The choice of tech will depend on your play style. It also depends on the difficulty level, which can also alter your playing style. Some race to lucifers. Some use soldiers and snipers. Some focus only on soldiers and the academy. Others want to make sure they have shocking towers. Dependiong on their choices, some had wood walls while others had stone. In almost all cases, multiple walls with rows of towers is a common theme. You can get some ideas from the following comprehensive post. https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1810827257 Personally, I like wasps, so I did my run with stone walls, wasps, and ballistas. One of the great things about TAB is that there are many different ways to win.

You can soft-lock yourself with research to prevent getting past Cape Storm, but you'd pretty much have to try to do that; even a beginner with no knowledge of the game should be able to get a research tree that can work at lower levels of difficultly; that's what lower difficulty settings are for. In other words, you don't have to find the "optimal" research tree when there are so many "good enough" research trees, and chances are you'll land on one with some reasonably intelligent guesswork. So I'm thinking that the root problem isn't the research tree but your game play. Not that that's your fault; this is not a casual game an you can't expect to be good at game play after 70 hrs.

Okay thx

This is what i did for cape storm
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2139146810
As Felis said though, their are many ways to approach the game, but honestly speaking... early game Tesla kind of trounce hordes since the majority of final waves consist of 80% runners and 20% executives, with maybe some maps having chubbies on higher difficulties, Executives can survive one hit from a tesla but are over half dead so even just rangers set to highest priority can clean them up fairly quickly.

define soft lock, are you doing 800% or less than 800%.

on like 200% you can just build wooden towers all the way back to the comand center and fill them with soldiers and it will work. (hell it works on 800% but you have less time and might need more upgrades.

On 800% some maps are a bit nasty starting out, Iron and stone from the train helps. having a starting ballista helps.

some waves get nasty. having wooden stakes helps. having shocking towers helps.

I did a run at 800% won, then I did a more recent run at 800%.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3543046800

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3543046712

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3543046630

Research I unlocked going into the final mission.

I uh, actually did not do the final mission on this run yet.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2599420682 cape storm however you can just wall up and you'll live, especially if its less than 200% or so.