The Tower - Idle Tower Defense Beginners Turtle Build Guide
The Tower - Idle Tower Defense Turtle Build Guide is the best Beginners Build for the new players. It's part of The Tower - Idle Tower Defense Guides series, where you can find the rest of the guides on the game. It will help F2P players to start farming Gold Coins, progress some tiers and get your basic workshop upgrades, unlock Lab, do Lab research and other unlocks.
Make sure that you've checked The Tower Ultimate Beginners Guide since it has a lot of basic things that will be taken into account in this guide.
The main idea of the Turtle build is to nullify enemy damage. It can be achieved by keeping your Defense Absolute higher than enemy Attack. This is the main aspect on which you will have to focus to keep the game going.
For the damage, we will use Thorns, that will do % of enemy health as a damage, that means that higher Thorns lvl and % will kill enemies faster.
Other than that, focusing on the Coins and Cash upgrades in the Utility Upgrades will help to farm more Coins per run or get more upgrades faster and last longer.
It's the best build for the new players to hit your first milestones, farm coins and get some upgrades. The drawback that it becomes obsolete pretty fast and will be replaced with Blender Build later.
The Tower Turtle Build Upgrades[edit source]
Turtle Build is extremely 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 ingame.
The main order of in the run upgrade purchases is to keep your Defense Absolute higher than the enemy's attack. You can see enemy's attack on the right next to the wave number and absolute defense amount on the upgrade itself. Over time enemies will outpace the Defense Absolute growth and overwhelm you, but by that time you should have enough coins farmed for couple of workshop upgrades.
Thorns are essential for the build, since it's the only source of the damage and depending on high high the level of the thorns is - the faster the enemies will die. Although it's unnecessary to get it very high, since you will ignore all the damage anyway. 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 stage. But when you just start out every little bit helps.
Keep in mind that every time enemy attacks The Tower it will get a 4% damage buff. That means that enemy attack of 100 will be buffed to 104 on the second attack, then it will be 108.2 and so on. That's why you need extra Defense Absolute than enemy attack in order to survive continuous enemy and Bosses attacks. Since bosses take only 50% damage from Thorns, they will have even higher attack buff on the lower Thorns % builds.
| Hits to kill normal enemy | Thorns % | Enemy damage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 101% | 100% |
| 2 | 51% | 104% |
| 3 | 34% | 108% |
| 4 | 26% | 112% |
| 5 | 21% | 117% |
| 6 | 17% | 122% |
| 7 | 15% | 127% |
| 8 | 13% | 132% |
| 9 | 12% | 137% |
| 10 | 11% | 142% |
When Defense Absolute is at the safe levels and you have at least 10% Thorns invest some cash into the Cash/Wave and Cash Utility upgrades early on to have more income or in Coins/Kill Bonus or Coins/Wave for higher coins gain.
Keep in mind that every time an enemy attacks you, the next time the same enemy deal 1.04 times more damage. this is self-multiplicative and even if you "shouldn't get hurt" you will if enemies hit you enough times. That's why higher level of Thorns will help you to avoid being killed if enemies attack is close to your Absolute Defense.
Other upgrades are not required, but putting some extra points into Health might help you to buffer some damage if you will forget to do the Absolute Defense upgrades.
Workshop Upgrades[edit source]
If you just started playing The Tower early on it's better to spread the coins in the Workshop upgrade menu between Cash, Coin and Absolute Defense upgrades in order to increase income and get a better start. The idea is that purchased upgrades will increase the starting step for the upgrade, but in the run cash upgrade costs will stay the same, so you will be able to reach higher values for the same cash price.
As a secondary option you can level up some Thorns to kill enemies a bit faster and maybe health to have some extra buffer during the run.
At some point as you progress the game upgrades will become extremely expensive. At that point consider switching to Blender build or focus on the Coins/Cash upgrades, since they will be useful for the entire game unlike Defense Absolute.
Laboratory Upgrades[edit source]
Once you will unlock the Laboratory try to get first couple of fast and cheap upgrades for the build and then focus on the long term stuff. For the Turtle tower build it's not essential to invest in the lab too much, but couple of fast researches for Defense Absolute will help to push further and earn more coins or reach better milestones.
Afterwards focus on either Game Speed for overall gains or Coins/Kill to farm coins faster. Getting some extra Attack speed and other stats when they are cheap and fast are good options as well, but none of that is really essential for the Turtle build and it will not make it stronger.
Turtle Build Video Guide[edit source]
This video showcases the Turtle Build for beginners and how it works in combat.