A Guide to Growing Fast in Clash of Clans

It has been five months, a few updates, and thousands of raids since I wrote the original “Intermediates Guide to Growing Fast.” I thought I would take a stab at revising it. The premise remains the same: I see lots of players growing very slowly in CoC – this guide is aimed at correcting that. I am expanding the scope to go through TH9 as well. It may be applicable for five as well, but I have not gone and started the game fresh to test it. I welcome input here or in the clan Burning Soul.

Growing fast really just comes down to a few simple rules:

1. Keep as many builders as possible busy all the time.
2. Keep your laboratory busy most of the time.
3. Be smart about what you build and when you build it.
4. Raid efficiently so that you can “fund” your activities.
5. Follow some simple rules and copy others when laying out your town.
6. Fight wars, trophy push, smash people with hogs, etc. to have fun, but don’t forget #4 since it is what will “pay the bills.”

Now with perhaps a little more detail as to make this useful.

1. Keep as many builders as possible busy all the time.
In CoC, the most constrained resource is time. This is particularly true of builders and laboratories. You can play all day, collect millions in gold and elixir, but unless you part with gems, you cannot speed up builders or the laboratory. Another way to think about it is that every minute your builder is not building is another minute that achieving your ultimate goal moves out. Minutes may not count that much, but frequently hours and days pass with a builder sitting idle. The busier you keep your builders and the more builders you have, the faster you will reach your goals. Since having more builders is so helpful, hoard your gems until you have four or five (the more active you are, the more important five will be). You may find it is “impossible” to get enough resources to keep the builders running, but before you assume that is the case, it is “safer” to assume that if you paid attention to the upcoming rules 3 and 4, you will have enough.

2. Keep your laboratory busy most of the time.
Like your builders, you can never make up time lost when your laboratory is idle. As such, you need to keep it busy; however, you don’t want to do so at the expense of a higher goal. For example, don’t research something you are not going to use simply because you are 50K elixir short of researching something you really want. Additionally, you will probably have to balance the timing of elixir for research and elixir for some key buildings.

3. Be smart about what you build and when you build it.
There are a lot of ways to be smart about building. There are still some general rules that can help you figure out what order you should be building and upgrading.

First, if you have ever wondered how long it will take to build everything, here is what it takes to max out the various town halls in builder days (i.e. 1 builder for 1 day). I have excluded upgrading the archer queen and the barbarian king from this count.

“Builder Days” to Needed to Achieve Various Levels

Townhall Level	Max	Reduced Collectors	Reduced Defenses	Reduced Barracks	Recommended
1	0.1	0.1	0.1	0.1	0.1
2	1.2	1.2	1.1	0.8	0.8
3	7.6	7.6	7.3	6.8	6.8
4	31.1	23.1	20.6	19.0	19.0
5	111.7	51.7	38.5	36.0	36.0
6	180.1	108.1	74.6	70.1	70.1
7	367.9	247.9	164.9	152.9	152.9
8	814.8	634.8	395.8	375.8	514.8
9	1325.5	1145.5	730.5	710.5	1301.5
10	1665.7	1455.7	1097.8	1077.8	1665.7

There is a lot to build, but there is some good news in the chart as well. First, the lower levels simply do not take that long (for example, if you had three builders, you could be a fully upgrade level five in a little over one month). Second, a lot of this is simply not necessary to advance forward in the game.

I have met a number of people that advise to max out everything before upgrading to the next town hall. While I do think this is appropriate in some situations, I believe it is poor universal advice. In my view, you need to do what maximizes your income and enjoyment of the game. Players should find it much easier to get 100,000 gold for whatever reason at town hall 7 than they will find it at town hall four. With proper care, they can make sure that is true. If you are in a war clan, you will also need to consider the impact of your choices on the clan in war. I will cover that toward the end of this section.

If you have only three builders you could maximize town hall 6 (and presumably ready to seven) in 51 days. If you limited your collectors to level 7, that would drop to 34 days. If you only upgrade your defenses to two less than the maximum, now only a 23 days. If you only upgrade a few of your barracks to maximum and leave the others one or two levels down, 21 days. If that reduced base can work well for you, it has taken you only half the time to upgrade to TH7 and get access to a really strong army.

The balance will depend on how often and how long you play. If you raid a lot and stay online, you may find that you depend on your defenses a lot less than someone who attacks occasionally and spread out throughout the day.

Assuming you can attack several times in a relatively short period, I recommend you “rush” all the way to town hall 7. Fundamentally, you should be able to generate enough resources from raiding and use them immediately for building, so that your primary “defense” is simply that you are generating enough income you can afford for other people to attack you occasionally and that when they do, you don’t have that much on hand. Depending on how much time you can work in for clash of clans and whether or not you use gems to boost barracks production (remember hoard gems until you have five builders) and whether your attacks are spread out or in one block of time, you will eventually reach a point where you need to save for things and giving people an open door to your resource storage is not going to help. Also remember that as your town hall goes up, the game penalizes you if you attack lower levels. I recommend you don’t blast through town hall level 7. TH7 is a particularly attractive place to catch up because you can still take out relatively wealthy TH6s while having access to armies that can attack stronger players. If you are not involved in lots of clan wars and then if you are boosting barracks, can work your schedule to continuously check in, or simply can devote a lot of time to Clash of Clans, you may be better suited to keep pushing on to TH8 or higher. Ultimately, it will be a decision based on what is working for you.

With this in mind, here is the building strategy I use.

1. Build to support your strategy. Assuming that you are going to follow my raiding strategy, that means you will need to prioritize getting your army camps built and fully upgraded as quickly as possible to make sure your laboratory is upgraded if doing so will allow you to upgrade your raiding army. Do not neglect your offense as you advance your town hall. That can lead to some hard landings where you are too weak to attack other players at or one level below your town hall.
2. Don’t waste time with mines and elixir collectors. Note, I said don’t “waste” time, not “don’t build them.” With enough raiding, you can earn FAR more attacking than the collectors will get for you. This is a valuable place to cut corners. Nearly half the time to achieve a maxed out TH6 is spent on mines and collectors. If you have enough income from raiding, you are better off moving up to TH7 than you are waiting for those things to build. Mines and collectors are great “fillers” though – particular in TH8 or TH9 (depending on your level of activity). If you are trying to save up for that next hidden tesla upgrade, putting your spare builder on a mine upgrade will avoid wasting time. All in all, I recommend you prioritize getting your collectors to level 7. This way, you don’t lose resources when they prematurely fill up, but you also avoid pushing into the day long builds of 8 and above. After that, build them as it opportune, but plan on having them complete before or while you are town hall 9.
3. Generally, keep all buildings and walls within 1 level of the highest level of the same type. Usually, the incremental advantage of a building upgrade is about the same for each level; however, the cost of the higher level upgrades is considerably higher. So, better to have two level three archer towers than one level four and one level two. Barracks are a notable exception.
4. Only upgrade your barracks to the highest “convenient” level. Usually, this will mean that at least one barracks is very high (perhaps maxed out), so that you can get the newest “toy.” The rest of the barracks need to be set up to build your armies efficiently. You don’t need all your barracks able to make wizards if you only use a few for wars and the rest of the time you use low level troops. For convenience, I like having my barracks high enough that I can queue my entire regular army at one time. Also, if I use a lot of a unit, I want to make sure that multiple barracks can produce it (example, you may want multiple wizard barracks if you plan to donate a lot of them for clan wars). Finally, before upgrading a barracks, consider how inconvenient it will be not having it. If it is your highest level barracks, you may want to get two at the same level so that you can still produce that healer when you go for dragons (as an example).
5. Try to time your upgrades and purchases so that you have a constant stream of builders completing work. That can mean delaying a particular project because it would finish up the same time as two other upgrades. It is most important to make sure multiday projects don’t leave you without builders for several days. I also pick projects to try and get builders available at good times. For example, I might avoid a two hour upgrade right before going to sleep, but instead do an eight hour project and then do the two hour project first thing the next day. Now faced with only multiday upgrades, I save some of the minor projects purely to time my builders so I have them when they are most useful. Likewise, I also try to balance upgrades that take a long time, but have relatively low costs with other upgrades so that I make sure I always have sufficient resources for the next project.
6. Build every building a level has to offer before moving forward. I do this mostly so that I can plan for my layouts. Honestly, this is not entirely consistent with my overall message; however, if you never build the building, it is hard to assess how useful it is. There is an exception to my guidance, while I really like the barbarian king, you may not have enough dark elixir while at level 7 to build him. Feel free to wait until TH8.
7. Heroes deserve special attention. They are by far the longest upgrades of anything in Clash of Clans. Getting to TH9 a little early can help you if you prioritize getting and upgrading your queen. Because of the length of their upgrades, I try to make sure one hero is upgrading at all times. A few, very dedicated players are able to keep both of them constantly upgrading.

As I mentioned before, if you are in an active war clan, you should be aware that the current match making system for wars seems to consider town hall level in addition to some measurement of strength. This means that your clan faces a penalty of sorts for your upgrading your town hall. If you are a minor member of the clan, your rushing probably has little impact to the matching. On the other hand, a bunch of rushed TH10s could really make for some bad match ups. The approximate time for what I have below is the recommend column above. As such, I would recommend the following as a minimum:

• As mentioned above push to get up to TH7 as quickly as you can upgrade your offense.
• Before leaving TH7, make sure dragons, archers, barbarians, and army camps are maxed out. Other offensive troops you use should also be reasonably upgraded. No defense should be more than two levels below maximum.
• TH8 should have all defenses no more than 1 level less than maximum before upgrading and should have all level 6 walls or better.
• TH9 should have at least half of all defenses at maximum (the rest only one away from max) before upgrading to TH10. If you find that you still frequently depend on TH8s in your raiding, you may want to stay at TH9 until you are near max on all your buildings.

4. Raid efficiently so that you can “fund” your activities.
Raiding is a critical source of funds in clash of clans. You can use raiding to trophy push or get revenge, but the utility of raiding comes in getting funds to build more troops and a better base. If you are aggressive in your raiding, you can easily compensate for having fewer collectors or getting attacked when you are away.

There are perhaps four critical factors in raiding for resources.

1. Queue the right army
2. Picking the right target
3. Deploy appropriately
4. Wait for your army to finish building.
5. Repeat as quickly as possible

First, please note that step one is “Queue the right army” instead of “Build the right army.” The reason for this is the best way to raid is to already have your army built, queue your next army, and then raid. Depending on how much time you spend searching for your target and how many troops you deploy, you may come back to your base to find that most of your troops are already built. I find an added bonus is that it is psychologically much easier to donate troops early in the build cycle than when I am ready to attack. One other item on queueing up the troops – try to keep the build times for all the barracks the same. That will speed things up later.

The best resource army is going to be the one that enables one to capture as much as possible in a given amount of time while minimizing costs. Because you get to choose your target, this does not have to be a well-rounded army. While others will have varying opinions, I find a handful of wall breakers plus an even split of archers and barbarians to be the most efficient raiding army for gold and elixir. For the wall breakers, I bring one more (for back up) than is required to punch through my target walls. For a TH7, this army would ideally be 3 wall breakers, 97 barbarians, and 97 archers. If you have lower level wall breakers or smaller army camps, you will have a different mix. At higher levels, I often bring more because with a hero and enough wall breakers, I can punch fairly deep into a base (if a really good opportunity presents itself).

A critical stage for this army happens in TH7 when you can have about 97 level 4 archers and barbarians. Lower level town halls need to build toward this ideal as quickly as possible. Because there is not an army camp upgrade at TH8, the army for TH7 is close to on par with TH8. While the level 5 upgrade is well worth it, it is small enough that I would I think the disadvantages of rushing to TH8 outweigh the advantages. Also, in my experience, by the time I got to TH7, I had enough resources in storage that enemy raids started hurting enough that I wanted to upgrade walls and defenses to discourage that sort of thing.

So, why is this the “right” army over others? It is simple. Archers and barbs are cheap and can be built very fast. This means you can attack several times in the time that a more sophisticated army would be built. Second, it is surprisingly effective. You can use it to grab exposed resources and pick up a one star or you can unleash the entire thing at once and try to gut the opponent’s base. Add goblins and you slow down the build time. Switch to only archers or only barbarians and you make it much less flexible and less powerful. Giants can help, but really are not necessary for this tactic. I only include a few wall breakers so that I can punch through a single wall allowing my archers quicker access to the inner part of a base. Most limitations to this army can be addressed simply by attacking the right opponent.

Picking the correct target is a critical step. Frequently, I see replays of “successful” attacks where I find myself asking “why did they even attack that guy?” So, what makes a good target? First, there needs to be a lot of resources. How much is a lot? For TH7 and TH8 in the 1000 to 1500 trophy range, typically, I would say start looking for at least 100,000 of both elixir and gold. You may start a little lower until you get confidence, but if you always find your target after one or two minutes of searching, you probably need to raise your standards. For TH6, outside this trophy range, I would start in the 50,000 range and then see how much higher you can get. Your standards may also need to change depending on when you attack. On weekends, the ideal targets seem to be a bit scarcer.

Before settling on a target, you need to determine where the loot is. If it is buried deep in the base and its defenses are up to snuff, move on. Ideally, you will find a base that has been abandoned. There you will find all of the gold and elixir in the mines and collectors and none (or very little) in storage. Visually, if you see little or no gold or elixir in eve the low level storages, you can be reasonably confident you know where the resources are. Of course, there are many possibilities. With lower trophies you may find tragically bad bases that are easy to clean out or there is some aspect of the defense that makes you confident that you can destroy everything. I generally just look for two things in my initial scan. “Are gold and elixir roughly the same” (one potential sign that it is not sitting in storage) and “are the elixir collectors full” (easier to spot on my phone than the gold in mines).

OK, so now you have found a base with a lot of loot and you have a mass of archers and barbarians to raid. How do you do it? Starting with whatever resource I am most interested in, I deploy about a line of barbarians in as close as I can to the target. The exact number is not important to me. I usually swipe fast enough that there is about two barbarians per building I am trying to destroy. I then immediately deploy a line of archers behind the barbarians. I may have the same or slightly more archers depending on how well defended I think the target is. Even when there is a wall, it is important to lead with barbarians so that they attract the opponent’s defensive fire.

Attachment 87597
Barbarians deployed.


Attachment 87598
Archers follow (a few extra for the second row of buildings).


Your first few times, I recommend you watch how effective your troops are. If they are not meeting your objectives, consider adding more barbarians or archers. The goal is to have enough to finish off the targets, but not much more. Also, you want these guys to deploy quickly, but not in a bunch. A slow trickle can be easily picked off. A giant cluster can get wiped out by splash defenses. Repeat this attack for all parts of the base with vulnerable resources.

Occasionally, you may want to use wall breakers if there is either a very large group of resources right behind the wall (opening up them for your barbarians) or there are resources that are just a little deeper in the base that you want to get with your archers. In this case, deploy your barbarians first and then send in the appropriate number of wall breakers (keeping your spare in reserve). Remember, wall breakers are particularly vulnerable to cannon and can be easily killed if they run into the area at the same time a mortar lands on your barbarians. Cannon will shoot at the barbarians as long as they are there first. You should be able to dodge mortars simply being a little careful to offset your wall breaker’s attack.

Once you have torn up the majority of their resources, you need to make a decision – stop or keep going. Stopping may result in a defeat. If you have plenty of trophies, this is not a big deal (personally, I find that I need to drop trophies more often than not). Make sure you are being objective when you decide whether or not you need to win a battle. Walking away may mean you get to attack again in just a few minutes.

If you decide to keep going, you will probably find most targets have enough vulnerable buildings that you can get a one star victory. Of course, if the person has their town hall outside their walls, this will be easier. Even if they do not, killing off the resource and “other” buildings outside or within the first layer of the walls will usually be enough to one star. Use this final phase to adjust your trophies and stay in a comfortable range.

Before I wrap up with barbarians and archers, I should mention a few more things. First, the other typical archer-barbarian attack is to deploy as many archers and barbarians as quickly as possible on one vulnerable side of the base. This is much more likely to gut your opponent’s base, but it may leave resources on the other side if you do not three star it. The all-in approach is more powerful than the surgical version that I use; however, its results can be a lot more random. Also, the surgical version can be effective even against heavily defended bases (as long as their resources are toward the outside). That is not true for the all-in version. Second, I should point out that in my raiding, I frequently do not try to bait clan troops, kill off heroes, or trigger traps first. It is partially sloppiness on my part, but it is also a product of two important factors. One, I am hunting for inactive towns (so clan troops are not common). Two, usually in my wave attacks, my troops are spread out enough and I have enough spares at the end that I can compensate for any troops lost to traps, clan troops, or heroes for that matter. The last item I should mention is spells. In general, I don’t use spells in raiding (though I always have them in reserve). Spells take longer to prepare than the army, so you cannot depend on them and keep up the same attack rate. Also, this army is so cheap that if you use spells, you may more than double the cost of your attack. Often, elixir is plentiful, so this is not so critical, but if you are finding you occasionally need to raid for elixir, you may want to consider if you are using spells when you don’t really need them.

Once your attack is finished, it is time to wait for the new troops. Depending on how long your search took and how many troops you brought back, this may only be a few minutes. If you did bring troops back, make sure to go back and tweak your training queues. Because I frequently do not use the wall breakers, I try to leave them at the end of the training queues when I go to war so that I have a chance to get rid of them when I come back.

While I won’t go into much detail here, I should comment that once I shift my priorities away from gold and elixir and to dark elixir, I change my army as well since now I typically need to get to the center of a base where the dark elixir storage is. To do this at TH9, I use 12 giants, 12 wall breakers, 80 archers, 36 barbarians, and 20 goblins. I use a few archers to clear away exposed buildings and then send the giants and wall breakers in to cut deep into the enemy base. They are followed by more archers and barbarians. The goblins are released once a path is open to the resource storage. Having one or more hero helps tremendously. This army is not particularly strong, but generally tough enough to cut deep into TH8s and mid-level TH9s.

Remember that as long as you are online, no one will attack your base. For me, this is a convenient time to use a different device to check mail, type this article, or such. A few minutes later, it is time to repeat the process. On a really good day, without boosting I can get one million gold and one million elixir in about an hour. Typical is around six to seven hundred thousand. If I am prioritizing dark elixir, then I will aim for 1,000 or more per attack. The biggest obstacle to having a good day is getting impatient in the search and attacking someone I should not attack.

5. Follow simple rules and copy others when laying out your town.
I am not going to include anything nearly as long as the raiding section on base building. Getting into the really fine points of base building is something many others have done and honestly one that depends on a lot of factors.

The first thing I will say for your base is that you really need to consider your objectives. If your goal is to be a powerful TH10, trophy pushing at TH7 may not be the fastest way to get there. For those reading this with the goal to really improve, I strongly recommend you create a base that protects your resource storage, your defenses, and nothing else. Perfect is a base that you left enough space that you can easily move your town hall in and out of the center. Town halls outside your base can provoke people to attack them which does cost you trophies, but gets you a quick 12 hour shield (preventing someone doing something even worse). If you do park your town hall outside your base, make sure edit your war base.

I do recommend you look for a base online to copy. It probably is best to only pick ones where you can also see commentary on the base. As long as you are picking one that is pretty good for farming or as a hybrid base, you should be fine. Many war and trophy bases will be OK as well, but you will need to be more careful before just adopting one of those.

As you evaluate a base or build your own, remember a few simple rules:

1. Protect your resource storage. Keep them near defenses (particularly wizard towers) and behind walls.
2. Make attackers break multiple walls. A single big compartment can be defeated by one wave of wall breakers before the fight has even really started. Multiple interior walls will keep hordes from tearing through the base.
3. Keep mortars and air defenses toward the center of your base, but don’t put them right next to each other.
4. Use low value buildings (barracks, army camps, mines, spell factors, etc.) as a buffer around your town. This will keep troops from popping up right next to your wall. Keep them close enough that your archer towers and canon can attack any enemies attacking them. They can buy you time to defeat the enemy. You can consider putting buildings in the far corners of the map to reduce the chance you get three starred as well.
5. Before you add traps or hidden teslas to your base, make sure that all open ground within your walls is adjacent to a building or a while. Also make sure you do not have any decorations inside your walls. Open spots that are not adjacent to other structures and decorations are places enemies can appear in. Traps and hidden teslas can make it hard to see these spaces.
6. Keep your clan castle in or near the center of your base. Clan castle troops are very effective once defenders are being attacked from all directions, but are easily dispatched if the clan castle is out in the open.
7. Keep resources spread out if possible. A big row of all mines or all elixir collectors is a very easy target.
8. Watch replays against your base to find the weaknesses.
9. As mentioned above, for the most part, keep your buildings and walls balanced. One side with really strong walls does not help if the enemy can just attack the other side.

The rules above all have exceptions, but I think they make good rules of thumb.

If you have made it all the way through this tome, you have impressive stamina. While I have gone on for a long time, I hope the details I have provided both show you that you can grow to higher levels quickly and provide enough details for you to get there. Focus on keeping your builders busy. Use very efficient raiding to generate the gold and elixir you need to pay for everything and then use your surplus to splurge on trophy pushes, getting revenge, or glory in wars.

Man, you have really created an excellent topic for the noobs, like me :p

Excellent guide for beginners! This is a guide I'd recommend newbies in my clan to read. Good effort (y)

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Originally Posted by Rishad0172

Man, you have really created an excellent topic for the noobs, like me :p

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Thanks, Rishad0172. I am glad you found it helpful.

Useful for beginners. Good work.

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Originally Posted by SinOfDusk

Excellent guide for beginners! This is a guide I'd recommend newbies in my clan to read. Good effort (y)

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Thanks, I appreciate the recommendation.

I agree with others--this is a great guide for new CoC players. It looks like you put a lot of time and effort into this guide.

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Originally Posted by kather

Useful for beginners. Good work.

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Thanks, Kather. I appreciate it.

Very helpful, thanks very much 😃

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Originally Posted by Lightburb

I agree with others--this is a great guide for new CoC players. It looks like you put a lot of time and effort into this guide.

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Thanks Lightburb (interesting username).

Nice work!

Nice guide:cool:

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Originally Posted by Newbee

Nice work!

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Thanks Newbee.

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Originally Posted by DarkHero

Nice guide:cool:

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Thanks, Dark Hero.

Just a bump after a long pause to see if there are any more comments, requests or suggestions for improvement.

Hey you created a good topic I will try is but very excellent idea.

Good Guide for Beginners but if you really want to grow fast and be in clan wars then you have to raid with war troops. If you can get by just farming with Lava Loon you can reach TH11 very quick. After about you get Barbs, Gobs, Archers to lvl 4 you dont wanna spend the time to research them. You want to get your Lava Loon up and go on to the next TH till you are TH11.

Good guide you created. Too late. I am already experienced retired mmorpg player. I just went to play Clash of Clans one year and four months ago, September 2015. Now I am already at town hall level 9 and still growing and improving. I lash all out improvements to the top. Including those what are not to boost, I push them to the level. Nice job, anyway.

For the three most recent comments, thanks. Sorry that it took me a while to respond back to the thread.

There are a few things that have changed so dramatically in the game since I put this thing together, I don't think I would include if I were to rewrite it now. For example, originally, the only way to get DE for the barb king was through raiding and the sweet spot for gold and elixir rarely had bases with lots of DE - hence the comment that it is fine to wait for TH8. Likewise, people did not have engineered accounts at the time (at least not in the way that we have had for the last year or so).

donjuanPHC2, I will mention (in good humor) that this guide was there for you when you started. This version was published in January of 2015. The original was from 2014.

Noyepe2002, you will need to define "very quickly" for me and once again note this was written before TH11 and this revision only a short time after hounds even entered the game. There was one growing fast to get into wars, but the actual war techniques are quite different now. That said, if "very quickly" means getting to TH11 with low level heroes, I would not agree for a main account. I don't mind people engineering bases, but if one is scrimping on necessary offensive upgrades to get to high levels, I am not a fan. You don't need to upgrade everything, but so far, I have not seen TH11s in war with level 10-15 kings or queens that wouldn't have been better off fighting at TH9 for a longer time learning the game. Because I do think it is so important to push the heroes, I usually advocate to people who ask to use GiWiBarch for DE raiding to get their heroes up. In my experience, medium level active TH9s and above using that at the right trophy level can generally get the highest net DE (loot + attack bonus less army cost and what is lost to enemy raids). If your "very quick" still assumes you are getting to TH11 with a queen at least 25 or 30, then ignore this last paragraph. Likewise, I am a bit less critical about this for mini accounts, though I think the last adjust to war matching makes those less favorable than they were for most of 2016.