Turret Roles: Power, Support and Cleanup Explained

If your defence keeps failing after you have upgraded everything you can afford, the problem is almost never that your turrets are too weak. It is that they all do the same job.

A strategy guide on Steam proposes a three-way split that holds up well in practice: every turret is some combination of power, support and cleanup. The rest of this page is that framing plus the stat figures that back it.

Power: high damage, high penetration, slow

Power turrets exist to delete the body of a wave. The defining stat is penetration, because a shot that stops at the third orc does nothing against a column of forty.

Cannon — 34.5 DPS with 31 penetration and 350 range, at only 2 shots per second. Every fifth shot is larger with even more penetration. Aim it along the line orcs naturally walk rather than across it; a cannon firing perpendicular to the flow wastes most of that penetration on empty ground.

Laser — 27.5 DPS, 550 range (the longest available) and 15 bounces. The bounce is what makes it interesting: fired into a corridor it ricochets down the length, hitting the same wave repeatedly. The same guide warns that many slanted surfaces have flat sections, so aim deliberately or you get an unpredictable bounce.

The gunner sits awkwardly here. At 24 shots per second and 12 DPS it reads as a cleanup turret, but the guide argues that once upgraded, its sheer volume makes it function as reliable horde-thinning firepower.

Support: turrets that do not kill things

This is the category people under-build, because none of these turrets look good in a damage column.

Grenade launcher — seven gas grenades per shot, a 60% slow for 3 seconds, and slowed orcs take 30% more damage. Placed in front of your cannons it multiplies the whole line. The guide calls it the default support weapon.

Mortar — 32 DPS with a 28 metre blast and shrapnel, but its value is the knockback. Enough mortars covering a narrow choke will physically hold it shut, forcing the wave through your main damage instead of splitting around it. That saves you from having to build a second defensive line for the split.

Flamethrower — 0.6 damage per tick, three ticks per second, 3.5 second burn. Almost no damage. What it provides is a damage amp on burning orcs and a chance not to consume pierce, which makes gunners and lasers behind it noticeably stronger. Best placed just in front of your main damage, not as damage itself.

Cleanup: fast, reliable, catches what leaked

Tesla coil — 28 DPS at 3.55 shots per second, chains to 12 targets, and aims through 360 degrees. That last property is the whole argument for it. Every other turret has a facing and can be flanked; the tesla cannot. It also applies confusion for 2.8 seconds, which is a light crowd-control effect on top.

The guide calls it "one of the best weapons in the game" while noting it lacks horde-clearing power on later levels. Both are true, and they point at the same placement advice: put it behind your main line, far enough back that it is not wasting its output on the front of a wave it cannot penetrate.

The composition test

Before adding another turret, ask which of the three jobs your defence is short of.

If waves reach your base largely intact, you are short on power — more cannons or lasers, aimed along the flow.

If waves get shredded but a trickle always gets through, you are short on cleanup — a tesla coil set back from the line.

If your damage feels fine on paper but the wave arrives faster than you can chew through it, you are short on support — a grenade launcher or mortar in front, slowing and bunching the wave into the guns you already have.

Why this matters more than upgrade level

The upgrade tree is fed by resources from every run, won or lost, which is Mumpitz Games' own description of the system. That means grinding is always an option and never a wasted one. But it also means that when a level walls you, "upgrade more" is the expensive answer and "rebalance the three roles" is the free one. Try the free one first.

What we have not documented

We have no measured comparison of turret damage across upgrade tiers, so we cannot tell you at what upgrade level a gunner overtakes a cannon in practice. We also have no data on how enemy composition changes by level, which would determine how the three roles should be weighted late. Neither is published anywhere we can verify.