Strategies

Through years of playing, the community has developed a 'meta' of strategies to optimize progress-speed in The Perfect Tower. Listed below are some of these strategies.

## Beginner build and tower setup

The best build for the early phases of the game is basically the same as for the late game:

* Offense: the first 13 upgrades (Damage, Attack Speed, Crit. Chance, Crit. Factor, Multishot Chance, Multishot Targets, Attack Range, Impetus, Rapid Fire Chance, Rapid Fire Duration, Bounce Chance, Bounce Amount, Bounce Radius)
* Defense: Easy / Normal / Hard - None, Insane - Hitpoints
* Utility: Special Resources Income, Special Resource Bonus, Gem Chance / Wave, Gem Chance / Kill, (and when playing actively - Interest / Wave)
* Ultimate: 100% New Bounds (upon reaching HQt4)

Adding other upgrades will slow down your progression, so do not waste time and resources researching upgrades not listed here.

Early game you wont be able to max all the upgrades listed above. Since upgrades increase in cost as you buy more, distributing your resources equally is usually best. Still, some offense upgrades are "better" (more cost-efficient) than others, therefore at the very start you want to, in this order, focus on attackspeed, multishot, range, bounce and rapidfire (2sec + 20% is enough). Buy damage if you are not killing the cubes fast, optimally you kill atleast the small cubes in one attack. Later on you want to add 100% critchance and critfactor, for optimal play the ratio of upgrades in damage vs critfactor should be 4:1.

Once you get enough attack-speed and multishot to kill waves before they bunch together on your tower, use auto skip "<50" to farm faster.

When you unlock Wave Compression (research in the lab), use it and farm on hard. Farming on insane difficulty is not worth it untill you can buy newbounds in HQt4.

When you unlock targeting options (research in the lab), use the random targeting option "?". This will spread the multishot and bounces evenly over the enemies and has been tested to be the optimal targeting mode.

Headquarters Tiering should usually be done as soon as you complete the requirements. The factory should be ignored, it is not worth the investment. The lab should always be researching something useful; either one of the tower upgrades listed in the tower-build above or something cheap and fast to complete the HQtier requirements like interest limit.

When you have interest unlocked, using the safebuy option will help you to keep increasing your amount of normal (white) resources while still buying upgrades for your tower.

## Optimal farming build and tower-setup

Since progress in TPT is generally limited by how much special resources (sr) you can accumulate, the optimal farming setup is the one that yields the most sr/sec.

For the highest sr/sec, farming should be done on the correct difficulty. Easy and normal should only be used until you can clear 300-500 waves there, then progress to the next difficulty. Before NewBounds is unlocked (i.e. before HQt4), farming should be done on hard. With NB, insane rounds yield more sr/sec. In the early parts of HQt3, t4 and t5, running challenges can yield more sr/sec than rounds, here again Hard challenge will provide the best sr/sec. Challenges stop being optimal when you have 1-5 million blueprint points.

Wave compression can increase your sr/sec significantly and should be used once you are able to reach wave 100 in hard. Enabling compression earlier can be beneficial depending on setup/playstyle. When you upgrade your wave compression further in the lab, you can adjust the compression-slider in the options to compress more or less waves per skip. The number on the slider can be confusing, since it indicates how many waves you will gain per skip, and will therefore be 1 higher than your level of wave compression. In general, more compression is better, with the exception that WCV (slider6) and WCX (slider11) should not be used.

### Optimal farming blueprint

Many of the upgrades available in the game do not increase your farming-speed, some will even slow down your sr/sec. The optimal tower-setup consists of **ONLY** the following upgrades:

* Offense: the first 13 upgrades (damage, attackspeed, crit/critfactor, multishot chance/targets, range, impetus, rapid fire chance/duration, bounce chance/amount/radius)
* Defense: easy/normal/hard: none, insane: hitpoints
* Utility: special resources income/bonus, gem chance per wave/kill, interest (only when playing actively)
* Ultimate: 100% new bounds (available after reaching HQt4)

Adding any other upgrades to this list will likely lower your sr/sec. Most of the upgrades in this build can be filled-out early on, except for damage and crit-factor. For optimal cost-efficient farming, one should balance those two upgrades in a ratio of 4:1, meaning if you buy 400 upgrades in damage, they should be matched with 100 upgrades in crit-factor.

### Optimal farming blueprint (bpt1+)

When you have reached atleast blueprint tier 1, the upgrade list gets even shorter, since bpt takes care of dmg and hp for you:

* Offense: attackspeed, multishot chance/targets, range, rapid fire chance/duration, bounce chance/amount/radius
* Defense: none
* Utility: special resources income/bonus, gem chance per wave/kill
* Ultimate: new bounds

## Getting Wave Requirements

The easiest way of getting wave requirements is to just use the SR/s-build above.

In theory, switching to a defense-build can get you the required waves earlier, but:

* Defense-builds are MUCH, MUCH slower than SR/s-builds, so the time saved is not as much as you might think.
* Switching too early will lead to multiple defense-runs. Since these are so slow, they give much, much less SR/s, significantly delaying the point where you have enough blues to go far enough.
* Newbies are unlikely to know when to switch, wastly increasing the risk of extra defense-runs.

## Oneshotting, or why elements stink

Progress in TPT requires SR. The fastest way to get SR is to maximise SR/s. SR/s has two parts: SR and /s. Maximising SR gain comes naturally to most, so we'll focus on /s. This means finishing waves ASAP. Oneshotting is good for that. In fact, once you no longer oneshot, you immediately take twice as long per wave, halving your SR/s. Three-shooting is one third of the SR/s and so on. So once you're not oneshotting, DIE! ... then start over at easier waves you *do* oneshot so you get some SR/s.

What does this mean for upgrades? Well, if they don't help oneshotting, they're not helping at all. If they *do* help oneshotting, we must ask whether it's worth the slowdown from the extra calculations, seeing as the extra damage only matters at the very end of the run, but the calculations must be made for the entire run. The answer is always no, they're not worth it.

## Middle HQts

To get 500 waves in Insane, you need 1e45 damage and HP (1200 needs 1e105). The fastest way of getting that is farming on Hard.

Note that the requirement for HQt5 is "or", not "and". With NewBounds, the 10k are almost as easy as 500 was without. Also, with NB, you get more SR/s farming on Insane (use HP = Dmg).

## Challenge builds

Hard Challenger:

* Offense: Max Multi and Bounce, 25% 3.5s Rapid, 100-200 levels in each of Speed, Crit Chance and Range, 25-50 Impetus, the rest spent 4:1 in Damage and Crit Factor.
* Defense: Nothing.
* Utility: Nothing.
* Ultimate: Nothing.

Since the purpose of Challenge is to trigger the 100\*wave \*#bossesSR, there is no point in wasting blues on SR-stuff.

Insane Challenger: As above, but:

* Defense: HP = Damage.
* Ultimate: 100-200 in NewBounds.

## Post HQt5 roadmap

After reaching HQt5, optimal progress-speed will be achieved by following this roadmap to the towntier requirements (see Town Upgrades). Note that for new players, the current meta suggests to towntier the first time at bpt 414. Later towntiers should aim for higher bpts. This roadmap assumes you have enough instant research tokens to finish all Wave Compression researches till WCIX (this is possible with correct use of Codes).

* Farm waves on Insane difficulty.
* Unlock Wave Compression VI (=slider7).
* Upgrade to blueprint-tier 1, to be able to farm endwaves (see next).
* Farm endwaves with bpt1 to get srf to 14.35 or so.
* Get Stat-Bonus to 600+% (in Statistics Board, in-town).
* Farm endwaves to unlock Wave Compression IX (usually shortened to WCIX = slider10). This should take 8-9 hours.
* After WCIX, stop endwave farming and simply start on your maxwave and push further
* Progress to bpt 100.
* Kill Cubos 5 times.
* Reach bpt 414, export your save and towntier.

## Farming 'Endwaves'

The amount of sr you get from a wave depends linearly on the wavenumber: wave 2000 will give ten times more sr than wave 200. When enemies reach hitpoints over e308, they will 'tier up' and the wavenumber used for sr-calculation is reset back to 1. This means that the waves before enemies tier up will yield the most sr/sec and players can take advantage of that with a strategy usually called 'endwave farming'.

The goal of endwave farming is to be able to farm the last waves of tier0 enemies over and over again. To accomplish this, use a blueprint with bpt1 and the 'optimal farm build' (second version, for bpt1+). Start farming on Insane difficulty wave 52000 and the tower will die when enemies tier up to tier1 on wave 57280. Autorestart will restart the round on wave 52000 and you are farming the last 5000 waves of tier 0 enemies. Depending on your wpm, farming more or less than 5000 waves might yield slightly more sr/sec.

It is important to stay on bpt1 while you are endwave farming, upgrading your bpt will stop you from dieing on wave 57280 and will ruin the setup described above.

Wave Compression IX will enable your tower to reach very high waves per minute (>1800), making endwave farming less optimal. After researching WCIX, optimal sr/sec will be gained by simply pushing waves and bpt higher and higher.

## New Bounds Trick

SR-income scales (slowly) with the tier of the enemies you are killing (EnemyTier). After reaching WCIX and getting higher and higher bpts, sr-income will eventually increase to a point where your bpt is significantly higher than the ET. At this point, 'New Bounds Trick' can be used to increase your sr-income further. Too see ET, hover over their heart (next to 'Wave 12345678').

To perform New Bounds Trick in the most effective and easiest way, you want to have ONLY newbounds unlocked as ultimate upgrade and you want to have 'ultimate chance' bought in the Town Shop. (see Town Upgrades) While NB-trick can be done without these two requirements, this guide will only cover how to do it when these requirements are met.

Using an optimal farming build (the bpt1+ version), you add 100% ultimate chance in utility. To set up the trick, you need to lower your New Bounds % in the blueprint (down from 100%) to the point where, starting at your maximum wave, the enemy tier is close to your bpt. Optimally you find a NB% so that the enemy tier is only one less than your bpt, but any reduction in NB% will result in an sr/sec increase. Don't lower NB% too much, or ET will be higher than your bpt and you will die instantly when the round starts.

When you start the round on your max wave with the correctly lowered NB%, ET will be close to your bpt and ultimate chance will increase NB% to 100% during the round. The sr/sec increase NBtrick gives is linearly dependent on bpt/ET, so the bigger the difference between your bpt and the ET, the more NBtrick will increase your income. On high towntiers, you will reach a point where you can lower NB% all the way to 0%, at that point NB-trick will increase your sr/sec by x17.4.

## Town-tier strategy

For most new players, it will be optimal to towntier the first time at bpt 414. This will reward you with 40 Town Credits, see Town Upgrades. For optimal progress, these 40 TCs should be spent on buying 2 'utility skills' and 3 'increases conversion rate per BPT'. This will unlock 'ultimate chance' so you can do New Bounds trick in the easiest way and will increase your bpt-conversion almost eightfold.

For later towntiers, depending on your playstyle and patience, you likely want to get x1.5 to x2 more bpt each towntier. The optimal Town Credits distribution will be to balance conversion rate, increased sr-drop% and statbonus. Remember to always buy the conversion rate upgrade at the END of the towntier (just before you TT again) so that the Town Credits you reserve for that upgrade can give extra sr-drop% while you play.

Buying 'mega bounce', the second of the two 'extra ultimate skills', becomes viable arround 1400TCs. This will also unlock 'gravity well', which should be disabled at all times, with the checkbox below compression.

The 'x8'-speed upgrade may seem very tempting at first, but you need atleast 2000 TCs to make unlocking 'x8'-speed worth it. For 'x16'-speed, a similar breakpoint is around 133000 TCs.

The extra utilites after Ultimate Chance aren't worth much, so save them for late, and don't bother getting them until you can get the two Gem ones.

### Late-game build (high-BPt)

* Offense: attackspeed, multishot chance/targets, range, rapid fire chance/duration, bounce chance/amount/radius
* Defense: none
* Utility: ultimate chance, special resources income/bonus, gem chance per wave/kill, later resources/kill, more gems per wave/kill
* Ultimate: gravity well (but turn it off), mega bounce, (new bounds only until your BPt exceeds their highest tier)