A Tower for Every Occasion: 16 Ways to Ruin an Enemy's Day

td-survivors now has 16 towers, and the number one rule I gave myself while designing them was: no tower is allowed to be "the other one but with a bigger damage stat." If two towers do the same thing and one is just numerically better, the worse one is dead weight and the better one is boring. So every tower had to earn its slot by behaving differently, not by out-numbering the tower next to it. This is the post where I introduce all 16 and try to convince you (and myself) that each one has a reason to exist. Quick reminder that the name "td-survivors" is a placeholder, roughly as placeholder as a name can get, and it has stubbornly survived every attempt to replace it.

If you missed how this whole Bloons-meets-Vampire-Survivors thing came together, that's over in why I glued a tower defense to a survivors game. This post assumes you already know there's a fixed path, towers go beside it, and enemies drop XP orbs you use to level up. Good? Good.

The core four (the ones that teach you the game)

Every tower defense needs a starter kit that a new player can reason about without a spreadsheet. Mine is four towers, and between them they cover the four questions you ask on turn one: how do I hit one thing, how do I hit many things, how do I slow things down, and how do I delete one scary thing.

Gun is the cheap, fast, single-target chip damage tower. It is the water you drink. It is never the star of any run, and that is exactly the point: it's the baseline everything else is measured against.
Cannon is slow but lobs an explosive shell that splashes. This is your answer to "there are five of them and they are holding hands." Trades single-target DPS for crowd coverage.
Frost does almost no damage. On purpose. Its job is to slow enemies so every other tower gets more shots off before something reaches the end. Frost is my favorite kind of tower: an enabler, a tower that makes your other towers better and takes none of the credit.
Sniper has absurd range and a huge burst, paid for with a painfully slow reload. It's the single-target nuke: you place it once and it reaches most of the map, waiting to headshot the one thing you're scared of.

Four towers, four verbs. If a fifth tower can't add a fifth verb, it doesn't get made. Which brings me to the fun part.

The behavior towers (the whole thesis of the game)

This is the group I care about most, because these are the towers that are interesting because of how they work, and would be boring if you described them purely in numbers.

Tesla fires chain lightning that arcs from enemy to enemy, but it loses about 30% of its damage on every jump. That decay is the entire design. Tesla is an anti-conga-line weapon: it adores a tight clump of enemies (that's how the chain finds targets) and it politely falls apart against anything spread out. It is spectacular and situational, which is the dream.
Flame is a short cone that sets things on fire and deals burn damage over time. On paper it has the highest raw DPS in the game. In practice it only hits that number if you can physically hug the path with it, so it's a placement puzzle disguised as a flamethrower.
Guillotine doesn't care about your HP bar, it cares about a percentage of it. Drop an enemy below a threshold and it just executes them, no damage roll, gone. The catch: it can't execute bosses. Against a boss it caps its damage instead, so it's a trash-clearing monster and a boss-fight afterthought, which keeps it honest.
Prism fires a continuous beam that ramps the longer it stays locked on one target, climbing from roughly 1x to 4x damage. Flick it off a target and the ramp resets. This tower has a dream partner (a big fat boss that stands still and takes it) and a dream aim mode (more on those below).
Ricochet fires a disc that bounces to the farthest enemy still in range and gains +10% damage per bounce. It is the exact philosophical opposite of Tesla: Tesla wants enemies packed, Ricochet wants them spread across the whole screen so the disc gets a long, angry tour and hits like a truck by bounce five.
Poison pulses everything in range with stacking poison, up to 5 independent stacks. Its burst damage is genuinely embarrassing. Its sustained damage against a tank that has to walk through the whole cloud is monstrous. Poison is a patience tower.
Mortar is the only tower you actually aim: you click to set a bombardment zone and it shells that spot. Unlimited range, which sounds broken until you learn it has a dead zone right next to itself, so you can't just plop it on the path and forget it. It's a tower with a job title and an opinion.
Spikes arms traps directly on the path that detonate on the first enemy to cross them, and they pierce all armor and shields. When post 06 introduces the enemies built specifically to laugh at your damage types, Spikes is going to feel a lot less silly.

The utility towers (they don't even shoot)

Four of the 16 towers have no attack at all, and I think they're some of the most fun to build around. A tower that does zero damage but changes how every other tower behaves is exactly the kind of thing this genre mashup exists to enable.

Bank gives enemies that die near it a chance to drop a bonus-XP orb. It doesn't kill anything. It just quietly taxes every death in its neighborhood for extra XP.
Drummer projects an aura that buffs nearby towers' fire rate and range. The catch that makes it interesting: auras don't stack, only the best one applies. So the moment you place two Drummers you've created a packing puzzle where you're trying to fit as many real towers as possible inside one drum circle.
Magnet Pylon sucks XP orbs within its radius toward itself, so you're not chasing loot across the map. Pure quality of life, and it turns out quality of life is a build path.
Cursed Idol has no attack either, but periodically hexes the strongest enemy in range so it takes bonus damage and drops bonus XP. It's a force-multiplier and a greed engine at the same time: it makes your damage towers hit harder and pays you for it.

The systems that tie it together

A few shared mechanics matter as much as the towers themselves.

Towers level from 1 to 9, and here's the important bit: the level is shared across all towers of the same type. Upgrade Gun and every Gun on the field levels up. This means the decision isn't "which of my seven Guns do I invest in," it's "do I go wide with cheap towers or deep on a specialist." Those per-type levels come straight out of the level-up cards, which are a whole rabbit hole of their own.

Each placed tower also has an aim mode you can toggle between First, Most HP, and Least HP. First is the sane default. Least HP is for finishing wounded stragglers. And Most HP is the one people sleep on: it's how you force Prism to lock onto the boss instead of wasting its ramp on trash, and how you make sure your big hits land on the thing that actually matters. When post 06 shows you enemies that hide a nasty one behind a wall of chaff, Most HP stops being optional.

There's also an upgrade called the Architect's License that lets you relocate placed towers by right-click dragging them, with about a 5 second rearm delay after each move so it isn't a free "teleport my Sniper to wherever the boss is" button. It turns your layout from a commitment into a conversation.

Builds, because personality begs to be combined

Once towers have personalities, players start marrying them off. Three combos I keep coming back to:

The farm corner: a Bank and a Magnet Pylon tucked in a quiet corner, compounding bonus XP orbs and then vacuuming them up, so you out-level the difficulty curve instead of out-damaging it.
The arson build: Flame plus fire-spread upgrades, until the entire path is one continuous grease fire and burn damage does the heavy lifting.
The focus build: Prism set to Most HP, ramping to 4x on whatever boss dares to be the biggest thing on screen, melting it while it wonders where its health went.

Sixteen towers, and every single one of them is doing something the other fifteen can't. That was the whole goal, and I'm calling it a win until playtesting proves me embarrassingly wrong.

Placeholder confession

None of this looks as cohesive as it sounds. Every sprite is from Kenney's CC0 top-down tower defense set, reused with zero shame: the Tesla borrows the Frost turret sprite, the Poison tower also reuses Frost, the Mortar reuses the Cannon, and most towers just share a handful of base sprites. Sounds and music are Juhani Junkala's CC0 packs, and the font is good old "Press Start 2P." So yes, right now three completely different towers are the same little blue turret wearing different job titles. It works in my head. That counts for something.

Next time: the enemies. Because a tower is only as clever as the thing it's shooting, and post 06 is a field guide to the leakers, including the specific little monsters designed to walk straight through half the towers I just spent this whole post bragging about. Some of them spread out on purpose just to spite Tesla. Bring bug spray.