iPhone App: TapDefense Tips and Strategies
December 4, 2008
I have reviewed a few iPhone apps in my guitar blog but haven’t found too many that made me want recommend them on this site, until now. Downloaded and installed TapDefense a few days ago and I’m addicted. Defending the heavens from the minions of Hell can be quite a job. Anyway, this post is more of a forum to hopefully get tips from other players. I have searched the web but not much is out there yet on strategy and such and with this game, you need to think carefully before you act.
Here are the few things that I have learned:
- Can’t spend all your gold at once. You need to keep a large enough balance to gain interest for more purchases.
- Don’t buy too much of one thing. Some of the monsters are immune to certain towers.
- Arrow towers work well in the beginning but tend to lose their effectiveness as you get farther into the game.
- Upgraded cannons will inflict damage on a group of monsters. Very helpful unless the monsters are resistant to cannons.
- Ice and water combined is a great way to slow down the monster so the other towers can pick them off. Not as effective if there is a large fast moving group of monsters.
- Upgrade and place your towers where they can do twice the work. IE, on corners or in-between the path.
- Runs down your battery fast.
With what I know I can approach level 30 on almost all the difficulty levels but then it stops there. What strategies to you use or suggest to move farther in this game? My kudos to TapJoy for making a great game and for making it free.
More Tap Defense Tips:
12.7.08: If you have any buildings that you know you won’t want after a level, sell them before the level is finished. This will give you extra gold to acrue interest.
12.8.08: start out using arrows. You get the most bang for the buck. You will then be able to save your gold for the big guns. Magic is very effective, especially if you upgrade. After level 33, I believe, the arrows are useless. When you get to that level, sell them all. The game will warn you that the arrows are useless.
12.10.08: I got to level 37 and I took Todd’s Advice in the comments and used a ton of Ice. Storm towers help as well. Here’s a pic of my tower configuration.
12.11.08: New tap defense update is out. Deals with the ever important interest rate bug.
12.15.08: Got to level 43 today. The trick for me was to hold off researching any new towers until I upgraded interest twice in a row. How I was able to hold off was to utilize a lot of arrow 
towers. They are cheap and 4 of them put together is a 24 damage. I just made sure that the monsters were getting hit at all times on the path. It’s good to have something work them down. LVL 3 cannons are great at the start because they inflict a lot of damage and have a splash rating that will inflict damage on nearby monsters. I didn’t utilize ice until I upgraded interest twice, so that was about level 23 or so. Then I just fit them in and spaced them out appropriately. With the interest rate high, I was able to upgrade my ice towers with the interest and not lose too much money. LVL 2 ice at a minimum toward the end and you need a few LVL 3 ice to really be effective.
Before you are done with level 33 sell all of the arrow towers that you can. You will not need them anymore and I replaced my arrow towers with Magic towers. Almost a 1 to 1 trade. 
12.15.08: Won the game on easy. Finally. The key was to hold off on buying and build up money, then I bought storms and put them on lvl 3 at the beginning where they could do the most damage.
12.16.08: Just got word that Todd beat the medium level. He sent a pic. 
Good job Todd!! Not to be outdone I just finished beating the medium level as well. I forgot to take a screen shot but I wasn’t as efficient as Todd was with the towers. As always, storm towers are the key to beat this great iPhone game.
12.24.08: FINALLY BEAT THE HARD LEVEL!!!! After a few weeks of frustration and a bit of cussing, I beat the hard level today with 12 angels left. The key for me was to save money so I started with a ton of level 1 arrows, two by two, up the whole path. If there was a place that a level 1 arrow could get a hit, I would put one there. I staggered a few cannons and a whole bunch of water. a round lev
el 11, I was able to get in enough gold to pay for my water
and cannon upgrades with interest earned. I stayed with the formula of upgrading interest twice before researching towers. Next was ice and put them in between the water and upgraded to level 2 immediately and the level three within a few turns. Once magic was available, I slowly replaced the arrow towers and got most of my magic to level two. I put a crap load of storm on this level and upgraded almost all of them to level three. I didn’t put them all in the same 
area like last time. I staggered them and had a level three far into the path to get any the other storm towers missed. This will really come in handy when you deal with the politicians. I didn’t let one politician get by with that config. One thing I did do was upgrade and add magic as the politicians died. Just in case I needed to get something that got by all the other defenses.
Links:
- TapDefense Challenge Tips
- TapJoy.com
- http://sites.google.com/site/tapdefense/Home
- http://www.tapdefense.info
Posted in iPhone 
27 Comments »
software, ver 7.3, on a Gateway 9232T server. The system boots off the CD just fine and detects all the hardware but seems to time-out during the “verifying checksums” portion of the installation and I then get the error message below:
