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Turtle build is by many considered the best starting strategy in the game and it focuses on negating enemy damage by maintaining a higher Defense Absolute.
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The Turtle build is by many considered the best starting strategy in the game - particularly for F2P players. (PS! To learn all game abbreviations see: Abbreviations).
The turtle Build is easy to pull off and really cheap to run. If you just started the game you can run it with 0 Workshop and Lab upgrades, just by buying the stuff in a run.
This build is ideal for early game progression and some initial milestone achievement, but becomes extremely ineffective later and instead transitions into the Blender Strategy (early game).
The Turtle Build focuses on negating enemy damage by maintaining a higher Defense Absolute than enemy attack. You can see enemy's attack on the right next to the wave number and absolute defense amount on the upgrade itself.
So early in the run, you focus on upgrading cash upgrades first (Cash/Wave, Cash Bonus), and coin upgrades (Coins / Kill Bonus, Coins / Wave), and thereafter upgrading your Defense Absolute. Over time, enemies will outpace the Defense Absolute growth and overwhelm you, but by that time you should have enough coins farmed for a couple of workshop upgrades.
Thorns are the primary damage source, scaling with enemy health percentage. Thorns are essential for the build, since it's the only source of the damage and depending on how high the level of the thorns is, the faster the enemies will die. If you have too much cash, you can get some upgrades here. Good milestones are 11%, 21%, 34%, 51%. Going higher than that is pretty much unnecessary at this early stage. But when you just start out, every little bit helps.
Keep in mind that every time the enemy attacks The Tower it will get a 4% damage buff (Heat up). That means that an enemy attack of 100 will be buffed to 104 on the second attack, then it will be 108.2 on the third consecutive hit and so on. That's why you need extra Defense Absolute compared to enemy attack, in order to survive continuous enemy and Boss attacks. Since bosses take only 50% damage from Thorns, they will have an even higher attack buff on the lower Thorns % builds.
Important Considerations: