Once you've conquered the easy levels at the beginning of Bloons Monkey City, you're likely to hit a major wall - MOABs. No doubt the first time you encounter these massive blue blimps is in the Contested Territory, although quickly you'll find it difficult to take any of your own territory without encountering them. The strategies you use to pop regular bloons just don't work on MOABs. Plus, as the rounds get harder, the money you need goes up but the amount you get goes down! This means all new strategies, which I'll detail in my Monkey City Contested Territory guide!
Now, I'm going to talk mostly about Contested Territory here, because that's the first point you'll get into rounds high enough to find a real challenge. However, these strategies work just as well at taking land tiles in your regular city.
Popping Your First MOAB
In Bloons Monkey City, MOABs start showing up around round 20, although the harder the level, the earlier they'll start to appear. Later, you'll start seeing BFBs, which are red and breaks up into several MOABs when popped. Then comes the ZOMG, which is black and contains a set of BFBs, which in turn contain MOABs! There's also the DDT, which is a fast-moving variant of the MOAB.
Most towers have a difficult time popping a MOAB. There are a few really good towers versus MOABs, though:
The Monkey Sub is a favorite MOAB popper of mine. Once you get it to 2/3, it starts doing extra damage against MOABs, and at 2/4 it can completely obliterate ZOMGs with a single missile!
- The Monkey Sub is crazy powerful versus MOABs. First Strike Capability costs an arm and a leg (nearly $20,000!) but it can completely obliterate a ZOMG.
- Monkey Buccaneers can get an upgrade that can instantly down a MOAB or BFB, although it doesn't work on ZOMGs.
- Bloonchippers with the Super Wide Funnel upgrade can suck up a MOAB and stun it for several seconds, although towers can't attack it while it's being chewed on
- Spike Factories can get MOAB Shredder Spikes and Spike Storm, which can really put a dent in MOABs
- Bomb Shooters can take the MOAB Mauler and MOAB Assassin upgrades, but honestly they stop being effective against BFBs and ZOMGs pretty quickly
As you start approaching rounds in the late teens, be thinking about how you're going to handle the first MOABs that are coming your way shortly. Building one or more of these towers will really help you survive!
Monkeconomics
The Contested Territory in Bloons Monkey City starts to get harder pretty quickly. As the rounds mount, the difficulty increases faster than the amount of money you have to spend. If you want to survive to see past round 35 or so, you're going to need to think about making some money. There are several different ways to do this, and I'll cover each of them.
Banana Farms
Banana Farms are the obvious choice. Their whole purpose is to produce cash for you. They do nothing to pop bloons, though, and they take a long time to pay off. You're looking at something like 10+ rounds before you see any profit. Often times, though, the early rounds are easy enough that you can spare a few thousand cash in the early rounds to build one, and then reap the profits as things start to get harder.
There are two routes for the Banana Farm, just like every other tower in the game. Heading down the Banana Republic path leads to Banana Research Facility, which produces 5 giant boxes of bananas each round. That's a lot of cash! You can also add the Valuable Bananas upgrade to increase each box's value to $600. The other route leads to Monkey Bank and the Banana Investment Advisory, and both yield compound interest that can really pay off in the long term.
The Banana Research Facility is really worth the investment, as it pays short term dividends very quickly. The Monkey Bank route is less work (no tapping bananas!) and can pay off big if you're willing to wait for the bank to get nearly full before taking the money out.
Pro Tip There's also a bug in the game (at least when I play on Android...). Banana Farms don't change the number of bananas they produce mid-round. That means if you upgrade to the Banana Plantation mid-round, you won't get 7 bunches, you'll just get 3. Usually this is a bad thing, but when you go from Banana Republic to Banana Research Facility, the number of boxes generated actually goes down rather than up. That means, if you start a round with a Banana Republic and then immediately upgrade to a Research Facility when the round starts, you'll get 13 boxes that round instead of just 5! If you get the Valuable Bananas upgrade first, you're looking at a MASSIVE chunk of change very, very quickly!
Sniper Monkey Supply Drop
Usually the Sniper Monkey in Bloons Monkey City isn't one you'd think of when it comes to making money, but the Supply Drop upgrade changes that. When you take this upgrade, you can call in a stealth bomber to drop a crate that's worth around $500 cash or so. If you've got a good dozen or so of these guys, you can make a decent profit per-round.
This is not going to earn you nearly as much as Banana Farms, but it can save your bacon on levels where you can't build farms - like mountain areas. It's also very costly to get started, since the Supply Drop costs a good $10,000 to get started. You're looking at quite a few rounds to pay that off.
Pro Tip There are a couple of ways to maximize your Sniper investment. One is to use a Monkey Town with Energy Beacon, which makes the Supply Drop ability recharge faster. The other is to try to stall rounds - use Ice Monkeys, Glue Monkeys, Tornado-upgraded Apprentices, etc to slow rounds down and get more drops in per round.
Continued on page 2!
Bloon Trap Engineers
This one is my personal trade secret. Using the Monkey Engineer with the Bloon Trap upgrade is crazy overpowered in Bloons Monkey City. It can make you good seed money to start either of the other two options, and it's really good at popping bloons, to boot!
What you want to do is to place the engineer so that he can only see a small portion of the track, hopefully near the beginning. Try to avoid putting any towers that could destroy bloons before the engineer's little patch of track. Ignore the 9-Inch Nails upgrade and focus solely on getting to Bloon Trap.
Note the Engineer waaaay in the top right corner - tapping the trap will yield massive profits very, very fast!
The point of leaving the Engineer with only a small portion of the beginning of the track available is so that he'll always deploy the trap in roughly the same spot, and he'll capture a lot of bloons before you have a chance to pop them other ways. That way, you can just tap in the same spot over and over again and rake in the cash!
The trap is kind of confusing, but once you get the hang of it it's no big deal. The engineer will deploy a trap on the track as soon as a bloon enters the trap range. The trap will "absorb" bloons until it is full. Once full, you can tap on it to cash out and you'll get double the value of the bloons inside. If you don't tap it in time, it will explode and give you the normal value instead. Either way, a new trap will be deployed after a short delay.
When full, the trap is generally worth $500-$700, easily. This can earn you several thousand extra cash on every round! You can spend this on upgrades for your towers, or you can invest in more cashflow buildings like Banana Farms. Either way, it can give you a massive boost to your cash.
Pro Tip Multiple Engineers with Bloon Trap can earn you even more cash on later rounds. Also, although the traps don't work on most MOABs, when a DDT goes over a trap, if you time it just right, you can get thousands and thousands of dollars out of the trap!
Super Monkeys Save the Day!
Just dropping more towers will generally see you through the first 50 rounds. Just keep upping the ante over and over again, and chances are you'll get there with a good enough economy and some practice on tower choice and layout.
There gets to be a point where you've got way too much money with nothing to spend it on. At this point, you've probably built all the towers that are at all useful to you, and the rounds are still getting harder.
This is where the Temple of the Monkey God comes into play. The Temple is the top-tier upgrade for the Super Monkey, and boy is it a doozy. It clocks in at $100,000 for just this upgrade alone, and that's not the half of it.
When you go from Sun God to Temple, all the towers around the Sun God are consumed - if the center of another tower is inside the hit radius of the Sun God, it will be destroyed during the upgrade!
The upside to this is that each tower the Temple eats increases its power, up to a point. Some towers actually give their unique abilities to the Temple as a bonus!
This is not a "perfect" tower, but it does have several abilities. Note the giant globs of glue and the missiles!
There are many guides on the internet that purport to help you create the "perfect" Temple. Many of these don't take into account that in Bloons Monkey City, the Temple permanently eats your towers, so you won't be able to build them again until you start a new level! Not even selling the Temple will restore them to you. Thus, you've got to be careful with what you sacrifice.
I tend to start my Bloons Monkey City Temple of the Monkey God by building a 3/0 Sun God. Skip the range upgrades - if you take them, the Temple eats more of the map, and that's usually a bad thing. I'll clear out the Sun God's radius of any towers I want to keep, and then start building the ones I need to get my Temple.
I tend to go with the data compiled in this answer on Arqade:
- $30,000 worth of Mortars and/or Cannons (Gives the Temple rockets)
- $30,000 worth of Glue Monkeys (Gives the Temple glue shots)
- $30,000 worth of Apprentice Monkeys (Gives the Temple tornadoes)
- $30,000 worth of Ice Monkeys (Gives the Temple ice power)
- $30,000 worth of other monkeys (Gives the Temple blades)
This should yield an ultra-powerful Temple. Note that you're looking at something on the order of $350,000 to get here - $180k for the consumed towers, plus a good $150k or so for the Temple itself.
You can (and should) spend this in stages, and try to focus on the actually useful towers first. Having $30k worth of Glue Monkeys near the start of the track just isn't going to help much, for instance.
When it comes to "other monkeys" I'd suggest trying to use up monkeys that aren't particularly useful in Bloons Monkey City's later rounds. Stuff like excess Glue Monkeys or Boomerang Monkeys just can't cut it at the highest levels.
I believe that using a Monkey Village to discount the purchase price of the towers/upgrades also makes it harder to hit these cost requirements for the highest tier! Something to keep in mind, anyhow.
Conclusion
With these strategies under your belt, you should be able to take even "Impoppable" tiles or get to the highest rounds of Contested Territory. By the time your city is in the late 20's in terms of levels, you should be ready to get the upgrades I've described and start tackling the hardest challenges Bloons Monkey City has to offer.