Retro Tower Defense Best Loadout: What to Actually Bring

The three jobs a loadout has to fill

Loadout advice for this game usually amounts to a list of the strongest towers. That misses what actually loses runs. A working loadout covers three jobs:

1. Detections. Something on your board has to be able to see every tag the map throws — Ghost, Flying, Tough. A tower that cannot detect a tag does not shoot that enemy at all. This is the constraint that kills otherwise strong boards, and it is why Sniper (Flying + Ghost + Tough) stays in loadouts long after its 17.5 DPS stops mattering.

2. Early-board damage. Wave one, you cannot afford your best tower. Cheap towers that fill space matter more than ceiling here.

3. A high ceiling. By wave 30 the cheap towers are irrelevant and one or two big towers carry.

Most bad loadouts fail job 1 or job 2 while over-investing in job 3.

Cheapest damage per Tix

If your constraint is Tix in a run rather than which towers you own, this is the table that matters. Cost to reach level 5 divided by the DPS you get there:

Jolly Elf is the best raw deal in the game, and it is a Unique rather than a Heroic — you do not need a lucky summon to get one. Gauntlet manages 129 Tix per DPS while also having the highest ceiling in the game, which is why it is the XP path worth saving for. The full ranking of all 41 damage towers is worth a look before you commit Tix anywhere.

Highest ceilings

For the late board, raw peak damage at level 5:

1. Gauntlet — 266.67 (XP path)
2. Chance — 200 (Forsaken collab track, closes 4 September)
3. c00lkidd — 188.89 (999 Robux bundle)
4. Ellernate — 188.89 (summon only)
5. 1x1x1x1 — 167.5 (summon only)
6. Gunner — 150 (Epic, no summon luck needed)
7. Disaster Dude — 150 (cheapest XP path in the game)

Two of those seven need no luck and no Robux. Gunner is an Epic at 150 DPS for 21,200 Tix, and Disaster Dude is a 150-DPS Heroic at the end of a 750 XP path. If you are free-to-play and new, those two are your ceiling, and they are good enough for Hard.

What the DPS column does not tell you

Five towers rank far lower than they play, because their damage sits in an ability the DPS row does not count:

• LAZER shows 31.25 — its cannon mode fires for 1,600 per shot at level 5.
• Headless Horseman shows 24 — and has infinite attack range, which no DPS figure prices in.
• Noli shows 113 — plus tripmines doing 450 on a 10-second cycle.
• Fire Mage and Forest Mage show 12.27 and 18.75 — neither includes burn or poison damage over time.

And eleven towers publish no damage numbers at all because they are support: Freezer, Trapper Bot, Bloxy Cola, Taser, Tycoon, Base, DJ, Helperbot, Body Swap, Dusekkar and Yorick. They are grouped separately on the tier list rather than given an invented grade.

Adjusting by map

Map shape changes the answer more than most guides admit:

• Multi-path maps (Reborn Family Abode’s three, Dark Park’s two, Baseplate’s three) punish single high-damage towers. Spread cheap coverage.
• Maps with few cliff spots — Classic Battlegrounds and Pirate Bay both get flagged for this — punish cliff towers like Sniper. Bring ground damage.
• Long single-path maps reward slows: iTrapped, Dusekkar and Freezer buy every other tower more shots on the same enemy.

The map list has star ratings, path counts and how many players have actually cleared each one, which is a better difficulty signal than the stars alone.

Traits, last

Once the loadout works, traits are the tuning layer. Hawkeye 1 (range +10%) rolls at 14.99%, Bargain 1 (−5% placement and upgrade cost) at 13.74%, Strength 1 (+5% damage) at 11.24%. Trait Points come from dailies, missions, events and boss kills, so they accumulate whether you plan for them or not — but rerolling for a specific trait is expensive, and the odds table is worth reading before you start.