Violator

Overview

 * Violator is a great floating tower, enjoying the greatest range of all towers.
 * It is effective vs heavy lumes.
 * It's an expensive sniper-like tower that hunts enemies on their long traverse from afar, dealing massive damage at a very low rate.

Notes & tactics

 * The Violator has the highest range and damage per shot of all projectile-type of towers. The only damage towers that surpass them per "hit" are the mines (both the AR & Rupture-ones).
 * Alone by itself, this tower finds diffculty to handle enemies that approarch the core too rapidly or match in DPS with other towers.
 * This tower can be called a burst-tower like the Lightnings & level 3 Cannons, since it lacks attack speed. Its theoretical DPS is seemingly not very high, but if there is enough space, the heavy range of the tower can overcome this weakness. The real advantage of the tower is not DPS, but range, it's good to use Violators at maps in a large scale, where enemies take a long passageway to the core, to utilize the high range.
 * Compared to the other two towers among the three ones with lowest fire rate, the Orbital strike relay releases a beam twice as rarely at lvl 1&2 and is still slower at level 3, although the beam can damage multiple targets or to do more hits to single target(s) if they are slow enough. The Lightnings have a bit more than twice the attack speed of the Violators, but, unlike them, putting more money in a single Lightning tower generally means lowering the cost-efficiency, while also the range is a lot lower.
 * Unlike most other automatically-acting towers, Violators usually don't bother very much about how the maze has been constructed, since they often can gather a humongous part of the map. Instead of creating specific killzones for the towers' radius of action, the player often can simply concentrate on just creating a bigger path of the lumes with the bases, although if the map is very big and the dimensions exceed the radius of Violators, some twists can be made to hold the lumes in the pain fields.
 * Due to its power, this tower can easily overcome the damage reduction of all enemies that have finite armour, although it cannot bypass the partial invulnerabilites of Hoverers, Hoverer queens, Bobble heads & Fiskeplaske. The Hoverers & their queens, of course, still take damage from Violators if they hit their backs, with the slow fire rate being somewhat an issue, although not being as problematic as the Lightnings in this relation - the high range is likely to ensure that the Violators will hit their back even if they lose some tower potential with hitting their invulnerable fronts at first.
 * Overcharging the tower grants 1000 damage per 100 resources (= 10 dmg per resource). This means that overcharging gives 83,33% of the damage, gained by building level 3 Violators.
 * Like the other projectile-using towers, the Violators suffer from random sight obstructions like walls, rocks and so on. When it comes to other towers as sight obstructions, however, it seems like the only towers that can block the Violators ' sight are the ones that are high enough, mainly other Violators & Anti-air, although the ACP & Orbital strike relays also can potentially serve as obstructions. If their sight is blocked, Violators simply wouldn't fire, although they might still follow their target.
 * Projectile-using towers that suffer from sight obstructions are the Scatter lasers & the ones with targeting system.
 * Alone by themselves, Violators tend to work better if being more in numbers, even before upgrade, or to delay the upgrade to level 2/3, for the purpose of putting resources in other towers.
 * One reason is their low fire rate, similarly to the situation with other burst-towers like Lightnings, level 3 Cannons, Rockets & Orbital strike relays. Stacked Violators can do decent job also when having to deal with numerous weak or average enemies, so setting the targetting system to "Least health" when using multiple Violators is mostly not a problem. If there is enough space to utilize the range, stacked Violators can be as good as stacked Lightnings and level 3 Cannons, occasionally being an effective substitution of the ACP if the crowds are not too dense, although for this they might need really big numbers, even up to the 15 tower maximum, like Lightnings.
 * The higher level Violators tend to more often deal overkill damage, despite of the overall better capability when upgraded. This is the sharpest when it comes to Runners, or to other low-health lumes like Brood mothers, Walker pups & Snorkers, although it might occur even vs average lumes between the tower shots. If the situation is a bunch of level 1/2 Violators though, it is usually not too much of a problem since it is a lower loss of damage potential.
 * Another idea is to use it in groups of 2-4 with their damage increased by overcharge or Amp spire, and their target priority set to "most health" to quickly weaken/kill a boss lume, but using them in such way leaves them somewhat behind other powerful combos like the Focus + Range spire.
 * Mixing Violators with random other damage towers is mostly fine. They can block the sight of the Anti-Air, but this can be resolved by careful positioning.
 * Support tower recommendations
 * Mind control spire(s) can do good job in assisting vs the lumes via holding them and potetntially engaging multiple aggressive lumes in the process.
 * The Kairos has a good area of effect and, unlike Slow fields, allows for better kiting and therefore holding the lumes under the delayed fire of the Violators.
 * The Range spire & the Amp might have difficulty applying to all Violators if there are lots, although a range-boosted Amp might grab them all in range.
 * Slow fields are usually not better than Kairos for the Violators. They are mostly not as helpful for kiting, since they can affect players as well.
 * Amp spire correlations
 * A level 1 Amp adds more damage per resource than overcharging a Violator.
 * A level 2 Amp adds the same amount of dmg as overcharging a Violator to more than 11556 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 a Violator to above 15625 damage and adding such Amp before further overcharging makes for a bigger damage gain.
 * Overcharging the Amp adds the same damage as overcharging a Violator to above 50000 dmg and from then on, max dmg gain can be reached by putting equal amounts of resources between them.
 * These correlations are valid for the damage value, reached only via 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. These 4 mentioned buffs stack additively with each other.
 * The fire rate 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 comes the calculation - Violators have 6/60 = 0,1 shots per second (=1 shot per 10 seconds=6 shots per minute).
 * Violators find use mainly in low-resource games in the Campaign & Easy modes, since in high-resource games, including Survival, they tend to fall behind the damage & DPS of many other dmg towers. The Gatling and Drone have higher single-target total DPS, while the ACP needs just two targets to deal higher total damage than a Violator. Violators simply cannot match the Anti-air's damage potential. Clearly, the only disadvantage of those mentioned towers compared to the Violator is the range, which could easily be 'fixed' by using a Range spire. Violators are way behind the Drone and the Gatling at making Soakers more vulnerable.