Spiked Ball Factory

"Modified to produce heavy but viciously sharp spiked balls instead of regular spikes. Do extra damage to Ceramic Bloons."

- BTD5 Official Description

"Produces sharp spiked balls that do extra damage to ceramics."

- BTDB Steam description

 is the third upgrade for Path 1 of the Spike Factory in Bloons TD 5.

It makes the Spike Factory produce spiked balls that have 16 Pierce (20 on Mobile) each and do 3X damage to Ceramic Bloons. The spiked balls are black balls with orange spikes coming from them. Upon upgrade, a slight range increase occurs (BTD5 Mobile versions only). Usage in great numbers will destroy small numbers of MOAB-class bloons, but is not reliable in late game. If many are used, be prepared for a large amount of lag.

It costs $2040 on Easy, $2400 on Medium $2590 on Hard and $2880 on Impoppable.

In BTD6, this upgrade makes a return as the third upgrade of Path 1 for the Spike Factory, renamed as Spiked Balls. See more about this upgrade here.

Summary
Spike Ball Factory with its significantly more durable spiked balls can tank the bloons more easily, thanks to extra damage to ceramic shells. This allows its stockpiles to endure ceramics even better. As with many Spike Factory upgrades, it is best placed at the end of the bloon track to make the most of its stockpiling potential for use as last line of defense.

Compared to its MOAB-SHREDR Spikes counterpart, Spiked Balls are very weak against MOAB-Class Bloons dealing no extra damage outside of the ceramics MOAB releases. On the other hand MOAB-SHREDR is very weak against bloons namely Ceramic Bloons while doing 4 damage per each spike against MOAB Class Bloons.

Tips

 * In Bloons Monkey City, by giving enough Monkey Knowledge Packs to the Spike Factory's Monkey Knowledge Book, the Spiked Ball Factory can do +3, +4 or +5 extra damage to Ceramic Bloons.
 * The Spike Factory's extra damage to Ceramics is known as crushing damage.
 * Crosspathing a Spiked Ball Factory is greatly recommended to produce spiked balls much faster.

Trivia

 * Spiked Ball Factory is the only upgrade in BTD5 that costs $2400 on Medium for the upgrade alone.
 * The first price decrease of Spiked Balls in BTD6 was dropped to the same price as it did for Bloons TD Battles Mobile until the BTDB Mobile 6.9 update.
 * In Bloons Monkey City Flash, Spiked Ball Factory is referred to as "Spiked Balls", just like as MOAB-SHREDR Spikes is referred as "MOAB-SHREDR spikes". This could simply just be a way to describe the projectiles from these Spike Factory upgrades.