Bloons TD6 - Glacial Trail tips
- Learn easy tips for beating the Glacial Trail
- Find out what exactly an 0-2-5 Dart Monkey is
- Beat the map easily!
We already gave a brief overview of Bloons TD6 in our most recent guide about how to use the Beast Master monkey. However, in brief, it’s a tower defence game where you place and upgrade squadrons of monkeys to pop balloons floating down a given trail. You focus on upgrading and synergising your monkeys to unlock new combinations and defeat powerful bosses.
So, to elaborate on the specifics of a map, if you’re new to mobile tower defence games, you should know that the map you play on can have a decisive effect. Some will have stage hazards or access to certain resources whereas others do not - remember how the Beast Master needs access to things like water for summoning certain beasts? - and all of them have different lengths of trails or spots to place down monkeys.
What is the Glacial Trail?
The Glacial Trail is a newly added map for December 2023 in Bloons TD6 that is available for Expert mode and above. This map is a single lane, meaning there is only one track for balloons to progress down. However, while this usually makes the approach much simpler, what makes the map difficult is a combination of icicles blocking line-of-sight - meaning you can’t rely on all monkeys being able to attack at the same time - and the unique stage hazards, such as the snowstorms.
Snow Storms will freeze your monkeys for two rounds. However, they are predictable as they always happen ten rounds after your monkey is placed. So it’s easy to plan ahead for them. There’s also one key way to evade this environmental effect and that’s to use Ice Monkeys instead, given that they don’t freeze.
Strategies to deal with Glacial Trail
Obviously, the first big strategy is to use Ice Monkeys. Not exclusively, mind you, but these allow you to keep doing damage effectively even while your other towers may be frozen. Getting to a 2-0-5 Ice Monkey is recommended, combined with either a 0-2-5 Perma-Spike, a 1-5-0 Druid or both to shore up your defences near the end of the trail.
The advantage of the latter two monkeys is that the obstacles they place down - vines for the Druid and spikes for the…well, Perma-Spike - are both passive. This means that even when frozen, these obstacles will continue to do damage. So, on top of a monkey that can’t be frozen, you get two where it effectively doesn’t matter whether or not they are.
It should also be noted that in terms of generating income, should you need to, Banana Farms won’t produce during a freeze, but Monkey Banks will (albeit you need to wait for them to be unfrozen to collect). In terms of support towers, most recommendations include an Alchemist or Monkey Village for the added bonuses.
Top Tip - The numbers, Mason, what do they mean?!
Since we’re only offering a basic overview, many advanced players who are going for a win on something like Chimps mode may take to looking up expert player guides. But when they start talking about things like a 0-2-5 Dart Monkey or a 2-0-4 Alchemist, you might start getting confused.
But, this is actually quite simple. Since there are three upgrade paths for each monkey, these numbers correspond to how many purchases on each path you take to get the requisite monkey.
The example we gave with the dart monkey probably isn’t that useful, but it serves as a good example. So a 0-2-2 Dart Monkey would be one with Quick Shorts and Very Quick Shots on Path 2, and Long Range Darts with Enhanced Eyesight on Path 3. Simple.
Just remember, you can only select upgrades from two paths: one with your primary path that can go up to 5, the total number of upgrades on that path, and one on which you can take two secondary upgrades.
If you want to get a headstart on Bloons TD6, you can also check the BTD6 tier list of heroes you can acquire and use in-game. These are dramatically more powerful, but also more finicky, characters.
