Martian Transport is a Bloons Adventure Time ally exclusively available from the Martian Trader. This means you can only get Martian Transport by playing Martian Games, capturing the throne, and racking up enough Martian crystals to buy it.
Martian Transport costs 45,000 Martian crystals.
What Does Martian Transport Do?
Martian Transport is a two-part Adventure Time Bloons ally. It both attacks on its own and works as an activated ability.
The cost to place Martian Transport on the board is $1,200 with three upgrades available:
- Improved Laser Coolant: faster firing
- Warp Drive: faster movement around the board
- Co-pilot: reduced cool-down on the activated ability
How is Martian Tranport’s Attack?
Pretty weak, to be honest. Here’s the stat page from the game –
Martian Transport is not fast and it’s low on damage.
However, it’s a mobile attacker, which means it follows bloons around the board. This can be highly useful in some situations, despite its weak firepower.
As a fighting ally, MT lacks punch, but that’s almost beside the point. With Martian Transport, you’re paying for the activated ability.
How Does Martian Transport’s Activated Ability Work?
Like a damn dream, that’s how.
Okay. Not quite. It does have one main flaw we’ll get to in a few paragraphs, but it IS a really good ability.
When activated, green circles appear around all the characters on the board. Any of these characters can now be moved.
To move a character, simply touch the character and drag it to a new position. I say “simply,” but dragging a character in Bloons can sometimes feel glitchy.
It can take practice to choose the proper character and move the character smoothly.
Once you touch and drag the character, Martian Transport will stop attacking, fly to the chosen character, pick the character up off the board, fly the character to the new position, and deposit the character back onto the board. Then, it will return to attacking.
Herein lies its one flaw.
Martian Transport is not fast, so, depending on how far it has to travel across the board, this transport process can take a second or two. It’s not as quick as the skateboard trinket, which transports a single character (the character who holds it) from one position to another.
You’ll get used to this time delay the more you use the ability, but it’s not intuitive. You can lose a lot of precious seconds as Martian Transport picks up and deposits a character.
Meanwhile, the bloons just keep on moving along the track.
Martian Transport Cool-down
Like other activated abilities in Bloons AT, Martian Transport’s ability has a cool-down period before it can be used again. When first placed, this cool-down period is loooooong.
I timed the Martian Transport activated ability cool-down under several in-game conditions, and these were the times:
- Cooldown when first placed: 240 seconds
- Cooldown with “Co-pilot” upgrade: 120 seconds
- Cooldown with “Co-pilot” upgrade and ally Cobra on-board upgraded with “Monkey Stim”: 60 seconds
At the 60-second cooldown on a long board, Martian Transport’s activated ability could be used more than once, meaning a powerful character (Super Monkey, anyone?) could conceivably cover the entire track.
Or more than one character could be moved from the start of the track to the end.
Martian Transport: Is it Worth It?
Yes. If you get use to using the activated ability, it can be a powerhouse.
If Martian Transport were no more than its firepower, the answer would be absolutely ‘No’. It takes a lot of wins to earn 45,000 Martian crystals in Martian Games, and there are more powerful allies on offer from the Martian Trader.
But as an activated ability, Martian Transport is hard to beat. On long rounds, you have the potential to move characters multiple times.
This makes Martian Transport especially effective in the Martian Games themselves, since each round lasts considerably longer than a standard round.
Martian Transport is also highly useful on boards with blindspots or shifting tracks, allowing you to move characters from round to round, placing them where they will be most effective during each round.
Final Verdict:
If you have the Martian crystals and aren’t saving up for a premium character or more powerful ally, Martian Transport is worth its price.