Spike Factory (BTDB2)/Strategies/Countermeasures

The Spike Factory is stockpile tower. It is not as powerful as they are in BTD6, given the new competitive circumstances, but they are quite the middle ground powerful tower in this game as of currently, making it somewhat of a challenge to fight against a Sub user. Sub's general weakness is grouped bloons, so try to overwhelm the opponent before they can afford the better grouped-popping Sub upgrades.

General

Attributes	Spike Factory countermeasures
Role	Spike Factories in offense form mostly as a barrier to the exit due to their stockpile potential, and supportive DPS.
Attack Speed	Spike Factories are usually quite slow, except for path 2 upgrades, Smart Targeting allows the Spike factory to attack 4x faster for the start of the round.
Damage	Damage is high for its top and middle paths for their price in each path.
Pierce	Spike factories pierce is high, especially for its price, given it be able to stockpile. Its pierce is drastically increased with upper path 3 upgrades.
Range	Spike factories usually have a below-average range with only one option to directly improve it. Starting from Spike Storm, the range of the ability allows the Spike Factory to reach the entire track, albeit not 100% of the track.
Support	Spike Factories has no direct buffing options but supports the defense by laying down spike piles that the bloon will go over.
Power	Due its moderate price and slow attack speed, it has a weak early game, a good mid and late game.

Upgrade-specific

Path 1

Upgrade	Spike Factory countermeasures
Bigger Stacks	Double the pierce of the spike piles and is very useful for Spike Storm, as this means each spike pile it produces will have double the damage without this upgrade. For Perma-Spike, Spikes produced for there will have 90% more pierce.
White Hot Spikes	Allows the Spike Factory to damage frozen and lead bloons. Again, useful for Spike Storms as MIB is not necessary for Spike Storm to damage DDTs.
Spiked Balls	Spiked Balls can defend ceramics popped from MOAB-class bloons, but if the MOAB-class bloons are large enough (such as ZOMGs), they may eat these spiked balls first. This is prominent on the map Dino Graveyard.
Spiked Mines	Spike Mines destroys ceramics and MOABs in general although for either one of these concerns, Spike balls are much cheaper had handling ceramics, and Spike Storm is better at handling MOABs, both for a much cheaper price.
Super Mines	Super Mines is one of the few 6 figure upgrades in Battles 2 but doesn't provide the damage that one would expect for such a monstrously large price tag.

Path 2

Upgrade	Spike Factory countermeasures
Faster Production	Simple attack speed buff, nothing to say here.
Even Faster Production	Another attack speed buff.
MOAB -SHREDR	MOAB-SHREDR has fair MOAB-class damage, although it falls victim to multiple MOABs or stronger and faster blimps.
Spike Storm	Spike Storm is capable of one-shotting BADs and ZOMGs. If you see a Spike Storm, know that sending high-HP blimps won't be so easy to do. To counter a Spike Storm user, sending a mix of multiple BADs and/or several Fortified DDTs may overwhelm the opponent, forcing them to choose between one-shotting the BADs and directly fighting off the Fortified DDTs. Spike Storm has an initial cooldown. If the opponent tries to sell-and-rebuy to get up Spike Storms all over, they are trying to destroy high-HP blimps quickly. Sending a single ZOMG may potentially trigger a Spike Storm to be summoned on screen; if the opponent does pull out their Spike Storm, take note of this.
Carpet of Spikes	Carpet of Spikes instantly deals high damage to any blimp incoming from the entrance(s) of a map. This is strong against large groups of weaker blimps, but the opponent will still need to handle the Ceramics underneath. Carpet of Spikes auto-spike storm attack is effective against DDTs but falls back to Fortified DDTs and freeplay ramping.

Path 3

Upgrade	Spike Factory countermeasures
Long Reach	Increases the range of the Spike Factory and spikes last longer, specifically, 50%. In particular, this crosspath allows Carpet of Spikes to have two layers of spikes at all times with the cost of having no access to lead popping to the local tower.
Smart Spikes	Smart Spikes produces 4x the spike piles for 2.5 seconds at the start of each round. The new targeting option for Smart Spikes has yet to be explored thoroughly in a Battles setting, as of Version 1.1(.)
Long Life Spikes	Spikes last even longer than before, however, they still have the same pierce from the previous upgrade. Due to the round limit being removed, one of Long Life Spikes key advantages from other paths in BTD6 is removed.
Deadly Spikes	Spikes now last EVEN longer than Long Life Spikes and deal double damage to all bloons.
Perma-Spike	Perma-Spikes pushes spike longevity to its limit and deals 5x times the damage from Deadly Spikes, from 2 to 10, however, spike production is reduced significantly to compensate for the large increase in spike power. Perma-Spikes power compared to BTD6 is significantly weaker here as since stockpiling spikes is harder because of these reasons: Because of the three-tower loadout, it reduces the number of types of towers that can be used for stalling. Using Perma-Spike to its full potential almost requires Berserker Brew from the Alchemist, reducing the choice of the tower types to one. Due to the Player sends forcing the Perma-Spike to not put their Perma-Spike at the far opposite entrances of both bloons lanes (though closer to the natural bloons entrances is typical of a Perma-Spike player), reducing the amount of time Perma-Spike has for stockpiling in face of a bloon rush for the player.

Crosspath-specific

Crosspath	Spike Factory countermeasures
0-2-5	Perma-Spike with Even Faster Production is usually the go-to since its lead weakness can be made up with Acidic Mixture Dip, without sacrificing Stockpile Potential.

Synergy-specific

First	Second	Spike Factory countermeasures
Perma-Spike	Berserker Brew	Like in BTD6, not only does its lead weakness become fully null 100% of the time, thanks to Acidic Mixture Dip, but it also buffs virtually all-important attributes of Perma-Spike, especially attack speed which is very important since its base attack speed is dreadfully slow compared to its previous upgrade. What makes this even better is the fact that the attack speed buff is multiplicative, which means that higher base attack speeds get a bigger boost than slower attack speeds.

Other Advice

• If you see the opponent's Spike Factories having their respective unique cosmetics, the opponent has unlocked all upgrades for Spike Factory. In that case, prepare for all possible upgrades.
• An important thing to understand about Spike Factories is how its spikes work. When talking about how much pierce Spike Factory has, pierce refers to the whole spike pile (or each time the Spike Factory spews out any spikes of any kind), not each individual spike. Damage, in regards to Spike Factories is how many layers each individual spike pops. This means it's important that Spike Facotry is popping the right bloons for the upgrades that it has so that it doesn't waste its spikes of bloons that it doesn't work well against. For example, Spike Storm has relatively high Blimp damge but low damage and pierce on anything else, so only try to use Spike Storm for the intent of using it on Blimps. Spike Mines, conversely, does much better against normal-class bloons than blimps, especially as health ramping starts to increase the later on a game goes on so try to focus on letting Spike Mines pop regualar bloons than MOABs and above.

See also

• Spike Factory Strategies
  • General Strategy
  • Optimization Strategy
  • Countermeasures Strategy

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