Example Run how to beat Insane Difficulty

[Crooked]

This thread is focused on beating insane difficulty. It is not the optimal way of getting a high score but it is an easy way of completing the mode.

A safe way to play the game is by placing your towers on the upper right corner. The wave lasts longer so you have more interest income and the wave passes there twice. You can decide if you want to end the wave fast which would give you a higher score or you could save your money and beat the wave a bit slower which means you have more gold thus better towers.

Elements in this run were used in the following order: Light, Nature, Water, Water, Nature, Light, Nature, Water, Fire, Fire

I started with Light and Nature since it enables you to build Life tower. If you have below/above 50 lives this tower will give you another life after killing 3/9 creeps. The early waves are weak so you can farm lives easily.

Next I got Water. This enables you to build Tidal towers (Water, Light, Nature). This is going to be my primary tower for damage output. If you are leaking waves more and more often it's time to say goodbye to your Life towers and upgrade them to Tidal towers.

4th and 5th element is Water and Nature. I plan to make Well towers. This tower provides attack speed bonus. General rule: For every 4 towers you have you should have 1 Well tower. 

I got Light next so I can max out my Tidal Tower, my primary tower for damage output. Then follows Nature and Water so I can max out my Well tower. When Well tower is maxed out it almost doubles the damage output of 4 towers.

Lastly I get 2 Fires. I'm going to build Nova and Windstorm towers. These towers slow down creeps.

My final lumber is converted into gold and pure essence. Pure essence allows you max out elemental towers.

 

Tips:

If you are playing in order to defeat the mode but not the score try to save up gold as much as possible. The more gold you possess the more gold you will gain. If you want to beat the score you have to end the waves as soon as you can but this also means you will have less gold for building towers.

 

Pay attention to the attribute in the next wave. If your towers are primary water and you see the next wave is fire then you will have an easy time beating the wave. Water towers deal 200% damage to fire units. But if the next wave is darkness you can expect a hard wave. Water towers deal 50% damage to darkness units. Upgrade your towers wisely.

In the early stage you can build cannon/arrow towers and sell it for 98% of their worth or 49 gold. 2% interest on 50 gold is 1 gold. So you can relocate your cannon/arrow tower basically for free. See what I'm doing at the beginning. You could just build more towers but the downside would be you would have less interest income.

[GuruDingo]

Would it be worth it to upgrade a life tower or two to recover some health in the late game? Life towers also target the lowest health creep, making them super helpful for last minute clean-up near the exit.

[WindStrike]

I'm curious, I see this build on the leaderboard multiple times, all of which uses primarily single-target damage (Tidal, after attacking long enough, is more single-target than AoE , especially with Level 3 Well buffs), buuut with two slowing towers. Why not try it with Earth as the last element and get two damage amplification towers? I find they synergize better with single-target than slowing does. Great guide, by the way!

[Crooked]

I will try that. Have to figure out how to beat your score. ^^

I'm currently rank 10, 267k score. 

[WindStrike]

I accidentally dropped part of the secret somewhere else on this forum in one of my replies, but until someone beats my score, I shall refrain from posting my build. Actually, my top score is skewed, cause I got screwed over by a bug involving trickery + pure essence. I'm pretty sure I can get it a little bit higher. Good luck trying to beat mah score, sire!

[WindStrike]

Okay, I just ran this build replacing fire with earth... it is surprisingly kinda weak against icefrogs. I might try it again going all pure water towers instead of pure nature towers, and then relying on tidal as my single-target.