Facebook Backyard Monsters Guides

Facebook Backyard Monsters Game Guides
Contents:
1) FAQ
2) Wild Monster Bases
3) Defending
4) Base Design
5) Advanced Defending
6) Attacking
7) Tips
8) Suggestions
8) Other Articles

From the Backyard Monsters Forum:

Backyard Monsters F.A.Q. – credit to Lara Leslie

Bank
Can you collect quest rewards when your bank is full?
Yes, you can.

Will you receive resources if you recycle buildings, when your bank is full?
No, you won’t.

Monsters
Can monsters defend my base?
No, but it will be added soon! There will be a monster bunker.

How can I destroy my own monsters?
If you do not want to lose your protection: leave your housings without defense and hope for wild monsters to attack them. Or recycle your monster housing. If you do not have protection or do not care about losing it: attack a player with them. You can fling them in far away from the base and click “end attack”, to prevent any damage.
As soon as you have a Monster Juicer, you can recycle your monsters there.

Mushrooms
Is it possible to remove them?
Yes. Click on them and click “Pick”. Some mushrooms even contain 3 – 10 shiny! Mushrooms re-grow slowly.

Do they work as walls?
No. They also don’t prevent monsters from being flung on top of them. Though they can help somewhat in pathing monsters.

How do I pick mushrooms that are at the edge of my screen where i can’t click them? – credit to APR & Sovereign Star
You hit the green “-” button and the yellow full screen mode button as fast as you can, you can then get a wider view of your base. It may take a buncha tries. I can get it to do it about one in 5 tries. You gotta be quick.

Protection
How does protection work? Can you get attacked while playing?
While you are under protection, you cannot get attacked by any player. Wild monsters can still attack you when you are online. As soon as you attack any other player, you will lose any protection.

1. Starter Protection
How long is Starter protection?
14 days. But it ends, as soon as you attack any player! So only attack once you are sure that you are ready to attack and be attacked! I suggest you build up your tower, gatherer and monster levels first!

2. Damage Protection
When does someone get damage protection?
1. If someone’s base is 25-49% destroyed, he gets 18 hours protection, 50% and above he gets 36 hours protection. This is based upon the bases total HP and not on the percentage of buildings destroyed.
2. If someone gets attacked 4 times in 1 hour by the same attacker, he gets 1 hour protection, beginning with the last attack.
3. If someone attacks the one person 10 times within 24 hours, the target will be removed from the attackers map room.
4. If someone gets attacked 10 times within 24 hours by any number of attackers, he gets 48 hours protection, beginning with the last attack.

Towers
Do towers defend while being upgraded?
No.

Why is there no range displayed for the towers?
You can see the range, as soon as you have a yard planner!

Truce
How does truce work?
If two players accept truce on each other, they cannot attack each other anymore. To request truce with someone, click on the map room, search for the player you want truce with and click on “Call A Truce”. Now, send a message to that player, which might move him to accept your truce. Do not write anything insulting nor start crying like a baby. Instead, write calm and polite things, which will convince the other player to accept your truce.
If someone requests a truce from you, you can decide to accept or reject the truce.
If someone rejects a truce, you can send a new truce request after 2 days. If someone accepts it, it expires after 14 days.

Walls
Can monsters go through small gaps or diagonal walls?
Yes, they can slip through the smallest gaps and as well through diagonal walls.

Do monsters destroy walls?
Yes. If the wall is too long or too weak (not enough layers), the monsters attack the wall. Eye-ra always attacks walls, unless the base has no walls.

Wall stats
Wood 1,000 HP
Stone 2,250 HP
Metal 5,650 HP
Gold 18,000 HP

Vengeance Attacks
Higher level players can not attack lower level players, unless the lower leveled player attacks the higher leveled Player first. The higher leveled player can attack the lower leveled player as many times, as the lower leveled Player attacked the higher leveled Player before.

Maproom
My base was attacked but the attackers don’t show up in my maproom?
1. Some players names that show up in the attack report aren’t the same as what shows up in the map room. Try searching for your attacker through the picture instead.
2. If that doesn’t work, sort the map room using the number of attacks and find the player which shows 1 new attack from. Thats probably him.
3. If those 2 methods don’t work, then he might have been removed from your map after either you or he leveled up.

I’ve run out of bases to attack! How do I get a bigger maproom?
1. Invite friends to play BYM or add players in the forum as friends. (there are numerous threads dedicated to friend requests)
2. Go fishing. The maproom is setup so that your base shows up in many players maprooms but they won’t show in yours unless they attack you. Lure these players to attack you by giving them a juicy target in your base like placing your extra gatherers or a lone silo on the edge of your yard as bait.

Decorations – not fully researched
Can decorations act like walls?
1. Monsters will pass through decorations if they are laid out in a line like a wall. But if you scatter them about strategically, monsters will path around them and they can be used to branch them into smaller groups.
2. Decorations can block the flinger and so decorations can be positioned strategically to block attacks. A yard with decorations scattered about to prevent flings can still be attacked by first destroying the decorations with the catapult, leaving an open space for a monster drop. (Be warned. The developers have stated that over exploitation of this tactic will lead to decorations being coded to no longer be able to block flings)

Ninjas
Someone, who attacks a base to get the resources, after someone else destroyed the defenses. In other games, that’s called a “kill-stealer”.

How do you defend against ninjas?
Unfortunately, there is no absolute defense. A dedicated ninja can still steal your kill no matter how carefully you plan your attacks. The only thing you can do is arrange the circumstances so they have fewer opportunities to interrupt your attacks. Here are 4 tactics I’ve come across you can use to make it more difficult for them…

1. Raid instead of destroy. a) Use mixes of tower monsters and looting monsters in your attacks so you always get some resources in each attack. Or b) use the first attacks to take out defenses while leaving a few towers to discourage the ninjas for the last attack, the last attack then uses a mix of loot and tower monsters. Disadvantage to this tactics is that if you use A, there is a higher chance of setting the target in %DP. If using tactic B, you might not have sufficiently weakened the defenses and not get a healthy profit from the resources.

2. Use the 1 hour DP rule to your advantage. Intentionally use the 4th attack so the base gets the 1 hour DP. Prepare your looting wave and wait until the 1 hour DP expires to launch your fifth attack (you can also attack other bases in the meantime while waiting for the 1 hour DP to expire) Disadvantage to this tactic is that there is a greater chance for the player your attacking to login negating your first 4 attacks and ninjas can sometimes still beat you to the attack.

3. Camp out at your targets base. Extend the length of your attack above the 7 minute limit by not clicking on the “End Attack” button even if your attack is done. Just keep your browser from timing out (ex. continuously clicking on the “+” sign on the add monsters window) during your attack until the monsters you have queued back at your HCC have finished hatching. You can then end the attack and in a few seconds start up a new attack. Disadvantage to this tactic is that this keeps the “Under Attack” sign in the ninja’s map rooms longer, announcing to them that there is a base which is ripe for the taking and they’ll try to beat you to the punch.

4. Make the ninjas work for you. Attack your target base but leave enough defenses standing for the base to look tempting so the ninja will have to use a tower destroying wave first in order to get to the resources. Once the ninja gets rid of the remaining towers for you, swoop in and take all the resources that are now undefended with a prepared looting wave. In other words… ninjaing the ninja. Disadvantage is that it doesn’t always work and you could be in for a long wait.

Trolling/Bullying – credit to malspina

There’s a guy who keeps attacking me on and on, I can’t upgrade my defences because he always destroys them before they are completed! He rejects my truce requests and sends me foul messages! What do I do?
1. There is an Ignore button to block out messages from specific players.
2. Use the DP he gave you or purchase some Protection from the General Store to strengthen your defenses and give him a whooping when you’re ready.
3. Allow him to level up ahead of you. He won’t be able to attack you once he is 3 levels above you.
4. Try luring him into attacking you 10 times within 24 hours, you will then be removed from his maproom and he will be unable to attack you. You can do this by attacking him multiple times (ex. keep destroying his yard planner or monster housing) so that he gets pissed off and retaliates each time. Do NOT attack him back after you have been removed from his maproom though as that will enable him to begin attacking you again.

Wild Monster Bases – credit Michael Foster II
There are 4 monster tribes with different specialties which attack you periodically and you can attack them by finding them in your map room. You can use wild monster bases for practice in attacking strategies as attacking them will not remove your Starter or Damage Protection.

Legionnaire Tribe
Defense ~ This tribe is very weak like a typical base, it seems bound by the players rules until you have destroyed his base 3 times.
Offense ~ His attacks are bound by player rules as well, he attacks with 75-80% of crabs and 25-20% project x’s.

Kozu Tribe
Defense ~ This tribe specializes in mazing and probably has double the amount of walls as normal. The base is riddled with good placement of booby traps.
Offense ~ ???

Abunakki Tribe
Defense ~ This tribes base is very weak at level 1, but when you destroy this base twice he gains 3 laser towers and 2 tesla’s. This base also doesn’t have any wm housing so all monsters are instantly sent to the juicer.
Offense ~ He sends masses of eye ra’s way above the normal player amount. Get ready to rebuild walls.

Dreadnaught Tribe
Defense ~ This tribee has 4 laser’s and 4 tesla’s at level 1, making him one of the best and worst defended. The lack of cannons make it a worst defended base, however the extra 2 lasers make for an uber defense.
Offense ~ This guy will send swarms of brains after your resources.

With each defeat the wild monster bases become stronger, however I cannot tell you at this time with any certainty that the attacks get stronger. With each defeat the rule books are further over looked with each base ranging from kozu’s amount of wall blocks to every bases gross over use of tesla’s and laser towers.

Also remember that you currently can only destroy the WMB 4 to 7 times each before they disappear. If you want to retain them in your map room, make sure to never destroy the WMB Town Hall after the 3rd time you destroy them. Let them repair first before you attack them again.

Good Luck with these new tribes guys and be careful when designing your base because you have to look out for different assaults now!

Defending

“Your job in defending is to make the attacker believe he/she has options but no matter what he/she does, you’ve planned for it and are essentially orchestrating the whole attack by design alone.” – General Tabb Bonaparte

The current best defense – credit to Michael Foster II
Check the link above for samples of current defense theories in base layouts

The Basic / Intermediate Base Guide – credit to David McLeod

1. Defensive Priority. What is the most important thing to defend?
#1 – Towers
#2 – Silos and Town Hall (you lose 4% of all banked resources PER silo and 5% for the Town Hall)
#3 – Resource Collectors (mix them up so specific resources can’t be targeted in raid attacks)
#4 – Everything Else

If the towers fall, the rest of your base will too, so they need to be defended.
Don’t protect housing. I know it is a pain in the butt to find out that someone took out your housing with pokies but it is much more annoying to find out that someone took out your town hall and silos. Protect the silos and TH!

2. Crossfire (Concentrating Firepower)
– Lone isolated towers (towers which are not inside the firing range of other towers) are very easy to attack. If you want your defense to be strong, you need to maximize the number of towers covering each other. Every tower should be in firing range of at least 3 other towers, but imagine 7 or 8 towers all firing at the same targets at the same time.
– Mix tower types up – for example, a Snipe covering a Splash is good, but clumping together all your snipes on one side and all you splashes on the other is generally a bad idea.

3. Spacing between towers. How much space should there be between towers?
– If your towers are too close together the catapult will annihilate them. I recommend a minimum of 1 block between any two towers. But try to keep this distance between towers small so as to make it harder to take down any one individual tower. Two blocks apart is sufficient to thwart the catapult.

4. Booby traps
– You have two choices, you can booby trap your towers or you can booby trap your silos and TH. You can, of course, try both but the booby traps might get spread a little thin.
– Booby traps work best when they are positioned so that monsters will be in a clump when they go over them. Try to put them on the other side of a wall that you know monsters will have to go through. Or try to put them between towers. It can be devastating to ichis to run into a mine or two right after they have bunched up destroying a tower. Or to take out resource monsters, put the mine in between a resource gatherer and a silo. Make the monsters bunch up taking down the resource gatherer and then run smack into a booby trap on the way to the silo.

5. Walls
– Do not make a huge one-layer wall around your base because monsters will break a hole anywhere the attacker chooses, and a simple wall is destroyed within a few seconds!
– Make mazes! Give monsters an opening in a wall where monsters can go through. Then you can control their movement and use your booby traps and tower cross-fires much more effectively.
– It is also effective to have a 2-3 block thick wall and then only have a 1 block thick wall where you want the monsters to enter. They will bunch up to chew through that 1 block and then if you put a booby trap on the other side you can create massive destruction.
– Monsters will go through corners. If you have two blocks that only touch at the corners monsters will go through them.

6. Forcing damage protection
– If your base is more than 25% damaged, based on total HP, you will go into damage protection. You can try to encourage this by:
a) Leaving a few resource generators unprotected to encourage people to send in a couple waves of pokies to knock them down. If you bank regularly you shouldn’t lose much and it will put you into DP faster.

b) Placing usual catapult targets (ex. lasers) next to high HP buildings (like resource gatherers) so that the catapult will damage those buildings in it’s strike too.

c) Don’t build non essential or extra buildings (ex. only build 3 out of the maximum 5 silos available) or don’t level up buildings to their highest level (ex. recycle your hatcheries or leave them at level 1 instead of upgrading them to level 3)

– If you have been attacked 10 times in 24 hours you will go into damage protection. If you have been attacked 9 times, the next one will put you into 48 hour DP. Try to use this to your advantage, come out of DP well within the first 24 hours and your attackers will only get one attack before you go back into 48 hour DP. This is because their 1st attack will be considered as the 10th attack in 24 hours. You can continue to do this so that attackers will only get 2-3 attacks at a time before you go into DP again.

7. Cannon towers
– IMHO, cannon towers are your most valuable towers. Lasers are great but they get catapulted right away. Cannons will do the most damage after laser towers so try to put them on the inside of your defense. Let the attackers take down your sniper towers first and protect the cannon towers.

8. Your base will get leveled
– Sorry to be a party-pooper but there is no perfect base. Even if you follow this advice you will still get leveled. But you should make your attacker work harder for it, and if you do it right, they might even lose resources trying to take your base down.

9. Base Layout
– There is a fair amount of room for individuality here. The basic principle is that your silos and TH will be near the centre of your base with the towers close by. You want to force your attackers to go through your towers before you they can get to your silos and TH.
– I put my monster housings in the corners of my yard and they are generally left alone. Every now and then someone takes them out with a wave of pokies but not as often as you might think.
– Look at other bases posted in the forums and in your maproom for more ideas. If you really want to get an idea of what is effective and what isn’t then get out there and attack. If you find a base that is especially good then study it and incorporate some of its features into your design. If you find a base that is particularly bad make sure your base doesn’t have the same weakness!

10. Common Base Designs: – credit to Tabb
BDB – Big Dumb Bunch; refers to a design where all towers are place directly beside each other; most widely used base design pre-catapult.
BBDB – Better Big Dumb Bunch; towers are placed together in much the same way as the BDB but in this design they are spaced apart at varying intervals to limit the damage done by the catapult.
DOUGHNUT – consists of town hall and silo core with towers (& sometimes resource collectors) circling it, followed by another circle of resource collectors and/or other buildings; each circle is generally wrapped in a layer of blocks. It is not the best defense but it is not the worst either. It is a good starter design though.
CHECKERBOARD – consists of alternating rows of towers and other buildings; generally forms a square or rectangle shape. Designed to frustrate the catapult.

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The Art of Base Design by Nubbels

The Advanced Defensive Guide – credit to Jangooon

Predicting monster pathing
In other words, knowing where monsters will go when they attack. Monsters will always attack the closest tower and use the quickest route to that tower, knowing this you can create your base such that your weakest towers are always the first to die off and your stronger towers last longer. The strength of each tower and their value goes like this: Laser>Cannon>Tesla>Snipe. Try and put your snipes in front first.

You can also path monsters so that while on their way to an opening to get to a tower they are under fire by other long range towers firing from behind thick 2-3 layer walls. You can test where monsters will go with the monster baiter.

Proper use of booby traps
There are only 3 places where you should place booby traps, with varying priority.
1. In between towers: Like so–

Many people underestimate the true effectiveness of a properly placed booby trap, one or two can practically neutralize an entire wave of ichis. Each can do approx 1000 pts of damage.

But to utilize them properly you must first force monsters to mob up, this will automatically happen when monsters are attacking a tower, so placing them in between towers will make sure that the most damage a wave is likely to do is take down a single tower, after hitting booby traps, cannons and lasers will make easy work of what little hp they have left.
But, take care when placing traps, make sure that your tower coverage is not compromised or it would be all for nothing.

2. To protect Silos/TH, aka. Martyrdom: Once all towers are down and out, your opponent will likely send in a looting wave, if they are smart they would send Project Xs, but more often than not they will send finks. If you place booby traps around your Silos/TH where monster are likely to go, you will quite possibly ruin the attackers looting wave, expect hate mail.

3. Within entrances: Any spare booby traps should be left within your entrances, they won’t do too much, but they will likely weaken the first wave.

Deceptive tower placement:
Attacking any of the towers, all 4 will be within firing range.

Once all 16 towers are placed down, it will be very hard for the attacker to know just how many towers are within range of his target point.
This may force him to underestimate your bases defensive capabilities and send in weaker monsters, or he may attack a point which looks to him the weakest, when in fact it is your strongest point.

Mazing/Deceptive mazing – credit to Donald Harvill
Not so much an advanced tactic, but there are still many who do not utilize mazing (forcing monsters into where you want them to go with walls, I expect you to already know this). Deceptive mazing is when a single stone block wall is used, many do not realize that stone blocks count roughly as two wood blocks, and will likely attack this thinking they will not be ‘mazed’. You may use this to your advantage in two ways, to maze monsters to a nearby one wooden block thick wall with laz0rs nearby or to force monsters to mob up.

For extra sneakiness, hide a single wooden block in a row of stone blocks behind a tall building. People will drop their monsters expecting them to take a direct path through the stone wall, but instead they’ll get mazed through the hidden entrance.

In this image, the single wooden block is hidden behind the gray monster locker in the normal view. Tower monster attacks all along the south side of the base get mazed through the single entrance, and first-time attackers won’t know that it is there.

The golden rule
Protect other towers with Snipes, UNLESS, you can increase cannon coverage by putting them near the front. For the laser and tesla it’s always better that they are protected by snipes, as they have much lower hp.

Make sure drops are always out of tower range. – credit to Keo & Michael Hackett
A small, yet effective tip, just check the tower range on the yard planner and make sure there are buildings or walls on the outer edges of your coverage. That way, monster will be forced to drop outside of your range, and you will maximize shots fired when they come closer.

You can also spread out non-essential buildings or blocks right to the edge of your yard, so attackers will be forced to fling monsters outside your yard. For extra sneakiness, you can cover your whole yard but leave 1 space big enough for the attacker to drop his monsters. Place traps here. The psychological effect on the attacker who sees his monsters blow up in the very 1st second of his attack is devastating. lol

If u can force a drop really far from any possible targets, you can make it harder for the attacker to predict where the monsters will go by using extra scattered walls, often causing them to ‘branch’ out spreading out the damage as will be mentioned below.

Also, depending on how u build a corner in a wall u can create a weak point that can b used to mob up the monsters at a specific location behind which u can place mines 4 maximum effect.

In the image above, the top wall is 2 blocks thick all the way through the corner. The bottom wall LOOKS just as strong but there r 2 blocks which are not reinforced (monsters can go between blocks that r corner to corner without stopping). Monsters will always go through this wall through those 2 blocks.

Monster branching
This is quite possibly the most difficult technique to get right, but if done properly will greatly increase your defenses. This will only work if you have entrances, so if you don’t have them, I suggest you go make them now.
The idea is to place two towers of equal distance from the end of the entrance, and force the group of monsters to split up into two groups, greatly reducing their overall effectiveness and dispersing damage to more than one tower.
Here’s a picture to better explain it:

Hint: – credit to David Sacco
Using non tower buildings instead of walls work easier in branching monsters by forcing tower monsters to path between the 2 buildings before reaching the towers…

Branching off branches/Triple branching…
Is it possible? You’ll have to find out for yourself….

Note: Branching techniques might backfire on you if the attacker uses the 10M Putty Rage since monsters invulnerable to damage will be able to attack more buildings in their limited “enraged” time.

Manipulating monster behavior – credit to ZeXuan

Defense guide for all levels! – credit to ZeXuan

One of the hardest defensive concepts to master in BYM is understanding & controlling monster pathing. The idea is to design a defense where you can force the monsters to go where you want by manipulating their targeting A.I. The programming for the monster pathing is constantly tweaked, but the basics as explained by David Scott is this:

1. Monsters first look for the closest buildings (by line of sight)
2. They then figure out the path to the 3 closest
3. They then take the path that is the shortest.
4. While walking they repeat the above 3 steps every now and then (in case the path they take takes them closer to another target)

As for walls they move around them until the length of the detour is too great, how great depends on if the blocks are wood, stone, metal or gold. They are unaware of the health of blocks and they do not calculate the time to destroy a block vs walk around it (they don’t look at blocks HP / their speed / their damage and the distance needed to travel) and they don’t take into account how many other monsters may be there to help them (10 crabs will walk as far as 1 crab even though they could take down a wooden block quickly)

So using the info the developer has provided, here are some of the things a few forum members have discovered:
1. Monsters will take the shortest route to a target. Even if it means smashing 5 gold blocks rather than walking 20 block spaces away. Use this to your advantage.
2. Monsters consistently target and re-target the closest 3 buildings, to see if the route they take brings them to a closer target than the one they chose before.
3. Monsters WILL path, if within the next few blocks a thinner wall is present.
4. A one-block wall can path monsters, if it is less than 10 blocks long. Use this to wear out putty rage.
5. Monsters walk over rubble to reach a target, if it is shorter than walking on space without. Try using a design that does not require them to walk over rubble, so that traps will be effective.
6. Eye-Ras target the closest block, even if it looks like it is 10 blocks away from what LOOKS to be the closest.

If you can learn to take advantage of the information above, you can force the monsters to go where you want no matter from where they attack.

Note: Wormzers almost always surfaces to the RIGHT of a building!

Disillusionment – credit to Randy Ex-Mason, Kizoku & Tabb
Fool attackers and ruin their planned attack by cleverly hiding your defenses.

1. Hidden entrances – hiding your entrances from view behind buildings or disguising them through clever wall block arrangements. When attackers plan to attack your base, their monsters will be pathed to an opening the they knew nothing about.

2. Hidden towers – This could be used in a couple different ways.
a) It’s a way to mess up the aim of the catapult. From what I’ve noticed,catapult attacks tend to come in more from the right side, then straight down and I’ve never seen them come from the left.
b) If you were to replace the hatcheries with silos, then it’s possible the attacker would either choose to leave the important towers to monsters, or go ahead and launch and end up taking out more silo than tower.
c) If an attacker happens to not notice the hidden towers, it could mess up his whole attack plan and force him to use an extra wave to level your base.

Attacking

Basic Attack – credit to Lara Leslie
How can I attack?
You need a locker to research monsters, a hatchery to produce them, a monster housing to store them, a map room to find enemy bases and a flinger to fling monsters into battle.

1. If you have an army to attack with, view the map and find a target.

Note: Only do this if you are ready to lose your Starter Protection!
Tip: Don’t fling your monsters all in 1 big bunch. Spread them out a bit to counter damage from traps and splash damage.

Advanced Attack – credit to Tommy Renard

You have 5 minutes of “pure” attack, during which you can fling mobs. After these initial 5 minutes, the flinger lock ends and monsters will run free after 2 more minutes, which equals a total attack time of 7 minutes.

Taking down defenses before looting
You will never push your target into DP if you aim to do the job properly. By doing it properly, I refer to using pure tower monster waves until all towers have been leveled to the ground. Do remember to push “end attack” after the last tower falls, otherwise your tower monsters will start munching on buildings, which at that point may push your target into DP with a poor choice of monsters and a bad end result. After all towers have been ground to dust and you have ended the final assault, you have a few options for your looting wave.
a) If you wish to flatten your targets whole base in your looting wave, focus on monsters doing the most DPS (damage per second). The best of these are Project X, with Finks at second place.
b) If you wish to get the maximum amount of loot, focus on looting monsters like Brains as they get a % bonus on resources looted.
c) Also take into account the targets probable booby trap layout. Brains, Finks and Bolts will not survive 1 trap explosion. While a Project X can take 2 traps before they die. So for a moderately well trapped base Project X is the way to go.

Risk Factors
Do note that there are risks with every attack.
1. Ninjas – If you start with focusing on towers for several attacks, your target is very tempting for ninja looters. And if you get hit by a ninja, you won’t get anything for your work since you have done damage to towers only.

2. 10-in-24 attack DP – Remember that 10 attacks within 24 hours by any number of attackers will put your target into 48 hour DP. Unfortunately, there is no way to know how many attacks the target has already received from different attackers, so even if you only did 3 attacks but the 3rd attack was the 10th in 24 hours for that base… they will go into 48 hour DP.

3. Target goes online – Also remember that the target can login at anytime between your attacks to ruin your plans.

Resource Management
Plan your monster and catapult usage carefully as it would be embarrassing to attack a base and not be able to level or loot it because you ran out of goo, or lost more resources in the attack than you looted.

Resource Raiding
While mixing tower monsters and resource/anything monsters in an attack before all towers are down will get you some resources, you will often push your target into DP before doing any real damage. I advise only using the mixed attack for certain bases where quick raids are feasible and your only looking to get some resources instead of trying to level a base.

D.A.V.E. attack
D.A.V.E.s are bling-bling monsters. While they sound and look nice, they are both slow and inefficient in terms of damage. Crabatrons (possibly paired with Project X depending on target base layout) are the best tower killers, while Project X and Finks are the best damage dealers. But if you encounter an extremely well trapped base, D.A.V.E.s are the only monsters that can survive multiple traps to reach the silos after hitting the mines.

Percentage Damage Protection
%DP (non 4-in-1 and 10-in-24 DP in this case) is triggered by a ratio of damage done versus total hit points. DP is never triggered by killing all towers first UNLESS your target intentionally has NOT built all available buildings (non towers). In this case each towers hit points is a larger percentage of the whole, and your target might rely on that. So, if your target has all towers but not all possible buildings (especially silos and resource factories), take this into account.

Prematurely setting-off booby traps
No. Catapult attacks do not set off booby traps.
But, since resource monsters go directly after resources and ignore all else, they are good for clearing out traps. Especially if you know that your target has designed his base with traps defending inner silos in mind, which you may not trigger until the looting phase. Bolts for example are great in this case for clearing out the danger before sending in your looters (or sending them in pairs – bolts are faster and will run ahead detonating traps before your more valuable monsters hit them).

Catapult Attacks – credit to micky
The catapult, designed to break the defensive shell of the BDB, once was considered a support weapon but is now becoming the primary form of attack in the game. Many players consider it to be over-powered but the developers have their own design and so far have posted no plans of limiting it’s destructiveness. Just manage your resources and you can use this weapon to level any base, no matter how well defended. There is no defense against this weapon for defenders except to force collateral damage on your strikes.
1. Twig Missile – A focused attack. The TM launches a barrage of twigs that will do high damage in a moderately compressed area. Useful for taking out strategic defenses. Has an area of effect of 8.5 blocks in diameter.

2. Pebble Bomb – A wide range attack. The PB launches a hail of stones that does moderate damage to a wide area. Be careful of collateral damage as this will promote sending the target into DP. Used mainly for weakening closely grouped buildings making them more vulnerable to attack. Has an area of effect of 17 blocks in diameter.

3. Putty Rage – A monster enhancement effect. The PR launches putty at your attacking monsters giving them a boost in attacking power, speed and armor for 30 seconds. Very useful when taking out a tightly packed yard where you don’t want to do too much collateral damage.

General Tips from the ‘Pros’ – credit to Kevin Kilfoil & Jason C. Braun

Tip #1: MOST IMPORTANT RULE OF ALL
If you come across a yard that does not yet have damage protection but has allot of damage done, more than likely some other player is working hard on that yard and they have earned the rights to that yard. Don’t be a douche bag and walk in and loot because some one else did all the hard work for you. Let those who start the yard, finish the yard. DON’T BE A DOUCHE!

Tip #2 Use Your Attack Log and DP Wisely
Your attack log can tell you a lot. Read it, and try and reconstruct attack. Look at your damaged yard before you rebuild. Try and use those things to learn where your weak spots might be. Improve those spots. Immediate retaliation isn’t necessarily the best choice.

Tip # 3 Using Booby Traps to foil the looting wave
Looting monsters are more fragile than tower monsters, so use your traps to thwart the looting wave. Place them around silos, the town hall, and your resource harvesters to take out the looting monsters.

Tip # 4 Monsters target nearest building in their class.
Learn this behavior when attacking so that you may set up a better defense.
Example: Use out buildings to lead anything monsters away from your important buildings.

Tip # 5 Try to get as much tower coverage as you can
The most basic rule, make your towers closer to each other (but not too close for catapults!)

Tip #6 Stay the Course but Don’t Be Stubborn About It
As you rise to immortality through BYM. You have a lot of choices to make. Decide whether or not you want to be a defensively oriented player, an offensive oriented player, or a balance of the two. If something doesn’t work, don’t just give up or keep doing it over and over again.

Improvise, adapt, and overecome…. REEEEECONNNNN!

Tip #7 Use your shiny wisely
Don’t waste shiny speeding up upgrades. A good use for your initial shiny is buying extra workers, expanding your yard, and purchasing improved packing skills, as these things stay with you for your entire BYM career

Tip #8 Mushrooms
Mushrooms do not make good walls. Monsters have a tendency to walk right through them like a hot knife through a stick of butter. They are, however, good for collecting shiny when picked.

Tip #9 Walls
Solid walls with no openings will not path monsters. If there are no breaks in the wall, the monsters will simply take the most direct route through them. Openings in walls are also a good place to set booby traps.

Tip #10 Splash damage is important
Cannon and Laser towers have high splash damage, so large groups of small weak monsters will get killed easily. The best monsters to use against cannons and lasers would be a few high HP monsters like Crabs.
On the flip side, Snipe and Tesla towers do high damage to a single monster and have no splash damage. So the best monsters to use against these would be masses of weaker monsters.

So protect your splash damage tower. A good combination would be 2 or more cannon towers covering each other while placing sniper towers in front so the sniper gets targeted first while the cannon tower provides covering fire to the monsters bunched up against the sniper tower.

Tip # 11 Catapult defense
Place high health, non-defense buildings (ex. resource gatherers) in the middle of your towers to discourage being catapulted or to speed up DP if catapulted.

Tip # 12 Traps placement
Avoid placing your traps on areas w/c will be 1st entered by monsters.. place it near towers and on the second line of defense.. This way monsters are already grouped before they reached the traps.. and when you read the attack log, you’ll see 20 monsters damage, 15 killed! LOL or something like that!

Tip # 13 Zoning towers
When I started to level up, I used the BDB (big dumb bunch) method… As I have read this is better than just scattering towers…
but then I realized that zoning your towers is more effective… specially against catapult attacks…

I arrange my towers in to three zones (2groups of 2 snipes and 2 canons each for silos and resource, and a main group with 2 lasers, 2 cannons, 1 snipe for the TH and silos) and 3 satellites (2 tesla and 1 snipe) w/c will force the monsters to group together if they were not destroyed 1st! LOL

Tip # 14 Study monster behavior when attacking
When attacking, observe how your monsters attack. Noticing certain patterns/behaviors in your monsters during your attack will help. Then, you can make use of these behaviors to your advantage.
Ex. Monsters avoid walls if there’s a hole nearby. You can then study your targets wall or building placement and predict where your monsters will go once flung into battle.

Tip # 15 Flags to create a ‘no-fling’ zone
If you have extra shiny to spare, flag (decorations) placement can be used to prevent attackers from flinging their monsters where the flags are placed. Letting you force attackers to fling monsters farther from your base than they want.

Tip # 16 Less is more
The less you have in your yard, the easier it is to defend! If you only have 3 silos and 3 of each collector but have 5 or 6 sniper towers, 5 or 6 cannon towers, 2 laser towers, and 2 tesla towers, more than likely, you wouln’t be attacked as much or lose as many resources.

Tip # 17 Build from the inside out
Build your defense from the middle of your yard out. Building walls against your property line is a BAD defense. This only helps the raiding player accomplish what they want faster.

Tip # 18 Understand your enemy
Understand your yard from an attacking players point of view. Where would you attack your yard from? What is the most effective way to attack your yard with the least amount of monster loss?

Monster Bunker

Originally Posted by David Scott

COMING UP
Monster Bunker (yes, it’s really going to happen – just requires a lot more programming, balancing and testing than I had hoped)

Picking Neighbors’ Mushrooms / Trading Resources for Shiny / Free Shiny – response by coolcat
– yes it is a game. a game that is paid for by purchasing shiny. if you like this game so much then buy some shiny to support it instead of asking for free shiny (which is exactly what you are doing)

– no, it still would NOT work. shiny is the life blood of this game. they give you very little for free, this is by design. they give you just enough to make you want more.
Resource Converter – response by coolcat
The developer designed the game with 4 separate resources, each having it’s own specific uses. If you could just exchange them for another resource, then there would be no purpose to having separate resources. If the developer wanted there to only be one resource, then he would have designed it that way. But he didn’t, presumably because the game would be too easy, there would be no strategy involved in resource management, and there would be less of an incentive to buy more [with] shiny.

If you want more of a specific resource, the game already provides you with 3 ways to get it; 1.) Wait for your harvesters to produce it. 2.) Attack other players yards and loot their resources. 3.) Buy resources from the store.
Clans/Alliances
Yes, I know Dave said that he is working on this idea… but some people like playing this game solo.

The real reason I am leery of this idea though is it’s potential for bullying. Imagine how many complaints against bullying there already are in the forum with just 1 attacker harassing them, now imagine if bullies were able to ally with another bully to coordinate their attacks against you, now imagine if it were a WHOLE CLAN that was bullying you… you’re only recourse would be to join another clan that is big enough to protect you. Pretty soon the game would be 2 big clans duking each other out while the small clans suffer. People who don’t want to join clans would obviously be driven out of the game.

It would be fun to have a clan based game play implemented in BYM, but please offer an acceptable solution first to the problem i mentioned above. Currently the only clan/alliance based ideas i have liked is gildward’s “Lets talk about sects” idea or allying with friends to take out a strong Wild Monster Base.

Controlling Catapult Strength
Dave put this to the vote, so it probably will be implemented someday… but let me ask this first.
Have you ever been annoyed by catapult attacks that you can’t defend against? Ever tried defending against an attacker that didn’t fling a single monster in 3 attacks but just kept spamming you with the catapult?

Well if you haven’t, lucky you. Lots of other players have experienced this, and giving attackers an option to control the amount of resources they can catapult will only make it worse. Why you ask?

Because the only limitation we currently have against using the catapult is it’s high usage cost. If attackers were able to control that usage they would no longer have qualms about catapulting you over and over again since he knows he is launching an efficient attack that doesn’t waste resources. No limitations, equals more catapult usage, equals less need for monsters other than for looting purposes. Defending would be pointless.

No, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but think of a different limitation for the catapult first that would prevent it’s over use. Personally, I like limiting the damage the catapult can do to a buildings HP to only 99%.
My Wishlist for this game.

1. Ninja Revenge Room – by gildward
– lets us track a certain number of ninjas for revenge.

2. Lets talk about Sects – by gildward
– gives specific bonuses and penalties for specific styles of play.

3. Better Yard Planner or Wall & Mine Storage – by gildward & Micky
– gives us ability to save base layouts or store wall blocks & booby traps while redesigning our base.

4. Remove the “UNDER ATTACK” sign from the map rooms
– helps lessen ninja attacks while still keeping the ninja tactic viable.

5. Review the effect of current DP rules
– as a bone to higher level players with no one to attack.

6. Dynamic map rooms (bases that have not attacked you in a week get randomly replaced by a different base)
– now think on this for a moment, the map rooms would have a weekly shuffle.
– AND, in order to preserve rivalries, you can keep each other in your respective map rooms by simply attacking each other at least once each week.
– BUT, if you are tired of your rivalry or someone is bullying you, simply do not retaliate against that attacker for 1 week, you are then removed from his map room and you get replaced by someone else. Same on your side, he would also be removed from your map room to be replaced by a different player.

7. Limiting catapults to only 99% damage
– since catapults will no longer be able to destroy walls, eye-ra becomes an option again for punching holes in walls.
– brings back importance of monsters in attacking, but the catapult still helps against defenses with bunched up towers. (since damaged towers do significantly less damage)

8. Name your own base (and remove players’ real names from the Leader Board)
– helps keep privacy of players and adds an element of customization.

9. Auto-kick attacker from base once owner logs in
– if the owner of your target base goes online, you will immediately be kicked out of your attack and a message will pop-up saying that “Enemy monster reinforcements at 6 o’clock, RUN AWAY!”
– removes the annoyance of waiting to log into your base due to an attacker camping out for more than 7 minutes.

10. Let the Monster Juicer building be able to juice 50% of monsters that attack it as previously promised
– i just like the idea.

11. Let the surviving monsters come back home
– to help counter the shortage in goo.

12. A damage % meter in the attack window (not in the map room)
– will let you know in the middle of your attack if you are close to triggering the DP% rule.

13. Goo Meter and ‘Quick-Add’ monster button for HCC – by papercarrier
– shows amount of goo to be used on queued monsters as well as a feature to quickly add monsters to the queue.