Bloons Tower Defense / Tropes S to Z

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

---

S

• Sandbox Mode: The games starting from 4 (which was likely the Trope Namer) include a sandbox mode which is unlocked at rank 25/26 in which you have nearly unlimited money and lives and you can test all towers as well as bloons in it. In 6 it's more refined, as you can send any round you have unlocked to see where the bloons will go and how fast they'll move at that round. However, you can't create the Vengeful True Sun God (even with the Monkey Knowledge unlocked) or the Paragons here.
• Save Scumming: In BTD6, exiting back to the menu before leaking allows to have another shot at a round without having to pay for a continue. However, trying to use this trick 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.
• Scratch Damage Enemy: In BTD6, the Golden Bloon is one of these.
• Secret Level: The map "Blons" in BTD6. It can only be played in the Challenge Editor, by clicking "Random" until the map gets selected. Once you've beaten a challenge on the map, it becomes selectable normally on the editor (you still can't play it on normal modes, though).
• Sentry Gun: Some towers, like the Bomb Shooter and the Spike Factory, seem to be fully autonomous machines that can automatically attack Bloons without any monkeys controlling them. There's also the Engineer's sentries, which also fire automatically at Bloons. The Tack Shooter is a subverted example, however; it looks like one, but as seen in Bloons TD Battles 2, there's a monkey hiding inside.
• Sequel Escalation:
  • In BTD1, the strongest bloons were Black Bloons and White Bloons. In BTD2, the strongest bloon was the Rainbow Bloon, which contained 2 Blacks and 2 Whites. In BTD3 we meet the first real "boss", the MOAB, which is an instant game-over if it leaks and has 4 Ceramic Bloons in it. Each game since then has introduced a progressively higher-ranked blimp—BFB in 4, ZOMG in 5, and BAD in 6.
  • The tower upgrades. In the first two games, each tower only has two simple upgrades, like extra range or attack speed. The third game adds two more upgrades, which are stronger but still simple. The fourth game towers also only have four upgrades each, but also arrange them linearly where the fourth upgrade heavily increases the tower's power. The fifth game doubles the number of upgrades, arranging them into two upgrade paths for each tower. The sixth game has three upgrade paths for each tower, and adds fifth tier upgrades, for a total of 15 upgrades per tower. A few years into the sixth game’s lifespan, Paragons were introduced that combine all three fifth tier upgrades of a given monkey into one.
  • Think you're good at the game? Can you take on Impoppable with ease? Here comes a new, even more difficult game mode right after it in the sixth game; C.H.I.M.P.S. In short, you can't leak anything (nor can you use a continue to salvage your game should you lose), you can't use any powers, Monkey Knowledge upgrades don't apply, you can't get any extra income (meaning that the Banana Farm is entirely useless in this mode), and to top it all off, you can't sell any of your towers. The game calls it "the true test of a BTD master" for a good reason.
• Shop Fodder: Bloons TD 6 has the Rare Quincy Action Figure, which can be bought at Geraldo's shop. It does literally nothing when placed. The sole purpose of the figure is to be sold at a profit later on, as the action figure increases in selling value after placing it.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Buckshot and its upgrades severely reduce the lifetime of Dartling projectiles.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The Buckshot path of the Dartling Gun swaps out high fire rate for a burst of high-damage pellets.
• Shout-Out:
  • Super Monkeys are a blatant reference to several superheroes:
    • Its basic appearance is a reference to Superman, further solidified by its Laser Vision upgrade being incapable of popping Lead Bloons.
    • The Laser Vision and Plasma Vision upgrades give it a visor that bears a resemblance to Cyclops's.
    • The Robo-Monkey upgrade looks like RoboCop and its description references the "part man, and part machine" quote.
    • The Boomerang Throwers can be upgraded to throw "glaives".
  • In BTD4:
    • Operation: Dart Storm's description:
      Our darts will block out the sun.
    • The Extreme tracks of the mobile port have 1.21 Gigapops!, Monkeys vs. Bloons, Bloonraker, and MOAB-y Dick. Jolly Roger is the only one that's not a Shout-Out.
    • The Lightsaber Monkeys of BTD4 are also examples. Their description even says that they are Jedi.
  • In BTD5:
    • The Monkey Engineer is an obvious Team Fortress 2 reference. It can even produce little, green, automatically-firing turrets!
  • In BTD6:
    • The Dark Knight upgrade makes it a blatant Batman expy, thanks to its name, costume, and shooting blades that vaguely resemble Batarangs. Its following upgrades also follow this trend.
    • The "Sails Again" music track, a track added for oceanic-themed maps in 2021, is an instrumental version of The Wellerman, a sea shanty that gained popularity on social media that same year.
    • The second path for the Monkey Sub basically turns them into the Red October complete with the commander becoming monkey!Ramius. The final upgrade (Pre-Emptive strike) also literally turns the sub red.
    • Psi's hero pet is a tiny bison. With Psi themselves being a kid monk with mystical powers, it's a clear nod to Aang and Appa from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
    • Besides the mode with the same name that makes it debut in 5, some maps like Lotus Island and Polyphemus are this to The Odyssey. The monkey on the odyssey icon is even referred to as Modysseus and is a reference to Odysseus!
    • Like the previous game, many Races, Challenges and Odysseys are this.
  • In BTDB2:
    • Agent Jericho is an obvious reference to James Bond.
• Skill Gate Characters: In BTD6, the hero Sauda works like this. Her attacking power is extremely high at close range, and she does very well on tracks with criss-crossing or curved paths, which many of the Beginner and several of the Intermediate maps have. However, she doesn't do well on maps with multiple paths or limited land near the track, so her power declines sharply on most of the Advanced and Expert maps.
• Smart Bomb:
  • In BTD3 and BTD4, the Monkey Beacon can be upgraded to call in the Super Monkey Storm, which insta-kill every single bloon on the screen. Well, except MOAB-class bloons. In BTD5, this same thing appears as a Special Agent, and it wrecks everything but ZOMGs.
  • The Ground Zero ability for the Monkey Ace does this, and takes it quite literally, by dropping a bomb that deals huge damage to all Bloons on screen, enough to wipe out weaker Bloons! The Tsar Bomba in BTD6 drops a bomb that's even larger than Ground Zero, able to take down BFBs and stun ZOMGs!
  • In BTD6, the final bottom path upgrade for the Bomb Shooter, Bomb Blitz, blows up almost all of the Bloons on screen with a series of huge explosions when a life is lost.
• Snowlems: The Mad Snowman special agent in 5. It's a snowman that throws snowballs at Bloons to pop and freeze them. It also melts away after a certain number of rounds.
• So Last Season: As bloons get tougher and tougher with each passing game, so do the monkeys. After the game that introduced them, the strongest of bloons become noticeably easier to deal with:
  • Ceramic Bloons in BTD3 and BTD4 could not be slowed down by glue and there were no towers capable of dealing extra damage to them - only the Super Monkey Storm could instantly destroy them. BTD4 made them easier to deal with thanks to the introduction of tower upgrades that can destroy multiple layers in one hit. Finally, from BTD5 onwards, they can be slowed down by glue (not helped by Bloon Dissolver and Bloon Liquefier being capable of eating the Ceramic layer very quickly), and upgrades such as Juggernaut and Deadly Precision could deal extra damage or outright pop it in one shot.
  • The MOAB in BTD3 could not be slowed down by ice or glue, and could not be damaged by Super Monkey Storm. Furthermore, just like Ceramic Bloons, there were no towers capable of dealing more than 1 damage per hit. In BTD4, MOAB Maulers were introduced and could deal 10 times that damage; in BTD5 they were no longer immune to the Super Monkey Storm, and more anti-MOAB measures (including abilities capable of one-shooting a MOAB) were introduced. In BTD6, almost any tier 5 tower can eat them for breakfast, to the point their Ceramic children are more dangerous than them.
  • The BFB in BTD4 was mostly like the MOAB in that it had the same immunities and countermeasures. In BTD5 they can be popped in one hit by Monkey Pirates, Technological Terrors or First Strike Capability, which was expanded into more abilities from other towers as well as ways to slow it down in BTD6.
  • The ZOMG in BTD5 was immune to a lot of tower abilities and it took reduced damage from the ones it was not immune to. Only the First Strike Capability ability could one-shot it before Freeplay. BTD6 introduces more ways to take down a ZOMG in one hit as well as means to stall them down with ice, glue or stuns (albeit with reduced effect compared to MOABs and BFBs, and a ZOMG's Fortified property cannot be removed).
  • In BMC it is impossible to remove a DDT's special traits. The Mortar Tower's Blooncineration ability in BTD6 can remove its Camo and Fortified traits.
• Spell My Name With An S: CHIMPS mode is spelled with periods as "C.H.I.M.P.S." in the debriefing window when you load or create a save file. However it's spelled without periods on the save loading button, the Co-op debriefing window and on the Hard-difficulty mode selection screen.
• Spike Balls of Doom:
  • The Spike-o-pult (and its upgrades) launches these, with the tower being worked into the Dart Monkey from BTD4 onward. In BTD6, the Spike-o-pult's path's final upgrade, Ultra-Juggernaut, launches a giant spiked balls that split into multiple smaller spiked balls.
  • The Spike Factory can be upgraded to produce these. The next upgrade makes the spike balls Made of Explodium.
• Spikes of Doom: Road Spikes can be placed on the floor, and will pop 10 or 11 bloons before disappearing. The Spike Factory will periodically place spikes on any section of path in its radius, making less need for road spikes.
• Splash Damage: Many upgrades give towers this ability, but Mortars and Cannons have it as their bread-and-butter.
• Splash Damage Abuse: In Bloons Tower Defense 4, Camo bloons can't be targeted by most towers; however, if a tower attacks another bloon and the camo bloon happens to be in the path or blast radius of the attack, it'll still get popped. This is no longer the case in later games, however, where camo bloons completely ignore attacks from most towers that don't have camo detection.
• Spoofs "R" Us: The Specialty Building for Spike Factories is called Spikes R Us.
• Spread Shot: Sun God Monkeys have a rapid piercing 3-way eye beam, while Monkey Buccaneers can be upgraded to have a 5-way shot, the regular dart monkey can have a 3-way shot, and the Dartling Gun can be upgraded into this in the missile line in BTD5, and the Buckshot path in BTD6.
• Status Effects: While most towers are designed only for destruction, a few specialized abilities are required by some.
  • Ice Towers can freeze bloons in place, then slow them down permanently with the Permafrost upgrade, and even make MOAB-class bloons take more damage with the Embrittlement upgrade.
  • Glue Piles (and in later versions Glue Gunners) slow down the fast-moving bloons.
  • Glue Gunners with corrosive glue can also give the bloons a Damage Over Time effect, while slowing them down at the same time.
  • The Burny Stuff upgrade for mortars set bloons on fire. Other attacks like the Buccaneer's flaming grapes and Gwendolin's flamethrower can also inflict Burn.
  • Alchemists in BTD6 throws acid bottles that eat away several Bloon layers over time as their basic attack.
  • The Bloon Impact upgrade for the Bomb Tower and the Mortar's Pop and Awe ability can stun Bloons, stopping them from moving for a while. Striker Jones can also stun with his level Concussion Shot ability.
  • Ezili's MOAB Hex makes MOAB-class bloons damage lose 4-5% of their health per second. Even BADs degrade at the same rate.
• Stealthy Mook: Camo Bloons. Most towers will not detect them, but there are specialized towers that can, and certain abilities that can allow nearby towers to spot them.
• Stop Poking Me!: In BTD6 and Bloons Adventure Time TD, hero characters become annoyed after you tap them too many times in a row.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: invoked Waves right before a Difficulty Spike will tend to send lots of weak bloons at you to give you some cash (notably the wave prior to the first Lead bloons). The text popup in between rounds tends to give some advance warning and in some games even acknowledges that you're getting the cash for a reason.
• Symbol Swearing: Round 63 for older versions of BTD5: "Next round will be @#$*% hard."

T

• Tactical Superweapon Unit: * Bloons Tower Defense 6 has several variants:
  • Upon release, it has the Tier 5 upgrades. In the game, each tower has three different upgrade paths, each path having five tiers. The fifth upgrades are very powerful, but to compensate they're usually very expensive, costing around 5 to 10 times the previous upgrades, and you can only have one of each at a time.
  • Of particular note is the True Sun God, one of the Tier 5 upgrades of the Super Monkey tower. It's the single most expensive upgrade in the game at five hundred thousand. It also has a unique sacrifice mechanic, that when you buy this upgrade, the tower will destroy all other towers in its radius, gaining additional powers depending on the sacrifice. Furthermore, if you have the "There Can Only Be One" Monkey Knowledge, you can also sacrifice The Anti-Bloon and Legend of the Night, the other Tier 5 upgrades of the Super Money to the True Sun God, transforming the god into a darker, much more powerful version known as the Vengeful True Sun God. You can also only have one Vengeful True Sun God in a co-op game.
  • Later updates upped the ante with Paragon towers. To build them, you need to have all three tier 5 upgrades of a tower, and you still need to spend hundreds of thousands of money. Upon building, they consume all towers of their type, and the amount of money you spend on the consumes towers further improve the Paragon's strength. Very costly to build, but the result is a tower that can easily last you hundreds of rounds.
• Technicolor Toxin: Bloon Dissolver, Bloon Liquefier and Bloon Solver glue are green. Likewise, in BTD6, the acid that splashes out of Alchemists' potions is red, and can be upgraded to purple.
• Tech Tree:
  • The tower upgrades in BTD5 and BTD6.
    • In 5, each tower now has two upgrade paths that can be chosen from. You can go two upgrades down both paths without penalty, but after you pick a third upgrade from either, you can no longer go beyond the second upgrade from the path you didn't pick.
    • It's taken even further in 6; all towers have three different paths of upgrades, but each tower can only choose two paths before the other one closes. In addition, the same rules from before apply in that a tower can only have one path have a third path or higher, and in addition, only one 5th tier upgrade per tower can be put in per gameplay session.
  • The Monkey Knowledge upgrades in 6, in which they take it to its traditional roots. You need to spend a Knowledge Point to unlock a permanent upgrade for your towers. An upgrade can only be unlocked only if the previous upgrade has also been unlocked as well.
• Temporary Online Content: In BTD6, October and December 2020 saw the arrival of limited-time holiday-themed Trophy Store items. Thankfully, they were timed so that even if you have no trophies when they first arrive, you'll still be able to earn enough and get them all. Additionally, the October ones were teased with a "start collecting trophies" message in the news a week or two before their arrival.
• Tempting Fate:
  • The description for the ZOMG in BTD6 when it first comes out is one, possibly foreshadowing the existence of the BAD if you go far enough.
  "Surely this is the largest thing the Bloons could possibly send at us? Right...?"
  • The pre-round comment on round 9 in Alternate Bloon Rounds mode says that it "wonders" when the first lead bloon will appear. Two appear on the very next round.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: "Overkill" doesn't seem to be a word in the monkey vocabulary. For context, in order to pop an army of balloons and blimps, a few of the weapons you can choose are Humongous Mecha with antimatter cannons, nuclear warheads, Sun Gods, death rays, rapid-fire missile launchers, heavily armed gunships or warships, orbital strikes, volatile chemicals, necromancy, elemental magic... the list goes on and on. In their defense, as the later rounds and Boss Events prove, these balloons and blimps are not only able to withstand these weapons, but sometimes even overpower them.
• Timed Mission:
  • In the mobile version of 5, there is a mission called "No Escape", which features a map with no exits. Instead, you need to pop all bloons before they last for more than 30 seconds, after which they'll drain your health every second.
  • In 6's boss events, you have to defeat the boss in 20 rounds, or you'll get a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • Version 37.0 of 6 introduces a mission called "Birthday Party" which has you try to pop the Party Bloon as many times as you can before it goes a full circle in Quad. You need to pop it at least 10 times to claim the rewards.
• Too Awesome to Use: Insta-Monkeys in BTD6, especially for tier 4 and 5 monkeys. An Insta-Monkey lets you place a pre-upgraded tower for free. High-tier Instas can potentially save you tens or hundreds thousands of cash. On the other hand, login bonuses only give you low-tier ones every few days, and the other way to get them is reaching round 100 in a game. Even then, you'll mostly get Tier 3 ones. Tier 4 Instas are rare, and you'll need to play Expert maps for a decent chance of them. Tier 5 ones are even rarer, only being obtainable through special events, and even then, only with a massive amount of grinding.
• 2½D: Bloons TD 6 uses 3D graphics and modelling, but gameplay logic is still almost entirely 2D, with height only being used to determine a tower's line of sight. This leads to quite a bit of Depth Perplexion instances. A mod that allows you to move the camera shows the discrepancy between the model's positions and the actual, logical positions used in gameplay.
• Tyop on the Cover: The Double HP MOABs game mode in Bloons TD 6 is capitalized incorrectly as "Double Hp MOABs" in-game, such as on the load game button and the intro message to any Co-op game played on it.

U

• Unexpected Shmup Level: The Direct Assault Mission from BTD5 Deluxe. Rather than a winding path, bloons come straight from the right to the left from every height. Your main tools in stopping the onslaught are the manually aimed Dartling Guns.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • In BTD6, expert maps on CHIMPS are said by Ninja Kiwi themselves are not checked to see if they can be won. Balance changes in patches rarely take the plausibility of expert maps CHIMPS into account. As of patch 23.x, the only map impossible on singleplayer CHIMPS mode was Ravine. (That being said, there will often be changes to let Expert maps be winnable—such as a scenery gimmick in Ravine that was added to let you complete the one early round that couldn’t be beaten on solo CHIMPS.)
  • Certain Daily Challenges from 5 like Anti-Camo Dust, Highly Opinionated, and Ten Hits were impossible for many players and so they had to be fixed later, either after 12 hours since the challenge released to even three months after they initially expired. A list of impossible DCs can be found here.
  • Bloons TD 6 had the February 1, 2021 Advanced Challenge, "Okampuss's Challenge", that was accidentally made impossible for several hours due to Ninja Kiwi swapping the health bonuses given to ceramics and to blimps. Blimps were supposed to have quadruple health and ceramics should have had normal health. Unfortunately, NK mistakenly quadrupled the health of the ceramics instead and kept the blimp HP as normal, making the ceramics too tough for the lone sniper provided in the challenge to shoot down. Thankfully, the health bonuses were corrected later on in the day.
• Unwinnable by Design: A gimmick in the Needs Healing odyssey in 6. Each island sends out a camo regrow ceramic (which will take away 104 out of your 105 lives) on the very first round that cannot be killed whole, and you are supposed to restore the lives by various means. On Hard Mode, you cannot reuse healing towers between tracks except for the Hero Unit Benjamin. If you misallocated your towers, powers, and Monkey Knowledge so that you cannot heal sufficient health or use powers to mitigate the damage caused by the initial ceramic on each island, the odyssey is unwinnable and you have to restart it from the beginning.
• Updated Re-release: Bloons TD5 on Steam, which replaces Deluxe. Even though it seems like a direct port of the tablet versions, there are some changes, such as no IAPs (with the exception of cosmetic changes).
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • Comanche Defense in Bloons TD 6 gives an ability that summons three Comanche helicopters that last for ten seconds "when they're most needed", but with caveats that nullify this assurance. The extra helicopters only appear when there is 2000 RBE on the screen (note that a MOAB is worth only 616 RBE) and take 25 seconds to recharge, leaving the main Comanche a sitting duck with little popping power other than its MOAB shove skills. The ability automatically triggers when both the recharge and RBE conditions are met even if the player thinks it isn't desirable to send out the extra Comanches at that time.
  • The Legend of the Night's Unrealistic Black Hole attack easily qualifies. The black hole can suck up any leak for 7.5 seconds and kill the leaking bloons in one hit; even the BAD is not immune to it. Unfortunately, its very high price (costing over $200,000 on Easy difficulty) makes it not cost-effective in non-freeplay rounds, and even in freeplay its use is nonexistent because the construction of the Vengeful True Sun God (a powerful tower essential to freeplay runs) permanently disables the Legend of the Night upgrade, leaving the black holes unavailable.
  • Faster Darts, the tier 1 bottom-path helicopter upgrade, increases the projectile speed of the helicopter's darts. It does not increase their rate of fire (which is what the next upgrade, Faster Firing, does). This upgrade does little to nothing for the helicopter since its attacking style (especially for higher tiers) is primarily based on hounding bloons at close range.
  • In Impoppable and CHIMPS, Ezili's Sacrificial Totem ability, which grants multiple status buffs and camo detection to affected towers, becomes this. It is disabled if you lack enough lives to sacrifice to it, and both those modes leave you as a One-Hit-Point Wonder and disable all means of gaining extra lives. Similarly, any abilities that trigger on loss of health is this (such as Bomb Blitz's Smart Bomb and Elite Defender's speed boost), although their respective upgrade may still be useful.
  • The bottom-path Wizard Monkey upgrade Soulbind was very quickly reworked from scratch into Prince of Darkness precisely because the soulbinding ability was the game's purest example of this trope. You could bind towers with an ability that would sell the towers and convert one hundredth of the tower's cost into lives. Sounds cool, doesn't it? But this was an absolutely terrible bargain: a tower costing around $10,000 would only give approximately 100 lives, all of which could be destroyed by a single ceramic or blimp (which were everywhere from the midgame onwards). Needless to say, sacrificing towers (that could have hindered the leaks in the first place) for a pittance of lives proved to be completely useless.
  • The tier 4 Ice Monkey upgrades in Bloons TD 5 were considered the most useless tier 4 upgrades in the fifth generation games, and for good reason.
    • Viral Frost did not come back for Bloons TD 6 due to its sheer uselessness of its own attacks. It was supposed to allow bloons frozen by the Viral Frost to freeze other bloons coming into contact with them, even if the unlucky bloons were outside the range of the Ice Monkey itself, or were camo, white or zebras (all normally immune to freeze attacks). But an Arctic Wind (the predecessor upgrade to Viral Frost) could destroy all non-blimp bloons with only the assistance of a Monkey Intelligence Bureau in the Flash games, making the viral frost effect completely worthless. Viral Frost's only useful purpose was to be a temple sacrifice.
    • Absolute Zero's fifth-generation Flash version also qualified as a Useless Useful Spell. It froze bloons across the whole screen for four seconds, and affected camo bloons as well. Sadly, the Flash version did not allow it to freeze blimps, making it obsolete very fast. Even worse, frozen bloons would No-Sell several towers and upgrades, and thus freezing all bloons on screen lowered their overall damage to the rush. Finally, the frost effect wears off if the now-frozen bloons are popped. In every way Absolute Zero was outclassed by the similar-cost Sabotage Supply Lines. The mobile-derived versions made Absolute Zero less useless by allowing the ability to slow down blimps (stacking on top of sabotage), and Bloons TD 6 gave its counterpart's ability (Snowstorm) the power to briefly slow down blimps significantly.
  • Bloons TD 4 onwards give the Monkey Ace an upgrade that drops exploding pineapples^note its name is never consistent throughout the franchise; in 4 it was Pineapple Express, in 5 it was Pineapple Present, and in 6 it is the Exploding Pineapple, which gave the Ace a useful explosive that when spammed, could carpet bomb an entire map. Unfortunately, 5 onwards nerfed it to the ground by severely slowing down the pineapples' attack rate, and they often explode in all sorts of random and useless locations where no bloons are. They only do 1 damage, to boot.
  • Bloon Master Alchemist and Benjamin are massive liabilities in CHIMPS, due to them both being towers dedicated to both earning income and bypassing entire bloon layers at once. Income generation is disabled in CHIMPS and their blimp-targeted bloon layer bypasses deny you a lot of the bloon pop income you would have received had you popped the blimps with brute force.
  • Striker Jones's level 10 ability, Artillery Command, is an example of this trope until its level 20 upgrade. It resets the cooldowns of all Mortar Monkey and Bomb Tower abilities, and itself has a very long cooldown. The problem? Only three abilities in the entire game fit this bill: the MOAB Assassin, MOAB Eliminator, and Pop and Awe abilities. All three of them are considered not very cost-effective, and the MOAB Eliminator has an extremely fast cooldown regardless. The level 20 version averts the trope as it gains a much more useful function of doubling the damage and pierce of Bomb Towers and Mortars for 10 seconds.

V

• Vagueness Is Coming:
  • BTD5 doesn't tell you what round 85 will bring until it's actually started for the first time.
    If you're playing on Hard, you've done well to get this far, but it will all end next level.
  • The majority of the 5th tier upgrades in BTD6 are pretty vague, not really describing much about what the upgrade does, other than the fact that it's immensely powerful.
    Flying Fortress: This is a BIG plane.
  • The Monkey Knowledge upgrade "There Can Be Only One" shows an image of the True Sun God. Its description is the same thing as its name, so what does it actually do? It combines itself with both the Anti-Bloon and Legend of the Night together via sacrificing them if you have all three 5th tier Super Monkeys on the map, and that they weren't already sacrificed when the True Sun God was put on the map.
• Video Game 3D Leap: The sixth game has towers rendered in 3D, and even that obstruct their vision, although many 2D-reliant conventions remain, such as spikes placed on the ground still managing to hit bloons flying as high as blimps.
• Videogame Flamethrowers Suck: Averted with the "Dragon's Breath" upgrade for the Monkey Apprentice/Wizard Monkey, which does massive amounts of damage per second and makes for a great defense when saving up money. The hero Gwendolin in 6 uses a flamethrower, and its fast attack speed, high damage, and ability to set Bloons on fire makes her one of the more powerful heroes for offense. Really, the only thing that "sucks" about the flamethrowers in 6 is that fire is one of the attack types resisted by Purple Bloons.
• Visual Pun: Obyn's Wall of Trees generates extra money (outside of CHIMPS) via releasing bananas when the trees are either full or refreshed. In other words, money is literally growing on trees.

W

• Wake-Up Call Boss: The first appearance of Lead, Ceramic, and especially the first MOAB, although 6 makes the MOAB at round 40 have less health on Easy Mode.
• War Has Never Been So Much Fun: The series juxtaposes a wide variety of military weapons and other war-related imagery with bright colors and complete absurdity.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Ray of Doom, Bloonsday Device, and (arguably) the Sun God and Temple of the Monkey God.
• Weapon of Mass Destruction:
  • The Temple of the Monkey God is one the most extreme weapons one could ever see. It sacrifices all towers in its former radius when upgrade, but also gets their powers. In fact, when given the max sacrifices^*$30000 each worth of ice towers, apprentices, glue gunners, bomb towers and other towers in BTD5 or $50000 each worth of primary, military, magic, and support towers in 6, can destroy any bloons that come its way, including ZOMGs and BADs.
  • The Temple of the Monkey God pales in comparison to the Temple of the Vengeful Monkey ability, the Tier 4 Super Monkey Lair upgrade. When activated, it replaces the aforementioned tower... with a darker-colored temple that fires twice the beams, each one being stronger and having more range than that of the regular Temple of the Monkey God. At this point, the damage output all but makes ZOMGs vanish once they approach a maxed Temple's firing range, and even then those blimps are going to need a large speed increase and a huge group to even hope to break through the Temple's "Instant Death" Radius.
  • The Technological Terror is less powerful then a near max temple, but still pretty darn effective. It fires 2 streams of green plasma (each one being piercing more bloons than the regular purple plasma) and has a lethal ability called the "Bloon Annihilation", which generates a short ranged force-field that does 1000 damage to all MOAB-class bloons next to it. Its final upgrade in the 6th game, called "Anti-Bloon", is twice as powerful and has a much stronger ability.
  • There is also the Ray of Doom, which shoots a constant solid beam of bloon destruction with a pop rate of 100, practically killing any and all regular bloons in less then a second. The problem though, is that it is notoriously weak against MOAB-class bloons, since it only pops 1 per frame for those. Even so, a single one is still pretty effective against the MOABs and BFBs. The ZOMGs are another story...
  • The alternate option competing with the Ray of Doom, the Bloon Area Denial System, which fires 3 dart-tipped rockets that do splash damage and can kill any type of Bloon every shot, it's an Dartling gun upgade and keeps all the rate of fire and upgrades to said rate of fire. Oh, and it has a special ability, namely firing a rocket at the 100 closest bloons and repeating for 5 times. This is probably as many rockets as filing the entire screen with rocket turrets can barf out.
  • Both final upgrades for the Monkey Ace: the Spectre which rapidly fires darts and hydra rockets directly at the bloons and the Operation Ground Zero, which grants the ability that can be used to clear the screen of bloons.
  • The Spiked Mines Factory in BTD5: It fires at an extreme rate and its spiked balls explode when they reach their pop cap of 16 bloons. Since its downgrade is the Spiked Ball Factory, its spikes also deal 3 times as much damage to ceramics and MOAB-classers as regular spikes.
  • The Apache Dartship fires darts at the bloons like a machine gun and also fires a quad-storm of rockets every couple of seconds. Its downgrade also allows it to pop bloons with the blades that it uses to fly with.
  • The Bloonsday Device, which has the ability to activate the powerful beam from a satelitte which soars high above the maps. Its pro variation is even more epic, because its beam leaves energy tacks in its wake.
  • The Aircraft Carrier launches up to 3 mini-aces at a time. These mini-aces fire 2 streams of darts and the Monkey Aces trademark 8-dart spread fire. They are great at popping bloons from all around the track.
• Weapons That Suck: Debuting in Deluxe and reappearing in the mobile and Steam versions of BTD5^note as well as Bloons Monkey City mobile and the mobile and Steam versions of Bloons TD Battles, one of the new weapons is the Bloonchipper. It doesn't do damage very quickly, but it can keep a number of bloons permanently busy; even if they survive the first trip through, its vacuum will just lock on to them again before they resume normal travel (provided your other towers don't pop them as soon as they're viable targets). In addition, while it can't normally attack MOAB-class bloons, the final tier upgrade on its first path ultimately lets it chew on them.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: Many towers have upgrades that specialize in doing bonus damage to certain bloon types, such as (most commonly) MOAB-class bloons, ceramic bloons, or fortified bloons as a whole. Paragons in BTD6 deal more damage to Boss Bloons.
• Wingdinglish: The Monklish. It's actually English written in different symbols in place of alphabets, and it has been used to tease many stuffs in updates as well as appearing in some in-game places like temples to make things looking more exotic to players. The Version 33.0 update of BTD6 even made Monklish one of the avaliable languages for the game!
• Wood Chipper of Doom: Introduced in the fifth game is the Bloonchipper, a mechanical device that sucks in Bloons, shreds them, and spits out the remains, which then can be sucked in again. Its upgrades allow it to suck in more Bloons or shred them faster, and the final upgrade allows it to suck in MOAB-class Bloons, stalling and delaying their movement.

Y

• You Are Already Dead: In Bloons TD 6:
  • Corrosive Glue or higher acids, on anything below a MOAB. The Bloon Liquefier will murder anything ceramic or weaker if it gets its glue on them. The Bloon Solver can murder Super Ceramic Bloons.
  • The player's save file is deleted the moment they end up with zero lives, before the Game Over message is displayed. It is possible to pause the game between losing all one's lives and the Game Over message, but the save file cannot be salvaged.
• You Have Researched Breathing:
  • One of the Alchemist's low tier upgrades is Acid Pool, AKA throwing the acid on the track. Making it egregious, it's one of the more expensive low tier upgrades. Apparently, it's easier for the Alchemist to learn making stronger acid than it is to learn how to throw a bottle on the floor.
  • The Monkey Submarine needs to be upgraded before it can submerge itself in water. It's only available in one upgrade path, too, so other Subs can never submerge themselves.
  • Gwendolin uses a flamethrower as her weapon. She needs to be level 5 before her flames can set the Bloons on fire.
  • The Heli Pilot requires a specific upgrade, the Razor Rotors, before anything takes damage from getting stuck in its fast-moving rotors.
  • Moving a tower to a new location on a map forces the player to pay over $10,000 for a helicopter that can move them. Dark Knights and Dark Champions are also able to teleport on their own. This is despite the fact that many towers are monkeys that should be capable of just plain walking to elsewhere on the map.
• You Will Not Evade Me: The Ice Tower's Arctic Wind slows down the bloons, allowing the Snap Freeze effect to pop them down to the last layer (or until it reaches a freezing-immune layer).

Z

• Zerg Rush: The entire methodology of the Bloon hordes; each higher grade bloon contains so many of the next class down. Sending a whole bunch at one time is usually what amounts to difficulty in the series.

---