Those of you who have been trophy pushing, know that above 3200 cups or so the number of bases with bad trophy offers increases drastically. So people would typically lower their target number of trophies as one climbs further above 3200. During my cup runs I went from 24 to 21 to 18 to 15.
Of course that also meant that I was risking losing more cups as I was lowering my requirement.
From 23 to 25 to 27 to 29.
I am a decent player with decent troops and will win most battles against max bases. But I will certainly win not all matches (I have farmed like 99% of my clash time, only done 3 serious cup runs). Assuming I would lose 20% of battles, I figured a trophy offer of 15 could be insufficient to make progress. So I did some math to work that out.
Let’s say I encounter a tough base with a 15 cup trophy offer. I estimate I will 2-star that base 50% of the time, 1-star 30% and lose the remaining 20% (I will ignore 3-stars which is rare against strong TH10 bases).
The number of cups I can expect to win on that base is
0.5 * 2/3 * 15 + 0.3 * 1/3 * 15 – 0.2 * 29 = a lousy 0.7 cups
(with 29 being the number of cups I would lose on this 15-cup offer)
So I win only 0.7 cups on average if I attack a 15-cup offer if my chances of 2, 1 ,0 star are indeed 70%, 30%, 20% respectively. That’s not really worth training my troops for…
I will attach (later) the excel file I used for the calculation, in case people want to plug in own numbers. But I will give a few scenarios below which may help to base a strategy on.
I will list odds for 2-starring in green, for 1 star in amber, a loss in red (in that order, in case you are colour blind).
Scenario 1: very easy base, or you are a very skilled player. Odds: 80%, 15%, 5%
Average 15 cup profit requires trophy offer of 27
Average 10 cup profit requires trophy offer of 20
Average 6 cup profit requires trophy offer of 14
Average 3 cup profit requires trophy offer of 9
To break even over time, cup offer should be 3
Scenario 2: low-risk base considering your skills. Odds: 70%, 20%, 10%
Average 15 cup profit requires trophy offer of 32
Average 10 cup profit requires trophy offer of 24
Average 6 cup profit requires trophy offer of 17
Average 3 cup profit requires trophy offer of 12
To break even over time, cup offer should be 8
Scenario 3: medium-risk base considering your skills. Odds: 50%, 30%, 20%
Average 15 cup profit will require a stretch of whales
Average 10 cup profit requires trophy offer of 32
Average 6 cup profit requires trophy offer of 25
Average 3 cup requires trophy offer of 20
To break even over time, cup offer should be 15
Scenario 4: high-risk base considering your skills. Odds: 40%, 30%, 30%
Average 6 cup profit requires trophy offer of 32
Average 3 cup requires trophy offer of 27
To break even over time, cup offer should be 21
I give the break even numbers (0 cup net profit) for reference, but of course they are not very helpful if you want to push trophies. (they may be if you need to farm a few bases to fill up resources).
I was really quite amazed about these figures. That's why I am sharing them here… If you think you have a 70% chance of not losing, you should really only attack if the cup offer is 27+. And then still you need to do 33 of those attacks to expect to climb 100 cups on offense.
(thanks to Zach for providing the formula to calculate numbers of cups at stake as a function of cup offer)
