Special Poperations

"Deploys a powerful special Monkey Marine with machine gun."

- BTD6

 is the final upgrade of Path 2 for the Heli Pilot in BTD6. Alongside making its own crate ability give just over double the amount of cash and lives, it also adds another ability that drops one temporary "Marine" monkey in-game upon activation which shoots like a fast-shooting Super Monkey with limited range that pops 6 layers per shot and has 20 pierce per dart. The Marine can also pop Camo and Leads, making it effective against most Bloon types. The Marine lasts for 30 seconds and the ability cooldown for the Marine Ability is 25 seconds, more than enough uptime to consistently have one Marine up at all times.

Additionally, Special Poperations also increases the Heli Pilot's flight speed by 50%, making it the fastest aircraft-based tower.

It costs $25,500 on Easy, $30,000 on Medium, $32,400 on Hard and $36,000 on Impoppable.

Description
The main Heli Pilot becomes of a darker shade, and has added a logo with an electric symbol to its side. In the upgrade picture, it is revealed that the Special Poperations deploys towers using a rope from the Heli Pilot.

In the artwork, the Marine is shown to be grabbing onto the rope and shooting. When placed down and selected, the monkey's image is standing and shooting normally. On the field, the Marine fires red coloured darts.

The new Marine Ability's upgrade icon is a recoloured version of the head and rifle of the Elite Defender.

When the Marine Ability is activated, the Marine will be placed on the nearest placeable land spot and generate the sound of a secret agency walkie-talkie call (removed as of Version 22.0 or so, definitely so in Version 23.0).

Marine Ability
Upon activation, the Special Poperations Chinook will deploy the Marine near the closest land spot relative to the Special Poperations Chinook. The Marine lasts for 30 seconds and has a 25-second cooldown. The Marine has 6 damage and 20 pierce, and attacks 20 times per second.

The Marine is also affected by the Faster Firing upgrade, making it a better crosspath than top path if considering maximum efficiency.

Supply Crate Ability
Upon activation, the Special Poperations Chinook will drop crates of cash and lives. These crates give more cash and lives than the previous iteration (specifically $4500 and 25 lives), but the cooldown remains the same, at 90 seconds.

When a player has over 1000 lives, the amount of lives given by the crates is greatly reduced to 2. This limit is shared with the Chinook and any other life-generating upgrades.

Pickup Tower Ability
Also referred to as the "Reposition Ability", "Redeploy Ability", or "Move Tower Ability".

Upon activation, the screen will change to show what towers can be moved, with targets on towers that can be moved. Selecting a moveable tower will allow the player to reposition the tower. After repositioning a tower, the Special Poperations Chinook will move to the tower, pick up the tower, move to the new position, then drop the tower. The ability remains unchanged from the previous iteration. However, due to the increased movement speed of the Heli, the tower is redeployed slightly faster.

The list of towers that cannot be moved remains the same:
 * All Banana Farms
 * All Monkey Villages
 * Sun Temples and the True Sun God, including Vengeful True Sun God
 * Aircraft Carriers and the Carrier Flagship
 * All temporary towers
 * Monkey Ace landing pads
 * Heli Pilot landing pads
 * Portable Lakes
 * All Paragons
 * Other players' towers in Co-Op Mode

Door Gunner Ability
The Door Gunner ability unlocks for the Special Poperations when the "Door Gunner" MK is unlocked and active. The main function of the Door Gunner ability is to pick up any pickable tower Tier 4 or below (this excludes Heroes too) and allow the tower to attack while active. The tower will not be able to change target priority or activate their abilities until transported to a new location, although the picked up tower's ability can still be active while transported via Door Gunner.

When activated, the ability sends the helicopter towards the selected tower and picks it up. Once activated, the tower will continue shooting on their set target priority until transported back to a new location via pressing the Door Gunner ability again. The Door Gunner tower will be considered to have Flying, just like the Heli itself, allowing its projectiles to travel above all obstacles.

While a Door Gunner is active, the Redeploy ability is disabled until the Door Gunner is placed onto a new location. When the Door Gunner is relocated onto another location, the 60-second cooldown for both Door Gunner ability and Redeploy ability will begin. Note that both the Door Gunner ability and Redeploy ability are shared between each other; activating either ability sets the cooldown for both abilities.

Certain interactions occur while using Door Gunner. For example, Engineers with any Path 1 upgrade (except with Tier 5 upgrades) will drop their sentries directly below where the Special Poperations Heli is currently hovering at, or to the nearest placeable land spot if the target location is water or otherwise considered unplaceable terrain. Additionally, it is possible for the Door Gunner's ability to be active while picked up, but the Door Gunner's abilities cannot begin while picked up until placed down.

Summary
Special Poperations should not be underestimated just because the only major benefit of the upgrade is its new Marine ability. The main advantages of the Marine are its flexible placement, universal popping power, high pierce, and fast attack speed. Additionally, the total uptime for the Marine ability is very generous, with just over 100% uptime, allowing for frequent usages of the Marine in different spots at just about any time.

Tips

 * When it comes to optimizing the Marine ability, use the 0-5-2 crosspath, as the Marine is affected by this crosspath benefit. Quad Darts does not affect the Marine by any means, although Pursuit can affect where the Marine may land.
 * Basically, if you want efficiency, use the 0-5-2 crosspath; if you want a more automatized simple tower, then use the 2-5-0 crosspath.
 * The Marine ability has just over 100% uptime. As long as the ability is repetitively used, Special Poperations will retains its high DPS potential.

Sounds
When activating Supply Crate Ability:
 * [Crate dropping]
 * [Cash collecting]
 * [Lives collecting]

When activating Redeploy Ability or Door Gunner Ability:
 * [Helicopter flying]
 * [Picking up towers]
 * [Dropping off towers]

When activating Marine Ability:
 * [Helicopter flying]
 * [Walkie-talkie speaking] "You're going to seek near here! [psssh]" (removed in ~22.0)
 * [Walkie-talkie speaking] "Don't waste, no time to waste! [psssh]" (removed in ~22.0)

Trivia

 * The icon for this upgrade is similar to the artwork of the Elite Defender upgrade for the Sniper Monkey, but with blue colouring instead of orange.
 * This upgrade has the most number of different abilities per tower, with three different abilities for the same tower, with two abilities coming from the Support Chinook.
 * As of version 7.0, this is now tied with Ezili and Adora.
 * As of version 17.0, the Super Monkey has a higher number of total abilites (at four), though it can only have one at any given time.
 * As of version 17.0, the Door Gunner Monkey Knowledge gives this upgrade a fourth ability, though it shares its cooldown with the Redeploy ability.
 * "Poperations" is a portmanteau of "pop" and "operations."
 * "Special operations" is a term meaning military enforcement by special military forces.
 * Two new bugs have been introduced to Special Poperations in Version 17.0: one of them involves spawning multiple Marines every few seconds upon using the Marine ability while using picking up a tower via the Redeploy ability, and the other being placing a tower in the center of the map regardless of placement by using the Door Gunner MK ability to drop down a tower onto a Carrier Flagship and immediately selling the Carrier Flagship right before placement.
 * The former has been fixed as of Version 17.1.