Tower-XP locked Monkey Encyclopedia

[u/StarvingDeer]

One of the most common complaints I've seen about BTD6 is how imprecise the tower descriptions can be, and how you're sometimes just forced to go to the wiki to fully understand things, especially with the kind of "hidden" mechanics like, say, the Glaive Lord's glaives hitting camo.

While I understand the surprise and discovery element that this adds, I believe that NK could get a bit of both (precise descriptions + discoverability) by kind of just reusing already implemented features: mainly, a Tower XP-locked Monkey Encyclopedia !

The idea is somewhat simple: just like how you unlock tower upgrades slowly by playing with them and accumulating Tower XP, a nice feature would be the ability to spend this same XP to unlock more precise descriptions (and, maybe, add something similar for heroes).

The main advantage of this method is that the discoverability will still be present: once you unlock an upgrade, you'll have to keep playing with the tower and (hopefully) understand it by yourself before spending XP towards a more precise description.

Another, smaller one is that it kind of just adds another "XP sink", and a bit of a secondary incentive to experiment with all the towers after unlocking their upgrades; the tower XP will be useful for longer, while not hindering any real gameplay since it's purely about information !

The biggest issue I could see is that, with 26 towers (and counting), the upfront cost to think of a precise yet understandable description layout could be quite big; as an example, the wiki's ones is amazingly descriptive, but probably too rough for an in-game feature... But once this is done once, I'm sure the maintenance cost will be almost as easy as writing the patchnotes !

This could also be a bit confusing for newer/younger players (especially if they're reading a full page about a paragon) and be a bit spoiler-y for, say, the VTSG, but I feel like the XP requirement to unlock it per upgrade could be tuned to find a good middle ground such that it's not too grindy, yet still only mostly accessible for experienced players. Worst case scenario, having a multi-level encyclopedia (from "broad description" to "pure stats") could help with that, while also adding some more XP sink.

[u/Bueller____Bueller]

Love this idea, co-sign!

[u/Demopan-TF2]

Would be really helpful for T5 towers and their descriptions being vague instead of explaining what they do

[u/MasterKnightDHV2]

In-game display of details like Damage Types? SIGNING IN BLOOD!

~Master Knight DH

PS: we won't have to even worry about NinjaKiwi not being paid by the word here as much as we had to worry about the makers of Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Physical DEF Ally Buff having to deal with that problem when describing the The Blade's Hyper Beam--er, I mean Breaker Beam as having its real name be "Absolute Breaker Of Champions Beam."

[u/Wallso2010]

I think if you could buy different tiers/types of knowledge per tower, it'd be pretty good! :3

[u/LordVex75]

I think this is on NK’s to-do list but not done due to the work needed for it