I was able to experience one of the new events in Boom Beach recently, and I must say it really is a game-changer for me. Some background first.

Prior to this update, upgrading defensive buildings, especially over offensive options, wasn’t a great move. The general strategy for the game was to let your map build up by not doing much of anything, and then on the two days of the week that Dr. Terror landed, boost your reward statue(s), clear as much of your map as needed, start a big expensive upgrade, and wait for the cycle to repeat. If you get attacked by other players you aren’t holding a lot of resources so it doesn’t matter, which meant your defensive levels didn’t matter.

The above is no longer the case, for two reasons.

The first and major is that now each day brings a different event, and each event isn’t worth as much as the old Dr. Terror, countering the ‘let stuff build up’ inactivity phase and then resource rush. This means that it is much harder to horde a huge amount of resources, and also that your defenses are more important to deter other players since you will be building them up and leaving yourself open to attack.

The other factor is that one of the new events is an NPC attack on your base, which is really, really fun. You are attacked by a large swarm of enemies, far larger than what a player could bring, but the NPC force doesn’t have a gunboat or use energy, which is a large change compared to defending against another player. Designing a base to counter this NPC attack is a lot like playing tower defense, which I’m a huge fan of in general.

Watching and countering this attack really lets you see the value in upgrading defenses, including mines, and so serves as great motivation to do so. Defenses such as flame throwers, which against most players aren’t very helpful, suddenly become critical, which is nice from a “make everything useful” standpoint. Also being defeated by this NPC attack also pushes you towards defensive upgrades and building a better base, which again fills in a previous gap in the BB gameplay formula.

This has however exposed one big flaw with Boom Beach; you currently can’t go into a base edit mode like you can in CoC, and you also can’t save multiple layouts and switch between them easily. This needs to be added shortly, as right now redesigning your entire base in BB is rather frustrating.