Bloons Tower Defense / Tropes N to R

Bloons Tower Defense Trope Examples
A - C | D - I | J - M | N - R | S - Z

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N

• Naturally Huskless Coconuts: In 6, tropical levels sometimes have coconuts without husks growing on palm trees.
• Nerf: Many, many of the towers and their upgrades, and sometimes even the Bloons themselves, have gotten this as the games and updates passed. The Bloonchipper is probably a notable example of this in BTD Battles. The Ice Monkey and Banana Farm also got hit hard with this in BTD6 compared to how they acted in BTD5. Listing them all would take up an entire subpage.
  • The Ice Monkey's attacks are some of the very few in the fifth generation (i.e. in Bloons TD 5, Bloons Monkey City, and Bloons TD Battles) that could hit infinite amounts of bloons. In the sixth-generation games such as Bloons TD 6, its popping power has been capped at 40-100 individual bloons per shot, depending on the upgrade, severely crippling them.
  • Glaive Ricochet had its popping power reduced from 100 to 40 in between the fifth and sixth generations. This nerf was already in effect in the Flash version of Bloons Monkey City.
  • Perma-Spike shoots its spikes far slower that it previously did after a nerf.
  • Alchemists have been made dramatically less useful in supporting towers that shoot fast due to their buff running out after a certain number of shots. This change alone cascaded and ruined many strategies that relied on this combo.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The Hard track in the second game, the Ant Hill track in the fourth game, and Tar Pits and Down the Drain in the fifth game. Some of the daily challenges including "VVVVVV" (August 23, 2014) and "Anti-Camo Dust" (May 17, 2015) are this.
  • If you see a challenge made by the notable users incogneato, sniper355, The Supermonkey (formerly JamesNg2), lla26, Gamzdude, or Superbloons321 (formerly Simone Esposito), you better run for your life. Or alternately, consult the first of the list for a guide through Ninja Kiwi's forums or YouTube.
  • Impoppable difficulty in the mobile and Steam releases can easily be this, especially on harder maps.
  • Mastery mode. Bloons are one rank higher (red=blue, blue=green, etc.), yet you only get non-mastery cash from popping them. Lower difficulties combined with easier maps can still be challenging, but not quite this. Impoppable (and even Hard on later maps) combined with Mastery can be extremely brutal.
  • In BTD6, C.H.I.M.P.S. is no doubt this. To even play it, you have to complete Impoppable (although it uses Hard's pricing), plus its difficulty is absolutely absurd. You can't use any continues and powers, plus Monkey Knowledge and Banana Farms (as well as any tower that generates extra income) don't work on C.H.I.M.P.S., and just like Impoppable, you can't lose a single life. The game even calls it "the true test of a BTD master", which alone says for how difficult it is.
    • And if that wasn't bad enough? There's also earning the Black C.H.I.M.P.S. badge, a secret challenge needed to 100% complete a map which requires a player to beat a game of C.H.I.M.P.S. all in one sitting; which means no exiting to the main menu at any point or attempting to Save Scum
  • Elite Boss Bloons take what’s already a big test of your skills and cranks it up to 11.
• No Fair Cheating: Trying to use Save Scumming to bypass the No Continues rule in CHIMPS will result in a different medal than if the mode was beaten in one go. This results in a gold border instead of a more prestigious black border when finishing all modes on a map.
• Non-Indicative Difficulty:
  • Discussed in one of BTD3's pre-round comments.
    "Some tracks are hard on easy, and others are easy on hard. Ain't life funny."
  • In the fifth game, Tunnels is infamously easy despite its "Expert" rating, because MOAB-class bloons fly over the tunnels instead of through them, so they are not protected by the tunnels unlike regular bloons, and the bloons you can see always travel in perfectly straight lines, perfect to be popped by Dart Monkeys, Ninja Monkeys, Super Monkeys, Glue Gunners, and especially Dartling Gunners.
  • On the other end of the spectrum, Crypt Keeper and Downstream are rated "Advanced", yet their designs reek of an Expert map. Alongside these is the Intermediate map River Rapids, which is considered to be Advanced by a few.
  • Furthermore, Alpine Lake, a co-op map, is "Beginner" when it is closer to an "Advanced" map.
  • Hedges in BTD6 is often considered to be the hardest Beginner map. The Bloons travel up and down multiply twisty paths, most being blocked by hedges. You can't place towers like Druids and Wizards inside the innermost bends, and the line of sight blockers are very intrusive (if you place a tower on the side, half the map is blocked off).
  • Bazaar, also from BTD6, is an Intermediate map. It has two entrances and exits that have a small overlap area, water towers can just barely reach both paths, and there are a lot of line of sight blockers. (It’s since been nerfed, by giving the middle bridge far more room to place towers with a bigger footprint than a Ninja Monkey.
  • Cracked is one of the easiest Intermediate maps, consisting of one long, jagged path with plenty of bends, and a small pond of water that's efficiently close to the path.
  • Chutes in BTD6 despite being an Intermediate map is often considered more difficult than some Advanced maps. It consists of two separate, relatively short paths with only one small intersecting area.
  • Cornfield is quite simple and straightforward compared to other Advanced maps like Pat's Pond and X Factor. Its gimmick is that almost the entire map is covered in stalks of corn that need to be cut down before towers can be placed, but often times you'll only need to remove a few, due to BTD6's increased focus on a few synergistic towers rather than spamming. The path has multiple bends, is decently long, and there is only one entrance and exit.
  • Off the Coast seems intimidating with how half the map is covered in water, but it has only a minor and insignificant line of sight blocker. Having so much water lets you use the spamming powers of the Monkey Sub and Admiral Brickell to their maximum potential. It helps that the map only has one path that crosses into both the land and the sea.
  • Dark Castle is rated Expert in-game, but according to most players, it's easier than some Advanced maps like Peninsula, and definitely much easier than its fellow Expert maps QUAD, Muddy Puddles, and #Ouch. The map features four paths that converge into one to enter the castle, but that's not a very big threat.
  • A milder case, but Infernal is known as the second-easiest Expert map, after Dark Castle. The map features two rather long paths, which alternate between rounds. While the severe lack of land can be intimidating at first, global-range towers like Heli Plot will absolutely destroy the map.
  • Geared is an advanced map with only one path, but after every round, all towers you place are rotated around the center of the map by one eight of a turn. This means that if you do not use global ranged towers, you risk having no defense on the rounds where all your good DPS makers are at the bottom. As a result, the early-game is brutally hard, especially on CHIMPS where you cannot afford any global range tower to start with. For this reasons, it's seen as an expert map.
  • Lampshaded in an Odyssey titled "Journey of the Misplaced": the maps are Cracked, Rake, Chutes, Hedge, Dark Castle, and Geared. All ones that are considered easier or harder than their respective difficulties.
• Necessary Drawback: To compensate for their immense power, Paragon towers in 6 cannot normally recieve any buffs from other towers or Heroes. The only exceptions to this rule are buffs provided by another Paragon, or the Paragon of Power Monkey Knowledge upgrade.
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • In 5's Wizard Lord special mission, if you don't have any tower to feed him when he needs one, he'll leave and you'll receive a Game Over.
  • In Monkey City's Engineer Rescue mission, if you have all the captured engineers disappear from being touched by a bloon, you'll lose regardless of your health left. You can still keep going if at least one is still there, so you can prevent this by freeing at least one of them with some cash.
  • In 6, if a Boss Bloon spawns while its previous tier is still on the map, you lose.
• No Plot? No Problem!: As the entire series was based off a simple flash game where a monkey pops balloons, no real plot has ever been added, and any "lore" added usually just consists of gags from the developers thrown in just for fun. Bloons Adventure Time Tower Defense subverts this by having a plot in which the Bloons invade the land of Ooo. It's pretty simple but it's something.
• No-Sell:
  • Black Bloons are immune to explosives, White Bloons cannot be frozen, Zebra Bloons have both the properties of black and white, Purple Bloons are immune to energy and magic-based attacks, and Lead Bloons cannot be damaged by sharp objects (and Super Monkey/Laser Cannon lasers, but Plasma and the Sun God can, since BTD4). The MOAB and BFB are immune to anything that slows them down, as well as the Super Monkey Storm (in the third and fourth games). The ZOMG will merely take 1000 damage from one of the Bomb Tower's MOAB Assassin ability in BTD5. DDTs have both black and lead properties, which covers each others' primary counters.
  • Super Monkey Storm used to avert this in BTD5, as it used to destroy everything (Including ZOMGs) in one use. However, you only get one use per game! Due to a patch, however, Super Monkey Storms now only do 1000 damage to ZOMGs.
  • The BAD in BTD6 can't even be affected by any of the abilities, excluding those that will instantly damage it.
    • Subverted with Navarch of the Seas Paragon, who's activated ability allows it to instantly take down BADs like any other MOAB class Bloon. In a way the tower no sells the BAD's no sell attribute.
• Not Completely Useless: In Bloons TD 6:
  • Lead to Gold is a tier 3 upgrade for the Alchemist that lets it instantly pop lead bloons and turn them into $50 each. While it's a relatively cheap upgrade, lead bloons aren't very common, and there are much more useful ways of popping them. Lead to Gold also works on DDTs, but they move incredibly fast and have camo (which the Alchemist can't detect), so it's not a particularly effective attack against them. However, it did see use in an Odyssey which added many more Leads to the normal rounds.
  • Grand Saboteur, the tier 5 middle path ninja monkey upgrade, sees very little use outside of freeplay rounds due to its poor cost-efficiency. It costs a similar amount to four Bloon Saboteurs, but four saboteurs can permanently slow down bloons by using their sabotage abilities in sequential order as each expires (and even CHIMPS runs on the hardest maps use two saboteurs maximum), yet Grand Sabotage can only apply its effects for half of its own cooldown. Grand Sabotage is especially reviled by 2MPC challengers because its ability to damage all new blimps by 25% can erase many thousands of pops that were supposed to go to the main attacking tower. But in Freeplay, it is very useful due to its Percent Damage Attack being coveted to fight against BADs' eternally increasing health, since BADs cannot be slowed down by any means.
• Nuke 'em:
  • The Monkey Ace ability Ground Zero. It wipes out any non-MOAB bloon onscreen and deals 350 damage to MOAB-class bloons. Its BTD6 upgrade, Tsar Bomba, deals even more.
  • Monkey Sub's "First Strike Capability" clearly references a nuclear armed submarine. Its upgrade, Pre-emptive Strike, triggers a smaller missile on any blimp that enters the map.
• Numerical Hard:
  • In games prior to BTD6, the difficulty levels just increase the speed of the bloons, the price of the towers, the number of lives you have, and the amount of rounds thatyou have to play through, although there are alternate gamemodes that drastically change gameplay, such as Deflation and Apopolypse. However, in BTD5's Impoppable difficulty, the MOAB-class bloons are stronger, and there are five ZOMGs at level 85.
  • Generally Averted in BTD6. While the main 4 difficulties are still mainly numerical, there are also sub-difficulties to each difficulty that tend to add in even more rule changes or restrictions.
• Nostalgia Level:
  • Several retro maps appear in BTD5 Deluxe:
    • Ocean Road, a beginner map that first appeared in the Flash version of BTD4. Featuring a long road with many turns and a lake at the bottom-left, near the exit.
    • Military Base, another beginner map; this one first appeared in the Mobile versions of BTD4. Features a road that centers around a helicopter landing pad, with background elements such as a lake, a runway, and a building with satellite dishes.
    • Pool Table, an intermediate map that first appeared in BTD4, like Ocean Road. The bloons enter in both top corners and the bottom-right, circle around a few times, and exit in the top corners and the bottom-left. It is a confusing map due to the overlapping paths.
    • Railway, an expert map that originated as one of the optional "Premium" maps in the Flash version of BTD4. The bloons enter at five points at the top and the tracks they travel on merge into one path that exits at the bottom, surrounded by water on both sides.
  • BTD6 brings back Park Path, a beginner map from 5, now reworked to fit 6's aesthetics. For added bonus, the music playing in this track is the music from 5.

O

• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • It was possible to beat BTD1 using only Dart Monkeys and Tack Towers. BTD2 introduced Lead Bloons which could only be popped with Bomb Towers, and with Black Bloons' existence you wouldn't only rely on those either, thus forcing more tower variety and preventing players from abusing the Hypersonic Tack Tower glitch.
  • In BTD6, the Apache Dartship ended up having its price increased in order to stop players from using it to solo Deflation mode on most maps. At one time, it costed $19,500 (Deflation only gives you $20,000 period); however, with discounts from bottom path Villages, it was still barely affordable. The very next update increased its cost to $19,600, just enough to make it too expensive for Deflation, but not enough to hinder any strategy in other modes.
  • A minor price hike of Arcane Spike wizards was used to put a stop to a once-popular strategy of saving up for Arcane Spike to beat round 40 of CHIMPS alone.
  • During the Easter 2019 Egg Collection event, players figured out the best strategy to farm Eggs is to repeatedly play Dark Castle (the easiest of the Expert maps, rewarding the most Eggs) on Deflation mode (a mode that allows player to be away from keyboard). A minor patch in the middle of the event reduces the Egg rewards from beating Deflation mode to be only 20% of other modes. Note, however, that the devs originally intended for Deflation to have much less than the other modes, and simply forgot about it until people started talking about it.
  • Mana Shield (Monkey Knowledge granting a 25 regenerating extra lives) was formerly usable in Impoppable difficulty, where you're supposed to permanently have one life. A later patch nerfed the shield to be disabled there.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • The Super Monkey storm. Works on everything except for MOAB-class bloons in 3 and 4. In 5, it is played straight, except for ZOMGs.
  • If a MOAB-class bloon slips through your defenses, it will take enough lives to instantly make you lose in any game mode. You can use towers with life gain abilities, but you'll still need to generate several hundred lives to survive.
  • The MOAB Takedown ability in BTD5 will reel in a bloon of any rank up to a BFB. In 6, the Pirate Lord upgrade allows this ability to target up to three blimps at once. It can also spend two hooks to one-shot a ZOMG.
  • The Navarch of the Seas takes things a step further than the pirate upgrades because it not only now has 6 passive hooks that can hook anything weaker than a BAD (a ZOMG still takes 2 of those hooks), but it now has a special ability that can be used twice per round to hook in even a BAD
  • The Technological Terror can execute a shockwave powerful enough to practically destroy everything in its radius that isn't a ZOMG.
  • The submarine gets this ability with the First Strike Capability upgrade: a single missile, on an extremely long recharge time, which is extremely notable as it's the only one that can deal enough damage to completely destroy a ZOMG in one hit, leaving no child bloons behind.
  • In BTD6, the Druid of the Jungle can grow vines to ensnare bloons up to Ceramics. It takes time, but any bloon caught in the vines are guaranteed popped, even if it's in a Custom Challenge modified to have 2000% HP Ceramic. It's one of the few "true" one-hit kills in the game.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: In Impoppable mode (as well as CHIMPS in BTD6), you only have one life, and you cannot get more through either abilities or the Healthy Bananas upgrade. You can't even let a Red bloon leak.
• One-Hit Polykill: A default ability in almost every tower, given that regular bloons only take 1 hit to kill.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: If a Bloon is affected with Benjamin's Bloon Trojan in BTD6, glitchy graphics appear on it.

P

• Pain & Gain:
  • Bottom Path Bomb upgrade 5, Bomb Blitz launches a screen nuke whenever you lose a life.
  • Sniper's Elite Defender upgrade gains a massive boost to attack speed for 7 seconds whenever a bloon is leaked.
  • The Bottom Path Druid has an upgrade called Heart of Vengeance that makes it fire 1% faster for each missing life.
• Painfully Slow Projectile: The darts fired by Monkey Aces travel super slowly as they travel from the plane to the edges of the map. Even if upgraded to home onto bloons, they're still rather slow.
• Palette Swap: The upgrade icon for Special Poperations is a palette swap of the upgrade art for the Elite Defender, with the orange parts turned blue.
• Percent Damage Attack: Ezili's MOAB Hex, the Alchemist's Unstable Concoction, Grand Saboteur's ability, and the Ascended Shadow's passive ability, all introduced in Bloons TD 6. The MOAB Hex ability takes away 4% (or 5% at level 20) of a blimp's HP every second. The Unstable Concoction attack covers blimps with a concoction that creates an explosion when the blimp's current layer is popped. The explosion's damage is worth 10% of the blimp's HP. ^note As of 27.0 multipliers like freeplay hp scaling and Double HP MOABS are not calculated in the explosion damage. The Grand Saboteur ability reduces the health of all newly spawned blimps by 25% when the ability is active. The Ascended Shadow's passive ability is identical to the Grand Saboteur ability, except that it is always active(The two can not be stacked however).
• Play Every Day: The Daily Challenges in 5 and 6. They can range from outright trivial to nightmarish (see Nintendo Hard above).
• Power Creep: Every iteration of the game introduced more powerful Bloons. In the first game, the most powerful Bloons were Black and White Bloons. TD 2 introduced Lead Bloons (to counter Dart Monkey spam) and Rainbow Rloons (which spawns two White and Black Bloons). TD 3 introduced Ceramic Bloons and MOABs. TD 4 introduced the BFB. TD 5 introduced the ZOMG, and Bloons Monkey City brought us the DDT and boss Bloons. Bloons TD 6 caps us off by introducing the strongest non-boss Bloon in the series, the BAD.
• Power-Up Letdown: Sun Temple / True Sun God insta-monkeys in BTD6. While getting the strongest tower in the game for no money at all sounds downright broken, and it does still shred through early to mid-game rounds effectively, they're completely incapable of taking sacrifices, which locks away a huge amount of their power to the point that Sun Avatar insta-monkeys end up outclassing them in the late game. This also applies to Sun Temple/True Sun God without sacrifices in general. A no-sacrifice Temple isn't that much better (and in some cases actually worse) than a Sun Avatar despite costing 100k cash, while a no-sacrifice True Sun God only offers triple the damage, despite costing around five times of a Temple.
• Precision F-Strike: Round 14's tip on the Super Monkey. Also round 63 of BTD5, though it later got removed.
• Precision-Guided Boomerang: Actually averted with the Boomerang monkeys—after being thrown, their boomerangs go in a set circular path, or a straight line out and back if Kylie Boomerangs are bought. Played straight with Glaive Ricochet (3rd upgrade, 1st path), glaives bounce from bloon to bloon.
• Production Foreshadowing: Boss events in BTD6 are weekly events that typically start on Saturday 8:00 pm for New Zealand Standard time^note Ninja Kiwi is a New Zealand company and ends at Thursday 3:00 pm New Zealand Standard time. If the time left for that boss week doesn't line up with it ending at that time, then there is a very high chance that the game is going to have a major update.

R

• Randomly Generated Quests: BTD5 has a Quests tab in the menu, available by clicking on a monkey wearing a red hat. It shows three quests selected from a pre-determined pool, which typically involve popping a certain number of bloons, using certain towers, or beating maps. Most quests have a duration of one day, but some longer ones last five. After a quest is completed, you're able to collect a reward, which is usually Monkey Money, Special Agents, or free towers.
• Real Is Brown: BTD4 has a darker and more desaturated artstyle, with monkey designs (for instance, the Boomerang Monkey and the Super Monkey) and certain tracks looking more washed out. This is noticeable when compared to the relatively bright first three games and sequels.
• Recurring Riff: The Main Theme, which is present in some form in all mainline games from the fourth game onwards. In BTD4, it is the only music that plays throughout the game. In BTD5, all the other themes are remixes of the Main Theme. In BTD6, it's not as present, but if you listen closely to Party Time, the sixth game's title theme, you can hear the bass in the background playing the Main Theme.
• Reduced Resource Cost: BTD5 introduces the Monkey Village for a 10% discount on purchase and upgrade costs. BTD6 relegates the discounts to one or more of the upgrade paths, instead having the village start with a 10% range increase.
• Regenerating Health: BTD5 gives us Regrow Bloons: Heart-shaped bloons which, if left unpopped, restore themselves to their original color. This can cause a Hydra Problem: As every Regenerating bloon will restore to the original color, if you only pop one layer of a Regenerating bloon that spawns two lesser Regenerating bloons, both will restore to the original color, doubling the amount of bloons you have to pop. Even worse if it was a Regenerating Ceramic bloon, as the 10-HP ceramic layer will also be restored.
• Remixed Level:
  • Rink Revenge is a remixed, harder version of the beginner levelThe Rink, with two shorter paths instead of one long path.
  • Flooded Lane is Monkey Lane, but almost completely covered in water, making it hard to place a majority of towers.
  • Spooky Castle is the Halloween version of Castle, with similar layout, but different paths. Note that Castle is already an Expert difficulty map.
  • Muddy Puddles is already one of the hardest maps in BTD6, and then Ninja Kiwi released the even harder Bloody Puddles. Muddy Puddles have four short paths with Bloons appearing on one path at a time. Bloody Puddles have five paths and the Bloons appear on two paths at once.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction:
  • Like most tower defense games, tower placements and upgrades are instant, which leads to this trope being used for some of the more advanced looking upgrades.
  • BTD6 has the map High Finance, in which you only have a tiny plot of land to place your towers in at first, but you can also pay to build structures which towers can also stand on, built in only a few sections.
• RPG Elements: The series has a history of this throughout its towers.
  • For most of the series, you only needed enough money to afford the next upgrade. With BTD4, ranks must be earned to unlock all of the towers and top tier upgrades.
  • In BTD5, however, all upgrades and towers must be unlocked. Both can be unlocked through rank-up, but a tower will need experience in the case of the former. Another case of the former is that rank-up only unlocks the final upgrades of the towers.
  • The Heroes in BTD6 gain EXP and level up as the rounds pass after placing them down, and you can also manually level them up with the in-game cash.
    • On the topic of EXP, your towers will also gain EXP after a round passes if they're placed in the map. You can use this EXP to unlock upgrades for them.
  • BATTD shares the same heroes gimmick as in BTD6 in that you can only place one of them per map, and also adds a few new elements, such as trinkets and weapons the characters can hold.

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