Hell rasiers event

Guys...the event has been forwarded to tuesday night or noon .

Ultimate Defence GUIDE--------just dont attack me!

If the defenses fall, the rest of your base will too.

Don't protect housing. I know it is a pain 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.

Towers

CONCENTRATING FIREPOWER

• Lone isolated towers (towers not inside the 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 range of at least 3 other towers, but imagine if you could get 7 or 8 towers all firing at the same targets at the same time.
• Mix tower types up - ex. 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.

TOWER SPACING

• It's nice to have mutual tower support, but bunching them together will make them vulnerable to the catapult. Make sure there is enough spacing to prevent the catapult in annihilating them in 1 shot.

Cannon towers - IMHO, Cannons are your most valuable towers. Lasers are great but they get catapulted right away. Cannons will do the most damage after lasers 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.

Note: Damaged Towers Do Less Damage

A 99% damaged tower will do 25% less damage and a 50% damaged tower will do 12.5% less damage.

Bunkers

by Kevin Troy Yabut & Arko

• When planning how to integrate the bunker in your defense, remember that bunkers are not like towers in that:
  1. They have a limited supply of ammo, if a bunker monster dies it can no longer help defend in a 2nd wave.
  2. They are a hidden weapon since the attacker can't know what monsters are stored until they are released.
  3. They allow flexibility in that you can store them with different monsters for different purposes.
  4. Bunker monsters take time to move from the bunker to their target, but their target in turn also comes closer to them.
  5. The bunker is considered as an anything building once its monsters are dead.
  6. Their range is larger than the sniper tower.

The first 3 distinctions are why IMO, the best use for the bunker is as either a 2nd line of defense to finish off attackers weakened by tower fire or as a delay to wear out an attackers putty rage. The last 3 are why I decided that the best way to use and at the same time protect them is by placing them at the very center of the base where their range can cover the whole base, they can act as decoys for looters, and they won't be so easily baited into wasting their unique defensive capabilities.

BEST BUNKER MONSTERS TO USE

• When choosing bunker monsters, you have to think first if you want to attack or delay, then balance between monster HP (health points), DMG (damage), speed & housing space.
  • Eye-Ra - is a good choice for it's high DMG & splash bonus, but it fails to take advantage of 1 of the best features of the bunker which is to heal all monsters that survive an attack since it explodes on contact. Still a good monster to use if you are concerned with stopping the first waves of a determined attacker.
  • Octo-Ooze, Ichi & Crabatron - are the best monsters to use for delay to wear out the putty rage so defenses can pick attacking monsters off. Octo can delay most kinds of attacks the best while Crab has the HP & DMG to both delay and kill monsters. The Ichi is the happy medium. Use this if you keep getting attacked with the 10M putty rage.
  • DAVE - is the best monster to use when you want balance between attack & defense. It has the DMG to dish out a lot of damage & has enough HP to usually survive an attack and be ready for round 2. Its drawbacks are its high housing requirement, high goo cost for replacement and it's slow speed in getting to the action. Still well worth it.
  • Bandito - is another good balanced monster. It has enough DMG and HP to take care of tower munching monsters (pwns an equal number of Ichis w/ half their number surviving for the 2nd round).
  • Project X - same case as Bandito, has high DMG and HP, but is not worth it due to its high housing cost.
  • Wormzer - they are fast, furious and can catch attacking monsters in a flash. They do well against looting monsters such as pokeys, bolts and brains but fail when faced against tower seeking monsters.
  • Pokey, Bolt, Fink, Fang & Brain - Pokeys have some use as a balanced delaying monster, Fink & Fang as a 2nd line cavalry monster with it's high DMG to housing ratio, but IMO, these monsters are not worth it when used in a defensive role.

Note: You can try mixing & matching the monsters to get the best of both offense & defense.

• Booby traps
  • You have two choices, either booby-traps your towers or booby trap your silos & TH. You can, of course, try both but the 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 hit 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.

• Walls
  • Do not make a huge one-layer wall around your base because monsters will break a hole anywhere the attacker chooses, a simple wall is destroyed within 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.

• 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:

  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.

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

  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)

  • 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.

• Your base will get leveled
  • There is no perfect base. Even if you follow this guide you will still get leveled. But you should make your attacker work hard for it, and if you do it right, they might even lose resources trying to take your base down.

• 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 center of your base with the towers close by. You want to force your attackers to go through your towers before 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!

Advanced Defense

by Jangooon

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.

   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.

Note: Each mine can do 1000 HP damage in an area around 4 wall blocks square with less damage towards the edge of the explosion.

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 that looks to him the weakest, when in fact it is your strongest point.

Tip: 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 snipes protect them, as they have much lower hp.

Disillusionment

by Randy Ex-Mason, Kizoku & Tabb

Fool attackers and ruin their planned attack by cleverly hiding your defenses.

1. Hidden entrances - hide your entrances from view behind buildings or disguising them through clever wall block arrangements. When attackers plan to attack your base, their whole attack could be ruined when monsters get mazed to a different direction then they planned due to an opening they knew nothing about.
2. Hidden towers - This could be used in a couple different ways.

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.

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.

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.

Optimizing tower range - credit to Keo & Michael Hackett

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 can be devastating.

Also, if you 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 attack different targets then what the attacker wanted.

Wall block flinger defense

by Coolcat

Once a building is destroyed, an attacker can fling on top of that buildings ruins as long as there is enough free space for the flinger. This means that some defense concepts (like the NeC) will no longer be as effective since an attacker can choose to destroy buildings in your perimeter and launch monsters closer after he has cleared enough space. Some spread out bases can even have monsters be flung inside the base once a big enough are is cleared with the catapult. An effective defense against this is to use gold blocks as flinger defense. A gold block has enough HP to withstand multiple catapult shots, so place them strategically around your base in areas where you want to prevent monster flings.

Predicting monster pathing

In other words, knowing where monsters will go when they attack. Monsters will always attack the closest building in their targeting criteria and will use the quickest route to that building, 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 your weakest 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.

Monster mazing

Using walls to force monsters into where you want them to go. Not so much an advanced tactic, but there are still many who do not fully utilize wall mazing. One of the most useless things you can use wall blocks for is to fully enclose a base. An attacker can easily predict where his monsters will go, as they will simply chew through the nearest wall to their objective. Walls are best used for mazing monsters into tower fire or booby traps. You can achieve this by creating openings, layering walls and leaving weaknesses in the walls where monsters will gravitate.

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

DECEPTIVE MAZING

by Donald Harvill

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 stonewall, 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.

Monster branching

by Jangooon

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: You can also use other buildings in branching monsters. An example (shown in the 3rd pic above) is by forcing tower monsters to walk exactly in-between the 2 gatherers before they can reach the tower…

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

by 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:

• Monsters first look for the closest buildings (by line of sight)
• They then figure out the path to the 3 closest
• They then take the path that is the shortest.
• While walking they repeat the above 3 steps every now and then (in case the path they take takes them closer to another target)
• New path has to be more than just shorter, it has to be 20% shorter (prevents NEPoH, at least that's the plan)
• If a monster targets building A, then gets closer to building B and in going to B gets closer to A again it won't re-target to A (prevents ping-ponging between buildings)
• 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 if you can learn to take advantage of the information Dave provided above, you can force the monsters to go where you want no matter from where they attack.

Ultimate Defence GUIDE--------just dont attack me!

If the defenses fall, the rest of your base will too.

Don't protect housing. I know it is a pain 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.

Towers

CONCENTRATING FIREPOWER

• Lone isolated towers (towers not inside the 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 range of at least 3 other towers, but imagine if you could get 7 or 8 towers all firing at the same targets at the same time.
• Mix tower types up - ex. 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.

TOWER SPACING

• It's nice to have mutual tower support, but bunching them together will make them vulnerable to the catapult. Make sure there is enough spacing to prevent the catapult in annihilating them in 1 shot.

Cannon towers - IMHO, Cannons are your most valuable towers. Lasers are great but they get catapulted right away. Cannons will do the most damage after lasers 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.

Note: Damaged Towers Do Less Damage

A 99% damaged tower will do 25% less damage and a 50% damaged tower will do 12.5% less damage.

Bunkers

by Kevin Troy Yabut & Arko

• When planning how to integrate the bunker in your defense, remember that bunkers are not like towers in that:
  1. They have a limited supply of ammo, if a bunker monster dies it can no longer help defend in a 2nd wave.
  2. They are a hidden weapon since the attacker can't know what monsters are stored until they are released.
  3. They allow flexibility in that you can store them with different monsters for different purposes.
  4. Bunker monsters take time to move from the bunker to their target, but their target in turn also comes closer to them.
  5. The bunker is considered as an anything building once its monsters are dead.
  6. Their range is larger than the sniper tower.

The first 3 distinctions are why IMO, the best use for the bunker is as either a 2nd line of defense to finish off attackers weakened by tower fire or as a delay to wear out an attackers putty rage. The last 3 are why I decided that the best way to use and at the same time protect them is by placing them at the very center of the base where their range can cover the whole base, they can act as decoys for looters, and they won't be so easily baited into wasting their unique defensive capabilities.

BEST BUNKER MONSTERS TO USE

• When choosing bunker monsters, you have to think first if you want to attack or delay, then balance between monster HP (health points), DMG (damage), speed & housing space.
  • Eye-Ra - is a good choice for it's high DMG & splash bonus, but it fails to take advantage of 1 of the best features of the bunker which is to heal all monsters that survive an attack since it explodes on contact. Still a good monster to use if you are concerned with stopping the first waves of a determined attacker.
  • Octo-Ooze, Ichi & Crabatron - are the best monsters to use for delay to wear out the putty rage so defenses can pick attacking monsters off. Octo can delay most kinds of attacks the best while Crab has the HP & DMG to both delay and kill monsters. The Ichi is the happy medium. Use this if you keep getting attacked with the 10M putty rage.
  • DAVE - is the best monster to use when you want balance between attack & defense. It has the DMG to dish out a lot of damage & has enough HP to usually survive an attack and be ready for round 2. Its drawbacks are its high housing requirement, high goo cost for replacement and it's slow speed in getting to the action. Still well worth it.
  • Bandito - is another good balanced monster. It has enough DMG and HP to take care of tower munching monsters (pwns an equal number of Ichis w/ half their number surviving for the 2nd round).
  • Project X - same case as Bandito, has high DMG and HP, but is not worth it due to its high housing cost.
  • Wormzer - they are fast, furious and can catch attacking monsters in a flash. They do well against looting monsters such as pokeys, bolts and brains but fail when faced against tower seeking monsters.
  • Pokey, Bolt, Fink, Fang & Brain - Pokeys have some use as a balanced delaying monster, Fink & Fang as a 2nd line cavalry monster with it's high DMG to housing ratio, but IMO, these monsters are not worth it when used in a defensive role.

Note: You can try mixing & matching the monsters to get the best of both offense & defense.

• Booby traps
  • You have two choices, either booby-traps your towers or booby trap your silos & TH. You can, of course, try both but the 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 hit 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.

• Walls
  • Do not make a huge one-layer wall around your base because monsters will break a hole anywhere the attacker chooses, a simple wall is destroyed within 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.

• 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:

  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.

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

  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)

  • 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.

• Your base will get leveled
  • There is no perfect base. Even if you follow this guide you will still get leveled. But you should make your attacker work hard for it, and if you do it right, they might even lose resources trying to take your base down.

• 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 center of your base with the towers close by. You want to force your attackers to go through your towers before 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!

Advanced Defense

by Jangooon

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.

   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.

Note: Each mine can do 1000 HP damage in an area around 4 wall blocks square with less damage towards the edge of the explosion.

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 that looks to him the weakest, when in fact it is your strongest point.

Tip: 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 snipes protect them, as they have much lower hp.

Disillusionment

by Randy Ex-Mason, Kizoku & Tabb

Fool attackers and ruin their planned attack by cleverly hiding your defenses.

1. Hidden entrances - hide your entrances from view behind buildings or disguising them through clever wall block arrangements. When attackers plan to attack your base, their whole attack could be ruined when monsters get mazed to a different direction then they planned due to an opening they knew nothing about.
2. Hidden towers - This could be used in a couple different ways.

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.

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.

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.

Optimizing tower range - credit to Keo & Michael Hackett

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 can be devastating.

Also, if you 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 attack different targets then what the attacker wanted.

Wall block flinger defense

by Coolcat

Once a building is destroyed, an attacker can fling on top of that buildings ruins as long as there is enough free space for the flinger. This means that some defense concepts (like the NeC) will no longer be as effective since an attacker can choose to destroy buildings in your perimeter and launch monsters closer after he has cleared enough space. Some spread out bases can even have monsters be flung inside the base once a big enough are is cleared with the catapult. An effective defense against this is to use gold blocks as flinger defense. A gold block has enough HP to withstand multiple catapult shots, so place them strategically around your base in areas where you want to prevent monster flings.

Predicting monster pathing

In other words, knowing where monsters will go when they attack. Monsters will always attack the closest building in their targeting criteria and will use the quickest route to that building, 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 your weakest 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.

Monster mazing

Using walls to force monsters into where you want them to go. Not so much an advanced tactic, but there are still many who do not fully utilize wall mazing. One of the most useless things you can use wall blocks for is to fully enclose a base. An attacker can easily predict where his monsters will go, as they will simply chew through the nearest wall to their objective. Walls are best used for mazing monsters into tower fire or booby traps. You can achieve this by creating openings, layering walls and leaving weaknesses in the walls where monsters will gravitate.

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

DECEPTIVE MAZING

by Donald Harvill

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 stonewall, 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.

Monster branching

by Jangooon

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: You can also use other buildings in branching monsters. An example (shown in the 3rd pic above) is by forcing tower monsters to walk exactly in-between the 2 gatherers before they can reach the tower…

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

by 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:

• Monsters first look for the closest buildings (by line of sight)
• They then figure out the path to the 3 closest
• They then take the path that is the shortest.
• While walking they repeat the above 3 steps every now and then (in case the path they take takes them closer to another target)
• New path has to be more than just shorter, it has to be 20% shorter (prevents NEPoH, at least that's the plan)
• If a monster targets building A, then gets closer to building B and in going to B gets closer to A again it won't re-target to A (prevents ping-ponging between buildings)
• 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 if you can learn to take advantage of the information Dave provided above, you can force the monsters to go where you want no matter from where they attack.