Apart from the visuals' similarities and differences, the gameplay has the same objectives as in Clash of Clans.
You defend your base with the strategic positioning of your resource and defensive buildings.
You attack enemy bases to loot their resources and use them for upgrading your buildings.
Use of strategic troop collection to benefit certain bases.
But various rules will differ from each other as to how you will be rewarded after an attack and after defence in the raid.
While attacking in COC, each building destroyed adds up to the percentage of the total base destroyed out of 100 per cent. At a certain percentage, out of three stars, a star will be obtained. One star is enough for the attacker to win although you are rewarded fewer trophies. The more the stars, the more number of trophies, however, you can surely earn one star by destroying the main building i.e the Town Hall. There are possibilities where you can destroy defensive buildings and the town hall and yet not be able to loot gold and elixir, but get rewarded with trophies and a small amount of loot for winning a star or two.
But in Boom Beach, things get twisted. To win and get all the loot, you have to somehow devise strategies that can help your troops reach the main building i.e Headquarters (HQ) and destroy it to win. In case all your troops are capable of destroying 3/4th of the base, it is still counted as a loss. Even a 95% isn’t considered a victory, but a 95% - two stars is a win in COC. There are crazy strategies applied when trying to reach the troops towards the headquarters without having to get in range of any defensive buildings. This is the biggest reason which makes Boom Beach way more challenging than Clash of Clans.
For making situations a bit easy, COC has various spells that add to the support of the troops. Spells like rage, heal, freeze, poison, lightning, jump and more spells allow the troops to get over buildings that pose a greater threat. For instance, spells like lightning, earthquake, and poison deal area damage to buildings and defence troops that are threats to your attacking troops. Heal spell heals troops over an area, freeze spell immobilizes defensive buildings and troops.
In BB, we have abilities that can be deployed to destroy defensive buildings that pose a bigger threat. You can throw in some artillery, barrage artillery, flare, smoke grenades, shock bombs and med-kit. All of this requires gunboat energy which will lob at the correct location tapped by the player. Gunboat energy can be earned by destroying any enemy’s buildings during an attack. This restricts you to be judicial with your abilities and decisions to continue the attack. For instance, you can use artillery and barrage to demolish any threat, flares are used to direct your troops towards a target or a safe spot (an advantage of Boom Beach as Clash of Clans does not have such a feature or spell), and smoke grenades are used to hide troops from any defence building’s range, shock bombs are used to temporarily stun defences from attacking the troops raiding and med-kits are used just like the heal spell to heal troops over an area. Strategies can vary with the use of these abilities. Eg. Players can make use of all their gunboat energy to obliterate the most powerful building(s) that can interrupt your strategy.
Some other differences between the two games are;
COC has walls to protect buildings, while BB does not make use of any wall.
Once you deploy your troops on the battlefield, whether dead or alive in Clash of Clans, those troops are wasted and constantly you have to train more troops. On the contrary, in Boom Beach, you can reuse troops that are alive till you win or lose.
In COC, you can deploy your troops one by one anywhere outside the highlighted area, where there are no buildings on the plain base while in BB, you deploy a group of troops in succession on the island’s shore and can call for a retreat towards the carriers that carry the group of troops if you are not sure about winning and would want to reuse troops for the next raid with a better strategy. This makes it possible for you to attack at least three times within the first 10 minutes which is not very possible in COC as all your troops get wasted.
Although in COC we have five builders who can build and upgrade separately, as time flies by, upgrading in higher base levels take a lot of time, with some buildings that will take a maximum of five or more days. Some also exceed ten days. In BB, we have one upgrade of a building that takes comparatively less time but all of your engineers working on just one project, no two upgrades simultaneously. You can buy with cash and upgrade two buildings simultaneously. You can understand the balance of builders in both games. While one has five builders who can simultaneously upgrade/build five yet they take a lot of time in the process, the other can perform one build/upgrade in very little time.
Four heroes in both games supposedly look slightly large. Each of the heroes is well balanced. You can deploy all four heroes in a raid and defence in COC, while on the other hand, you can deploy just one hero for a raid in BB with no option of using them for defence. But each hero in BB has different super attacks that you can select and use strategically thereby adding up variances in strategies. This is another reason that makes BB even way more difficult and makes COC look easier.
Most of these points make Boom beach more realistic than Clash of Clans. However, due to the various reasons that make it a tough nut to crack while playing Boom Beach, it seems it has become less attractive to a major chunk of the audience. Moreover, Boom Beach pressurizes players to make complex strategies than Clash of Clans with the fear in the attackers’ minds of a complete failure in the attack, at the same time assures you that you only lose medals (trophies) when you lose your defence and win medals only when you win in raids unlike Clash of Clans where you win or lose in a raid and a defence.
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