Easter Event

The Easter Event has started in River Crossing and will run for the next 10 days. It follows the standard holiday event formula.

There are a few things worth mentioning for this event. Firstly, the reward tiers have been changed up a bit. The troop rewards are significantly worse than usual - specials and U grabs. On the other hand, the individual rewards are better than usual. If you can get under 2500, you'll get at least a super and legendary grabs, and tiers under 800 can net you supers and ultras.

I would bet more people than usual will be spending during this event, thanks to these rewards and the holiday specials that PennyPop is running this first day of the event. You may find it a little harder to get into the tier you expect from previous events.

The other interesting thing about this event are the boss mechanics. The changes to the lieutenant fight that we first saw in "I, Joebot" continue to be in effect. The Architect is also present, offering "prestige" raids to troops that can complete 5 extreme boss fights.

The boss himself, Farmer Brownhare, doesn't do any direct attacks. Instead, he inflicts a very strong poison - dealing 20k damage per turn on hard difficulty, and 30k per turn on extreme. You'll need to carefully manage your hearts and heals to get through the full timer.

Head over to River Crossing and start beating on bunnies and marshmallows. Good luck!

PvP Event, With a Twist

The PvP Event has started again. See the event summary post if you don't know the basics. There are two things that are a little different this time around.

Firstly, the daily event quests that we first saw in I, Joebot are back, tuned for this event. There's also a meta-quest that requires you to complete all the daily event quests. Should you succeed, you'll get the chance to try an Elite Spin - the new gamble that can (theoretically) net you a legendary monster. Once again, the first day's events were pretty easy. We'll see how they ramp up in difficulty, since this is only a 5 day event.

Secondly, the Architect has crashed the PvP party and is hanging around in the PvP fort. When your troop defeats the boss a certain number of times, you'll get the opportunity to battle the Architect's monster as a special boss. This guy hits very hard, but if you defeat him you have a chance to get elemental and rarity crystals to use in second evolution.

This is a really nice addition, allowing people the chance to get some crystals without the (fairly hardcore) requirement of running Lost Temple over and over. I doubt the Architect will show his face in every event, but hopefully he'll show up to dole out crystals every now and then.

I, Joebot

It's not a holiday (unless you count Pi Day), but brand new holiday-style event called "I, Joebot" has started in Winter Peak. The zone has been redecorated as a robot laboratory, and it's swarming with rock and fire monsters.

Just like any other holiday event, you're collecting event specials to donate to the boss so you can raid. The specials for this event are rock monsters called "Spybots".

Spybot

There's also the standard trader NPC - Mayaspace this time - who will sell you trophies, energy, specials, event rares, and event costumes for your event tokens.

Cool New Event Mechanics!

Twitterbell

The lieutenant this time around is a robot named Twitterbell, but she works a little differently from the lieutenant fights in previous events. Firstly, when you engage her, you have to pick a difficulty level. Then, you're faced with a cave battle, including multiple waves of robots. For the final wave you'll face Twitterbell herself. She always rewards a single Spybot and five event tokens. Additionally, she awards some amount of trophies, which varies based on the difficulty you chose.

Joebot

The other big change with this event is the introduction of event quests. These are quests that you complete by participating in the event. These quests reset daily, and it looks like there may be different variations each day. The ones for today are:

• Twitterbell Takedown - Defeat Twitterbell 1 time. (Missed the reward text).
• Raid Boss Takedown - Defeat the raid boss 1 time. Rewards 50 trophies.
• Mortimer Takedown - Defeat Mortimer 1 time. Rewards one super candy special.
• Raid Boss Donation - Donate 1 Spybot to Joebot. Rewards 5 event tokens.
• Daily Event Completion (4 parts) - Complete all of today's event quests. Rewards 1 Freezoid piece.
• Event All-Star (50 parts) - Complete all of the event quests. Rewards 1 epic candy special.

This is a pretty cool addition, adding some extra spice to the standard "grind monsters, fight lieutenant, fight boss" routine.

This is a 10 day event, so you have until March 23 or 24th (depending on your time zone) to kick some robot butt.

PvP Event Starts Today!

The PvP event is back.

You can read the overview of this event here. It looks like they've kept some of the new mechanics, including the "double down" system. However, rifts have gone away, and the boss monster is back - so save up your Valor Tokens and raid against the Warrior King of Desolation. Also, like any event boss, you can expect him to have a chance to enrage halfway through the event for double trophies.

Time for Troop Wars!

Troop wars starts today. If you don't know what you're doing, see the event summary here.

Valentine's Event

Valentines Day has come and gone, and I've been a bit remiss in my duties!

The Valentine's event started about a week ago, and thanks real world responsibilities, I wasn't able to get a detailed post up in time. However, all of the events that happen in River Crossing follow the same system, just with slightly different characters. So, my next post will cover River Crossing events in general. This will hopefully serve as a guide for all the holiday events going forward (at least until Battle Camp gets some new zones!)

Having covered the recurring events (Towers, PvP, Troop Wars) and the holiday events, I'll have time to post more about strategy, evolution, and lots of other fun topics. Stay tuned!

Player vs. Player Event Starts Today

The PvP event started today, and will run until Tuesday. As noted in the big patch notes earlier this week, the format of this event has changed a bit. I'll post a guide tonight or tomorrow.

Huge New Update!

Winter is over in Battle Camp, and the snow, lights and candy canes have been replaced with hearts and arrows in preparation for the Valentines Day event. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Today's update introduced a host of new features and improvements that PennyPop has been hinting at for quite a while on their Facebook page.

• The Lost Temple area is finally open, after months of taunting us on the map. Lost temple isn't an ordinary area: there are no common monsters to fight and capture, and the standard quest chain is missing. Instead, the Lost Temple gives us the ultimate showdown with The Architect, the villain that all the previous quests have been leading to. Troops can tackle a series of raid battles to earn boosts, new supers, and ingredients for...
• 2nd Evolution! Many monsters can now be evolved a second time by fusing 2 of their evolved versions along with new special ingredients from Lost Temple raids. Right now, only some monsters have 2nd evolution forms, but supposedly there will be more added in future updates.
• Passive Leveling has been added, changing the way that passive abilities work. Stars no longer denote the "quality tier" of a passive ability. Instead, all of these abilities have had their power tweaked, and all of them can be leveled to increase the number of stars, and the percentage of benefits the ability offers. To level a passive ability, simply feed a monster with the same passive.
• Additional changes. Mystery eggs let you spam your Facebook friends even more, giving them a random monster once per day. Monster happiness is a new stat that makes your monsters more powerful for a few hours after they've been fed. It also temporarily increases the amount of experience they gain from feeding.

The update notes also offered a little info on upcoming events. 

• The PvP event, which will start Jan. 23, is going to work differently. Players will now win more trophies for stringing together victories in the arena, and valor medals can now be used to boost the amount of trophies players win for their matches. It's not clear yet if there will still be a boss raid mechanic.
• A Chinese New Year event will be happening (presumably around Friday, Jan. 31). It's described as a "special Tower Event". Does that mean a variation on the standard Celestial Towers event, or something entirely new? I guess we'll have to wait and see.
• A Valentines Day event is also in our future. It involves breaking Cdr. Cupid's arrows, if that means anything to you.

As you can see, that's a whole lot of stuff. Expect to see posts on each of the major improvements over the next week or so, as I dig into them. And, of course, I'll have detailed explanations and strategies for the events as they roll out.

Troop Wars Again

Only two days after the Towers event ended, we're doing a weekend of Troop Wars. I don't think I'm the only one who would like a few more days between events so we can level and evolve our pets.

If you haven't done Troop Wars before, see my summary to learn how it works.

Celestial Towers Event has Started!

The Celestial Towers event started this evening and will go through Monday. I'll post an overview shortly.

Interesting to note, this time around Freezaur gets 150% bonus damage against the boss, and it's evolved form, Freezerex, gets 200% bonus damage. This is the reward super for the first raid, so many relatively new players will be able to get lots of damage in.

EDIT: According to the Battle Camp Facebook page, "Inkwell, Lochnessy, Freezaur, and Wotter all do 150% bonus damage against the Warden unevolved, and 200% evolved!"

Also interesting is that almost all of the instant trophy rewards are either free energy or event grabs. Unfortunately, even if you get enough trophies to get an event grab, it's probably not worth leveling an event monster in the middle of the event, when you could be spending that energy on the event itself (unless you're already sitting on some leveled specials you can feed it).

Troop Wars has Started!

Welcome to the first Battle Camp event of 2014. It started late in the day and people couldn't get into the first battle until it was half-over. Hopefully everything will go smoothly from here on out.

Tomorrow I'll post an overview of this event.