Attack Speed

Icon for attack speed in Bloons TD 6

Most BTD4 upgrades that involve attack speed increases (some not mentioned in description excluded)

Attack Speed is the rate of attacks per second. Attack Cooldown is the cooldown time between each attack. Speed Cap is a fan-made term used to refer to a limit on how fast a tower/weapon can attack. All attacking towers when triggered will create attacks at a specific rate, or inversely, attack after a specific amount of time. If bloons are detected by the tower, they will make an attack, and will persist until there are no longer any detected bloons. Most of the time, enemy bloons have to be within the tower's range to trigger attack, but there are exceptions. Some towers such as the Sniper Monkey can make attacks from any distance, ignoring Range limitations. Other towers such as the Monkey Ace sporadically create attacks every so often for as long as they appear on the map.

Explanation

An attack is usually done every time bloons are detected by the tower, and will persist to create a constant rate of attacks if the attack is still triggered. Once an attack is made, there is a brief cooldown before the same attack can be created again. If the attack's trigger is off, the attack can still refresh while under cooldown, but the tower only makes an attack once the trigger is turned back on. Attack speed and attack cooldown both calculate the way the attack is created with respect to time.

Attack Speed vs Attack Cooldown

"Attack speed" is strictly measured in terms of attacks per second. However, there is an inverse of this called the "attack cooldown". Attack cooldown calculates in terms of seconds per attack, which is the amount of time it takes to make a single attack. An attack can be created at a maximum rate equivalent to the inverse of the attack cooldown.

Attack speed bonuses are calculated in three unique ways: additive attack speed bonuses (e.g. +25% attack speed), multiplicative attack speed bonuses (e.g. 1.25x attack speed),attack cooldown multipliers (e.g. 0.80x attack cooldown), and attack cooldown reduction (e.g. -20% attack cooldown). An additive attack speed bonus is calculated by either multiplying the attack speed multiplier or multiplying the sum of the attack speed percentage bonus plus 100% (e.g. 100% + 25%). On the other hand, an attack cooldown is always calculated by multiplying the attack cooldown multiplier. In order to interchange between attack speed and attack cooldown, convert to multiplier form and then calculate the inverse to obtain the opposite counterpart.

For example, suppose we took the BTD6 Jungle Drums. The attack cooldown provided from this buff is 0.85x. Its attack speed bonus is equivalent to roughly 1.176x attack speed, or +17.6% attack speed. Now take a BTD6 Tack Shooter with Faster Shooting, which has a 0.75x attack cooldown (equivalent to 1.33x attack speed or +33% attack speed) compared to its base 1.4s attack speed. Say that this Tack Shooter is supported by the same Jungle Drums. To find the upgraded Tack Shooter's new attack speed, multiply the upgraded Tack Shooter's attack speed with the attack speed bonus of the buff, or inversely multiply the upgraded Tack Shooter's attack cooldown with the attack cooldown of the buff. Ensure that both variants of these attack speed/cooldown calculations are of the same type.

Speed Cap

Note: Some players claim Bloons TD 6 has a universal attack speed cap. It does not, and the incorrect perception of an attack speed cap existing in BTD6 likely stems from previous games in the series. In this game, there is a special case on how attacks are handled on very fast attacking towers. From the popology: "[Reload] times less than 0.1s are accurate on average — towers will release multiple projectiles on the same frame as necessary to maintain this average, similar to fractional pierce."

Note that in-game descriptions and patch notes usually use the word "speed" even when they in fact refer to reload time.

Many older titles in the Bloons series have a cap on how fast towers can attack. This is typically around 30 attacks a second give or take, as that is the maximum amount of frames those games can run. This frame cap does not exist in some games, notably Bloons TD 6 and Bloons TD Battles 2. The cap is often called "Speed Cap".

In Bloons TD 6, despite the lack of speed cap, the game manages reload speeds less than a single 60 FPS frame in terms of fractions. If an attack's attack cooldown is between 60 FPS frames, the tower's attack releases multiple projectiles on the same frame whenever necessary, in order to maintain accuracy in fractions of 1/60 (0.01667) seconds.

History

Bloons Tower Defense 1 - Bloons Tower Defense 3

In BTD1, the only upgrade that increased attack speed was for the Tack Tower's (Tack Shooter) Faster Shooting upgrade. In later generations, however, more and more towers have received upgrades that are able to increase attack speed for itself or other nearby towers. The only way to universally increase attack speed in BTD3 was with Jungle Drums. The attack speed of towers is limited to 1 frame, and as BTD1-3 can run up to 40 frames, this effectively means that the speed cap in those games is 0.025s.

In Bloons TD iOS (and presumably its related console ports), the attack speed cap is 30 attacks per second (every 2 frames), as that is how fast Plasma Vision supers attack on the iOS version, although the iOS port runs at 60fps. Jungle Drums is bugged to have 0 effect in iOS, PSN, and DSi.

Although not directly attack speed related, in BTD3 Flash, MOABs and Ceramic Bloons can only take 1 damage per frame in the flash version. This is not the case in the iOS port, as MOABs and Ceramics can be instantaneously popped by receiving a large quantity of projectiles.

In addition, towers in BTD1 and BTD2 will have a different "speed" displayed, depending on how many frames it takes to attack. BTD1, BTD2, and BTD3 run at 40 frames per second by default, although other circumstances can cause this number to decrease. This vague display was removed in subsequent games starting with BTD3. The vague speed term "hypersonic" listed below still persists today, as it was only found on the Super Monkey and the Faster Shooting upgrade glitch for the Tack Tower. The accurate equivalent for "hypersonic" in a modern Bloons TD or Super Monkey game would technically be any attack faster than 0.075s, although in BTD1 and BTD2 it could only be displayed for towers that attack every 2 or 1 frames (0.05s - 0.025s) without modding the game file.

Frames in-between Attacks and Correlating Description
Frames	Displayed Speed
1 - 3	"hypersonic"
4 - 23	"very fast"
24 - 39	"fast"
40 - 59	"medium"
60 - 99	"slow"
100+	"very slow"

Bloons TD 4

In addition to more towers being able to gain attack speed via upgrades, towers are still able to gain attack speed via buff from Jungle Drums. There is also an attack speed cap of 35 attacks per second (~0.0286s) in the flash version, as that is how many frames per second BTD4 runs in. Fast Forward will double this speed cap to 70 and double the speed that everything runs in, effectively maintaining the same attack speed and speed cap. In the Flash version, Jungle Drums will also truncate decimals from the modified attack rate of an attack to match every frame, resulting in Jungle Drums having no effect on towers which attack every 6 frames or lower.

In the Mobile version, attack speed is instead capped at 20 frames a second (0.05s), resulting in the Sun God (BTD4) being significantly nerfed in the Mobile version, as it attacks 75% slower than its flash counterpart. Jungle Drums also works differently from the Flash version, as the buffed attack speed of a tower is not rounded to an integer, resulting in the attack speed matching the calculated amount of attack speed, provided that it does not reach the speed cap. Thus, a base Super Monkey and Faster Barrel Spin Dartling can be buffed by Jungle Drums on mobile, but a Plasma Vision Super or Sun God will not benefit from Jungle Drums.

Bloons Super Monkey

While there are technically no multipliers to attack speed in Bloons Super Monkey, Death Ray Vision is the only weapon that attacks at the speed cap, dealing damage every frame. On the flash version this is 30 frames a seccond, the iOS version is capped at 60 frames a second, doubling its DPS, and is the reason it costs more in the iOS version.

Bloons TD 5

Starting from Bloons TD 5, towers also can gain increase attack speed from towers' various Abilities, including both from self buffs (such as Turbo Charge, boosting the tower's own attack speed for a limited time,) or from Tower Buffs (such as MIB Call to Arms, which increases the attack speed of nearby towers for a limited of time). The speed cap returns in Bloons TD 5, with a limit of every frame (0.033s) on Flash, and ??? on mobile.

Bloons Super Monkey 2

in the Flash version, attack speed is capped at 60 times a second, although there are no attack speed modifiers that can be used to bypass this limit. In the mobile version, attack speed is coded in terms of seconds instead of frames. The mobile version also has the addition of Turbo Boost to multiply the attack cooldown of a weapon by 0.33x (3.03x faster attack speed). Thus, even though Bloons Supermonkey 2 Mobile runs at 60fps, if a certain weapon is able to attack faster than 60fps, it will release multiple projectiles on the same frame as necessary to maintain this average, while properly spacing them out according to their projectile speed.

There is one exception though in BSM2 Mobile. All energy arms are coded to create one projectile every frame due to its attack speed being internally set to 0.0, so attack cooldown bonuses have no effect on energy whips such as Pulse Whip.

In addition, Invisibility Cloak Rank 2+ and Phase Scanner remove their respective properties from bloons every frame (0.0167s).

Bloons TD 6

Attack speed works the same as it did in previous games, with the addition of some new types of buffs: Some tower upgrades first introduced in BTD6, such as Shinobi Tactics and Poplust, only increase the attack speed of certain tower types within its radius, Ninja Monkeys and Druids, respectively. Also introduced, are more conditional attack speed modifiers, such as Elite Defender (scales with bloon progress), Heart of Vengeance (scales with lives lost), and Druid of Wrath (scales with bloons popped by said tower). Monkey Boost can also improve the attack speed of towers.

Although there is no global attack speed cap, certain towers and upgrades have caps on their attack speed. For example, after version 27.0, Spike Storm has an internal speed cap for its ability that prevents it from casting more attacks than normal. Previously, that cap was removed with the Smart Spikes crosspath until version 32.2. Bloon Trap also has a 2.8s cap on how fast it can deploy its bloon trap that carries over to XXXL Trap, regardless of how many attack cooldown reduction buffs it gains. In addition, spike piles from the Spike Factory only damage bloons one pierce at a time, thus causing each individual spike to only consume one pierce per frame. This is especially noticeable with Perma-Spike, as each of its spikes have a large amount of pierce, and can be increased with pierce buffs, in which the pre-v36.0 Perma-Spike would be very noticeable vs bosses if it barely can completely pop a boss's health, and against freeplay DDTs which can often be seen bypassing perma-spike piles.

Some attacks undergo an initial cooldown, one notable example being Wall of Fire. Attacks that do have an initial cooldown are handled in the in-game code as the boolean startInCooldown.

Bloons Adventure Time TD

In addition to via upgrades and, the attack speed of towers can also be modified by equippable Weapons and Trinkets. Towers have a 60 attacks per second (0.0167s) limit on how fast they can attack, as the game runs at 60 FPS. In-game, a tower's attack speed can only be done in multiples of frames, as unlike BTD6 or BSM2, there is nothing that simulates attacks occuring between frames. Note that some attacks can reach 60 attacks per second in-game simply by going over 30 attacks per second. For instance, Supermonkey with all upgrades without activating Sun God cannot easily fire more than 20% faster after maxing out his upgrades in-game, as he already attacks every 0.04 seconds with the Hypersonic Speed upgrade, which by default is rounded to attack once every 3 frames, or 0.05s. If given enough attack speed, he can attack every 2 frames, the equivalent of every 0.0333s instead. Using Trail Mix and Party Time will easily let him attack 60 times per second, if he already attacks 30 times a second.

Trivia

• TBA