YMMV / Tower Battles

• Abridged Arena Array: Among the games many available maps, players will almost always vote for the maps with the longest track lengths, since they're the easiest to win on. Borderlands in particular is pretty much guaranteed to be the map you're playing on if it shows up on the ballot.
• Best Level Ever: Borderlands. It's the longest track in the game, one of the most visually detailed, and is rife with cliffs to place towers restricted to such areas on. As mentioned above, it pretty much insta-wins if it's among the maps you can choose from.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The go-to strategy for many players is to immediately stack Farms and wait to get the money for big towers right away, and leave early game defense to their allies. Some players go far enough to stock only expensive towers, and have nothing cheap for the early waves. If their allies are unable to cope with the handicap and lose before the money starts pouring in, the farming players pulling a Never My Fault is also frequent.
  • As far as individual towers go, you will run into Farms, Commandos, and Jeeps almost every game.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Hiddens, which are faster than most zombies and cannot be targeted by most towers without upgrades. Some towers cannot attack them at all.
  • Lavas, the main reason people hesitate to use the Flamethrower. Bulky, only slightly slower than Normals, and spawn in droves in later waves. As implied above, they're also immune to fire damage.
  • With some bad enough luck, Mysteries of both flavors can be painful. Both of them can spawn the strongest boss zombies their stage of the game can throw at you when killed, which can easily result in 5 Mystery2s turning into 5 Boss3s.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Tuber is moderate in cost, but outclasses almost every other tower capable of dealing splash damage by just how reliable it is. Its upgrades are cheap, it deals enough direct damage to one-shot weaker zombies, and unlike the Mortar, doesn't require a cliff to be placed. Groups of them can utterly trivialize any attempt at a Zerg Rush.
  • The Spy Plane upgrade for the Aviator. Not only does it allow the already strong tower to target Hiddens, it also allows all towers within its radius to target Hiddens as well, allowing even towers that normally can't be upgraded to attack Hiddens to do so.
  • The Thrifty upgrade for the DJ reduces the price of upgrades for all towers in its range by 10%. If you can coordinate your team to place all their towers near the DJ, the gold saved from the constant discounts can be game-changing. The DJ can still be upgraded to further reduce the price of upgrades.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Most players drop their Scouts as soon as they unlock other towers, as despite being extremely cheap, they are very weak and are generally outclassed by every other tower in the game.
  • Shotgunners are hated for their extremely short reach and low fire rate, often resulting in faster zombies running right by them without suffering a scratch. They're also one of the few towers that cannot be upgraded to detect Hiddens, further compounding their relative uselessness.
  • The Phaser is the second-most expensive tower in the game, so it has a lot to live up to. Alas, it's simply too good to be true. While the Phaser can possess extremely high DPS, it has a gimmick of ramping up in power overtime, but once its target dies, it needs a moment to lock onto a new target before it starts firing again. These two points combined are detrimental to it since there is no feature to program your towers to lock onto specific targets, so the Phaser will always lock onto the first zombie in its range. With how dense the zombie waves get in the last stages of the game, the Phaser is liable to spend more time slowly switching to new targets than actually firing. For this reason, you'll generally see players stick to Zeds or Golden Commandos as their end-game towers, which are more expensive but also much more reliable.
• Scrappy Level: The Grasslands is basically the opposite of Borderlands; Incredibly vanilla in design, very short and thus difficult, and having very little room for cliff towers.
• That One Boss: The Hidden Boss can and will end the game for an unprepared team. Like regular Hiddens, it cannot be targeted without upgrades. It also has half the health of the Boss2, so that even the towers that can attack it will need some time to kill it. It's also as fast as a Speedy, making it even harder to kill it before it reaches your base.