Cryo Cannon

"Shoots freezing bombs at Bloons over long range."

- In-game description

 is the third upgrade of Path 3 for the Ice Monkey in Bloons TD 6. It allows the Ice Monkey to use a freezing cannon that shoots freezing snowballs. This will replace its freezing cold radial blasts with a projectile freeze attack fired at a faster rate (2.4x faster, shoots every 1.0 seconds) and increased damage (from 1 to 2) with less pierce (30 as opposed to 40) and a smaller blast radius (20 blast radius). Along with this replacement, the attack has significantly greater range for the Ice Monkey to shoot snowballs at further range.

It costs $1,655 on Easy, $1,950 on Medium, $2,105 on Hard, $2,340 on Impoppable.

Appearance
The Ice Monkey gains grey earmuffs and a grey wristband. Its right hand is replaced with a cannon-like projectile launcher encased in ice.

Summary
Cryo Cannon has a limited niche for freezing bloons from a controllable distance at the cost of less pierce and smaller blast radius. By converting the Ice Monkey's normal radial freeze attacks into projectile-based attacks, it is useful in concept but very limited in practice. Besides being a stepping stone for Icicles and Icicle Impale, it can be used as a budget Bloon Impact for defenses that are able to pop Frozen Bloons. In spite of its comparatively lower pierce and blast radius, it attacks considerably faster than Bloon Impact with similar range.

Due to the nature of aim-based projectiles in general, Cryo Cannon naturally performs best along straight lines rather than around curves. Like the popular 0-1-2 Re-Freeze Ice Monkeys, it works the best against Ceramics and Super Ceramics. But due to the reduced pierce and blast radius, the Cryo Cannon upgrade should be reserved in situations where there needs extended flexibility for inflicting freeze effects at range. The higher damage can help in combination with its extensive freeze coverage, but alternate options can also deal good damage plus stalling, such as The Big One or Bloon Impact.

Tips

 * This upgrade improves the Ice Monkey's performance by extending its coverage to shoot from further, but this sacrifices the overall pierce and blast radius.
 * Multi-lane maps such as High Finance, Flooded Valley, and Muddy Puddles are among many of the maps where Cryo Cannon may perform better than an x-x-2 Ice Monkey would.
 * Besides catching Super Ceramics easier through its new projectile-based attack, it is a suitable choice for stopping waves of grouped bloons.
 * Since the Cryo Cannon upgrade is at least twice the price of a single 0-0-2 Ice Monkey and just under the price of two 0-1-2 Ice Monkeys, in most situations it would be preferred to have more 0-1-2 Ice Monkeys. If there's more than one section that needs to be covered by base Ice Monkeys, it's still worth trying Cryo Cannon as an alternative.
 * With Cryo Cannon, there is more control over what nearby bloons should be or shouldn't be frozen. Just like conventional towers, Cryo Cannon uses the four standard target priorities: First, Last, Close, Strong.
 * For most occasions, First is the best option, followed by Last and Strong. There is little reason to set it on Close, as 0-1-2 Ice Monkeys are more cost-efficient at close-range freezing anyway.
 * Cryo Cannon is one of the few Primary Monkeys that are able to reach bloons on Flooded Valley without the use of land platforms (i.e. from Pontoons and Arctic Wind ice platforms). Place the Cryo Cannon on one of the rocks on the ground side closer to the bloon path, and also place a 4-x-x Monkey Village nearby the Cryo Cannon to give it even better range.
 * If using Cryo Cannon as purely a stalling tower, there are some cases where crosspathing with Path 1 is superior over Path 2, but generally Path 2 is the better option.
 * One 1-0-3 or 2-0-3 Cryo Cannon set on Strong can ensure that all three Ceramic waves spawning on Round 63 will become affected by Permafrost effect. Alternately, set it to Last to hit the earliest Ceramics, specifically Super Ceramics, to set the Permafrost effect sooner.
 * Otherwise, the 0-1-3 Cryo Cannon is better if utilizing it for pure damage, or freezing dense groups of Super Ceramics. Deep Freeze is useless with Cryo Cannon, unless paired with other towers.
 * Cryo Cannon works best as a budget Bloon Impact, except without white-popping power instead of black-popping power. It is much faster than Bloon Impact but has less blast radius and lower pierce. As of Version 25.0, due to Bloon Impact's damage type nerf, Cryo Cannon can outclass Bloon Impact in terms of taking down Super Ceramics, and it can even be upgraded to Icicles to counter the white immunity.

Trivia

 * Prior to the Version 23.0 Cryo Cannon price buff, the Cryo Cannon upgrade costed as much as the Ice Shards upgrade did in BTD5. Interestingly, the BTD5 Absolute Zero upgrade following the BTD5 Ice Shards upgrade also costed the same, at a cost of $2,000 on Medium. And similarly, the price of Icicles was also the same price too.
 * Despite what the patch notes mentioned regarding Cryo Cannon pierce not being affected by the change, Cryo Cannon actually received a pierce buff from 20 to 30. This has also affected its subsequent upgrades.