The Wiz Biz

Mage Towers in Kingdom Rush - you know you wand them!

Review

Apologies for that awful pun - it's early, OK people? Hopefully the following peek under the hood into Mage Towers in Kingdom Rush will make up for that.

The Mage Tower units are the mystical counterpart to the Ranged Towers in KR. However, once upgraded into and above their Special level, they can wield an extremely wide array of destructive spells. Lets take a look into the four types available, and their cost:

	Lvl 1		Lvl 2		Lvl 3		Special		Lvl 4	Xtra 1	Xtra 2	Xtra 3		Total Cost
Mage	100		160		240		Arcane (Death Ray)		300	350	200	200		1550
Mage	100		160		240		Arcane (Teleport)		300	300	100	100		1300
Mage	100		160		240		Sorc (Polymorph)		300	300	150	150		1400
Mage	100		160		240		Sorc (Elemental)		300	350	150	150		1450

Clearly, Teleport is the cheapest of the four options. But in this case, I think it's a tie between Teleport and Elemental in terms of usefulness in battle, despite Elemental cost being second highest. Teleport will transport your enemies back to an earlier part of the path, which allows your other Towers to have a second shot at damaging them. This is really useful during boss battles. The Elementals just stop the enemy dead in their tracks, can inflict damage, and can be re-positioned. Teleport is more of passive defense. If you have the coins, a double tower team of both types can be beyond lethal.

Mage Towers do have their weaknesses - certain enemies, like Shaman, Giant Spiders, and Worg, all have high resistance to Mage Tower attacks. So placing other Tower types, like Ranged, in the same area as Mage Towers, will keep the enemy from just running through your Mage Towers unscathed.

A point of clarification: A Tower can be upgraded to both type of Specials i.e. an Arcane Tower can have Death Ray AND Teleport powers. But often, it's better to spread your limited coin resources to other Towers, rather than totally pimp out just one Tower.