Lightning

Overview

 * The Lightning is a powerful tower, good vs heavy enemies, as it shoots powerful electric bolt at a low rate to deal significant damage.
 * It's among the most expensive towers.
 * When ranked up, the bolt becomes able to bounce and damage other enemies near the target - one extra enemy for level 2 and two for lvl 3.

Notes & tactics

 * While quite expensive, this is a nice burst-tower, that can do decent job at tight spaces.
 * The upgrades to lvl 2 & 3 partially fix the tower's weakness of low fire rate and the capabilities vs crowds with the bounces to 1/2 other lumes.
 * Lightnings are good at killing enemies with plenty of health and/or armor.
 * At ranks 2 & 3, Lightnings can kill small groups of weak enemies because the lightning bolt gains the ability to bounce to multiple targets. Lightnings are able to instantly kill some weaker lumes. It often deals some overkill damage though that at first seem to waste its potential, although it is usually not a too big deal even if it occurs vs Runners.
 * While powerful, the low fire rate and short range needs to place the tower at the point of/close to a U-turn or T-/X-like parts in the maze in order to get its maximum damage potential.
 * This tower is most efficient when being build as more level 1 towers, since at lvl 2 & 3 the upgrade seems to be more aimed at gaining damage distribution and slightly more range rather than gaining noticeably high damage per resource. That's why it is usually better to leave the tower not upgraded for longer, but instead to put the resources in more Lightnings lvl 1 or for other towers early on. Another reason is the low fire rate, that can be overcame partially with building numerous Lightnings
 * Despite of these stats, it is mostly fine to combine this tower with random other towers, although one should be wary about the sight that becomes lower the more the towers are. While the sight obstruction is mostly not too much of an issue for the Lightnings themselves, some other towers are sensitive to the sight factor.
 * Lightnings are burst towers, they hardly can be called DPS-ones like the Gatling & Focus due to the lack of attack speed, similarly to Violators & Rockets. Despite of this, they still have some DPS per resource ratio to offer, particularly when the upgraded tower(s) hit 2/3 lumes.
 * Overcharging the tower grants 600 damage per 100 resources (=6 damage per resource). This means that overcharging gives 77,22% of the damage, gained by building level 3 Lightnings.
 * Like the other projectile-using towers, the Lightnings suffer from random sight obstructions, including other towers, although their low range generally means very little trouble with this specific feature. Also there are less to no problems with small towers like Drones & Dispensers and ones with high placing of the shooting part like Violators & Anti-air.
 * Projectile-using towers that suffer from sight obstructions are the Scatter lasers & the ones with targeting system.
 * Each consecutive bounce causes the lightning bolt to go weaker. At lvl 2 the 2nd bolt does 1/2 of the damage to a second enemy if one is around and at lvl 3, if there is a 3rd enemy around, it takes 1/8 of the dmg.
 * Some comparisons with other towers:
 * The Gatling has superior DPS, regardless of how many lumes the Ligthning(s) hit. However, it often has a tougher early/low-resource game, partially due to its limits vs armoured lumes.
 * The ACP hardly can be called a DPS or a burst-tower. However, it is vastly superior when it comes to crowds and often Lightnings cannot deal with the heavy numbers of weaker, average, and sometimes even bunches of heavier lumes, that the ACP can reliably crush or bring to low health, provided that it is overcharged and boosted much enough. The ACP on its own, however, is somewhat dependent on the Range spire, has bigger needs of a specific killzone (ordering of the bases) and usually needs overcharge, especially vs armoured enemies. Among the best towers in the game, regardless of whether for coop or for solo. Tends to work a lot better if used as a sole tower instead of building multiple ACPs for random reasons. The moment when the ACP clearly beats the Lightning is when it can hit at least 4 targets.
 * The Drone has generally higher potential than the Lightning, since given the reach/range is enough, it can deal higher overall damage, regardless of how many lumes suffer. However, it has its own limits, which can be problematic in short-game scenarios, such as the minimal tower range, lack of burst action and mediocre anti-crowd capabilities. Clearly, the Drone tower is better against partially-invulnerable lumes. The Hoverers & Queens are likely to block ~50% of the Lightning's damage, while the Drone would always ignore the armour.
 * The Anti-air is way ahead of any other damage tower in the game when it comes to usual flying lumes.


 * Amp spire correlations
 * A level 1 Amp adds same amount of damage as overcharging a Lightning to more than 5539 damage and makes for a bigger damage gain if being put before the overcharge.
 * A level 2 Amp adds the same amount of dmg as overcharging a Lightning to more than 6934 damage and adding such Amp before further overcharging makes for a bigger damage gain.
 * A lvl 3 Amp adds the same amount of dmg as overcharging the Lightning to above 9375 damage and adding such Amp before further overcharging makes for a bigger damage gain.
 * Overcharging the Amp adds the same amount of damage as overcharging the Lightning to >30000 dmg and from then on, max dmg gain can be reached by putting equal amounts of resources between them.
 * These correlations are in action for the damage value, reached only via upgrading & overcharging, without Tinkerer, Engineer, Core-tower synergy or already existing Amp spire. If any of these is in action, it is needed to calculate the damage, gained by pure overcharging/upgrading (or to remove the buffs) to see the real efficiency stats. Note that all these 4 mentioned buffs stack only additively (no multiplications).
 * The attack speed of the tower in-game is converted into shots per second this way: One in-game speed unit is 1/60 shots per second and therefore come the calculation - Lightnings have 13/60 ~ 0,2167 shots per second (=13 shots per minute ~ 1 shot per 4,62 seconds)
 * Lightnings find use mainly in low/medium-resource Campaign & Easy games, since in high-resource Campaign & Survival games they tend to fall behind high-potential damage towers such as the ACP, Anti-air, Drone & Gatling. Lightnings are also behind the Drone and the Gatling at making Soakers more vulnerable.