Bloons Monkey City

Bloons Monkey City

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Late game Contested Territory Guide
By Planterror
This is a guide for achieving high rounds in Contested Territory. It will likely not apply to players with City level 30 or below.

Please stop adding me solely to get the friends quest completed. I have a strict friends list, and you can complete that quest by spying on enemy territories in Contested.
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Introduction
This guide will NOT help the majority of newcomers! This guide will apply likely when you hit City Level 30, as it is when the "late game" begins.

Why are there so many people aiming for round 100? Why not further?
Round 100 in Contested Territory is the final bunch of rewards for the Milestone rewards. By reaching it, it also pretty much guarantees you own that CT for the next 6 hours (unless someone is crazy enough to go higher)

Going past round 100 isn't easy, considering the mass amount of ZOMGs that spawn along with the insane health and speed buffs to anything ceramic and above. For those reasons, round 100 is what a lot of veterans perfer.

Also, it takes a lot of time to even get there, nobody is likely to actually take the 2 hours it needs to beat that record.

TL;DR (In case you don't want to hear the specifics)
Late game in CT involves a lot of late game planning, with towers that stall and pop massive amounts of ZOMGs taking high ranks. I find the best combo is having Temples, Bloonchipper Moab Shredders (Bloonchipper 4-2), MIB CTA (Village 2-4) with Energy Beacon cooldown reduction (Village 4-2), Spike Storms (Spike Factory 1-4), and stalling with 2+ Cripple Moabs (Sniper)(You will need one with Fast firing and one without, as the snipers shooting at the same time will not give any additional stun) as well as with abilities like Absolute Zero (Ice) can push to round 100 pretty simple with enough ability spam.

A word of warning
Contested Territories are currently (and maybe will be forever) bugged. If you enter CT directly after completing a Bloon Beacon tile, the double waves of the bloon beacon will carry into CT. Capture some additional tiles or defeat the Boss Bloon before entering CT to fix this bug. If you have already entered CT with this bug, you can try deleting the CT event data in your steam folder, or just wait for a new event.
Making Cash
This may be obvious to some, but the golden rule to winning CT is to plan for the late game. You'll want to use Farms and other sources of income to bring in enough cash to afford a solid defense late game.

With your first bit of money, start with a 2-0 farm, and your free dart and random tower. While you continue to place down 2-0 farms, (they are quite efficient, especially with monkey knowledge) there is a need for some additional defense. While you could start bloon trapping right now, it's not required as until ceramics come, your towers will likely pop the bloons before they enter the trap. So a Bloonjitzu and something to deal with lead, like a Cluster Bomb should be enough on most maps, or Destroyers + Cannon Ship on water tiles.

While planations are efficient, BRFs are much better in efficiency and we should be rushing to get one as soon as possible. So therefore, after placing 3-4 farms and upgrading them all to 2-0, upgrade one of the farms to 3-0, then when you get around $6k, sell the other 2-0 farms and upgrade your 3-0 to 4-0, then to 4-2. From there, it's relatively quick to get the other factories outright so the selling trick doesn't matter.

Continue to get up BRFs until you have 1 farm left, as thanks to, once again, monkey knowledge, having a single bank will give us a percentage of our current reserves every round, which can quickly spiral.

Now that we have our farms setup, there's now somewhat of an issue to address: Farms lose value the longer we go into CT, because there are a fixed amount of cash that can be gathered from them each round. So while we keep the farms around for the early and mid game, we're going to have to turn to alternative sources of cash, those that aren't round dependant.

So what other income can be used?
I'm glad you asked.

The Bloon Trap

The engineer's 4th tier upgrade can handle 2 problems we have: Mass ceramic rushes and Mid game cash generation. By using these effectively, we can generate heaps of cash in the midgame, because they ignore the late game cash reduction on bloons (at least on mobile/steam). Placing the tower where only one section of the track is visible makes a quick and easy clicker game cash trap for ceramics.

Remember to use Monkey Towns to boost the cash created by bloon traps. Another useful tower to use to assist the bloon trap is an Arctic wind, which can slow down mass ceramic rushes in case the engineers get overwhelmed.

The only thing Bloon Traps can't trap are MOAB class bloons, but that can also be accounted for by using 4-2 Bloonchippers, the Super Wide Funnel Upgrade. In order to ensure they do not scoop up valuable ceramics, have their range not directly on the track (Since MOABs have a much bigger hitbox) shown here as an example.

Supply Drop
Pretty soon, there will likely be too many MOAB class bloons for just a handful of chippers to break down. At about round 35, you'll want to switch entirely to using the Sniper's supply drops. Each crate drops about $1000, and you will usually have 15 or more active for money grinding. Since the waves are much longer and bigger, snipers become more valuable since the ability can be activated independently of the waves. Remember when I said farms lose value? This is why. You can activate supply drops any amount of times in each wave, whereas factories will only give you a set amount of banana boxes per wave.

Another useful thing to note is we can use the Village's 4th tier Energy Beacon to reduce the cooldown of supply drops from 60 seconds to 45, giving us even more cash per round. Oh yeah, and everything said for the supply drop also works for Support Chinooks, although they are more expensive. Make sure to build them if you have space.

On tougher maps, it may be useful to setup one of your temples early to deal with the bloons that overrun your engineers, like certain volcano tiles where Arctic Wind and Monkey Town aren't available. This way you can keep farming up to the proper point without losing the whole CT.

But when do we stop money grinding and actually setup a defense? Generally I'd recommend stopping at around round 45, with around 2 million cash to spare. You can definitely farm past that point, but because of the limited tower space and selection you won't actually be spending more than 2 million on most maps. But from there, we go wild with our defenses.
Temple Setup
City Level 38 gives the max amount of Super monkeys, 6, you can have, meaning that is the max amount of temples that one can use. Maximizing the temple's effectiveness is essential to late game popping power.

Placement

Of course, you can't just stick supers in and expect them to be good temples. Aside from having space for sacrifices, you must also realize that the Temple's beams fire in a straight line: if you can hit more track with one beam, you can hit lots of ZOMGs. See this example, the track is straight enough that a temple spot is bound to be good.

Remember to space out the super monkeys so that they are not in range of each other (while still leaving ample space for placing down nearby towers), and mind the village's Beacon upgrade if you are using them as sacrifices. From that, we can plan out sacrifices.

Sacrifices

The big bulk of effective temple usage is sacrificing towers in it. You may already know that you must sacrifice 30k of Explosive (Bomb Tower/Mortar), Apprentice, Glue, Ice, and Miscellaneous towers* to have the max amount of sacrifices, but this can get tricky in BMC.

The reason? Tower Limits.
In BMC, you have a limited amount of towers to work with, and even when sacrificed to a temple, they still eat up a slot placed. This will likely mean you can't reach that glorious 30k sacs with every temple. Moreover, because of the fact that unlike in btd6, temples will still consume slots of the towers sacrificed, we have to be very careful about what towers to sacrifice.

*Villages are an exception to the misc category. Alongside it's contribution to this category, there are a few upgrades that actually transfer to the Temple itself. The known ones that do this include Jungle Drums, Monkey Fort, Monkey Town, and Radar Scanner. I have no idea if Energy Beacon reduces the cooldown of the Dark Temple ability, will need testing. But even so, I wouldn't really recommend sacrificing villages as you only have 11 of them total, which would leave 4 CTAs and a single energy beacon to reduce cooldowns. While a temple only needs 1 CTA boost to be at max speed, it's likely lack of a spread out range of the CTA villages hurts other towers' performances. It will need testing though.

Knowing that, we want to sacrifice towers that are useless to an end-game CT setup. Good candidates are Bombs, (Mortars can stun MOABs with the Pop and Awe ability, although not quite powerful) Boomerangs, (Handles ceramics well, but Temples can already shred them easily.) Apprentices, (Pheonix is dull, period.) and Glue (They can't do anything against MOAB class). Feel free to sacrifice 1-2 ice towers if you want a little more, but the Absolute Zero ability is very useful so make sure you have more than 4 remaining. Here's an example of a sacrifice setup at City rank 40, done for each temple.
The Other Towers
Of course, temples alone cannot get near round 100. Thankfully, we have a decent selection of towers that can assist with getting there.

Super Wide Funnel Bloonchippers


I covered this briefly in the Farming Cash section, but chippers are singlehandedly the cheapest option of MOAB shredding. Place them around the front to the middle of the track with lots of range coverage so that they constantly drain the ZOMG health.

Ray of Doom Dartling Gun


Like the Temple of the Monkey God, these are extremely useful to have hitting a large part of the track in order to reduce the amount of non-MOAB class nearby. This not only assists Bloonchippers to only focus attacks on MOAB shredding, but reducing the amount of bloons can help greatly in fighting lag. Since village buffs have no effect on them besides the discount, don't worry about putting it near your other defenses.

Cripple Moab Snipers


A Cripple Moab sniper set to strong doesn't make a whole difference, but with enough of them with different targettings and attack speed, it can stall ZOMGs almost as effectively. However, take care when placing and setting snipers, because multiple snipers hitting the same MOAB at the same time will not stun for longer, so if you intend to place multiple (and you should) you should attempt to desync the snipers' shots to prevent stun overlap as much as possible. The simplest form of this is with two snipers set to 4-1 and 4-0, but if you're feeling really crafty you can have four snipers, with two set to 4-1, 2 set to 4-0, and ensure one 4-1 and 4-0 sniper is not boosted by a Jungle Drums Village while the other two are. A more complex setup would be having snipers with changable attack speed with a village Jungle Drums and the sniper's attack speed buff (4 snipers) times the 4 targetting priorities, First, Last, Close, Strong (16 snipers) + additional Close snipers around the map (+1-5 snipers) giving intense stuns.

See the image of my setup on Shoe for an example of that.

Spectre Aces (and Apache Dartship Heli Pilots)

Even though they take up a ton of space, adding these can assist in popping power. You may not be able to fit all Ace and heli spots, but it helps as they can shred pretty effectively.

M.I.B. Call to Arms Village


The attack speed from this village is extremely beneficial for ramping up the damage of Temples and Bloonchippers. Don't underestimate it.

Energy Beacon Village


This one's pretty simple, it's to reduce the cooldowns of important towers like CTA and Spike Storm. It also helps you early game with money generation, as traps give more when the engineer is in range, and also for sniper and chinook crates having less cooldown. Remember to keep it away from the track during money grind if you upgrade to energy beacon.

Spike Storm Factory


With enough of these, it can severely damage ZOMGs that bust through our defenses a little bit. A short cooldown ensures it can be effective at shredding, although you may need a good triggerhand or an autoclicker.

Sabotage Supply Lines Ninja


This ability from the ninja helps with stalling ZOMGs. The ability affects recently spawned bloons and bloons about to spawn for 15 seconds, blimps already spawned aren't affected. Paired with Absolute Zero, ZOMGs can be slowed to a crawl.

Absolute Zero Ice Tower


Again, a really useful stalling tool for ZOMGs. This ability only affects bloons on screen, but it is permanent until they are popped down to another layer.

The Ice Shards part can help with non-MOAB cleaning, but I wouldn't recommend it as it can cause heavy lag on slower PCs/Phones.

Overclock Engineer


Has a different, but effective attack speed buff for one tower at a time. Usually, you'll be selecting a Temple to buff, as well as the buff can stack up to 3 times in the BTD5 era. A lesser but helpful support. There isn't much purpose in using more than 6, as 1 overclock + MIB + Temple ability provides the max attack speed bonus.

Artillery Battery Mortar


On the Flash version, they are essential to disrupting DDT rushes during CT. Since Mobile CT does not have DDTs, the effectiveness is limited, but having a few of them can minorly help with stalling, but if the stalling is very minimal, at less than half a second. Place down if you have nothing else.
Example Setups
Here are a few of my round 100 setups for reference:
Beehive/Hexagonal (Light Forest)

Talon (Heavy Forest)

Shoe (Snow)

U Bend (Light Forest)


Waves/Zigzag (Mountain)

Stairs (Desert)

DNA (Volcano) Note: this temple setup is unoptimized, I could've placed 2 temples on the bottom left and got max sacrifices. I didn't.
Final Notes and Misc Tips
  • Use up 2-3 of your Supply crates to jumpstart your Banana Farms or Bloon Traps. Winning the territory gives you 25 bloonstones, while purchasing 3 crates costs 15. Not to mention you can also receive bonus crates from friends or events.
  • A good bonus monkey should give us early game cash generation or support, and late game usefulness. Some of the good ones include Spike Factories, Snipers, Ice towers, and Engineers. If you are confident with your early game defense, Villages or another Super Monkey is not a bad idea.
  • Play with the terrain. Of course, not every track can allow for farms, but it can be a good opportunity to build better Supply Drops and Bloon Traps, or consider also throwing in Support Chinooks.
  • The first MOAB class bloon appears at around round 17. Ensure you are ready for it if you are using pure bloon trap spam.
  • Don't get too frustrated if you can't setup properly! Early game takes practice to balance money farming with tower popping power. If you have to place an extra tower to deal with rushes, so be it.
  • Late game can lag a lot. Mobile players beware, your phone may not handle the stress. You can attempt to mitigate it by prioritizing temples above all else, making more sacrifices and placing down ray of dooms to cleanup non-moab class bloons.

And that sums up pretty much everything to accomplish the famed round 100. If there's anything else that needs to be asked, ask in the comments and I may get around to responding.
32 Comments
󠀡󠀡ShowHotel 16 Jan @ 7:40pm 
a wise word a gamer said......'get gud"
Pregnant 31 Mar, 2024 @ 12:01am 
bloons monkey city :sbspat::spongebob:
Combo Kings 12 Jan, 2024 @ 10:51pm 
Great Guide!
Wiffle_Snuff 4 Jun, 2022 @ 12:17pm 
You are able to get 1 max temple pretty easily before round 40 which can let you do more farming if you want, it really depends on the cash left over, but 1 temple with overclock and sabotage under a 3-1 village can solo very far allowing you to accumulate hundreds of thousands without sniper, heli, or engineer, only x-3+ bank (preferably 2-4).
I'm not against using bloontrap and supply drop when farms are available, but I personally wouldn't recommend them when players aren't planning to afk as soon as possible.
I think the farming strategies to help go late game should be split into separate categories for people who wanna be fully afk, half afk half active, and fully active, as well as accounting for restrictions of the towers like farm, engineer, and I don't remember if sniper is restricted anywhere
Wiffle_Snuff 4 Jun, 2022 @ 12:15pm 
Most of my comment was not meant as criticism, more as just putting it out there for people reading this. I am happy to hear that you want to improve it, there may be a new guide coming out soon if it isn't already published.

"I'm not saying don't use them, in fact I highly recommend. But the issue is that farms become less useful as a money generator when the rounds get longer and longer, so by round 35 you should be setup with a sniper or heli ability farm."
While it is true that the longer the rounds, the less frequent cash is from them, compared to abilities such as sniper or bloontrap which gets more cash from more bloons, it's still not entirely necessary. Cash from bloons picks up heavily in later rounds, which allows the +2x% total cash from bank do more.
Planterror  [author] 1 Jun, 2022 @ 4:36pm 
Regardless, you are correct. I'm not happy with this guide in it's current state and I will be working to improve it with more information, and maybe get some images that are consistent.
Planterror  [author] 1 Jun, 2022 @ 4:30pm 
[quote]using the sabotage ability from 0-4 ninja and absolute zero from 0-4 ice monkey is very helpful, as well as overclock from 0-4 engineer if using on temples.[/quote]

This tells me you have not read the guide at all. I have mentioned this in "The Other Towers" already, they do come in handy.

[quote]so if you want to / can use all temples then don't make them all fully max. If I ever want to go to round 100 I have 3 max temples, the others aren't fully max. something like this for those other 3: 1 4-0 apprentice, 2 4-2 glue gunner, 1 4-0 ice monkey, $30K worth of bomb shooter and / or mortar (if bomb is banned, 1 4-0 mortar), $30K of miscellaneous (depends on how much space you have to place, but 3 4-2 boomerang, a 0-4 village, 2 2-4 snipers)[/quote]

Again, I find it odd that you put this in because I have already discussed that max temples are impossible due to tower limits.
Planterror  [author] 1 Jun, 2022 @ 4:30pm 
[quote]Banana farms are really good, only time you shouldn't use them is on maps that restrict them, and you should have a maximum of 1 2-4 farm for good farming (you need a min of x-3 anyway, why not get x-4 for higher capacity and more cash).[/quote]

I'm not saying don't use them, in fact I highly recommend. But the issue is that farms become less useful as a money generator when the rounds get longer and longer, so by round 35 you should be setup with a sniper or heli ability farm.

[quote]Using bloontrap in combination with farms is acceptable but not very necessary,[/quote]

Your first trap may not make much immediately, but since bloon trap isn't affected by cash reductions it is very powerful in the midgame.
Wiffle_Snuff 1 Jun, 2022 @ 3:36pm 
Also, you can have a maximum of 4 max temples, so if you want to / can use all temples then don't make them all fully max. If I ever want to go to round 100 I have 3 max temples, the others aren't fully max. something like this for those other 3: 1 4-0 apprentice, 2 4-2 glue gunner, 1 4-0 ice monkey, $30K worth of bomb shooter and / or mortar (if bomb is banned, 1 4-0 mortar), $30K of miscellaneous (depends on how much space you have to place, but 3 4-2 boomerang, a 0-4 village, 2 2-4 snipers). The difference between $0 and $10K for a sacrifice value is HUGE, the difference between $10K and $30K is only +25%. You wouldn't want to sacrifice the large damage output of another temple just to boost one by 25%, because ultimately it would have a lower total damage output.
Wiffle_Snuff 1 Jun, 2022 @ 3:36pm 
Not a very good guide. Banana farms are really good, only time you shouldn't use them is on maps that restrict them, and you should have a maximum of 1 2-4 farm for good farming (you need a min of x-3 anyway, why not get x-4 for higher capacity and more cash). If you're going for late game CT, rank 5 of all monkey knowledge is the bare minimum assumption and you should go even higher to make things easier. Remember you don't need as much cash as possible, you only need enough cash. excess cash is purely cosmetic.

Using bloontrap in combination with farms is acceptable but not very necessary, or using 0-4 sniper. using the sabotage ability from 0-4 ninja and absolute zero from 0-4 ice monkey is very helpful, as well as overclock from 0-4 engineer if using on temples.