Coldfury’s Strategy Guide for TH9/TH10 max gold per hour farming using BAM

[Smitdidit]

For me, its usually no loot in the morning and loot bonanza in the evening.

For example on monday, I made zip in the morning, but 3m gold after 4pm of my time.

Which time zone are you in? For me between 9 and 11 AM Central European seems to work best

[Coldfury]

Really great guide! Thanks for taking the time to write it.

Did you ever test raiding in different time zones? I have the perception that certain times of the day are better than others.
And weekdays are better than weekends in my mind.

So, I have absolutely tried to find the "ideal" times to farm and I've never really found anything to be consistent with days or times. I pretty regularly do a 2 hour boost session on Saturday mornings between 7:00-9:00 (CST) and it's the "most consistent" good raiding time for me, but even it goes flat at times.

Another thing I've noticed that's fairly consistent is how player activity levels effects our gph. SuperCell has acknowledged that they never remove inactive bases from the game, but they do prioritize active players to the head of the line for match ups. This makes total sense because as much as I'd love having non stop abandoned bases, it would also be really weird to never have to deal with CC or bombs. It would make it "too easy".

My oldest son played for a while up to TH9 but doesn't anymore. I had him log into his base (still installed on his phone) that he hadn't used in months and sure enough it was sitting with pegged lvl 11 mines, but his attack log showed the last attack from over a month ago and he had no shield. Within seconds of him logging off his base got attacked right away because he was "active" again and moved to the front of the queue.

So, if there happens to be a big holiday where everyone is home for the week, or SC just releases a big upgrade that drives player participation up it has a huge effect on loot, most notably on the collector raids. In other words there are enough "active" players in queue that we don't get presented with the more "inactive" players with full collectors.

ClanWars was the best example of this because participation went through the roof and farming was HORRIBLE!!!. I spent a two hour boost session the day after CW came out and farmed a total of 1m gold in two hours boosted! It was the worst I've ever done since I started the game.

Then in contrast the week or two leading up to clanwars something happened where the inactives were everywhere. I would hit 300k-400k bases back to back to back almost an entire boost session. During the same time I went almost 3 days with my TH outside my base and never got attacked or a shield. It was surreal for farming, but also a little creepy that I never got attacked.

I have this vision in my head of Marika sitting at SuperCell with a big dial on her desk to adjust the percentages of inactives that get mixed in and she accidentally turned it too far for a week.

The moral of the story is to recognize what loot is doing and react accordingly. The week after CW was released I pretty much stopped BAM farming completely and switched over to balloons and did a push into masters because it was better than anything I could find down lower. After a couple weeks things started calming down some, but there was a loot hangover for a good month or more after CW for sure.

[AlecMeow]

I'm sure it's a moving target, but my son who I posted the CCLE video a page or so back of was crushing it in the 1600 range the past couple weeks.
He'd be sitting in the living room across form me searching for DE because he was maxed on Gold/Elixir and would yell out every time he saw a collector raid. One time he saw a bunch of them in a row with over 200k gold. Obviously that's not normal, but it seems to be pretty hot in that zone the last week or so.

So he is the one taking all my loot bases!

[PropJoe]

Your guide was so good you made me create an account just to post here. Greatstuff

[Jonah]

I loved the detail of your guide Cold...

I was wondering, I am a fully maxed TH9 besides walls - almost finished with legos - and I plan on staying here a bit to level up my heroes more. Will your base layout work for a TH9 or do you think it will fail without the IT's and the extra xbow?

Thanks again!

[freshlikealex]

Hey cold awesome guide

I don't know if you mentioned it already but I would like to know how much gold you make per 2 hour sesh (with all 4 racks boosted). I seem to only make 3.5-4.5 mil gold every 2 hours. Do you think that 3.5-4.5 mil is a decent amount or should it be higher?

[DCMaxxx]

What an awesome guide. Just wanted to say it

[Coldfury]

Your guide was so good you made me create an account just to post here. Greatstuff

Thanks, you're making me blush.

I loved the detail of your guide Cold...

I was wondering, I am a fully maxed TH9 besides walls - almost finished with legos - and I plan on staying here a bit to level up my heroes more. Will your base layout work for a TH9 or do you think it will fail without the IT's and the extra xbow?

Thanks again!

I did use an almost identical wall layout at TH9 and just threw an AT in the center for a little extra support. "Inkhands" is in my clan and is using essentially the same layout as I did at TH9.

I tried several TH9 layouts that were "very popular" and used by a lot of people, but no matter what I got 2 and 3 starred every single time I'd try moving up in trophy's (Crystal I/Masters III). So, I figured I better start getting into the AI exploiting business because I just didn't (and still don't) have the defensive firepower to take on a high level attack.

My base is really nothing more than any other "ringus" style base, but ringus provides no value at all in Dragon attacks. With mine the double wide moat keeps dragons at bay in addition to all the other benefits of a ringus base.
I spent about a week in Masters III with my TH in the center and didn't have a single 2 star loss at TH9. My walls were mostly lego's so that helped a bunch, but it's just w♥♥♥♥y enough that people don't know how to attack it so it "seems" to work better than most standard bases. To me a 1 star loss as a TH9 in Masters is a big time win.

Hey cold awesome guide

I don't know if you mentioned it already but I would like to know how much gold you make per 2 hour sesh (with all 4 racks boosted). I seem to only make 3.5-4.5 mil gold every 2 hours. Do you think that 3.5-4.5 mil is a decent amount or should it be higher?

I kind of touched on it in the tutorial, but it's honestly all over the place and varies greatly depending on the number of collector bases that are available as well as general "base luck". Obviously TH level/loot penalty contributes as well, so a TH9 is almost always going to make more because the odds of hitting a juicy TH10/TH9/TH8 are better than just finding a juicy TH10/TH9.

The 30 minute video I posted was from Tuesday evening (central US) and you can see that I was right at 1.5M in a little over 30 minutes with a decent number of collector raids. I hit a couple 300+ ones after I stopped recording, but overall I hit right at 3M per hour that night.

Last night I jumped on at the same time in the same trophy range and loot was pretty bad for the first 30 minutes. I did less than 1M the first 30 minutes and then it picked up a little the second 30 minutes where I finished around 2.5M overall for the first hour. If it wouldn't have picked up I could have been as low as 2M for the hour boosted.

To contrast both of those, last week on Thursday night it was "collectorfest 2014" going on around the 2050 trophy range and I was right around the 4M per hour range.

From my experience as a TH10 I consider 2.5 - 3 mil in 1 hour to be fairly normal and when I get into the 3.5M+ per hour range I consider that to be a pretty good farming night.
When it gets into the sub 2M per hour range I consider it to be a pretty "crappy" loot night.

The important thing is to simply optimize your trophy ranges and make sure you're nexting the full 2 minutes when loot is down to ensure you're increasing your odds of getting the good bases as much as possible. After 20-30 minutes I usually have a pretty good feel for how the night is going to go and just roll with it. Sometimes it's just bad and it doesn't matter what you do, sometimes it's decent, and sometimes it's off the hook awesome. Recognizing this really helps reduce the frustration factor. It also helps you be content with just hitting 100k bases all night when it's bad vs. hitting next 500 times trying to find that 200k base that never materializes.

I'm switching between farming DE (discussed in this thread) and farming Gold with BAM, so a lot of times when I'm seeing a crappy gold night I just switch to my DE farming army and do that instead. DE seems to be fairly consistent across most nights, so it's a good fallback. Then when gold is good I'll just rock BAM until my gold is full and then switch to DE.

[Jonah]

I did use an almost identical wall layout at TH9 and just threw an AT in the center for a little extra support. "Inkhands" is in my clan and is using essentially the same layout as I did at TH9.

Thank you for the response! I checked out Inkhand's base - wanna try it but not sure about tesla and trap placement. I could guess - or is it like your base now? Thinking the teslas are near the builder's huts in the corners and double giant bombs are in between WT and mortar on the North side and AT and Cannon on the South.

Thanks again for the guide!

[Coldfury]

Thank you for the response! I checked out Inkhand's base - wanna try it but not sure about tesla and trap placement. I could guess - or is it like your base now? Thinking the teslas are near the builder's huts in the corners and double giant bombs are in between WT and mortar on the North side and AT and Cannon on the South.

Thanks again for the guide!

Here's a screenshot of his. with everything.


I ran very similar to that for several months and then somebody posted this video (not mine) on the forums that made me rearrange my base to more of an "anti-lure" mortars/teslas in the corner layout which I found fascinating (and funny).



So, I tweaked my base to this setup right before I hit TH10, but didn't really get to use it much. It's the basis for my current TH10 layout though and it's a lot of fun watching people try to lure my CC.
FuryGoRound - TH9 (Trophy/CW Layout)

Here's what I'm currently using for my farming and CW bases at TH10.
FuryGoRound - TH10 (Farming Layout)
FuryGoRound - TH10 (Trophy/CW Layout)

When I get my defenses to max TH9 level in the next few weeks I plan to do a Champions run to see how this layout stacks up to some stiffer competition.
I feel that no matter what we do on defense if a skilled player comes to town with a full GoWiPe style army there's not really anything any base layout can do. So, I really focus on trying to prevent the average players from getting that second star. Most attacks are people just spamming balloons, dragons, hogs or giants and this base just eats those up.
The attacks that do have some success are the ones who recognize that it's a Ringus style base and methodically take out a full side of defenses first and then release their hogs/loons to the core. They still have to bring a fair amount of spells to knock it down, but it's certainly doable. The good news is that very few players have that kind of army in our farming ranges, so this layout seems to do pretty well in ensuring I only get TH snipes every time.