Defenseless Base Journal Entry - Day 1
I decided to build a new defenseless base as an experiment. (My first was a fail; I accidentally upgraded the cannon to L2.) This will be a grounds up, no $$$ invested, game; I won’t be using my gems until I have at least 4 builders. As such, I expect it to take a LONG time to get anywhere. Additionally, my play style for this game will be very casual; I’m running it on BlueStacks for now, so I’ll pretty much only be playing when I am at my desk. I may include it in clan wars just to help lower overall clan war weight, but it won’t become very useful for a few months. Since this will be a defenseless base and therefore an abbreviated form of the full-fledge game, I’ll largely be maxing each level as I move up the line. There will be times that I either start a TH upgrade before everything is maxed, or even postpone some upgrades along the way, but it will be a mostly maxing game nonetheless.
7/13/2016 - Day 1; created new account a bit before noon (11:50) and went through the tutorial. Upon completion, started at TH2 and began the process of upgrading the gold mines and elixir collectors first. Ran these back to back until I ran out of resources (L3); after another 15 minutes or so, had just enough to upgrade storages to L2 so started those. L3 collectors pull down 600 units per hour and can hold 2.5 hours of production (1500 units). Next upgrade of resource collectors was 1400 units each, so I waited until there was enough and hit one each (gold mine and elixir collector), then did the next two as soon as enough resources had been generated (roughly 3pm). It took about the same amount of time to generate the resources, but since I only have two builders it’s important to maximize their time. This is also why I’ve focused on resource generating structures first; I’m not using gems, so getting everything upgraded through TH3 will be strictly based on resources collected by the gold mines/elixir collectors for the first few days of the game.
Once the resource collectors completed, I moved on to the second storage upgrade. I almost generated enough with just the one gold mine and elixir collector to upgrade the storages, but I needed a little more time than the 1 hour upgrade to gather the 1500 resource units for each storage, so it was 4:10 before I could start those upgrading.
I next turned my attention to the barracks. The barracks represent the most expensive and longest running upgrades of TH2 at 8500 elixir and 6.25 hours. The level 4 elixir collector only generates 800/hr; this means it would run late into the evening before I would able to collect enough elixir to finish the barracks upgrade. By 5:30 when the storages finished, I had enough resource to start the next upgrade on both barracks (1000 units each), *BUT* after that things slowed way down; the elixir collectors were too slow to generate what I needed to upgrade each level (2500 and 5000 units to L3 and L4, respectively). I worked out the numbers to determine the most efficient oath forward...
TH2 Max:
Gold Mines - L4 (2400E X 2)
Elixir Collectors - L4 (2400G X 2)
Gold Storage - L3 (2250E)
Elixir Storage - L3 (2250G)
Barracks - L4 (8500E X 2)
Army Camp - L2 (2500E)
TH3 Upgrade - 4000G
Total G/E Needed for Upgrades: 26,550E / 11050G
To fill the time, I went ahead and upgraded the TH along with the first of the L3 barracks upgrades. Two hours later, when it finished, I again had enough elixir to start a barracks upgrade so I did so. An hour after that, the TH finished, so I dropped the new collectors, army camp, storages, and barracks; ran the collectors through their first few upgrades…. The gold mines were generating plenty of gold in the interim so it made sense to upgrade in a different order while I was waiting for the elixir collectors to catch up and just push the final barracks upgrade off to tomorrow, when my collectors will be full and I have enough elixir to knock them out quickly.
Day 2 will follow a similar upgrade path; focusing first on resource collectors and storages, followed by barracks and army camps. With only two builders and relying on resource collectors for the gold and elixir to complete upgrades, TH3 will likely take two days to complete.
How NOT to rush to TH11…and how to recover….
I posted this in another thread and as I re-read it, it occurred to me that this should be in my rushing journal as well.
So...I took a brand new TH7 game and gemmed it up to TH11 shortly after the update came out. It was one of my umpteen games, so not my main and therefore just something to play around with. My intentions were to simply use it as a feeder base for the other games in the clan.
Raiding - Impossible. I made entirely too big of a jump. Again - I expected this though, and it only lasted until I got my farming troops up to snuff (read on).
Defending - Surprisingly...not a problem. The base I have up now is the same one I've run for 6 months or more and it has only been three starred ONCE in all that time. It has fended of 40/40 hero combinations and maxed troops on a regular basis. Now that the defenses are stronger, it typically gets one starred, occasionally two starred, and only on one side of the base. It defended all the way up to Masters I, just shy of Champs III, before I dropped it down to Silver a few weeks back to see if there were any better bases to raid in the lower leagues (there weren't). It largely defended back up to where it sits today in Masters III.
War - Nah...I took it out of the war rotation the moment I upgraded it to TH11. I've had it in a couple of wars since I got things a bit more juiced up and it's done fine; still hasn't been three starred.
(Since the December update, the regular multiplayer game has become much more like clan wars...just without the organized clans. The villages you face have the TH inside the walls and, although the storages are not usually on the outer defensive ring like they are in a war base, the base functions very much like the typical war base. As such, you get to play with stronger army compositions. Between this and the fact that the clan war matchmaking algorithm is still a mess, I stopped warring altogether for months. This gave me lots of time to spend building up my games, TH6 thru TH11. I recently started warring again with my TH7 games (10v10) and will be launching a full 20v20 war in the next couple of weeks that will run the full gamut of TH levels. This keeps me happy.)
Right now, the base has a minimum of max-TH8 defenses with level 6 walls (pinks). I got it there by regularly using shields and boosting my resource collectors a LOT. The reason this worked is simple - max collectors turn out a lot of resources when you're upgrading lower level structures that are far less expensive than the high level stuff. I have 7 level 12 elixir collectors and 7 level 12 gold mines chugging away; when boosted, that's 49K units of resource per hour. If I throw up 14 days of shields, I'll pull in just over 16M units of each. You can upgrade a LOT of stuff, very quickly, doing that.
Of course, I'm not one to spend my hard earned cash for long, even the $25/month it takes to run 14 days of shielded, boosted, resource collectors. I made it a priority to get my farming troops maxed out and now I can raid as well. I have level 7 barbarians, archers, giants, goblins, wallbreakers; level 6 wizards; and level 4 healers. This allows all manner of barch, gibarch, giwiz, giant-healer, goblin knife (which I still haven't gotten the hang of), and other farming strategies. I also have level 5 dragons and started working on my PEKKA upgrades this week.
Although the base was originally designed to be a feeder and just for fun, I've started upgrading it more regularly with an eye toward eventually maxing TH11. My main game, currently at TH10, will soon be making the jump to TH11 as well. That one is much further along on most defenses as I maxed everything at TH9 but walls and heroes. As soon as the heroes are 20/20, all the walls legos, and all the new TH10 items upgraded to max TH9 levels, I'll be jumping to TH11 on that one as well.
This is one of the reasons we say that rushing is a more efficient path to the maxed end-game. As always, it really depends on the skill of the player and the goals he/she sets. On this game, I had no intentions of using it in war - I was of a mind to play Sim City, Clash style. It was for fun, filling CCs, and something to tinker with alongside my other games. I'm a fairly skilled player; I have entirely too many hours in on CoC. As always...YMMV. it's important to evaluate your game to determine if the playing strategy fits your requirements.
One of the things I want to be clear on in this post - I give an example of how NOT to rush strategically (brand new TH7 to TH11 was insane, but still fun) and how to recover, strategically, from a bad rush (i.e., premie). As everyone knows - I'm a diehard strategic rusher and do this all the time on my games, so I’m not trying to discourage anyone from rushing. I'll be rushing my TH10 main game to TH11 in the next month; this will be done smartly, once things meet TH9 max levels, heroes are 20/20, walls are legos, and farming troops are upgraded. My premie TH11 is almost to a reasonable, rushing start-point as I am now working on TH9 upgrades to defensive structures and key offenses are upgraded. (In other words...it's recovered from its premie rush and is decent shape now.) In a lot of ways, this supports the benefits of strategic rushing; even though many things are a level lower than where I’d like to start TH11, the simple fact is that the game is WELL on its way, very defensible, and I have access to much higher troop levels in less than a year than I would have had in 2-3 years’ time.
The recovery part should be of particular interest to those who have rushed in a non-strategic fashion. If you invest the time, a little money, and strategically adjust the defenses and offenses...you can quickly recover to a very playable position. The key is to get you offenses up to snuff so you can raid. This game is about offense; defense is secondary at best. You're going to get raided - a lot - so just factor that into your plan. With strong offenses, you can easily build things up and secure the defensive game. In my case, I focused on upgrading farming troops and getting all defenses on the board then getting them all to max TH7 levels. I next upgraded the most feared of the defenses (x-bows, infernos, teslas, eagle artillery) to stave off the faint hearted while challenging the strong. I kept very little resources in my base; since I had so many low level structures to upgrade, it just wasn't a problem to keep builders and lab going around the clock. Even when I *DID* have a decent offer, the sheer volume of the base prevented most players from getting more than half of what I offered, so my resource collectors were actually able to produce more than I lost in any given, unshielded day.
This same, general strategy can be applied to any premie game - and it will work. I've done it with premie TH7 and premie TH9 games to test it out. CoC isn't very complicated; the way players play and the game works is fun to work out and lets you really progress fast.
As always -- FWIW and YMMV. Enjoy the game however you want. I hope some of these posts help others who are working on their rushing game get to the end with a "Wahoo!". :cool:
Here's my current base, from a scout view.
http://i.imgur.com/HcY7Ik9.jpg
