I liked the Protector series but the guy retired

>>2509466
bro you're leaking

try mindustry if you haven't. free and a mix of TD and factorio.

loop hero and super fantasy kingdom are another couple of not-strictly-TDs i also liked that scratched the same itch.

creeper world is tower offense, which is immensely based.

Infested Planet is kind of TD-adjacent, but mowing down aliens feels so right, I can hardly go back to other TD vidya. I tried CW4 and it bored me. Calyx demo had me interested but it's still in EA.

Gemcraft

bloons
gemtd
the king is watching

Plants vs Zombies was popular for a reason.
Also, Defenders Quest was a lot of fun.
As others have said, Loop Hero and Creeper World are similar but different to tower defense and they are both great games.
The question you need to ask yourself is, are you looking for a fun tower defense or an austic one?

>>2509466
>Is tower defense /vst/?
most are just puzzle games because there's one set order of towers that works for a certain level.
and by most i mean kingdom rush

>>2512285
Kingdom Rush is even more trivial than that. There's one broken overpowered hero per game that obliterates everything, like Ignus or Eiskalt.

>>2509466
BTD6 has basically made the rest of the tower defense genre obsolete.
It's like what Starcraft 2 was to RTS games in the 2010s or XCOM 2 to turn based tactics games

>>2509522
creeper world 5 is announced

>>2512507
But why? I checked gameplay vids and they look like shit.

>>2512543
What, BTD6? The Bloons series in general is innovative because of the layer mechanic, pop one layer of a bloon and then there is the next layer under it until you pop the last one like a matryoshka doll.
BTD6 specificall is very intuitive and easy to get into but has a surprisingly high skill ceiling in boss events where people compete to beat various stages of a boss under various metrics.
And because you have various ways to upgrade towers by mixing upgrades, that gives you a lot of variation

>>2512443
I remember playing the first Kingdom Rush on armorgames or whatever that site was called and there were no heroes then.

>>2513145
They were added at some point, along with a bunch of microtransactions: extra levels, heroes and goodies.

>>2512285
Sanctum is like that too, at least for the harder maps.

>>2511904
Gemcraft is definitely the latter. As you level up, there's a point when all values just turn logarythmic.

Honestly dont like gemcraft. The gem combinations are cool until you find the most optimal combos to mana farm, and the enemy variety doesnt ask for much more out of you as you progress through the game besides making the best mana farm.
For me its Immortal Defense. Now THAT is a goddamn game.

>>2509466
Defense Grid was the only TD I've played that felt like an evolution on WC3 UMS and not a shitty flash game.