Article by : snickledumper
Before describing the problem of boom beach, lets examine how a good game is structured:
In Clash of Clans, the more you farm/attack other players, the more gold you are rewarded with. If you max out your defense buildings prior to upgrading your town hall, you are rewarded with less people attacking your base and less loot stolen from you. Patience and hard work = more resources and success. If however, you rush your town hall upgrade in COC, you place yourself in a position where you are defenseless and find it hard to farm resources. You are matched with other players whose bases have similar town halls as you, but with tougher defense buildings that are hard to penetrate. Also, if you don't play COC often and allow your mines and pumps to accumulate with resources, you are punished because the amount of lootable resources from your base, increases. Mines and pumps are usually easier to pillage because they are typically on the outskirts of your base. This is all because of two things:
1)you are matched by town hall level and
2)you can control your trophy count by either winning or losing battles, in order to optimize your farming returns.
Now lets examine the problematic Boom Beach:
Unlike clash of clans, the evil (eeeviiil) player matching system works strictly by victory points. You can thus be matched to players with significantly higher headquarters because their victory points match yours.
So if you are a busy diligent player, frequently attacking, keeping your map clean of both Hammerman enemy bases and other player bases, collecting resources at a feverish pace, and maxing out your defense buildings before upgrading the headquarters,etc etc... you will notice that your victory points will skyrocket. And as they go up, you will be matched with more difficult players. The Players attacking you will be tougher with higher headquarter levels, and the players that pop up on your map will be tougher as well.
And so around headquarter level 9 or 10, you will hit a wall. You will find that it becomes very difficult to defeat enemy bases. At some point you will be unable to defeat them. And whats even more insidious is that the enemy players will more easily take over your resource bases and the resource bases that pop up on your map will be very difficult to take over.
So you try to find ways to lower your victory points. You can't lower victory points by loosing battles that you initiate. Victory points don't go down when you loose a battle that you started. EEEVVIIIIL.
Some suggest to place your headquarters at the beachhead, undefended, so that its easily taken by other players and will be an attractive target. You may think that overnight your victory points will plummet. But this doesn't happen. Other players won't attack you just for no reason because they don't want to raise their victory points either. You will have to leave lots of resources for them to steal from you, in order to make them want to attack you. And that is a very painful price to pay just to lower your victory points.
Your only option left is to not attack (the lazy strategy). Just sit there and wait for others to attack you. Also, never attack the Hammerman bases because they give very little loot but still raise you two victory points. And when your trophy count slowly drops over days and days, you will start to be matched to players with lower victory points. And players with lower victory points usually have lower level headquarters, and thus easier defenses. And you should then only attack players with lots of loot, to maximize your loot-to-victory point ratio. You will receive resources from your resource bases, while you wait. That is currently my main source of resources. I only attack about twice a day. And that sucks. Because I want to play more. Also attacking tough opponents is risky because you will lose lots of gold on troops if they all die.
The second part to this strategy is to not upgrade defense structures. You first upgrade the headquarters. You rush the headquarters. In Boom Beach, there is absolutely no penalty for rushing the upgrades of your headquarters because you are not matched to other players based on the headquarters level. The advantage of rushing headquarters upgrades is you get access to more defense buildings and more landing crafts and more troop types, etc.
After rushing the headquarters upgrades, you upgrade your landing crafts, troops, and gunboat. You also upgrade your sawmill, quarry, iron mine, armory, radar and sculptor. You DO NOT upgrade your defense structures. Its mostly a waste of resources because its much better to upgrade the headquarters and then to just plop down additional powerful defense structures than to upgrade existing ones. And this just goes so much against my grain. It just feels so wrong. Whats the point of even having the ability to upgrade these defense structures if its pretty much useless to do so.
After using this two-part strategy (rushing headquarters upgrades and upgrading only offensive items and resource structures) I started to see a slight improvement in performance. But I am still struggling. I want to clear my map of hammerman enemies and I want to upgrade my defense structures because it just feels right to do so. But that would just hit me against the victory point wall again. This game is forcing me to play LESS.
So I ask supercell to change their player matching system from matching victory points, to match players by their headquarters level and overall base strength.
Thank you for reading my lengthy rant
Before describing the problem of boom beach, lets examine how a good game is structured:
In Clash of Clans, the more you farm/attack other players, the more gold you are rewarded with. If you max out your defense buildings prior to upgrading your town hall, you are rewarded with less people attacking your base and less loot stolen from you. Patience and hard work = more resources and success. If however, you rush your town hall upgrade in COC, you place yourself in a position where you are defenseless and find it hard to farm resources. You are matched with other players whose bases have similar town halls as you, but with tougher defense buildings that are hard to penetrate. Also, if you don't play COC often and allow your mines and pumps to accumulate with resources, you are punished because the amount of lootable resources from your base, increases. Mines and pumps are usually easier to pillage because they are typically on the outskirts of your base. This is all because of two things:
1)you are matched by town hall level and
2)you can control your trophy count by either winning or losing battles, in order to optimize your farming returns.
Now lets examine the problematic Boom Beach:
Unlike clash of clans, the evil (eeeviiil) player matching system works strictly by victory points. You can thus be matched to players with significantly higher headquarters because their victory points match yours.
So if you are a busy diligent player, frequently attacking, keeping your map clean of both Hammerman enemy bases and other player bases, collecting resources at a feverish pace, and maxing out your defense buildings before upgrading the headquarters,etc etc... you will notice that your victory points will skyrocket. And as they go up, you will be matched with more difficult players. The Players attacking you will be tougher with higher headquarter levels, and the players that pop up on your map will be tougher as well.
And so around headquarter level 9 or 10, you will hit a wall. You will find that it becomes very difficult to defeat enemy bases. At some point you will be unable to defeat them. And whats even more insidious is that the enemy players will more easily take over your resource bases and the resource bases that pop up on your map will be very difficult to take over.
So you try to find ways to lower your victory points. You can't lower victory points by loosing battles that you initiate. Victory points don't go down when you loose a battle that you started. EEEVVIIIIL.
Some suggest to place your headquarters at the beachhead, undefended, so that its easily taken by other players and will be an attractive target. You may think that overnight your victory points will plummet. But this doesn't happen. Other players won't attack you just for no reason because they don't want to raise their victory points either. You will have to leave lots of resources for them to steal from you, in order to make them want to attack you. And that is a very painful price to pay just to lower your victory points.
Your only option left is to not attack (the lazy strategy). Just sit there and wait for others to attack you. Also, never attack the Hammerman bases because they give very little loot but still raise you two victory points. And when your trophy count slowly drops over days and days, you will start to be matched to players with lower victory points. And players with lower victory points usually have lower level headquarters, and thus easier defenses. And you should then only attack players with lots of loot, to maximize your loot-to-victory point ratio. You will receive resources from your resource bases, while you wait. That is currently my main source of resources. I only attack about twice a day. And that sucks. Because I want to play more. Also attacking tough opponents is risky because you will lose lots of gold on troops if they all die.
The second part to this strategy is to not upgrade defense structures. You first upgrade the headquarters. You rush the headquarters. In Boom Beach, there is absolutely no penalty for rushing the upgrades of your headquarters because you are not matched to other players based on the headquarters level. The advantage of rushing headquarters upgrades is you get access to more defense buildings and more landing crafts and more troop types, etc.
After rushing the headquarters upgrades, you upgrade your landing crafts, troops, and gunboat. You also upgrade your sawmill, quarry, iron mine, armory, radar and sculptor. You DO NOT upgrade your defense structures. Its mostly a waste of resources because its much better to upgrade the headquarters and then to just plop down additional powerful defense structures than to upgrade existing ones. And this just goes so much against my grain. It just feels so wrong. Whats the point of even having the ability to upgrade these defense structures if its pretty much useless to do so.
After using this two-part strategy (rushing headquarters upgrades and upgrading only offensive items and resource structures) I started to see a slight improvement in performance. But I am still struggling. I want to clear my map of hammerman enemies and I want to upgrade my defense structures because it just feels right to do so. But that would just hit me against the victory point wall again. This game is forcing me to play LESS.
So I ask supercell to change their player matching system from matching victory points, to match players by their headquarters level and overall base strength.
Thank you for reading my lengthy rant