Life Under The New Loot System, Day 38: Hard Times
The New Loot System and all it's controversy sprang up right around I became a Town Hall 9, so I have no prior experience to compare it to. For me there was no upset to Town Hall 9 life, this "New Loot System" IS TH9 life.
I've had to run up to Gold 2 since no Town Hall 7 is worth raiding. (This morning I was bumped up to Gold 1 as others run screaming from the Crystal League.) I've got 220 troops, two x-bows (level 1 and 2), and my 4th wizard tower recently joined the others at level 6. My Dark drills are levels 4 and 5, and my research lab is ready to go--except I can't fund the good stuff so I have them working on the Level 4 Healer.
I find myself in a difficult predicament. Supercell reasons that if the new cap is higher, I can recover the extra damage because my opponents also have higher loot caps. Even though I was patient with their system I often find myself face-first in the flaw: Most towns don't have gold, and the ones that do are too strong.
Town Hall 9 is hilariously lopsided in resource needs, requiring not even 100 million elixir to buy all upgrades while demanding over a billion gold in walls alone. This means most Town Hall 9 villages you find will have scant amounts of gold but enough elixir to fund military upgrades in a reasonable amount of time--under 4 million anyway, more on that later.
It's later. There's no point in finding a town with both 350k+ gold and elixir. Such bases are TH10 with two, 5-way inferno towers and 3 level 3 x-bows. So I have to find bases with 250K+ elixir, or better. I can find a few but seldom do they have over 100K gold available. Three raids is all I have time for if I'm lucky. Spell and troop costs, not to mention failing at a raid (♥♥♥♥ING GIANT BOMBS) can knock the per-raid effort to 100k elixir. So three raids and an hour of work and I've got...I don't know, 350,000 elixir and 350,000 gold extra. Then I turn the game off and go to work.
Then I lose EVERYTHING because of the new loot cap. The Army Camps were 2,250,000 each, so even a raid and 12-hour shield wouldn't wipe out the whole day's progress. But once you start going for Level-2 x-bows or Level 6 Dark Drills, that's it. The day's progress is gone. The past two days I've been trying to get from 2 million elixir to 4 million elixir. Nope, wipeout on both days. Now my poor builder is out of work because I can't fund his project.
I was trying to raise up to 2.5 million for my Archer Tower. It'll be level 9 in 16 hours, I'd like to send it to 10. Even two days of raiding wouldn't get me the 500,000 more I needed, because every step forward is wiped out by some TH10 with Level 5 Hog Riders. Under the old system I'd be 60% of the way to my goal because with a 200k cap I'd be keeping an extra 150,000 on each wipeout.
Even upgrading to Level 4 hogs would help, but without a second level 5 drill I probably can't produce fast enough to account for raiders. I'm going to need lots of shields, which means I won't actually be playing the game because a stronger player said so. I could dump my gold into walls, but that's not as much fun.
As a Town Hall 8 I got to build my village on my terms. I bought the most expensive stuff first because I was able to earn more than they could take. I kept four builders busy until there was nothing but walls to upgrade. (Now I have a full set of 225 level-8 walls--which Hogs just jump right over, so there's 112.5 million gold well-spent.) Now I feel like every build decision I make is my ONLY recourse. I don't want to buy the cheapest upgrades ASAP, I HAVE to or else some TH10 is going to take my gold because that's 1/12 of a Level-11 wall purchase. Now, each time a day's progress is wiped out by a single player in two minutes, I have to wonder if the old system really was better.
