Video Game / Bloons TD Battles

aka: Bloons Tower Defense Battles

Bloons TD Battles (a.k.a. BTD Battles or Bloons Tower Defense Battles) is a spinoff of the Bloons Tower Defense series centered around Player Versus Player. The goal depends on the game mode: First, there's Assault, in which you can send bloons at your opponents to defeat them or at least boost your income. Second, there's Defensive, where you simply focus on building a better defense then your opponent, but with reduced income.

The first game is available on Ninja Kiwi's site, the iOS and Android app stores, and Steam. The latter three versions add a few game modes and such to the mix:

• Battle arenas, in which both players pay a number of medallions to enter and the winner takes all.
• 5 unique Club game rules, any 3 of which can be combined in one game.
  • A Card Battle Game-style mode in which each card has a tower with preset upgrades and a preset bloon send.
• Practice Mode, which is like the above Defensive mode, but it is played solo and powerups lack a battle energy cost.

The mobile and Steam versions also have a "Battles TV" feature that records every match and posts the replays for everyone to see.

Bloons TD Battles 2 was released on Android, iOS, and Steam on November 30, 2021. It borrows a lot from Bloons Tower Defense 6, including all of the towers and their three upgrade paths, Hero Units, and 3D graphics, while keeping the Assault mode gameplay.

Most of the tropes in this game are listed in the Bloons Tower Defense series, but this page is for the unique examples in Battles.

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Tropes present in Bloons Tower Defense Battles:

The whole series

• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • The Flash version of the first game has a store with stuff you can buy using Ninja Kiwi coins, including energy potions, energy cap boosters, bonus medallions, and instant access to all towers and upgrades. The Mobile and Steam ports also have purchasable battle energy and medallions.
  • In the second game, you can purchase Monkey Money, Battle Points, and Multipliers, as well as a VIP subscription which triples your rewards.
• Limited Loadout: While in the normal Bloons TD games, you usually have access to every tower, Battles has you picking only a few of them.
  • In the Flash version of the first game, you can bring four towers, while the Steam and mobile versions limit it to three. You can spend Battle Energy to get a random extra tower on top of that.
  • In the second game, you get to pick three towers plus one Hero Unit.
• Player Versus Player: Of course. You battle other players and can choose either to be able to send extra bloons to put the pressure on them to defend, or simply outlast them in defensive game.

The first game

• Bilingual Bonus: The map "Wizard's Keep", one of two released in the 3.10 Halloween update for the Mobile and Steam ports, has Latin text inscribed on it. When translated, it effectively means, "And the monkeys will win. We cannot be beaten."
  • The inscription's "Potteris" is actually a typo. It's supposed to be "Poteris".
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • Round 8 unlocks the ability to send Regen bloons at a 1.5x cost multiplier. Round 12 unlocks the ability to send camo bloons at a 3x cost multiplier. Money not a problem? You can send camo regen rushes at your opponents!
• Difficulty by Acceleration: At round 32 or so, all bloons gain a speed boost each round
  • Exaggerated in the Mobile/Steam versions with club gamemodes, all of which have specific conditions that apply to both players. Any three of these five modes can be combined for a unique Battles experience. The modes are:
    • Play with Fire: income boost from sent bloons are doubled, but bloons are sent to both sides.
    • Random Trio: both players get the same, randomly selected loadout.
    • Mega Boosts: tower boost upgrades towers once-per-use for free; bloon boost upgrades all bloons on opponent's side by 1.
    • Speed Battle: all bloons are faster and can be sent earlier
    • Banana Bonanza: all income sources (farms, bloon income, etc.) are doubled.
• Cool Gate: The bloons' entrance in the above Wizard's Keep map.
• Easter Egg: in the Flash version, hovering your mouse pointer over the monkeys that appear above the title give each one its own action:
  • The sniper monkey loads his rifle and fires it once every few seconds.
  • The supermonkey fires his Eye Beams continuously.
  • The ninja monkey vanishes and is replaced with a log.
• Fun with Acronyms: The COBRA tower. Its name stands for Covert-Ops Battles Response Agent.
• Game Plays Itself: Like in Bloons Tower Defense 5, rounds advance automatically, meaning that a good defense can lead to this, although increasingly difficult bloons mean it can only last so long without manual intervention.
• Money Sink: The silver and gold projectile skins are this for medallions, costing 10 million and '75 million respectively.
• Visual Pun: One of the harder maps, "A-Game", has a path shaped like a capital letter A.
• Weak, but Skilled: The COBRA tower in the Mobile/Steam versions has a slow attack speed, can't detect camo normally, and short range (although it pops two layers per shot similarly to a vanilla Sniper Monkey and can increase firing speed with a tier 1 upgrade). However, it can give you free money similar to a farm, make your opponent's bloons stronger, reduce the cool-down for tower boosts and bloon upgrades, steal your opponent's lives, (which used to be able to kill them before being nerfed), and allow you to send powerful bloons earlier then your opponent, and send any bloon up to M.O.A.B.s and B.F.B.s from your side to your opponent's. Also, it doesn't cost very much, so they can quickly turn into God Damned Bats if used correctly.

Bloons TD Battles 2

• The Artifact: In Bloons TD 6, the Monkey City upgrade for the Village would give you a free Dart Monkey every round. Thus, it makes sense that its icon is a Dart Monkey with a white glow around it. Since not every player uses the Dart Monkey in TD Battles, this effect wouldn't work, so it instead has a completely different effect (increasing eco gain from sending Bloons, and automatically collecting bananas from nearby farms); despite this, it still has a Dart Monkey as its icon.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Unlike Bloons TD 6, where Hero skins are purely cosmetic, in this game, they are instead referred to as Hero Alts and have subtle gameplay differences.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The game launched in quite a buggy state.
  • The UFO skin for the BAD has a tendency to crash the game, especially when the opponent has an Engineer with a Bloon Trap.
  • For the first two months, the Dartling Gun's Laser Shock upgrade was more powerful than it was supposed to be. The attack stacked when it wasn't supposed to, meaning Dartling absolutely demolished everything in its path, including MOABs. It became the main tower for most players, dominating the meta.
  • The game has a serious problem with disconnects, lag, and errors. While having a perfectly-executed all-in against an unprepared player fail because the server didn't track the leaked bloons was something that occasionally happened in earlier games, such problems have been amplified in this entry, making it borderline unplayable at times.

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