Sprockets (BTD6)

"Increases sentry gun and Engineer attack speed."

- Official Bloons TD 6 description.

Sprockets is the third upgrade of path 1 for the Engineer Monkey in Bloons TD 6. It allows the Engineer's nailgun and any newly spawned sentries to attack 66% faster. The Engineer's improved sentries are still deployed every 6.0s. In addition, sentries with this upgrade inherit the pinning properties of Pin.

It costs $490 on Easy, $575 on Medium, $620 on Hard, and $690 on Impoppable.

Appearance
An Engineer with Sprockets receives a black construction helmet with two green arrowhead symbols pointing downwards. On the Engineer's left hand, the wrench's grip is changed from red to yellow. On the upgrade portrait, the Engineer leans on his sentry in a casual way, leaning with his left arm, crossing his legs while stanidng up, and looking at the sentry while smiling.

Sprockets Nail Sentry
Sprockets Nail Sentry is simply an upgraded version of a Nail Sentry, and is named as a "Sentry". Just like the normal Nail Sentry, the Sprockets Nail Sentry appears green and shoots nails. It shoot nails every 0.57 seconds, and each nail can pop 2 bloons (3 with Oversize Nails) and they have a range of 45 (+4 with Larger Service Area). The nails are of the sharp damage type and cannot pop lead or frozen without special upgrades. Crosspathing with Oversize Nails changes the sentry damage type from sharp to shatter (sharp + frozen-popping). One unique crosspathing interaction is being able to receive benefits exclusive to the Pin upgrade, allowing these sentries to pin bloons.


 * Damage Type: Sharp
 * Damage: 1
 * Pierce: 2 (3 with 1-0-1)
 * Attack Speed: 1.75x (every 0.95s)

Summary
Sprockets primarily focuses on improving firepower via Engineer sentries. This makes the Sprockets Engineer a decent early-game advancement option in the game. Combining the Engineer's own range with his sentries, the Sprockets Engineer has rather good overall combined range and DPS for its price.

Tips

 * Adding Sprockets can allow the whole Engineer and his sentries to easily solo versus rounds with lots of Yellows and/or Pinks, where normally other sentry-based Engineers would struggle.
 * Generally, the 3-0-2 crosspath is better than the 3-2-0 crosspath. The Pin helps the Engineer, while the Oversize Nails increases pierce. Plus, sentries can now pin bloons starting from 3-0-2.
 * Larger Service Area can be bad because it increases sentry deploy range, however Deconstruction helps apply more damage to MOABs and Fortified Bloons.
 * Sprockets tends to have better single-target popping power compared to its next upgrade Sentry Expert. However, with less pierce overall and limited utility it would help to add Gwendolin to boost pierce if opting for Sprockets spam.

Sounds
When a sentry is placed:


 * [gadget placement]
 * [gadget placement]

Trivia

 * In BTD6, a 3-0-0 Sprockets costs exactly $2020 on Hard Difficulty. This is still the case after the Version 29.0 price adjustment of Sprockets and base Engineer.
 * Sprockets is the first upgrade to have an Impoppable price of a number whose coefficient in scientific notation is equal to 6.9 (and hence upgrades with $690, for instance).
 * Sprockets requires the Sentry Gun upgrade, because said upgrade is in the path of Sprockets. In constrast in BTD5, it is possible to get Sprockets without having Sentry Guns.