Backyard Monsters Guide

Backyard Monsters is a time-based strategy game that begins with a single yard that you attack and defend from and moves towards building and managing an empire. There are 2.7 million monthly users on Facebook and 10,330,828 plays on Kongregate. The following guide will cover my experience and thoughts for beginners, defending your yard, champion, empire building, and plenty of miscellaneous advice. If you find this helpful, please share it with your friends!

1. Advice for Beginners

2. Champions

3. Advanced Defense

4. Advanced Attacking

Advice for Beginners:

Defense:

You have 7 days of protection at the start, and from my experience attacks are infrequent until you are roughly level 20 and above. Knowing that, the best use of your time for that week is to build and upgrade resource buildings and your town hall. I would certainly build all possible defensive towers in the final two days, but once there is the appearance of defense within a reasonably built yard, you should be good to go!

In your earliest days of upgrading resource buildings, Twig Snappers and Pebble Shiners are the most important. Following that, Putty Squishers are of middling value and finally Goo is only important when you're ready to fill your monster bunkers and loot wild monster tribes.

Aim to build your yard with symmetry. Your Town Hall and Champion Cage should be built towards the middle, Storage Silos surrounding, and defense around that. Use resource buildings and all other structures to catch the attention of monsters while your defensive towers kill them. Check out our article on defense in Backyard Monsters for much more information and reasoning.

In general, Monster Bunkers built close to the middle and surrounded by many other buildings and blocks and filled with D.A.V.E. or Bandito units are the strongest ways to defend your yard. If they are left out of the middle and unprotected, they can be baited (discussed in the attacking section of this article) and you can lose your strongest defense and increase the odds someone levels your yard.

There are seven types of defensive buildings plus Blocks, Traps, and a Champion Chamber:

1. Sniper Tower: Long distance, attacks one monster at a time, and does very high damage. Can harm flying monsters.
2. Cannon Tower: Short distance, attacks multiple monsters with splash damage, and does fairly low damage to a single monster. Cannot harm flying monsters.
3. Tesla Tower: Long distance, attacks single monsters rapidly and then takes a pause to reload, and does a medium amount of damage. Can harm flying monsters.
4. Laser Tower: Short distance, attacks multiple monsters with splash damage, medium amount of concentrated damage, and cannot harm flying monsters.
5. Aerial Defense Tower: Long distance, High damage, many shots at once, and only attacks flying monsters.
6. Railgun: Very long distance, shoots infinitely forward once triggered, high damage, cannot harm flying monsters.
7. Monster Bunker: Can house monsters ready to defend your yard or outpost and has a fairly short distance before these units are triggered. The monsters placed inside dictates whether you can harm flying monsters.

Attacking:

The main reason to attack someone is to gain resources. The next best reason is to get revenge on those who attack you, and decrease the odds they attack you in the future. You can either attack the yards of human players or loot wild monster tribes. In the beginning, poorly built yards by human players can yield the maximum amount of resources for the amount of goo you would have to invest in attacking monsters. As time goes on, wild monster tribes are generally the most valuable as players improve their yards' defense.

Higher level players cannot attack people less than two levels below them unless you attack them. If you do, those players then get the ability to attack you once for every time you hit them. In general, attacking higher level player is a very bad idea as your yard getting leveled will cost you resources and increase the time necessary to upgrade buildings.

It is probably not a good idea to upgrade your Map Room to level two until you have a well designed yard and are at least level 38 given you can attack anyone in level two, regardless of disparity. I personally didn't upgrade until level 40, but I lost out on the speed with which I could grow my empire by not taking the chance I could land in a good area and then quickly looting Kozu and low level players.

You have seven total minutes to attack someone. During the first five minutes you can use your flinger and catapult and for the last two minutes those options are unavailable. If you prefer to send in multiple varying waves of monsters, you may need to time your attacks to make sure you aren't holding important monsters back and leaving them with only a couple minutes before they lose their utility.

Alliances have a fair amount of value once you upgrade your Map Room to level two. The leader of these alliances typically have one of two goals: Unify all empires in the area or have the most players throughout the entire game with the largest empires. These leaders have the ability to trigger power-ups like increased tower and block hit points, a 25% discount on outpost takeovers, and flingers with increased range, capacity, and target lock time.

You can attack a total of four times as long as the first through third waves don't wipe out more than 50% of the base's total hit points. After those four attacks and/or you do more than 50% damage, your opponent or the wild monster tribe in question goes into damage protection.

What puts a yard into damage protection and for how long:

• If the yard gets hit four times in an hour = 1 hour damage protection
• If the yard gets hit ten times within a twenty-four hour period = 48 hours of damage protection
• 50-75% of yard = 18 hours damage protection
• 75-100% of yard = 36 hours of damage protection

To avoid putting your opponent into damage protection, either stop in your first three attacks before you do 50% or more damage to the yard in question or consider sending in many very strong monsters (overkill) to wipe out their yard in a single attack.

There are six types of monsters:

1. "Anything" - Pokey, Fink, Bandito, Fang, Teratorn, Wormzer, and D.A.V.E. units. These monsters will attack whatever is closest to them.
2. "Tower" - Octo-ooze, Ichi, Crabatron, and Project X units. These monsters will seek out defensive towers first and then once all of them are destroyed, become "anything" monsters.
3. "Looting" - Bolt and Brain units. These monsters go for resource buildings, storage silos, and the Town Hall. These have little use in the beginning as defensive towers will quickly kill them, but once you use "tower" monsters to wipe out the defense, these looting monsters can yield a lot for a small Goo investment.
4. Eye-ra: This unit does a tremendous amount of damage to blocks first, and then the closest thing second. Once they explode, they are killed.
5. Zafreeti: This unit flies and heals it's accompanying friendly monsters. They cannot be put into the Monster Bunker and cannot heal other Zafreeti units. They heal in large amounts and can heal multiple monsters at once if they are stacked, but often focus on your Champion and heal 1/10th of what they would normally.
6. Champions: Discussed in-depth in our "Understanding Champions" article. You may only have one at a given time, but with the use of a Champion Chamber you may store the other two at any level. These monsters may attack and defend and when they run out of hit points they retreat to heal at your main yard.

In the beginning, you may see the best return on your Goo investment by using all Octo-ooze in your first attack and then all Pokeys in a subsequent attack to loot the resource buildings, Storage Silos, and Town Hall. As you grow and deal with better yards, Ichi and Bolt units have significant uses.

You can build and upgrade your catapult in order to destroy defensive towers with pebbles and twigs and provide a buff to your monsters with putty. You may wish to try and catapult Monster Bunkers with 100k pebbles/twigs to kill the monsters inside if there are not Storage Silos nearby. If there are, you stand a chance of destroying the vary resources you are attacking to gain.

The level of a yard's flinger is equal to the number of total hexes (spaces in the level two Map Room) you can send your monsters to attack.

To bait defending monsters in bunkers or a champion, use Octo-ooze, Ichis, or Crabbatrons. The strength of these units should depend upon how many defensive towers are in between that bunker/cage and where you fling your attacking monsters. Once the defending monsters have been lured past walls, you can send Eye-ra units to kill them easily.

Miscellaneous:

Upgrade your Monster Juicer to three in all outposts and your main yard before juicing monsters. This will give you your full goo investment back to you. Furthermore, you may need to quickly juice bunkered DAVEs in order to build an outpost or move your main yard quickly - you don't want to unnecessarily give up resources you could save.

Always pick Mushrooms for shiny which will allow you to get very important upgrades like multiple workers, more yard space, and whatnot.

With your initial shiny - buy extra workers and more yardage. Getting to the five total possible workers is the most important use of shiny. More yardage is the next important. Beyond that, packing and resources are likely the best use of shiny. Upgrading walls is a poor use of shiny given they are a great place to invest extra resources when you know someone will attack you soon. Keeping your resources low when under fire is a great way to reduce the benefit someone gets in attacking and better blocks makes attacks harder.

Use your extra putty to upgrade all of your monsters through the Monster Academy and Monster Lab. Most important monsters to upgrade: D.A.V.E., Eye-Ra, and Wormzer.

When you have a lot more Twigs than you do pebbles, upgrade your laser towers in your main yard and outposts. Upgrading or Fortifying your Laser Towers spends 2:1 Twigs to Pebbles, so you can rectify a large disparity in your storage with these upgrades and pump up one of the most devastating defensive towers in the game.

Truces only last 14 days. If you have a truce, neither of you can attack each other. Don't expect people to always continue accepting truces.

Use quest rewards from following the tutorial to provide you with a fair amount of resources to build quickly.

Speed up anything with five minutes or less in necessary construction time for free. Speeding up other buildings with more time is generally a large waste of shiny.

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