| “ | Shoots freezing bombs at Bloons over long range. | ” |
| ~ BTD6 description |
Cryo Cannon is the third upgrade of Path 3 for the Ice Monkey in BTD6. It allows the Ice Monkey to use a freezing cannon to shoot 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) with less pierce (30 as opposed to 40) and a smaller blast radius. Along with this replacement, the attack has significantly extra range for the Ice Monkey to shoot snowballs at further range.
It costs $1,700 on Easy, $2,000 on Medium, $2,160 on Hard, $2,400 on Impoppable.
Tips
- This upgrade will improve the Ice Monkey on places where the maximum track area is problematic, such as where there are poor track bends around the entire track. On the other hand, it makes the tower worse than not having Cryo Cannon if placed where there are poor spaces for optimizing straight lines.
- Maps such as High Finance and Flooded Valley are among many of the maps where Cryo Cannon may perform better than an x/x/2 Ice Monkey would.
- In most cases, it is worse than a x/x/2 Ice Monkey, due to the relatively low pierce and tiny blast radius. However, there are some viable occasions where Cryo Cannon can be better than a x/x/2 Ice Monkey, such as being able to catch Super Ceramics a lot more effectively.
- 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 a 0/1/2 Ice Monkey, it is generally more worth purchasing two x/x/2 Ice Monkeys rather than one x/x/3 Ice Monkey.
- With Cryo Cannon, there is more control over what nearby bloons should be or shouldn't be frozen. Particularly with the new target priorities: First, Last, Close, Strong.
- 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). It can be used as a stalling tower for those purposes.
- If using Cryo Cannon as purely a stalling tower, a 1-0-3 or 2-0-3 Cryo Cannon set on Strong may be the best option to go for, and can be useful for ensuring that all Ceramics that spawn on Round 63 become affected by Permafrost effect.
Strategy
Cryo Cannon has an extremely limited niche for freezing bloons from a controllable distance at the cost of less pierce and smaller blast radius. By turning the Ice Monkey's normal radial freeze attacks into projectile-based attacks, it appears useful in concept, but in reality it is highly overpriced for how it performs in a real game. Its only practical purpose besides going for the Icicles or Icicle Impale upgrades is for ice-stalling on certain map designs against Super Ceramics.
Although the Cryo Cannon allows it to attack much faster, it overall stalls fewer bloons due to its decreased pierce and smaller blast radius per shot. However, one thing it is slightly better at compared to x-x-2 Ice Monkeys is that it is far better at chasing Super Ceramics going along straight lines, due to the nature of aim-based projectiles in general.
Update History
- 2.0
Cryo Cannon pierce increased (20 → 30).
Gallery
Trivia
- The Cryo Cannon upgrade currently costs 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 $2000 on Medium.
- 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.
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