Section one
Offense > Defense
New recruits to dailyCoCbeaters #89P9QCL2, this is must read information. Everyone else, enjoy the guide that I wish I had a year and a half ago when I first started clashing.
So, as you can see I chose to put the often repeated maxim of offense before defense at the top of this guide. This simple concept is crucial to your war success, but what does it mean? It really deserves to be expanded upon. Lets start with some basic terminology.
Offense: Camps + spell factory + dark spell factory + clan castle + lab upgrades + heroes = Offense. All categories are critical; all troops maxed are not. Heroes and lab upgrades are where you should focus as they take the longest.
Defense: everything not listed as offense excluding traps, resource collectors and storage. Excluded items are not included in my definition of “defense” because they have little or no war weight (they are still useful in defending).
Section two
When should I upgrade my town hall?
So every new player asks this and it’s at the heart of much contention.
The truth is that there is no one right answer in the greater scope of this game nor should there be. This is what makes the game great.
In general, however, the game creators have presented us with a distributive choice. What is good for you as an individual in protecting your loot is generally bad for the clan as a whole in war. You have a choice to make here, how bad do you want to win wars?
There is a reason why you will find people in game and on these forums who insist upon “maxing” aka building and fully upgrading everything before going up in town hall.
Maxing is:
1) Simple to describe, you don’t have to write an essay like this one you are reading.
2) Ideal for loot retention (not to be confused with farming efficiency as rushing will yield greater loot per hour).
3) Good at preventing mistakes. Since Offense > Defense maxing will only let your defenses get so far ahead of your offenses. This benefit, however, is a double edged sword that makes maxing far from ideal in terms of winning wars.
4) A compromise between doing what is good for the individual and what is good for the teams’ war effort. This makes maxing a good option for clans in the average to less serious about war range.
We are going to throw maxing out the window for the purpose of this guide. It, like the concept of mirror attacking simply has no place in any clan serious about winning wars. Winning is of course the reason you’re reading this and in the clan wars subsection in the first place.
I am not, however, going to tell you exactly how to upgrade your base. I want you to think a bit here. What I will do is give you the framework of the basic must haves before going up in town hall and follow up with some suggestions to consider.
Minimum required upgrades before going up a town hall level:
1) Farming: goblins to max level.
2) War: one solid composition to get three stars. See my recommended beginner composition below for rushing to TH10.
3) Offensive structures: Camps+SF+DSF+lab building+CC
Recommended starter composition:
I recommend dragons. For your lab work this means upgrade priority is:
1) goblins to farm
2) dragons
3) rage spell
4) lightning spell
5) earthquake spell
There are a few benefits to making this your starter comp.
a) lower lab time than other options
b) elixir heavy so you can save more DE to put into heroes
c) does not require heroes for a kill squad, which allows you to war with heroes upgrading while your base is still young and light on war weight.
d) Teaches funneling
e) Can consistently 2 star with 3 star potential once mastered and on the right base.
f) Works well with CC troops after clan perks bonus especially after they added level 3 lavahounds and level 7 balloons.
Of course there are a few caveats to consider. Clearly this is only a starter composition and you will want to unlock other compositions as soon as possible since certain layouts are not suited to this attack.
Coordinating among your mates here is a great idea. Having each person pick a different secondary composition to specialize in is a great way to optimize for donations while covering different enemy base layout possibilities.
Also this strategy lends itself to rushing to town hall 10, which brings me to my next major point.
Section 3
Town hall 10 is the ideal spot to strategically rush to right now for both war and farming
I have 16 accounts ranging the full town hall spectrum and can confirm via personal experience that town hall 10 has the best loot per hour.
Some will argue that going up in town hall with lower heroes is bad for war and/or for farming, I can’t disagree more.
In war:
In war heroes are a must have for success but here is the thing, your town hall does not determine what you should be attacking in war, your weight does.
So as long as you are careful to keep your weight well below your attacking power, heroes being a critical component in determining attack power, you will be fine.
Imagine a TH10 with town hall 7 defense weight and heroes in their late teens. Is this a war liability? Of course not, this player is an asset to any war due to their troop and camp levels alone. Furthermore this player can afford to war while upgrading his heroes!
The fact that your camps and spell factories max out at TH10 is reason alone to make getting there a priority. Bigger armies, all other things being equal, are always a good thing.
Unlocking beastly troops like level 5 valkarie doesn’t hurt as a motivation to get to TH10 asap either.
In contrast TH11 gets no immediate offensive boost since the warden will not be available while upgrading and is useless until level 5 and the newest troop additions take a long time to get unlocked and upgraded.
In farming: The higher the town hall the more resources available to steal. What makes TH11 an exception to this rule (the reason TH10 is slightly better for loot) is that TH11 must hit bases with infernos (loot penalty for 1 TH lower is hardly noticeable but for 2 down it’s a whopping 50%).
Also there is the fact that there are fewer targets in the TH10-11 range. Lastly, there is the recent change that made TH11 the only TH in game less likely to find the town hall below it in regular matchmaking. I notice this most when dropping down on my TH11 to sub 900 cups. Once down there I generally see far more TH9’s than TH10’s on my TH11, all at 50% loot penalty.
Making the case to go TH11
In war it is useful working on all 3 heroes at TH11 instead of maxing king and queen at TH10 because you can alternate between king and queen down and warden down.
Adding a grand warden set to air to my dragon comp from above is a great way to get those heroes done and still war as a higher town hall with lower weight.
Just like with any strategic rush for war purposes, going 11 early lets you get a jump on those heroes while builders are busy on low to no weight upgrades.
While I would recommend rushing to TH10 for any active player serious about war, town hall 11 is another beast entirely and there is more to consider. If you are top of your clans line-up and very active it’s worth seriously considering the rush and taking the hit for your team in terms of farming efficiency.
Section 4
Gold, the unbalanced resource
In terms of war, gold is unbalanced. This would not be the case if not for the fact that walls have too much war weight and consequently cannot be used as a gold dump.
With air compositions that fly over walls, spells that shatter them or jump over them, units that burrow under them and other units that hurl boulders over them, walls simply don’t provide enough utility to warrant their weight beyond level 9.
Ideally you want to use a mix of wall levels strategically. Level 1 walls for example have nearly zero weight, but on the outer layer can mess up wall breakers getting to the inner layers just as well as a max wall can.
If you played through the game with little thought into the golden problem, doing gold upgrades every time you get gold, you WILL eventually end up defense heavy. This is the case even if you target the elixirs.
For some time now, I have been ignoring even easily obtainable gold unless in very large quantities such as overflowing max mines. It simply isn’t worth using the troops for. Even using targeted farming such as, the struggle to keep offense > defense is real.
The sooner you start treating gold like it is worthless, the better in terms of your war weight. If you don’t have elixir or DE to steal, don’t worry about logging off with lots of gold. Perhaps even leave those gold storages near the outside of the base for a cheap shield which will allow your collectors to fill.
Section5
Tip section
1) Mortars are generally the worst defense for war. These carry huge weight and will not stop most war attacks. How many you make of course depends on your goals and the stage of your base development. Having none may just open you up to being barched… in war.
I tend to think 2 mortars maxed for your town hall level is a good stopping point for the higher town halls, 9+. For lower town halls 0-1 is worth considering depending on your clans mix of town halls. Remember in a mixed clan the lower town halls will get 3 stared regardless; this is what makes defenseless accounts a good option for bottom of the line-up.
2) Adding defenses adds more weight than upgrading existing defenses. Let’s imagine a base intentionally built to lose, it would have every single thing built at level 1. Such a base would have substantially higher war weight than its defensive ability would warrant (this is not even considering troop upgrades, we are talking purely defensive here).
Generally you want to max existing defenses before adding more defenses. You certainly do not want to have more defenses un-maxed at a time for your town hall than you have free builders to upgrade with and 1-3 builders should be on heroes.
This is not to be confused with maxing. The joke on maxers is actually that as soon as they upgrade their town hall they instantly have more defenses built than they can upgrade and become very un-maxed upon upping their town hall. If you mini-max, the term for selectively choosing defenses based on their utility relative to your war base, then you can more easily maintain max levels on your existing defenses for your town hall.
3) Storage and collectors are an excellent way to keep your builders busy while you ensure offense > defense. The passive resource generation is a nice perk, but the real benefit is boosting your bases total health points without adding weight.
4) Do those traps! I love traps and usually do these along with collectors and storages while working on those offensive upgrades. These carry little weight and nothing beats the element of surprise. With the addition of spring levels, this is a great way to dump that unwanted gold as well.
5) You don’t need to know exact war weight. Just consider all upgrades in terms of utility. The goal should be holding enemies near your bases’ war weight to 2 stars. If you do this while keeping offense > defense then you can in turn 3 star them and win the war. 2 stars are nearly impossible to stop against any skilled clan, so it’s worth considering; will that extra defense weight make the difference between 2 or 3 stars on your base? Look at the big picture and how your base fits into your clans’ line-up.
6) You want some defensively heavy (near maxer) bases in your clans mix, ideally an odd number due to the fact that every attacker gets 2 attacks. It is also good to stagger it a bit; for example 3 nearly equal heavyweights 3 nearly equal middleweights and 3 equal welter weights with offensively heavy defensively weaker bases in between.
Section 6
Utility of each building (my opinion)
Heavyweight
Mortars: already covered in last section, they are the worst for war.
Wizard towers: very high weight but with much better utility than mortars. Its worth considering not building all of them right away but you want some. They can do the job of mortars with the additional benefit of stopping balloons and providing a nice health point buffer after that recent update.
Air defense: The AD is particularly critical for TH7+8. This defense, however, is another heavyweight. I tend to think this defense is an exception to the mini-max rule; this is one worth considering building all available but not maxing right away.
Tesla: weighs a lot but who doesn’t love electrickery? This defense becomes more critical TH8+ due to pekkas. Grouping them all together, commonly known as a tesla farm, can stop gowipe, not to mention it’s the highest dps point defense in the game. I like to use some near the outside of my base with an un-lurable CC to mess up the CC pull when someone uses hogs or loons to try and get the CC out. In cases like this consider not upgrading all teslas to max since the ones on the outside are easy kills anyhow. At TH7+8 a corner tesla can prevent a mass drag attack from 3 staring on the first go.
Walls: Taken as individual tiles these don’t really belong in the heavyweight section. However, cumulatively and viewed as a single defense the difference between one upgrade at the higher levels makes them one of the heaviest things in game. A level 1 wall has almost no weight. I highly suggest using varied wall levels with higher level wall tiles at strategic points. Walls used to distract wall breakers or to funnel troops into springs don’t need to be high level.
Middle weight
Archer towers and cannons: I group these together because they have equal DPS and both serve the function of point defense. The key trade off to consider is this, cannons have more health but cannot fire on air. In my base cannons and wiz towers behind resource storage with a nearby grand warden nearby provide a nice health buffer while archer towers are more central spread out and placed between high health buildings. I tend to prioritize archer towers.
Sweepers: Some think these are not worth their weight. I think you want them, but don’t necessarily need them maxed.
Light to no weight
Traps: Gbombs are top priority, springs to level 2 asap, max those skellie traps and put in core, and do air traps asap. All well worth their weight and then some. In terms of utility some would argue springs beyond level 2 and regular bombs are not worth doing, but since they keep builders busy and provide a gold sink with minimal weight I think they are worth doing before many of the higher weight stuff, this is case specific of course depending on where you are in progression.
Resource storage: provides a huge HP boost without the weight. These are always a top priority right after builders are done doing the key offensive stuff, but not necessary before going to next TH. Certainly worth doing before defenses while working on those heroes and keeping your weight low.
Collectors: Same deal as the storage but lower priority.
Specialty defenses
X-bow: I used to put these on low priority, my TH11 still has none, but my TH10 has 2 at level 3. The recent buff to them made X-bows actually worth their weight however be careful as they aren’t worth having at level 1 and take a lot of resources and builder time. Only do X-bows when you are ready to dedicate the time as even at level 1 they have a lot of weight.
Also you do not need all X-bows built right away. The primary reason to add these from a war perspective is to take out the enemy queen or wizards. To achieve this you don’t want them locking on golems.
Inferno: This defense had huge weight, they recently upped that weight and it’s now massive. Still it’s a game changer and worth having. Given its massive weight, carefully consider the utility of this defense. I stopped at level 2 on both as this seemed a sweet spot looking at the dps jumps between levels. Set to multi for the healing de-buff there is a strong argument for leaving this at level 1 for a long time while you do other stuff.
Eagle artillery: I built it and maxed it. It is the highest weight item in the game. You need two things before considering this defense. 1) Offense capable of three staring a max TH10 2) Like the infernos, enough other leveled defenses to support it.
The eagles’ main strength is in forcing the opening gambit. I treat it like a second town hall containing core (war base has two separate cores). If an enemy goes right for the town hall they cannot get 3 stars. If they go for the eagle core it increases the chance of a 1 star, a tough opening gambit indeed.
I have not found that having the eagle guarantees facing other TH11’s, in fact its rare that our enemies have a town hall 11 at all.
