power sink (even just for Banana Farmers) and requiring many, many retries if you don’t know what you’re doing.
- Money Multiplier: Many have been gradually introduced throughout the series.
- Bloons Tower Defense 4 introduced the Banana Farm, which gave you extra money after a round finishes. It was majorly reworked in the fifth generation onwards to now give the player bananas worth small amounts of money that are thrown over the duration of a round instead. The player must manually pick up the bananas from the ground, and the bananas disappear if you do not do so.
- Bloons Tower Defense 5 introduced:
- Supply Drop, an activated ability for the Sniper Monkey that allows them call in airplanes that drop between $500-1000 per call. In the fifth generation, this ability could be used any amount of times as long as it's recharged, allowing it to generate infinite money via regrow farms.
- Monkey Town, which multiplies the cash you get by popping bloons with the towers under its radius by 1.5.
- Monkey Banks and Banana Investment Advisories, right-path upgrades for the Banana Farm which generate small amounts of money each round and then applies compound interest to the money currently in the bank when the round finishes. The money can be withdrawn at any time.
- Support Chinook, the tier 4 Heli Pilot upgrade, gives you an ability that alternates between dropping extra lives and cash-giving crates when activated.
- Bloons TD 6 added even more income generation sources on top of upgrading the existing sources.
- Alchemists' bottom path contains two upgrades that fall under this trope. The tier 3 upgrade Lead to Gold gives you an extra $50 per lead bloon hit by the alchemist. The tier 4 upgrade, Rubber to Gold additionally throws a gold-making potion that triples the cash you receive from popping the non MOAB-class bloons hit by it. The cash received by Monkey Pirates and the Pirate Lord upon instantly killing blimps hit by the gold potion is also tripled.
- Druids have the tier 4 Jungle's Bounty ability, that gives you an amount of cash that scales with the amount of farms near the Druid. They also possess the tier 5 Spirit of the Forest upgrade, that additionally gives $1000 when a round finishes.
- Buccaneers gain a bottom path that starting with the tier 3 Merchantmen, give cash when the round is finished. This amount increases when it is upgraded to the tier 4 Favoured Trades, and is increased even further with the Trade Empire tier 5 upgrade, which increases the amount that Merchantmen generate by the amount of Merchantmen on the screen. The Merchantmen's money generation can also be boosted by 10% with the Central Market upgrade for the Banana Farm up to 10 times. By extension, Navarch of the Seas is also this trope as it gives end-of-round money like the Trade Empire.
- Supply Drop and Support Chinook gain their corresponding Tier 5 upgrades, Elite Sniper and Special Poperations, that not only increases the money their cash drops give, but augments their attacks as well (Elite Sniper with an attack speed boost, Special Poperations with a new offensive ability).
- The Banana Research Facility can now have their crate values be increased by 25% via the succeeding Tier 5 upgrade, the Banana Central.
- Benjamin is a hero dedicated to being a Money Multiplier - his very first skill giving you at least $150 after a round finishes, which can be increased by upgrading Benjamin. He also has a skill that allows Monkey Banks to fill faster.
- Engineers starting with the Tier 4 bottom path upgrade get Bloon Traps, which trap bloons inside it and when it gets full, it's collected and generates double the amount of cash the trapped bloons would give. Tier 5 Engineers has the XXXL Trap which not only has a larger capacity, it also allows the Engineer to trap MOAB-class bloons. Obyn's Wall of Trees ability works similarly.
- Sun Temples and the True Sun God (and by extension, the Vengeful True Sun God), can also have this trope if you sacrificed enough support towers not only boost the cash-per-pop of all towers in radius, but also give an end-of-round cash bonus.
- Geraldo has Rare Quincy Action Figure that can be sold at a later round for profit and the Fertilizer, which improves all banana farms except for farms that do not drop bananas to boost their income.
- More Dakka: The Bloons can be a victim of this, as a strategy for many high-grade towers is spamming darts or other projectiles that travel far in all directions and cover as much of the screen as possible.
- The Dartling Gunner's distinguishing feature is its high fire rate, which can be further amplified by upgrading to Faster Barrel Spin.
- The Aircraft Carrier's bread and butter is making this via tiny Monkey Aces rapid-firing darts. A Carrier Flagship spawns Aces that spew even more bullets.
- The Tack Shooter's Blade Maelstrom ability does this by spinning around and spraying sawblades everywhere. In the sixth game, it can be upgraded into a Super Maelstrom that keeps firing for much longer. Additionally, its bottom-path upgrades easily fall into this; Overdrive already shoots incredibly fast, while The Tack Zone creates a huge storm of tacks near itself that covers a massive radius.Many, many tacks.
- If you place lots of 2-0-2 or 2-0-3 Monkey Subs on a map with lots of water, such as Spice Islands, you can make this. 2-0-4 makes the darts do extra damage to MOAB-class bloons too.
- A top-path Monkey Ace in BTD6 eventually becomes the Sky Shredder, which leaves no part of the screen untouched by its hypersonic rain of darts.
- Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups:
- BTD5 lets you pick two upgrades on each path, and two more on a single path.
- In BTD6, each tower has three paths, but a tower can only have upgrades from two of them at once. Once you have upgrades in two paths, the third path will be closed. In addition, only one path can go into tier 3 upgrade and beyond, while the other is stuck at tier 2.
