Towers, Classes & Upgrade Paths

Kingdom Rush 6: Genesis ships with 15 towers, of which you bring 5 into any single stage. Every buildable tower belongs to one of four families, and each family covers a different job on the path. The design hook is synergy: the value of your five-tower set comes from how the pieces interact rather than from any one tower's raw output.

The roster was half a mystery before launch, when Ironhide had named ten of the fifteen. The official site's post-launch update settled it: all fifteen names are now first-party, with Gold Prospectors, Cursed Crossbows, Alchemist Shack, Arcane Forger and Sentry Watchtower joining the original ten. What the official pages still do not spell out, the star gates and the premium split, is recorded by the community wiki and labelled as such below.

Towers By Family

Archers

Ranged single-target damage, typically the backbone of early waves.

Mages

Magic damage, area effects and support duties.

Barracks

Barracks towers put units directly onto the path to block enemies, which is what buys the rest of your defence its time.

Artillery

Splash damage for packed waves, and the family with the most unusual member.

Family Not Stated

Neither Ironhide's family grouping nor the community wiki assigns a family to the two remaining free towers. The wiki's transcription of their in-game description text is all that exists so far:

Unverified

Unlock Order And Availability

Towers gate on stars: three are there from the first stage, a fourth arrives after you clear it, and everything after that waits on a star total. The thresholds below are the community wiki's record of the release build, in ascending order, with Sentry Watchtower as the one tower whose gate is still unrecorded.

Ten free, five premium. The premium five are Wildcat Huntresses, Alchemist Shack, Sentry Watchtower, Ironbark Treant and Arcane Forger. Note that premium does not mean unlocked late: Wildcat Huntresses sits between the two cheapest free gates. What premium towers cost is not in our sources, so check the in-game store.

The Skill Sets Recorded From The Demo

Six towers have documented skill sets: exactly the six the demo made playable, five from its opening content plus the Elven Elite Ranger added in the June update. The community wiki recorded their trees, and the shape matches what Devlog #28 described officially: each tower carries one mandatory skill, two interchangeable skills you choose between, and a capstone that is the "third skill" sitting at the top of the upgrade tree.

Two honest limits. First, the wiki's tables carry demo-build numbers, the demo was delisted on 6 July 2026 and the upgrade system was reworked after it. We reproduce those tables in the next section, labelled as demo history rather than live values. Second, the other nine towers have no documented skill sets yet; the wiki infers three skill names per premium tower from voice-line attributions, but that is a transcript detail, not a confirmed list, so we do not repeat it.

Tower Stats Recorded From The Demo

⚠️ Unconfirmed, and old. The numbers below are the community wiki's transcription of the demo build, not the released game. The demo was delisted on 6 July 2026 and the upgrade system was reworked after it, so treat every figure as a historical record of what the demo shipped. Read them as relative shape, which tower hits hard and which fires slowly, rather than as values you will see in your own game.

Only these six towers have stats written down, and they are exactly the six the demo made playable. The other nine have no stats on the wiki at all. Where a cell shows a value in brackets, that is the wiki recording a second figure without saying what it means: we reproduce it and do not interpret it. Empty brackets, x-18 and xs (ys) are placeholders the wiki left unfilled, not real numbers.

Archer Garrison

Knights Order

Royal Catapult

Scholar Mage

Dwarven Culverin

Elven Elite Ranger

Read across the four tiers and the shape matches the family roles above: Knights Order trades damage for hit points and a respawn timer, the two artillery entries are slow and expensive, and the two ranged entries sit in the middle with cheap build costs. That is the part worth taking away. The specific digits are demo history.

For the officially described upgrade shape, see the upgrade system page, and for the four original 2011 tower lines in Classic Mode see the Classic towers page.

How Tower Upgrades Work

Tower upgrades are global, applied at the family level rather than per individual tower. This is the system used by the original trilogy, and it is the system that replaced the individual per-tower leveling shown in the demo.

Each tower unlocks a third skill at the top of its upgrade tree. That capstone ability is the reason to commit gold to a specific tower rather than spreading investment across the map. The full explanation of what changed, and why, is on the upgrade system page.

Towers In Classic Mode

Classic Mode replaces the modern roster with the four original tower lines from 2011, redrawn for Genesis, each with a full three-tier progression and two level-4 specialities. That is 20 tower names in total and it is the most completely documented system Ironhide has published about this game. See the Classic towers page for the full lineages.

Picking Five Towers

Because you field five of fifteen, the meaningful decision in Genesis is not which tower is strongest but which five cover each other's weaknesses. A set that mixes blocking, single-target damage, splash and support will outperform a set of five high-damage towers, because the failure mode is a leak rather than a slow kill.

The five game modes test that decision from different angles. Hero Party and Spell Rush in particular strip away the hero and spell layers, leaving only your tower choice and placement.