Five tower defence mistakes I still catch myself making

The most common mistake, and the one I still make, is over-building early. It feels productive to cram towers in during the first calm waves, but you starve yourself of resources for the moment that actually matters. Save some.

Second: ignoring range overlap. Two towers covering the same short stretch look busy but do half the work of two towers layered along the whole path. Read the map, not just the pretty explosions.

Third, tunnel vision on damage. Slows, stuns and debuff towers win more late games than raw damage does, because they buy your damage dealers extra shots. I've lost more runs to skipping utility than to weak firepower.

Fourth is refusing to sell and rebuild. A tower that was perfect on wave five is often dead weight on wave twenty. Good players treat their layout as something to remodel, not a monument. And fifth, panicking when a wave leaks a couple of enemies. One or two through is fine; blowing your whole economy to stop them is how you actually lose the next wave.