Backyard Monsters Aerial Defense Guide

Backyard Monsters Aerial Defense Guide by Jonty Simson

As indicated by by the title, this is a guide to Aerial Defence but it’s also a few other things I wanted to tackle

Before I start, I just want to clear up a few things for noobs, mainly what the acronyms I’ll be using stand for (things with a * will be talked about later)
SDT*=Silo Death Trap, definition in link
DPS=Damage/second
NEPoH=Never Ending Path of Horror, a defunct pathing concept to make monsters path in an infinite loop
RGs=Resource Gatherers
ADTs*=Aerial Defense Towers
RGTs=Railguns
NEC=not actually never ending (named after the NEPoH) its a ring of useless, or non-essential buildings around the outside of a base, and ideally, they will all have to be destroyed before the core is targeted
NECoT*=Never Ending Chain of Towers, is using towers in an NEC, works well with SCDT and AZSF
NECoRG=Never Ending Chain of RGs, used as an NEC or incorporated into one
PPX*=10million putty on Project X
PiB*=10million putty on Brsins
ARGoH*=Annoying Resource Gatherers of Horror, A counter to invisi-brains, comprised of booby traps between RGs
AZSF*=Anti-Zafriti Smiley Face, an AA concept so named as the original schematic used to explain it looked like a smiley face
SCDT*=Space Counter Death Trap. Putting booby traps in fling spaces/unexpected locations
RDaves*= Rocket Daves
SPoD= SDT incorporating towers, where tower monsters won’t set off crucial traps

The other things I want to mention are
Baiting bunkers-Using eye-ras to kill bunkered monsters OR Dave/Zaf to tank them
Eye-ra bait*- Blocks around the outside of a base to stop baiting Via eye-ras
Valgos-Bait*- The same as Eye-ra bait but with the the purpose of stopping valgos from messing with Pathing
Cataprone*-If something is cataprone, it can be hit with a catapult, without hitting silos
RDaveprone*- Straight halways, which will allow RDaves to destroy a building without travelling all the way to it
Bunker Sync*- All bunkers releasing monsters simultaneously, very good DPS
Cage – Bunker*- Very hard to explain, see this link for a good definition
More to come (possibly)

With the game the way it is, ALL (no exceptions) attacks on high level bases will feature at least 1 type of aerial monster be they Fomor, Zaf(s) or teratorn(s)

As we know, these monsters can’t be hit by the normal ground towers (all of which have splash); cannons, lasers, railguns or quakes

So Instead we have to use towers which are mostly non-splash which are vunerable to swarming; snipers, teslas, ADTs and bunkers(which are slightly different)

Snipers fire one shot every 2 seconds, with upto 1100 damage (at level 10)

Teslas fire charges of (upto) 30 shots with (upto) 200 damage each (at level 6), although the reload time depends entirely on the speed of the attackers computer

ADTs fire salvos of (upto) 12 shots each of which has (upto) 350 damage, this fires once a second, but they do have splash

Bunkers are more interesting. They can store upto 660 housing space of monsters, and can have incredibly high DPS. There are 5 monsters which can defend anti-air

They are Sabnox, Balthazaar, Eye-ra, Dave and Fomor

Sabnox has 950 damage at lvl 3, 1400 health and take up 80 housing space

Balthazaar have 2,385 damage at lvl 4 4500 health and take 40 housing space, but they’re vulnerable as they are unranged

Eye-ra has 24,000 damage at lvl6, 2,400 health, splash damage and take up 60 housing space, however, they explode when they attack

Dave has 1,900 damage at lvl6 21,000 health and take 160 housing space

Fomor has 650 damage (130x(5/second))at lvl6.3 44,000 health AND a 75% buff on other monsters movement/attack speed /health (for example, its impact a Dave would be moving its health to 84,000 (towers doing 75% less damage) and it will move at 1.75k/h rather than 1 (It will also attack 1.75 times a second)) Fomor has no housing space as he’s in the CC

The main point of having AA monsters in bunkers is to counteract zafs/fomor. There are two main ways of doing this. The first is to destroy these monsters, and the second is to do more damage than they can heal.

The first one will work fairly well when only aerial monsters are present as they will be targeted straight off by the bunkered monsters, even with a fomor/zaf bunkered Daves can kill teratorns faster than they can be healed.

The second one, which requires having very high DPS is slightly more risky. The monsters with the highest damage have lower health, and so they can be destroyed more quickly. It would follow then that a well balanced bunker has a combination of monsters, the more of which are AA the better.

These ways of countering AA monsters don’t just apply for bunkers, they’re applicable to the entire base(outposts included)

High CF bases will aim simply to knock 7 bells out of any attacking monsters, dealing more damage than can be healed

Medium CF/Low CF bases should aim for a combination of both, as they have not the fire-power to destroy an mob of monsters at once, but being more spread out they can take advantage of things such as AZSF

How to place AA towers

Of the four AA towers, each one has a different role to play (I’m also going to talk a little bit about SDTs as well)

ADTs. They should be the best protected tower in the entire base, as they are the main AA weapon, without which any base shall be over-run.

Ideally, they should be as far out as possible for coverage, but they shouldn’t be pathed straight to, or be cata-prone

Figure 1 shows a good way to place an ADT, between 2 silos to decrease cataprone-ness

Figure 2 a situation in which monsters will path to the ADT after the cannon, which is a bad thing

Figure 3 shows a way of stopping the ADT from being targeted, as it means that the next cannon is nearer than the ADT, however, the green line shows RDave pathing, and they would shoot the ADT first (the green dotted line indicates the path the rockets follow, when its relevant)

Figure 4 shows the same scenario but with 4 extra blocks in the entrance, meaning there is no clear line of sight for the RDaves to fire down so that they will ignore it

Figure 5 shows an almost identical set up but with one block missing, which allows a clear line of sight for the Daves, so they target the ADT

Figure 6 shows a more efficient way of doing this, but with bad consequences; monsters will chew through a block to get the ADT, then chew and walk through the SDT, setting the traps off prematurely

Figure 7/8 shows that if we can move the entrance around so its on the inside, monsters will ignore the ADT even if other towers are taken out around it, which will sometimes be done as part of a strategic attack. However the down side to it at the moment is that monsters will trip the traps in the SDT, so what we need to do to stop this happening is form a split SDT as shown in Figure 9

Figure 9 shows a split SDT which means that the ADTs achieve all the goals set for them; they will be amongst the last targeted, the aren’t catapultable, aren’t RDave-prone, and don’t waste traps from the SDT, this is an ideal way of setting out ADTs and silos, in a compact yard. For a more spread out design it is better for the ADTs to be further apart allowing for more NEC coverage (this doesn’t matter in a compact yard as the ADTs will cover almost everything anyway)

Bunkers. They should be as close to the center (British spelling) of the base as possible, so they will be harder to bait, and will cover the core. They have fairly low HP, especially as they’re made redundant (they don’t release monsters) at 50% health meaning that even lvl4 bunkers only have an actual health of 33k, so making them hard to catapult is essential, this damage can be done in one shot by a) the 5mil twig catapult (50k damage) or the 10mil pebble catapult (75k damage). There are 2 main concepts for strengthening the bunker, both of which were invented by Nicholas Leung, Cage – Bunker and Bunker sync/unison

The idea behind Cage – Bunker is that it allows fomor to constantly buff monsters; he never has to fight alone, and is therefore much harder to bait, this is done by placing the bunkers much further out than normal, see in thread for details. This is the only time when you should leave bunkers away from the center

Bunker sync works by having all 4 bunkers release monsters at roughly the same time, so all the monsters can fight simultaneously, which gives a massive increase in DPS

Figure 10 shows a way of placing bunkers so that they are difficult to catapult or bait

Figure 11 shows a way of doing this, where bunkers are still hard to catapult without hitting a silo, which will also create a bunker sync effect

Figure 12 is a base core which uses at least 2 silos per bunker/ADT for anti-catapult, which is only do-able by combining the various silos into an effective pattern, I have left this in for inspiration to designers (I’m currently using/refining a very similar design)

Teslas/Snipers. Teslas should be used for AZSF (preferably internal, but external will do and is sometimes better) and snipers should either be used for AZSF or for Quake stalling (putting high health buildings around a quake so it can attack the monsters whilst they’re chewing on the high HP buildings)

So the first thing I want to do is explain AZSF properly.

There is one major misconception surrounding AZSF, and unfortunately, it’s my fault

This was the image I used to explain AZSF when I created it, and unfortunately I forgot to mention a crucial point; the tower mob has to leave the range of the tesla/sniper for retarget onto the zaf. This schematic was accurate when it was first draw up aeons ago, as the intention was just for snipers to be able to fire of a few shots at a zaf when the tower mob left the range. Lots of people have now gone and created bases which just throw an AA tower behind some blocks and hope for the best.

This diagram shows how it *should* work. The tower mob leave the range and immediately chew on a building, the zaf will lag behind and remain in range of the tower, and hopefully be killed as the tower mob destroy the other tower (which should ideally be a cannon as it has high health and virtually no other use)

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1 Response

  1. EE041403 says:

    does the pathing work in fig12?

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