Strategy:Engineer Monkey (BTD6)

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Engineer Monkeys are a supporting damage tower, specializing in damage-dealing sub-towers, buffing the attack speed of other towers, or bloon control and income generation.

Base

Base Engineers are cheap enough to start with, and have good range, attack speed, and pierce at base. They can be used in Dart + Engineer starts on single lane maps with straight lines to fire down, including Blons on CHIMPS, and a solo Engineer start is also common in Least Tiers Boss Bloon Events.

Path 1

The top path focuses on deploying Sentries which deal damage. Sentries are placed in random positions in range that are not blocked by other towers, and both the sentry deployment rate and the sentry attack rate benefit from attack speed buffs. Middle crosspath gives more single target blimp damage, but bottom crosspath gives more pierce and much better crowd control with stuns. Bottom crosspath is usually preferred here, as it does more damage if it can max out pierce and offers more mid-game support.

Lower tiers through Sprockets produce Sentries comparable to Dart Monkeys, with low pierce but good single target damage for their cost. Sprockets is worth crosspathing to 3-0-2 while lower tiers are not. Sentries lack any fooprint, making these upgrades useful when extra single target damage and preserving limited space are important, such as on Workshop and Last Resort. None of these tiers can damage Lead or Camo.

Sentry Expert varies sentry types, letting it hit all Bloon types besides Camo and focus on either group damage or blimp damage. The reactive sentry deployment can actively hurt it in some cases, but it functions well as group damage in mid-game with the bottom crosspath. Middle crosspath does improve its performance against blimps, but it still needs slowdown support for fortified MOABs.

Sentry Champion is a cheap but somewhat weak T5 that relies on its synergy with attack speed buffs such as Call to Arms and debuffs such as Embrittlement or Glue Strike. It needs external support for Purple Bloons on 78 and 95. Pin falls off late game due to Super Ceramics and middle crosspaths can see more use here, but bottom crosspath still has better synergy with debuffs and performs better on dense rounds.

Path 2

Path 2 focuses on support. Lower tiers are not useful by themselves, but can be useful as crosspaths. Since this path focuses heavily on buffs, it needs to either be used with care or avoided against Lych.

Cleansing Foam with bottom crosspath slows bloons, removes camo, and pops lead in early game. During mid-game, its pierce is too low to handle all camo or regrow bloons. Late game, it can de-camo every DDT by manually targeting slightly off the track to conserve pierce. It is very niche with top or no crosspath.

Overclock is an attack speed buff for other towers. Compared to slowdown support, it is more expensive, but it helps against BADs. In CHIMPS, it is most useful for single expensive damage towers like Tyrannosaurus Rex or MOAB Domination, especially T4 ones due to their better uptime. Overclocking a Banana Research Facility or Banana Central is more space and cost-efficient than buying more, making Overclock a pillar of mid-game and late game farming. Overclocking a Monkey City can also get a bigger Monkeyopolis in late game. Crosspaths do not affect the ability.

Ultraboost boosts towers up to effectively a second Overclock boost at max stacks, mostly used in Freeplay and Boss Bloon Events. Its actual Overclock boost has higher uptime than normal Overclocks, reaching 100% uptime on T5s, but it is better to focus on building Ultraboost stacks on key towers and use other Overclocks to apply the main Overclock buff. Ultraboost is common in Least Tiers Boss Events especially, as its support bonus is far stronger relative to its 6 tier cost than any other tower. Crosspaths do not affect the ability.

Path 3

Path 3 focuses on taking out Bloon rushes.

Pin is an early game stun support that helps clump bloons to maximize pierce. It counts as a stun effect for towers like Sauda, but cannot affect Ceramics. Mostly used as a crosspath for top path Engineers.

Double Gun can be used without crosspaths to save up for an early Captain Churchill on single lane maps. It is much weaker than Sprockets due to the lack of Sentry Pin.

Bloon Trap switches over primarily to income generation with its trap, generating lots of money when entire rounds are fed to it. 0-1-4 lets the trap be manually targeted to the edge of the Engineer's range to maximize income, and this upgrade sees a lot of use in Boss Bloon Events from round 34 to the late 50s. During the 50s, a 0-3-2 MOAB SHREDR is often used with set targeting slightly off the track, so that MOAB layers can be popped to collect the insides in the trap. It can still make a profit during the 60s and 70s, but needs several full traps to compete with other options due to decreased per-pop income. It is very weak in CHIMPS.

XXXL Trap is expensive, but is much more consistent, generates twice as much extra profit, and can instakill blimps to benefit from Rubber to Gold's cash generation. Before round 78, it is too expensive for its extra value, but after that it makes more money for its cost than other options. Use 0-2-5 to ignore fortified status on blimps for greater capacity. Since the tower demands all of the pops each round and generates money, it is useful for building towards Master Builder, but it does not work well with other towers farming pops for their Paragons. In CHIMPS, trap downtime makes it weak to DDTs, but it is otherwise strong if it can be afforded.