YMMV / Boom Beach

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Out of the many tactics in the game, expect to see a lot of Heavy/Zooka, Smoke Screen/Warrior, and Tank Spam or Tank/Medic. For operations, expect most players to uses Smoke Screens to sneak Zookas into the enemy base, stun everything nearby, and do as much damage as possible in a suicide rush.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • All three of the original Prototroops are an extreme pain in the rear to deal with. While it costs gunboat energy to deploy and are not permanent members of armies, they will sweep through your base with ease. The Lazortron has the same standing range as a Tank, leaving it vulnerable to Boom Cannons, but its laser attacks non stop for pretty hefty damage. Plus, the lazor will contiune traveling through buildings until it hits the island border. When placed right, Lazortrons can snipe any building in the game without fear of retaliation and melt them in seconds. Critter Cannons have much higher range than regular tanks, but will shoot critters to distract towers, which can pave the way for normal Tanks to destroy your base. However, the Rain Maker is the absolute worst of the bunch. It has the highest range in the game, leaving it untouchable by Boom Cannons and most defenses unless you plant them right on the beachline. Even then, Rain Makers shoot ridiculously powerful shells in groups of five that can blow apart most buildings in one go. It combines the Lazortron's extreme range and the Critter Cannon's distraction potential for what it's agreed by many players to be the deadliest troop in the game.
  • For regular troops, even the Riflemen tend to get a lot of scorn, specifically in Hammerman Strikes Back and lower Tech Levels of Warships. Riflemen can be spammed much more than other troops, but will typically crumple quickly without backup. However, in Warships and Hammerman events, Riflemen are deployed in such insane numbers (Up to the thousands with Hammerman Attacks) that splash damage turrets are required to succeed, otherwise they will steamroll your base or warship easily. High leveled Mortars can thankfully shut down Riflemen, but with Hammerman, his infantry can have such ridiculously high health buffs that you would need 7 powered up ice statues for your area defenses to even stand a chance (Which is also why PVP players tend to hate "Hammerman Day").
  • In general, all of the Prototype Defenses are extremely dangerous, but a few stand out in the community:
    • The S.I.M.O may just look like a souped-up Sniper Tower at first glance, but it is significantly more deadly. It has the firepower of a Cannon and around the same fire rate as a Sniper Tower, allowing it to rip apart Heavies and Tanks easily. Think you can move higher health troops to defend the ones being battered? Well, the S.I.M.O breaks the rule of turrets targeting the closest troops: instead, it attacks the lowest health troops in range instead. This targeting method tends to ruin any attacks that rely on meat shields (such as the staple Heavy/Zooka stratgy), and to rub more salt in the wound, it is one of the only non-mine defenses that ignore Smoke Screens. These towers make Operation Duplexity much more harder than it is.
    • Shield Generators can't attack, but were clearly designed to shut down HQ rushing. It provides a shield that takes damage for the HQ, based on a percentage of the HQ's max health. Four Mark III's can give what is essentially a 400% health buff to the HQ, requiring attackers to deal with it first before striking the HQ - and since they scale with HQ health, Ice Statues can also boost the shield HP as well. While the shields can be instantly destroyed (or weakened, if there are more than one) by taking out the Generators, any savvy players will place them in spots that are hard to reach, heavily defended, or able to force troops into a disadvantageous position. And Shield Generator spam gets very, very bad on later operations, where there may be dozens of them giving the already HP-boosted Power Core a surplus of several million HP, making the core effectively immortal until you take them down - and the generators are often well defended by hyper-buffed defenses, leaving brute force as the only viable option.
    • Sky Shields cover an area in a shield that completely blocks all Gunboat weaponry that touches it. If well-placed, Sky Shields can completely ruin a strategy that relies on gunboat weaponry, nullifying bombardment or Shock Bombs that would cripple the defenses that are now protected by the shield (which are usually high-priority targets like Boom Cannons, both Launchers, or Prototype Defenses), potentially ruining directions by absorbing Flares, stopping Medkit support from reaching troops, and shutting down most strategies involving Smoke Screens or Critters. Fortunately, the shield can be destroyed via Artillery/Barrage or by downing the Sky Shield itself. Unfortunately, the shield has a lot of health, often requiring a huge energy investment to destroy with brute force, and the Sky Shield is protected by the same buildings it's protecting. More often than not, the best answer to the presence of a Sky Shield is to abandon your strategy and build a new one around the Shield.
• Fountain of Memes: Dr. T has become one as of late 2020, with nearly every commercial involving him becoming a meme in some capacity.
• Game-Breaker: The Remote Hack that sometimes appears in Mega Turtle stages is far more useful than the one Everspark owns by a landslide. The Remote needs far less Gunboat energy, but really made the Gunboat Remote so busted is that it can target the Mega Core, causing all defenses to shoot the core! Mega Turtle stages pack a lot of turrets on their bases, especially Boom Cannons that are only a few tiles away. Do the math.
  • The Air Units in Warships snapped everything about the game in half. The current ones are extremely fast, ignore landmines and pits that would significantly hamper land attacks, and have a decent amount of up and attack. The Heavy Choppas were especially bad, since they spawn an infinite amount of heavies that meat shield for themselves, while already having almost as much hp as a Scorcher. They are practically guaranteed to destroy a base regardless of the defenses, which forces the opponent to run a higher dps, but much more risky setup to win the match. They do require gunboat energy to deploy, but it's much less than Tanks and Scorchers, while being much more powerful units in general.
  • Suprisingly, Artillery and Barrages used to be extremely problematic to deal with. It only takes a couple of shots to destroy an ER than a HQ or Power Core, so players quickly figured out that you can just burst down a couple of rooms without risking troops. In early Tech levels, you could win without deploying a single landing craft!
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In "It's Lonely At the Top," an ad for the game released in 2017, Lieutenant Hammerman sings a song. There is a line at the end about how he yearns to be "the most popular villain on Boom Beach." Considering that Hammerman is the Big Bad of the game, this statement sounds strange on its own. However, it took on a whole new meaning in late 2020 when fellow villain Dr. T became a Fountain of Memes. Now it totally makes sense that Hammerman would feel the need to be more popular!
• Memetic Mutation: All of which comes from Dr. T.
  • "I hope no one looks at my plans while I'm sleeping." ^ExplanationA commercial of Dr. T saying the written line and placing a file on a side table, only for the file to open up and have him poke his head through and tease the player, become moderately popular in late 2020.
  • "I'm so excited about my super weapon that will take over Boom Beach, that I wrote a song about it!" ^ExplanationA commercial where Dr. T sings a song about his Mega Crab while playing an organ. Like the sleeping commercial, it also became popular in late 2020 with many edits where a different song starts playing.
  • "I've decided to give you a clue as to how to defeat me." ^ExplanationYet another Dr. T commercial, this one sees the doctor pulling a Bait-and-Switch by saying he'll give a hint about destroying his bases only to pocket sand the viewer and run off. Most edits either replace this with a flashbang, a gun, or have Dr. T transport the player somewhere using the sand.
  • "I'm an impostor, too!" ^ExplanationIn a commercial, Dr. T reveals his first Mega Crab to be a fake, before revealing he too was an inflatable decoy. The Among Us-related parodies that ensued practically wrote themselves.
• That One Level:
  • Many high-level operations are this. Most are reasonably well-designed and loaded with hundreds of defenses, an illegal amount of Prototypes (with most high level operations having one or two dozen at least), some defenses that aren't even allowed on player bases (such as Barbed Wire and Hammerman's two superweapons), and Ice Statues providing all of said defenses with an obscene damage and defense buff (which ranges from several hundred percent to over 1000%). Basically, everything here hits like a train and can take far more damage than one, meaning that you've got a veritable forest of defenses that are each near immortal and able to instantly kill even troops designed to withstand damage. If you want to take on some of the harder ones, your entire Task Force better be packing good coordination and near-max level troops or you're toast. It comes to an absolute head in the strongest mission, Operation Duplexity - with a FP total of 2160, not only are seven bases, all of them being the absolute strongest Power Bases in the game, but four of those seven violate one of the most fundamental rules of Boom Beach, and have two Power Cores.

---