Embrittlement

"Can hit MOAB class Bloons. All hit Bloons become brittle, take extra damage while frozen, and lose Camo properties."

- In-game Description, as of Version 29.4

 is the fourth upgrade of Path 1 for the Ice Monkey. This upgrade causes bloons frozen by this Ice Monkey to take extra damage from all attacks (+1 damage to be exact) for a duration of up to 2.0s, including sharp objects, and for the same duration. Bloons temporarily lose their immunities to attacks that normally cannot pop frozen or lead via the Brittle status (which includes Ice Shards). In addition, this upgrade allows the Ice Monkey to strip off camo and regrow properties from any non-blimp bloon damaged by its freeze attack. MOAB-class bloons can be directly hit too, but only get affected by its damage debuff and brittle effect.

It costs $1,870 on Easy, $2,200 on Medium, $2,375 on Hard, and $2,640 on Impoppable.

Appearance
TBA

Costs

 * Updated as of Version 29.4

Summary
Embrittlement's main role is to weaken groups of bloons or MOAB-class bloons. When placed along a bend, and grouped with many towers, it can help reduce the strength of large groups of bloons, although its rather slow attack speed may cause it to occasionally miss a few bloons. The fact that bloons frozen by the Embrittlement no longer temporarily gain immunity to sharp objects means that it will not hinder nearby towers with the frozen immunity added onto bloons. Embrittlement is also a viable option to countering Camo and/or Regrow rounds, although not the most reliable.

Tips

 * Since Version 17.0, Embrittlement grants camo stripping to the Ice Monkey. It is the only Primary Monkey to decamo bloons, which ends up being extremely useful in many situations, such as against Round 78.
 * However, Embrittlement is not reliable enough camo detection against Round 47, with spaced Camo Pinks, because of its relatively slow attack speed and limited range. Use alternate Ice Monkey options with Cold Snap crosspath instead.
 * With Embrittlement, there is no downside to placing towers that shoot sharp-based projectiles, because bloons frozen by Embrittlement are not affected by the frozen immunity. In fact, adding any other tower beside the Embrittlement is beneficial, because it allows the shards to activate more often.
 * As with most Ice Monkeys, place Embrittlement along a bend to take the greatest advantage of all of its freezing effects, especially for the benefits of decamo and degrowth.
 * Embrittlement is somewhat more expensive than Bloontonium Reactor, but it deals slower bursts of superior grouped popping power, although dependent on other towers to create the maximum popping power.


 * Embrittlement can be used as a cheap debuff source in combination with high-projectile options like Overdrive, as the Version 28.0 buff allows it to target and debuff blimps. It can also kind of assist against DDTs too, to a small extent.
 * Other options include Super Monkey Fan Club, Poplust, Destroyer with Grape Shots, Grandmaster Ninja with Shinobi army, bottom path Monkey Subs and Sun Avatar.

Trivia

 * This upgrade is the only upgrade of the Ice Monkey where the skin color of the monkey is not a cold color (i.e. greens, blues, purples). Instead, Embrittlement's skin color is red.
 * It is possible that the Embrittlement upgrade's appearance is based off of the Japanese Macaque, a species of monkey that have distinctive red skin and white fur. These monkeys are also called "Snow Monkeys".
 * "Embrittlement" is an actual term used within the material science study field that describes a decreased toughness of a material, thereby a loss of ductility, in turn rendering the material to become brittle. Objects that suffer from embrittlement become easier to rupture when forced under pressure, similar to what the Ice Monkey's Embrittlement upgrade does to bloons.
 * Unlike actual embrittlement, lowering the temperature of a material only temporarily renders a material to become brittle, until the temperature returns to the original amount. This is similar to what happens with the Ice Monkey's Embrittlement upgrade, as bloons will only temporarily gain the embrittlement vulnerability including after thawing.
 * The phenomenon called embrittlement also alters the properties of a material, which makes sense for both the Embrittlement upgrade setting a +1 damage vulnerability to all affected bloons and stripping off Camo and Regrow properties.
 * The Version 17.0 buff to Embrittlement whereby it can strip camo is based upon the Tier-4 Ice Fortress upgrade, exclusive to BTD5 Mobile and BTD5 Steam.
 * This upgrade (alongside Super Brittle, its Tier-5 counterpart) is the first upgrade in BTD6 to receive a camo detection buff.
 * Despite the buffs on Version 17.0, the description for Embrittlement was not changed to accommodate the new buff functionality until Version 20.0. The description still did not mention the removal of Regrow properties until 24.0.
 * Because of the Version 25.1 changes to Embrittlement's freezing effects allowing it to cause bloons frozen by it to become vulnerable to any type of freezing regardless of crosspathing, a 4-1-0 or 4-2-0 Embrittlement could near-permanently stall a Ceramic like a 0-1-2 Ice Monkey, except without the extra range but also with the extra damage. A 4-1-0 or 4-2-0 also allowed the embrittlement to trigger its own ice shards quick enough. This was patched in 28.0 secretly.