Advanced Defense in Backyard Monsters

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Defense isn't particularly hard, but if you take Backyard Monsters seriously you will often be tweaking your yard many times and experimenting to see what works best. There are core concepts which make the biggest differences, and much smaller issues that many forum members obsess over. In the following article, you'll figure out how to keep wild monster tribes from doing any damage to and prevent human opponents from breaking into the middle of your yard and looting all of your resources.

1. Advice for Beginners

2. Champions

3. Advanced Defense

4. Advanced Attack

Place your Town Hall and Champion Cage in the middle of your yard. I personally put the Champion Cage directly in the middle as preventing it from being "baited" (discussed in the article for beginners) is extremely important. Place storage silos surrounding your Town Hall and Champion Cage (not all on one side) and Monster Bunkers around the Town Hall, Champion Cage, and Storage Silos. If you keep your Storage Silos next to your Monster Bunkers, an opponent will have a hard time catapulting your bunkers because if they accidentally hit your silos they will destroy the resources they are trying to loot.

Beyond this basic building placement, symmetry is the next most important detail in building a well defended yard. Don't put all of your Laser Towers in a single spot, all of your Storage Silos on one side, and so on.

Your Aerial Defense Towers and Tesla Towers should surround your Monster Bunkers. This is because defending against flying units is critical in keeping an advanced player from leveling your base and you do not want someone dropping a bunch of tower monsters on them and releasing Zafreeti to heal them as soon as your ADT/Tesla goes down.

Place Laser, Cannon, and Sniper Towers around the middle, with some spacing to prevent them from being Catapulted or quickly destroyed by monsters buffed by Putty. Use the Yard planner and aim to have the area your towers will cover overlap so that if someone attacks any given tower they are being attacked by two others. A specific attack used to level a base that is tightly packed is called a PPX, which is to send in Puttied Project X monsters in to rapidly do a tremendous amount of damage to defensive towers and once the Putty Rage wears off, emit Acid Spores once they die (assuming those upgrades are researched in the Monster Lab).

Yard Planner Screenshots of my Main Yard

Try attacking someone and use the catapult to fling 100k Twigs. Note the size of that radius and make sure no two defensive towers are within that space. Keeping towers apart prevents an opponent from opening up a part of your yard and get to the middle and loot your resources.

Use resource buildings, housing, monster locker, and all other buildings not discussed previously and place them outside of the towers so that anything monsters will target those buildings first and give your towers time to kill attackers. Creating a chain of these non-essential buildings is called a "Never Ending Chain" and is abbreviated with NEC in the Backyard Monsters forums. You may think it's important to keep your resource buildings safe, but they have high health and yield relatively low amounts of resources so they're great to hold the attention of attacking monsters.

There are two main ways to full your bunkers in your advanced stages - D.A.V.E units plus Eye-Ras to do maximum damage or tons of Octo-ooze units to slow down Puttied Project X's from doing tons of damage to your towers. Many people use Banditos, which is helpful when you have low amounts of Goo. Also, some people use their four fully upgraded Monster Bunkers and completely fill them with Pokey units because when you unleash 377 defending units it may lag their connection and cost them the attack. I personally think that method is super cheap and not nearly as effective as four D.A.V.E.s with level three Rockets and a Fomor champion in the middle.

Use blocks to force attacking monsters through a specific path in order to make them walk through your traps and give towers the most time to kill them. You can force these monsters through specific spots by leaving openings - either through a single missing block or overlapping them with 1/4 or less of the block touching the next. If simply their corners touch, a monster will walk through the spot where they touch as if those blocks never existed.

Some people choose to use blocks to path monsters around their Town Hall and Storage Silos, making them hit a ton of traps. The benefit in using this strategy is to counter a specific attacking strategy. An attacker can either send a ton of D.A.V.E. and Zafreeti units to wipe out a base in a single attack or they can send a first wave of tower monsters and then follow up with low health looting or anything monsters to gather the resources without being killed. If someone sends a bunch of Bolt or Brain units in to loot your Storage Silos, a "Silo Death Trap" (SDT) or "Town Hall Death Trap" (THDT) can thwart that second wave. If your opponent gets that far, they will likely have done more than 50% damage, and once their units die you will be put into damage protection, unable to be attacked again for 18 to 36 hours.

You should place blocks outside of the perimeter of your yard in order to force enemy Eye-ra units to explode before hitting any of your buildings or defending monsters. If you have any space in the middle of your yard that an opponent could fling monsters into, you may wish to put blocks there to prevent that possibility too.

Through attacking various players and wild monster tribes you will soon figure out what you look for when trying to easily attack. Things like baitable champs and bunkers, silos easily able to be looted, and multiple clumped towers that you can catapult. Critically think about what works to prevent you from doing damage and then put those ideas into your own yard.

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If human or wild monster tribe attackers destroy one of your Storage Silos they will gain four percent of your total banked resources. If they destroy your outpost they will gain 5%. If you have a ton of resources banked and a poorly defended empire, you may wake and find you have half the resources you went to sleep with. Therefore, spend as much as possible of your banked resources when you plan to be away from your computer for a significant period (8 hours or more). I personally like to figure out how much it would take to upgrade a tower that would take a similar amount of time that I'll be away from the keyboard, spend the difference between that number and banked pebbles and twigs on blocks as they can be built in 5 seconds and then sped up, and then put the remaining resources towards that upgrade. Figuring out something small like that when you are being attacked often can be extremely helpful in keeping your silos thin enough people don't think to attack and cost you the least when someone does level your yard. You may also find benefit in queueing D.A.V.E.'s in the Hatchery Control Center of an Outpost out of reach from an aggressive opponent knowing you will recycle them later and regain that invested Goo.

If someone is relentlessly putting you into damage protection, just take that time and concentrate on improving your defensive towers and yard build. You can also recycle your map room, knowing you temporarily give up the right to loot wild monster tribes.

I have always found patience to be the best way to get revenge. Get a truce, rebuild your yard, and build outposts (if Map Room 2) out of the reach of your opponent. Consider moving a significant distance away from a bully, log in frequently and build outposts, strengthen them, and then slowly move back. I have dealt with two people that way, the strongest opponent taking three or four months of active play and pummeled him into quitting. You can also spend a bunch of money on Shiny, improve your yard by a lot, by some outposts close to them, and get your revenge a lot faster.

Conversely, if you attack someone - expect that they may come back to you much later and bring the pain.

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