f13.net

Clash of Clans (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clash-of-clans/id529479190?mt=8)

iOS PvP tower defense/attack game.  You build a village, try to optimize its defensive layout, build troops, and then attack other villages to try to steal their shit.

I was worried it'd be a hardcore game where you lose months of work when you fuck up, but attacks never actually damage your town, just your troops and resources, which are easy to regain.  And the game doesn't let you target specific players, nor does it let anyone get plundered multiple times a day.

Troops can't be controlled directly; you pick where to deploy them and then they do their thing.  A big part of the game is therefore trying to manipulate the troop AI -- build defensive patterns that will funnel them to their deaths, etc.

Picked this up and having fun.  Great for casual tablet play.

have not gotten to point of joining clans.

If your clan is well ranked (judged by the scores of the members) you get credits dispensed every ranking period.

Some friends played this obsessively for a while. I'm glad to be done with it. Takes a lot of repetitive time.

I've been playing this a lot for work related purposes. There is a new game by the same developers called Boom Beach. It's a lot more engaging than CoC while retaining the same core loop. I think it's only available in the Canadian app store for now but expect it to be wheeled out globally soon.

I've been having fun. I'll probably try and find Bat Country here soon.

dont think we have one.  Castle clash was game I made one on.

Derp.

I have created Bat Country. Flag is purple with a black eagle. Anyone can join. Except Schild.

What the hell, I loaded this back on ze tablet.  Just joined, need a break for a few days from castle clash.

Marching towards th6.  Can get to gold tourney, but its getting hard to do more then 20 to 30% on bases. 

Mainly been doing barb zerg rushes; gonna play with gobs and other tactics until th finishes.

Just did a remodel on the base - hopefully it makes my base a less-enticing target

We need more peoples.

I almost made a Bat Country back when I started playing this but didn't because there were already like 10 of them, which would make it problematic to find the "right" one.  My clan is "Cacophonists" and I have lots of upgraded troops to donate.   :awesome_for_real:

We got four or five folks in our Bat Country. You're welcome to pop over. Fairly active we are. /yoda

Finally put some time into this game.  Upgrading my Town Hall to 4 today, and I should be able to rebuild the clan hall after that.

Also, I made it into Bronze 3  :awesome_for_real:

Started futzing around with this on the tablet, for something to do while at work. Progress seems a bit slow and it feels a bit farmvilley to me, but the combat/defense mechanics are at least interesting. I don't think I'm allowed to join a clan yet, though, but I will seek out BC once I can. Are clans OS specific or will I be able to play with you Apple guys on my Android?

I'm on android bro. Seek us out, I don't think you need clan castle. Just to house reinforcement troops. Could be wrong. Still. Come find us. :D

I found the clan, but I don't know how to join it. There is no button, despite it saying anyone can join.

Edit: Just realized you can build more than one of each resource production and storage facility. That speeds things up considerably.

You have to rebuild the clan hall building that you'll find somewhere on your land plot in ruins.  Takes about 40k elixir or something to do.

Yea, that's what I thought.

Alrighty. We'll see ya when you get that then.

There's 2 of me. One is my Son who got me into the game and wanted to follow dad around. I didn't realize he was using my name on the iPad when he joined up this morning.

How much will we have to behave ourselves in clan chat now? :awesome_for_real:

Looks like you've been behaving as it is. You adult, you.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm stuck in the low to mid 800s in the ladder.  I need more force to overcome the people that are higher, but it's hard to find lower people that actually have resources to plunder.

#firstworldproblems   :why_so_serious:

Anywho, still having a good time with this. Almost maxed out everything I can do with a lvl 4 Townhall, save for making the jump to lvl 5.  Really appreciate the troop contributions from everyone, and I hope mine are helpful as well.

If you're maxed out where you are, you need to either pay the people or just farm up time wise.

My buddy recommended putting your town hall outside your walls. Losing the town hall ends the fight sooner, giving them less chance to get into your storage bins to really pillage. Granted, you are going to lose trophies this way but it keeps the shield up as much as possible.

I don't really have a problem there.  The only time I'm loosing defenses at this point is to people with

A) a shit-ton of forces
B) a small ton of highly laboratory reseached forces
C) Tons of flying

Tier 4 walls are holding up well.  I already have plans for tier 5 for superior  :awesome_for_real:

Is it worth doing all of the PVE battles or should I start attacking players? I've done a few PVP battles but never gotten a decent amount of cash out of it. I'm also not sure if I have a decent base layout or not; I've only been attacked twice and won both times so I guess I'm doing something right.

Does putting stuff in a corner even work? I haven't seen anyone else do that at the silver levels, so I assumed you are required to have walls all around.

No idea; I didn't think they could walk around walls on the edges.

I had the same thought and researched it.  People can place troops on the grass border, so sticking it in the corner doesn't help.

http://clashofclans.wikia.com/wiki/Dokugan%27s_Strategy_Guide

The PvE battles are good to start with, but I found that after the first 6 or 7 I was needing to build my base up to levels that it was easier just to stomp around the bronze III level and farm them instead.  You lose your shield eventually anyway, so may as well jump in once that happens.

Damn, alright. Thanks for that, guess I've gotta redesign mine.

Putting valuable stuff in the corner is the classic noob mistake that everyone makes until they watch one of their defense replays.   :awesome_for_real:

The PvE battles are definitely worth doing, but since each one gives you a finite amount of loot it's more cost-effective to do them when you have a strong enough army that you can three-star them on your first try.  While they last they also give you a nice "safe" loot source for when you're trying to save up for something big and don't want to break your shield.

No reason to hold off on doing PvP.  At the low levels it's actually at its most rewarding, because at the bottom of the food chain you have a lot of fat newbies who either don't know how to defend their loot or who quit playing after a few days and left their mines to run endlessly until someone comes along to empty them.

Here's my village layout BTW:


Note that I'm currently doing the (mostly) unprotected town hall cheese because I'm trying to save up goop for upgrades, and that's easier when people aren't rolling over my entire village with hog riders every day.  Once I spend down my goop vats I'll swap the town hall back with the laboratory in the middle so I can build up trophies (which is useful insofar as it gives you a better loot bonus when attacking).  Right now I'm spending my gold on wall upgrades as fast as I get it (upgrading the level 7 purple walls to level 8 black walls at 500k a pop -- almost done!).

Been playing for a bit, still very active.  Requested to join, name of Hgmvhf.  Tried to join the clan thing but got declined.

Boom Beach got a worldwide release yesterday btw.

iOS only  :oh_i_see:

I should comment here that if your game center name is wildly different from your f13 name, maybe include something in your join request like "this is grebo from f13" so we know you aren't a random leech.   :awesome_for_real:

Yeah I consider people if they bother to change the standard greeting at least. As soon as my eye hits "I'd like to join" you're out.

Typing in short bursts in clan chat is annoying, so I thought I'd try to share some strategy tips here:

1) If you find that you're frequently getting matched against people who are much stronger than you, you probably have too many trophies, since matching is done solely on the basis of trophy count.  This of course will self-correct since each loss drops your trophy count, but you can also game it by intentionally throwing matches.

2) Saving up loot is a matter of pulling in more loot than you spend on an attack, and losing very little when you're attacked.  Gaming your trophy count is a component of this; I usually try to shed trophies when I'm sitting on a lot of loot.  Leaving your town hall exposed while protecting your loot is a good cheap trick for both keeping your trophies low and minimizing raiding losses -- many attackers will be satisfied with just destroying your town hall, which activates your shield (and loses you some trophies) but doesn't in itself cost you very much loot.

3) If you're trying to save up elixir, use troops that don't cost very much elixir (that usually means stay away from the big flashy guys), and make sure to attack only targets that you can pull more elixir from than you spend attacking them.  This is basic "conservation of stuff" logic.  You'll gradually develop a sense when looking at an enemy village what percentage of its loot you might be able to grab with your available troops.

4) Available loot is a certain percentage of what's in your loot-containing buildings (mostly your stores and mines), capped at a certain amount.  Increasing your town hall level lowers the percentage but increases the cap.  I dunno the exact numbers, they're probably on a forum somewhere.  The mines have a much higher percentage than the stores, but also typically hold much less (basically whatever amount they've produced since their owner last logged in).  If you're lucky enough to stumble across a village whose owner has been idle for a few days, the mines are very easy pickings for whoever happens to attack them first.

Also you can queue up a few big ticket troops in excess of your actual camp capacity (but only up to your barracks capacity). The elixir for these is deducted but the units won't be built until there is space for them. So, before you go offline, add a few dragons (or angels or whatever your most expensive unit is) and those resources are locked up and unstealable. Just remember to unqueue them before you actually send your next attack.

For my part I've actually given up on trying to save elixir while I'm also saving gold -- it just makes me too tempting of a target, and all my upgrades cost upwards of 6mil now, so I have to bank up enough that I can be hit for 300k+ in one shot if someone steamrolls me.  For right now I'm in tower upgrade mode (banking up 6mil gold before spending it on a tower) and just spending all my elixir on dragons so that someone thinking about attacking me for my gold has to take a heavy loss in elixir.  I'll do the lab upgrades (last thing I have that needs elixir) while I'm upgrading walls so I'll be banking huge amounts of elixir but not huge amounts of gold.

So far it seems like this strategy is sound; my tower upgrades have been going MUCH faster.

At about 1250+ trophies I was having an easier time finding targets with big exposed full pumps.  Got 250k on one attack and only spent maybe 20.. keeping trophies up that high is hard though as it's hard to win when you go in with 100 goblins.

This.  Is.  Awesome.
Clash of Clans: Live Action Short (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaObO42bjiI)

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/clash-of-clans-live-action-short

Truth.

Oh my god, that barbarian bit just about killed me.

So, Clan Wars are coming.  FAQ is up here: http://forum.supercell.net/showthread.php/232849-Clan-Wars-FAQ

Maybe we should ask for a Clan Wars sub forum so we can better discuss/strategize?   :why_so_serious:

Also, the 1 Gem mining boost sale is  :awesome_for_real:.  Upgrading so much stuff!

Yah, the Clan Wars thingie changes my commitment to this game completely.  Much more compelling now.  The issue with the subforum though, is that you've only got 24hrs to strategize before the war starts, and certain members may be forced into spectator mode for balance.  Kinda tough to do anything meaningful in a forum unless you check alot; it's fairly on-the-fly.

I supposed it'd be worth it though.  Be like The West.

Eh.  Thing I like about this game is being able to play at my own pace.  Adding a timed thing where you're letting the team down if you aren't catassing on your phone doesn't sound that appealing.  I'd try it once though.

It doesn't really sound too much out of keeping with the regular flow of the game.  One day to set up your base for the war and the next day to do your 2 attacks.  Adds a bunch of strategery and teamwork things that this game needs imo.

The in practice portion sounds mildly interesting. I'm kind of fuzzy on the warbase setup thing. The war base mirrors your village. But there's no resource gathering. So how do resource buildings factor in? If I don't have resources on the war map, I'd build a completely different layout. My town hall would be the juicy center instead of my storage.

Update is going live today.  Prepare yourselves!

Android version downloading now.

Looks like Farming layouts are out for me if we're gonna do this war thing all the time.  Apparently once you go into prep mode, it copies your base as-is and uses it for the war. 

Ah well, so I loose the first battle  :awesome_for_real:

I think it takes the layout you have at the end of prep day.  I also have the farming layout and am just going to swap it around at the last minute.

Stupid system IMO, they should let you edit the war base separately, or at least let you "lock" your war base layout rather than having to time it.  The thing of keeping the loot in the clan castle is also annoying and also changes layout considerations.  Tying the two layouts together given the radically different defense mechanics makes no sense.

There's no way in hell I'm breaking down my newly built village just for a 1-day war.  If they were going to implement that system, they could at least give us some kind of multiple "village save" option so we dont have to manually rebuild each time.

So, what's the recommended layout? Is it "safe" to put the storage stuff outside the walls?? And what's this about the clan castle and loot? I don't want to be the derp.

Too late!  :awesome_for_real:

My timer shows 3 hours left on "prep day".  So keep fucking with your layouts if you don't like them.   :awesome_for_real:

Being in full defensive mode (I swapped it over yesterday so I wouldn't wind up forgetting before the deadline) has lost me a lot of gold so far.  Unless the war loot payouts are huge I'm probably not gonna be too interested in doing another one of these things until they fix the layout stupid.  Luckily they were smart enough to make it completely opt-in.

On the bright side, I think our odds of winning are pretty good since it looks like our opponents don't even know to modify their layouts (that or they're very clever catasses and are waiting until the last possible instant).  The only one of them that would give me personally any trouble is their leader, and he's still got his town hall out in the corner.

The random picking of teams is why I suggested we might wanna boot our inactives, assuming we do this again. I'm talking people with no troop donations that we haven't heard from since they joined. I don't know if any of these folks are even still playing at all.

Even of the people that are actually playing I'd guess it's a minority who are interested in doing this thing -- it'd probably be better to split off and start a new clan that's a bit more focused on that playstyle.

It seems like I might be in spectator mode which is weird because the lowest trophy counts are supposed to be the spectators... well I'm training an all dragon force to smash someone.  it'll suck if I can't.

And yea it is super annoying to not be able to lock your base and go back to normal without having to worry about the deadline.

Getting the "good" army ready.  Not really cost effective for looting, but when going for total annihilation it's hard to beat hogwizards.   :grin:

Now we've been stuck in "0s preparation day" limbo (apparently a common bug) for hours and I'm just waiting around with my expensive army.  I knew it was a mistake being an early adopter of a new feature.

On Battle Day now, but can't attack or scout it seems.

Meh, I am castle clashing. 

Warning:  supposedly if you 'scout' on the war map, it lags out the game.  To fix you must do a hard reset (exit the game and close it in background mgr).  So for this first cycle, best to just go in blind w/o scouting.  We should win as long as the other team doesnt realize the fix in time.

addendum:  use 'replay' in lieu of scout if someone has attked already

Looks pretty even so far.

We have 24 stars, 15 of 40 attacks played (1.6 stars per attack), they have 11 stars from 8 (1.375 SpA).

This could well be decided by who gets more of their 40 games in.

yea I think that's what is going to decide it.  If we were going to do this again I'd recommend everyone with TH7 get a l9 barracks asap and just attack with all dragons and heal spells.  Anything TH7 will get crushed easy.

9 drags and 1 healer should be unstoppable.

Later on in the battle if most have attacked and there are lowbies still attackable (with stars left) it might be wise to attack them instead of the 'recommended' target.  But only if most of our own lowbies have already had their 2 attks.

Healers don't heal flying units.

Yea I found that out...

My phone dinged with a polite, "You may get your war on now" and they already have 5 attacks going on.

Good. If they burn all their shit and fuck up some, we can hit all the light targets and coast to victory.

FYI, although I don't expect us to win any wars, I'll just keep starting them since it costs nothing and we do get a small loot bonus at the end (even if we lose) and points toward achievements.

Just don't get all wound up and sink a lot of expensive troops into it expecting a return on investment.  If there are 10+ folks who want to get serious about clan wars I'd suggest splitting off and forming an "daily actives only" clan since that's what you need at a minimum to compete in these things.

Yeah, it keeps pulling me in to wars, but given my schedule is, "Update my village in the morning before work, maybe a fight in the evening" that's about the extent of my partaking.

Given that you can't do shit as a TH6, that's ok with me.  I'm at least 3 weeks away from upgrading to the point I can produce low level dragons, nevermind the dark elixir shit.

If it's any consolation, low level dragons kick a lot of ass.

Yes but there's people whining about participation NOW. :why_so_serious:

TBH when people whine I'm strongly tempted to boot them so they can start their own super-serious whiner clan.   :why_so_serious:  I think people have mostly gotten the message that we're not in it to win it, though.

I plan to spend this war seeing how little money I can spend on an attack and still get three stars.  First come, first served on the lowbies.   :grin:

I think those of us that were talking about participation were speaking of the people we don't know that we never hear from and never see troop donations or requests from. I'm pretty sure nobody gives a toss about you having a casual schedule Merusk.

Course I cant do fuckall against anything right now, so I dont know what my participation is doing. Im losing to guys that I should be wrecking so I obviously need to go watch hours of youtube video.

Protip: Angels cant help pussy archers. At all.

Pussy Archer... hmmm

Getting wrecked by maxed clan wizards, when attacking targets I should rightfully roll...is somewhat annoying.

And I second Walrus' comment.

And on Dragons? Hell, my trophies are so out of whack, the only decent targets (resource-wise) I get are TH8 and above, and far more upgraded than me. I'm way further from Dragons than I would like, not least because my attacks (2 healers, 5 wallbreakers, 12+ giants, and assorted archers and barbs) just seem to cost me too much - not sure how I could do things more cheaply against the stout defenses I am usually faced with.

You've gotta give it to them though; they had a strat that worked.  Have their best guy distro all the top wiz's to everyone in the war.  /shrug  It was our strat too, to a point.  Just never executed.  We're not that serious anyways...  we tend to give eachother wallbreakers for defense.   :awesome_for_real:

I'm not gonna ask our best people to give every last person max-wizards anyways.  Too 'spensive.  The bonus is likely not even enough to cover the costs.

Ding ding ding!

I lost more loot on trying to win our first war than I would have gotten if we'd won.

Yea me too.  Maybe we can pick one war sometime to try to win but I'm ok with just rolling the low scrubs every time and taking the scratch loot from that.

Likely true, but there are two bonus pools. There's the per attack win bonus - akin to the league bonus - and then the final war bonus. The win bonus seems scaled to your target. One of my was 115k of both and the other was 125k. The 125k guy I came close to break even on elixir. I got 30k from him, plus the 125k bonus. My attack cost me ~161k elixir. On the up side, I got 160k gold. I'm actually rolling in gold. Wars are gold farms if you can at least eek out a "win" per attack for the bonus plus whatever you can fleece of the guy. Factor in the final "Sorry loser" pool and you probably just break even.

Annoying indeed.  I attacked a guy with 15 level 4 giants, and there were 2 or 3 wizards that were out of LOS behind a goop collector.  I didn't realize it until all 15 giants were 3-shotted in a group.

I couldn't figure out what happened until I zoomed way in on the replay and I could just see a few pixels of their heads.  :ye_gods:

I got hosed when I baited a clan hall, killed everything...and then more wizards popped out to kill my balloons.  :oh_i_see:

Lately I've been partial to nuking defensive noids (after pulling with a goblin) and most everything goes down; though I've not tried against max wiz.  I'm sure they'd get wiped out still though.  If the defensive units are weak I'll save the spell for the mortars or whatevs.

Wizards take a couple of lightning bolts worth of damage.  Archers are a one-shot.

Ghambit:

I know what it is, I just like rhetorical bitching.   :grin:

You realize that if you win all your matches, the matchmaking system isn't doing its job.   :awesome_for_real:

If you do want to shed trophies to make loot-farming easier, though, there remain two simple ways (I've said this before, but now that you see the problem with having too many trophies you might be inclined to listen to my sage advice):

1) Expose the town hall to attack.  The primary point of this is actually not just losing trophies; the main benefit is that it helps keep your shield up at minimal cost (attackers do not NEED to stop the attack after dropping the TH, but most of them will, and either way your shield is activated).

2) Make dummy attacks.  Start attack, drop 1 barb, surrender.  Repeat.  You can lose any number of trophies this way if you need to.  Only costs a few hundred gold and goop.  If you really can't find an attack that feels like a "fair" fight because your trophy count has gotten too inflated, this is the quick fix.


Me personally, I just do #1 -- it's such a nice double whammy of keeping attack targets a little squishier and keeping my own loot safe I honestly don't know why everyone doesn't do it. 

Look at it this way -- matchmaking demands equilibrium in trophies in vs trophies out (any imbalance means your trophy count changes which means harder/easier opponents until equilibrium is reached).  Trophies are zero-sum in any given attack.  Now consider this: you do not automatically lose any loot for losing on defense (you only lose what the attacker is able to loot; this can be decoupled from whether you lose the "battle").  You do however automatically GAIN loot for winning on attack.  Therefore, given that you must over time lose and gain an equal number of trophies, it is generally to your benefit to lose on defense so that you can win on attack.

The free loot bonus on victory would be massively exploitable if not for the fact that matchmaking is random -- if you were allowed to pick opponents, you and a friend could each do the exposed TH trick and trade 1-barbarian attacks that awarded the full loot bonus each time.  The only reason I booby-trap my TH instead of being altruistic is that if an attacker doesn't incur any losses taking down the TH, he'll try to press his luck and go for the loot stores; the booby traps aren't so much to protect the TH (although it's hilarious when it works out that way) as to soften up the attacking army so it won't go any further.

Re: boosting mines, my logic on that is that daily production on my mines is about equivalent to one good attack (it's something like 200k).  So if I boost all 12 mines for a day, it's about equivalent to just making one extra attack, and costs a shitton of gems.  Meh.

Also, remember that loot in your mines is highly vulnerable to attack, so you most likely don't even get to keep all of the bonus loot produced by your boosted mines, especially if you aren't online collecting the loot regularly.

The DE drills are more significant (I think I get more DE from my drills than I do from raiding, just because so few people have easily lootable DE vats), so I do boost the fuck out of my drills whenever the 1-gem deal comes up (it's not even remotely worth it at the usual 30 gems or whatever though).  I keep my drills inside my wall and away from my TH so they're less likely to get looted in an attack.

My alternate method to shedding trophies is gather a goblin horde and keep throwing one at losses unless I see a fat loot guy that hasn't logged in to dump stores. Then I send in all goblins to gather loots, and still lose the round. Shed trophies + loot. Yes please.

But.  I.  Just. Cannnn't.    :uhrr:

I know, doing that makes me feel dirty as well.  :oh_i_see:

6 l11 pumps at 3k an hour is 432k a day.. And you don't have to spend on troops to get it.  For me that's probably equivalent gain of about 4-5 good farming attacks.  Not that I boost my mines either but it's not insignificant.  :why_so_serious:

Oh that's right, the 200k is the amount the mines produce during the duration of a shield... that's the number that's relevant if you're trying to calculate how much keeping your shield up is worth.  :)

Upgrading my only source of angels was probably not the brightest idea I've ever had.

Barracks upgrades are the fucking worst.  I actually think they should change it to let you keep using them during the upgrade (like with camps), because knocking out a quarter (or a third) of your production for multiple days at a time puts such a damper on being able to play the game.

You don't have an option really. It happened to me last match and fucked my whole attack series. I don't think you'll be faulted for trying to upgrade. Agreed with sam, barracks upgrades suck ass.

Oh yeah, I was gonna post a thing here about the benefit of archers on D over wizards (apart from the obvious cost savings):

When troops fight each other, they do so in the most stupid manner possible: the entire group focus fires one opposing unit (the one that's closest), they all kill it twenty times over, then fire another volley.  This is the big strength of wizards and dragons (and valks) on D: the AoE compensates for the shitty AI.

However!  If the things you're fighting do NOT have AoE, then the length of time your defenders are able to distract them is a function of the number of units.  If you have five wizards, it will take five focused volleys to take them all out (unless the wizards take them out first with their AoE).  If you have twenty archers, it will take TWENTY focused volleys to take them all out.  During which time your buildings get to inflict their DPS freely.

Any idea if the order the troops are donated has anything to do with the order they come out?  Seems like half archers and half wizards would be the way to go (except for dragons of course) and would work best if the archers came out first.

I dunno on the order thing... wouldn't surprise me, since they always come out in batches of the same type but the types don't appear to be sorted.  Order donated would make as much sense as anything.

The archers coming out first doesn't guarantee they'll be tanking -- in fact I think the wizards will end up tanking because their range is slightly shorter IIRC (target acquisition is usually a function of distance).  Wizards and barbarians, or maybe even wizards and goblins (faster) might be a better bet.  (Note that I'm suggesting barbs and goblins rather than giants on the aforementioned theory that a greater number of targets is better for tanking than a greater number of hp.)

Archers are generally considered one of the better all-around defenders due to the all-in-one combination of being able to fit lots of them into your castle (hence maximizing targets and delaying the attackers), being really cheap/fast to produce, and having good range (so they can attack air targets, and attack melee targets from behind walls).  Wizards and dragons don't have the cheap thing going for them, but the AoE makes them really good at actually dealing out damage if you don't want to rely on your buildings to do the heavy lifting.

Is there a point to leveling barracks to PEKKA?

Increased capacity (training queue).  I don't use PEKKAs but all my barracks are maxed.  I'd prioritize the camps first for sure though.

So in other words, I have to wait a few minutes longer. Whoopty doo.

Queue length doesn't matter if you have the game in front of you constantly, but if you play in quick bursts (like I do) you very very much want to be able to load up your camps in one shot.

I just got pig dudes, they're pretty awesome

They're easily the most powerful unit in the game pound for pound, but fuck are they expensive.

I cannot wait to have pig dudes some day... :why_so_serious:

So, important strategy tip for those of you who like to use giants a lot: units that have favorite targets (e.g. giants' favorite target is defense buildings) will not attack anything else if their favorite target is anywhere on the map.  That means that if you drop nothing but giants, they will completely ignore any defending units wailing on them.

Which is why I just watched an attack by Ghambit get hilariously thwarted by a single hog rider -- it ran around beating all his giants to death while they ignored it, while the archers that would have shot the hog rider dead in a single volley plinked away at something on the other corner of the map.    :why_so_serious:

To dispatch hostile enemy units you have two good options:

1) Before dropping any other units, bait the clan castle until it's empty (i.e. drop a single cheap unit as near to the castle as possible, then when it dies drop another, etc until new guys stop coming out), then drop lightning on the defenders while they're standing in a clump waiting for new targets.  This works really well against small units like archers, but it's only an option if the clan castle is close enough to the droppable area to be easily baitable -- if you have to fight through defenses to get to the castle's trigger radius it won't work.  It's not worth using lightning on dragons and giants; their HP is too high for the AoE to be effective.  It's also very hard to use lightning on moving targets, which is why you need to do the careful baiting thing to get them all in a single clump.

2) Use your attacking units intelligently.  To fight other units you need something that doesn't target preferentially (i.e. not giants, goblins, balloons, wallbreakers, etc).  Also keep in mind that your units are vulnerable to defending buildings (especially AoE which will mess you up while you stand there picking the defenders off one by one), so it's better if you can bait the defenders away from their buildings.  Spread your guys out; ranged attackers like archers and wizards are great for this because you can deploy them in a nice little arc around the target(s).  This both minimizes the impact of AoE from the defenders (if you drop a big clump of archers or minions to fight a dragon you're gonna have a bad time) and helps your guys spread their targeting out (minimizing the "everyone focus on one guy, repeat twenty times" effect).  Replenish empty spots in your arc as your guys die rather than spamming all your guys and hoping for the best; a big clump of dudes is one good AoE hit away from dying, and you still have the whole rest of the attack to get through.

Help any?   :awesome_for_real:

Got fucked by a dragon last round because he was higher level and I didn't pack enough dudes to take him down. Bummer lots.

I pre-scouted their other defense strategies and never saw a hog rider... so sadly assumed I wouldnt get one.  Then yah, I never even saw the hog rider until it was too late - he came out last flanked with high lvl wiz and survived my lvl 3 lightning attk regardless.  When I reacted, the archers I had didn't even really target him much (as usual), but by then the jig was up anyways.

The last map it was maxed dragons as Walrus said, so not even possible to win regardless for th6 people.

I'm getting better... but damn this is a subtle game.

Dragons definitely need a ring of minions/archers/wizards to take them down.  I usually bait them out to get them as far from defending buildings as possible, then make a ring of minions around them that's spaced out enough so that each blast only hits one minion, replacing minions as they get dropped.  It's a little slow, hence pulling the fight away from the buildings so the buildings don't kill all my minions while they're plinking away at the dragon.

Heal spells can also work as long as your dudes are strong enough to not get dropped in one hit.

Yah, you attk with 200 guys.  I have 140.   :oh_i_see:

If it took 140 units to take out the clan castle defenders, I'd be losing all my battles regardless.   :grin:

To make sure your guys target enemy units, drop them close by.  Your guys will actually target units preferentially (as long as they don't have another favorite target, as discussed), but they won't hike across the map to do it.  I'm not sure exactly what the rules are, but your guys will retarget if they take damage from an enemy unit (man do I wish that worked with buildings), and if the enemy unit is closer than any enemy buildings that'll definitely work too.  Again, baiting the defenders away BEFORE you start attacking in earnest helps.  Once you drop your guys you have no control over them.

When using giants it's good anyway to drop your DPSing units nearby -- the giants do absolutely crapall for DPS, their role is to tank while something else does the damage.  If your DPSing units are on the other side of the map they're not benefiting from the giants as tanks and the giants will get picked off one by one before they do significant damage on their own.

Seriously, this most important takeaway is that if at all possible, you want to empty their clan castle before you've committed any significant troops to the fight.  The clan castle defenders are the biggest wildcard and fuck up more attacks than anything (except maybe traps, which are a whole other topic in baiting and probing).  It's worth dropping a few barbarians or archers or goblins or minions or whatever to make sure the castle is empty.  When I'm running a high-value army (like hog riders or witches or whatever) I always throw in a few goblins to use as castle/trap bait before I drop anything expensive.

It's kind of amazing the number of people I run across who play this. Two of the last family gatherings have ended up in long Clash talks.

Anyway, this was a question and I don't know if everyone knows, but as long as you get one star and we win, you get the bonus. Even if someone comes by later and gets more stars on that same village.

Despite it's popularity, a lot of people in the droid world still dont know it's out there.  This is why I headslap every time a mobile dev releases a one-trick-pony app; they're throwing away veritable millions.  Now you see CoC advertisements during the NBA playoffs because, like I said, no one knows about it.

I've had two Clash of Clans-related conversations with complete strangers in recent months.  One was with an app designer who's working on a competitor and wanted to know what made Clash good (I gave him an earful since it's something I'd already put a lot of thought into), and one was with some homies who were busy comparing arrest records until they found out I played, at which point they all wanted strategy tips from me.

I've played some decent competitors to CoC but then you run into the issue of viable clan play and time investment.  It's gonna be a while b4 the CoC shimmer wears off; it's only been what?  5 months since it's been on droid?  I have yet to find a clone that looks as nice though, but definitely clones with more depth of gameplay.

Far as clan wars are going, I'm thinkin it's pretty great. We're going to lose one now and again due to a few peeps that quit playing, but so what. The loots are a nice bonus, and we pretty much hold our own against an even, or even slightly better equipped clan.

I got no bitch.

Hell, I've even had conversations about CoC with a coworker of mine, who pokes at her spouse because he's constantly checking on the game at home.

Considering where I work, that should tell you...something. I'm not sure what, exactly.

I'm one of the folks not playing at the moment. Let us know if dropping from the clan would be beneficial (or boot, no hard feelings!).

Or secret option C - Start Playing Again!

Really like the new update with the set war base. I wonder how that will work as you add things when you level up. I could probably google it, but then I'd miss the entertainment of wondering.

I was wondering that too, although it's a moot point for me until they add a new town hall level.  I was imagining that they'd just go into the "inventory" for the war base until you went into edit mode and placed them.

It appears that it automagically places it. At least, that was my experience. For someone who has a radically different setup between War and Regular, I don't know how it would work.

Now that we can edit our war bases, here's what I think is an important tactical observation: you don't lose loot in war, so there is no reason to protect your resource buildings in your war base.  Therefore you should push all your gold stores and goop vats to the outside and push your defensive buildings inside (opposite of what makes sense for your normal village where the point of the defensive buildings is to protect the loot).  The longer it takes the attackers to get to your defenses the more of them the defenses can kill.

Also, putting your clan castle at the center of the base makes it more difficult to trigger, which is GOOD because it stops the attacker from pulling the clan castle early on like all smart attackers try to do.   :why_so_serious:  I don't bother hiding my clan castle in my normal village because it's usually empty anyway (I save the prime real estate for my loot), but in my war base the clan castle is right next to the TH because in a war I know it's always going to be full of defenders and I want them to wait to come out until it's the perfect moment to ruin the attacker's shit (i.e. while they're already getting nuked by my wizard towers).

Agreed. Also, new buildings get sidelined until added to War base. Oh well. Make sure to check back is all.

Couple of notes from things I've learned by getting my ass kicked.

1. Always attempt to pull clan castle first. Always.
2. Deploy the proper units to take down castle pull. Giants will not help you here.
3. If using giants, make them tank, and throw down some archers or barbs as backup. If you wait too long to do this, your giants will get slaughtered and you will not have taken down any structures to stop the defensive units from killing off your smaller support.
4. Wallbreakers are straight tarded. Pack more than you need.
5. Poke with a couple units first. Don't drop all you got in one shot. Giant bombs, or a couple of spring traps placed right will fuck your day if you like to hold your finger in one spot. Conversely, if you find a good spot to drop units that seems trap free, and are punching through their base, continuing to drop there is not a bad idea.

Need to start experimenting on my own time and not during the wars. Fucked up this round badly trying different things. I fear the nazis will win.

It's like there's an echo in here.   :grin:

Hog riders are so tempting to use, but they sure are expensive at th7.

It's like there's an echo in here.   :grin:

They never get any less expensive.  I almost never use them.  With all the upgrades I think it costs me about 3k dark elixir to field a hog-heavy army; it's almost impossible to recoup that in an attack.  I prefer to save up the dark stuff for my heroes.

My standard army is 80 minions and 16 balloons, which comes in at about 900 dark and 60k pink -- not hard to make back (and then some).  Also has the advantage of taking under half an hour to train, which means I can make an attack every half hour if I'm in a situation to be fiddling with my phone that often.

Is air just the way to go? You cut out the funneling from walls and circumvent two types of defense. The big negatives are no healers and most anti air is aoe so clumping can be a problem.

What spells do you toss in the mix there, and what level are those? I tried mass balloons a couple of times and my experience wasn't great. My suspicion is that they only work above a certain critical mass.

Air has a ceiling of effectiveness.  My air units are completely maxed on upgrades, but there are a lot of villages I just can't crack.  It's good for farming lower level villages, not for cracking top players (I don't even usually attack the top player in our wars because he'll often have a maxed Xbow or something else that I know is going to give my air guys a lot of trouble).

As far as it goes, though, balloons+minions is a great army IMO because the balloons can tank the wizard towers, which are the minions' main weakness (because it's AoE -- air defense isn't, fyi), and because of the aforementioned relatively low cost and training time (it takes about the same amount of time for 2 dark barracks to produce 80 minions as it does for 4 barracks to produce 16 balloons, all of which perfectly fills my 4 maxed camps).  It all synergizes very well.

For spells I keep a lightning on hand to deal with large clumps of archers (if present), and otherwise load up on heal.  Helps keep my balloons alive long enough to reach the wizard towers, and can keep my minions alive under fire from wizard towers or low level Xbows.  I used to throw a rage or two into the mix, but it takes longer to create (as does Freeze, which I still want to experiment with), whereas heal is only half an hour, so again, more attacks, more loot.

What sort of targets do you need to be hitting, regularly, to make all of that profitable?

This is going to sound like a glib answer but I don't have a better one: targets that yield more loot than you spend on hitting them are profitable.  That's the entire definition of "profit", the difference between what you put in and what you get.

You know how much your troops and spells cost.  When you're picking a target you can see how much loot is available.  You can eyeball the village layout and guess how much of that loot you'll be able to get before your guys die.  (You also get a league-dependent loot bonus on a victory, so factor that in too.)  The math isn't complicated.  Most of it comes down to being able to do that eyeballing and anticipate how the attack is likely to play out, and you get that from experience.

The frequency with which you attack doesn't factor into the profit per attack.  But if your attacks are on average profitable, then more attacks mean more profit.

I should note that I try to be conservative with my spell usage -- I'll drop a lightning if I pull a bunch of archers from the clan castle, because otherwise I'm going to blow through a third of my troops just dealing with that, but otherwise I save it.  Same for heals, I'll usually drop one heal on my balloons as they start taking damage so they can do more of it, but I try not to blow through a bunch of spells just because I have them.  Again, that's where experience comes in; you develop a sense for how much further into their base a heal (or rage) will let your guys push, and you can guess from that how much more loot you might get (if any) and make a quick decision accordingly.  I'll often drop a quick last minute heal if it makes the difference between zero stars and one star (loot bonus is 50k, easy choice there), or if I think it'll get my minions to last just long enough to take out a gold store with 100k in it.

I've moved to this model and have been having a lot of farming success.

140 level 4 goblins = 11.2K goop
4 level 4 wall breakers = 10K goop

So 21.2K invested is easy to net 4x profit by looking for bases with 100K each gold and goop.

I'm finding at 1100 trophies, lots of bases that are still in "square" configurations where there is one or two square enclosures for everything.  2 wall breakers for the first (outer) wall, and two for the second (inner) wall.  I can generally grab 80% of the resources with 140 goblins just running past all of the defenses.

No spells needed.

Yup, that was exactly my strategy for a long time.  You eventually get to a point where you hit defenses that shred your goblins faster than they can run past, but before that starts happening goblins are fantastic.

You can also mix them in with other troops (e.g. barb/archer/giant), which sometimes works really well because the tougher troops will tank the defenses and the goblins will keep them from wasting their time on the resources.  But sometimes it doesn't work at all because your army spreads itself too thin.

My last two upgrades to mortar level 5 and tesla tower level 2 are in progress.  As of then, I'll be maxed at TH7 for everything except walls.

Is it better to wait another month and gather the 32M+ gold needed to bring all of the wall segments to level 7 before I jump to TH8?  Or should I go ahead and ungrade to TH8 so I can start working on DE and getting the hero up and running?  The latter sounds like the better plan, especially since my research is maxed and I'd like to get researching on level 5 troop upgrades.

Upgrade the TH for sure.  That way you can get your builders working on the cheap stuff now (like more mines/collectors if that TH level unlocks any) and still work on the walls as available gold permits, since wall upgrades don't tie up builders.

Teslas max at tier 3 at TH7, FYI.

I need a few million more gold to finish my air defense, and I guess max my resource storage, but that's it.

Remember that if you wait to upgrade your TH until everything else is blocked by it, you can't build anything else the entire time the TH is upgrading.

Walls, bitches.

I'd argue that you should jump ahead to TH8 before upgrading everything to the max so you can unlock the dark elixir drill sooner rather than later.

I'd actually argue the opposite because farming is sooo much easier at TH7 until you get your guys leveled up again(which is damn expensive).

At my level, air is appearing to be the best method. Wall breakers are so goddamn unreliable, you'd have to pack so many that it would cramp your army strength to be able to make a dent. I can't understand their AI enough to aim them effectively. The next closest wall after the one I've punched through doesn't seem to matter, they'll run far to the side to hit something else. Boggles the mind.

Wall breakers used to be way stupider -- they would simply attack the nearest wall.  You could distract them by scattering empty wall segments around the perimeter of the map.  You kids don't know how good you have it.

Their logic now, as I understand it, is they path to nearby buildings and look for one where the path is blocked by a wall.  Then they target that wall.

My technique with them (and I'll be honest, I've used mostly air for months so I'm a little rusty on land attacks) is to drop them just as my other troops have cleared out the buildings in the current "cell" of the base.  That way the next batch of breakers will open up the next "cell" rather than opening up a new hole in the same cell (associated with a different building).

fake edit: Okay, I just watched your replay.  Your breakers did exactly what they were supposed to do, opening up the nearest closed cell.  What you could have done differently is drop fewer breakers per batch -- your giants were tanking, two breakers per batch would have been sufficient to crack those cells and then leave you reserves to start cracking the inner wall.

Another option is to look at the wall layout when deciding where to stage your assault from, thinking in terms of which cells you're going to be opening up with each wave of breakers, and which cell you want to get into.  If you'd gone in from the top corner, your first two waves of breakers would have cracked the two corners on that corner cell, and then they probably would have gone on to the corner on the inner wall, opening the whole thing up.

Nah I get that they went where they were programmed to go. Still think it would be easier if they just "aimed" for the center of the map and went for closed spaces. Easier steering. But I'm no programmer, and it frustrates me that my pixels won't do what I want.
 :why_so_serious:

How does everyone go about accruing larger amounts of resources?  Here's what's been happening to me over the past few weeks:

1) TH destroyed, 12 hour shield activated.
2) Six, level 11 collectors = 18,000 goop/gold per hour, over 12 hours equals 216K
3) Shield expires, and my base gets raided for 180K in resources
4) Net up about 30-40k every 12 hours, which is about 100K per 24 hour period

So after two weeks, I'm up to perhaps 1.5M each, and now I'm getting attacked even more regularly as the amounts in storage increase (mostly TH9 and TH10 people with highly upgraded troops).  Most of my builders are idle because I can't save up enough for TH8 upgrades due to the above.

If upgrading just my wizard towers to level 4 is going to take 2 months of accruing, then it seems rather pointless to keep going.

1) Make the TH an easier target than your resources.  That will sharply decrease the average amount you lose in a raid.
2) Move up the food chain.  Resource collectors are grass, and people who subsist on them solely are sheep.  Be a wolf.

Your TH level also dictates the % of available loot compared to your opponent. I saw a massive decrease in loots after rushing two TH upgrades (7-9).


Best to do in spurts so you are constantly "online" while building armies being invulnerable to attack and all.

Raising the TH level decreases the % but also raises the cap, so it's a two edged sword -- once you start holding a certain amount of loot the higher TH is causing you to lose more even though the % is lower.  OTOH if you don't raise your TH level you probably can't store that much loot in the first place, so whatever.

Staying online constantly works but is a pain in the ass and I don't recommend it.  I maintain that the way to do it is to just accept that you'll be attacked and try to make sure that each attack raises your shield while costing you as little as possible.  The better your defenses, the less often you get attacked but the more devastating each attack is likely to be, since the only people attacking you will be the ones with expensive armies, and they'll want to steamroll your entire base to make it worthwhile.  The "exposed TH" cheese means you get a lot of attacks from people with cheap armies who are looking for a quick easy win rather than total destruction.

I very seldom lose more than a couple thousand gold/goop per attack on me (not counting the expense of re-arming traps and such which is usually another 20k each).  Each successful attack I make gets me 50k gold/goop on loot bonus alone, so as long as I loot enough to cover the cost of the attack I'm coming out ahead, even if we assume I receive one attack for each one I make.  The most difficult thing is picking my attacks wisely so I don't waste resources (and a shield drop) on fruitless attacks -- experience has taught me that it's always better to keep looking for that one juicy easy target than to take a chance on a big score and wind up with nothing.

Im stuck at the upgrading troops to level 6 hump. I cannot for the life of me save the 6 + mil goop. I believe the game is available on the PC and its way easier to stay perm online. Well quasi perm I think after 7hrs of connection it will boot you.

Miguel, don't forget about pitching trophies. I usually pack stuff on till my base gets whopped by someone way out of my league. This happens to me around 1200 trophies. Then I load all 4 barracks with goblins and sink that bitch down to around 400 trophies. Doesn't hurt to have some breakers in case you see a fatty you wanna loot from. Couple rules for safety. Dont attack a guy that can come back and wreck your day. Try and pay for troop and attack expenses on the way down. Dont feel bad for ditching trophies. It keeps the assholes away.

Divert all your gold to your walls, use an exposed TH layout.  That'll minimize the looting -- if you're fat with goop AND gold it's hard to pass up, but if your gold is low people who are focused on it will skip you.

I've been staying down in the silver II/ III range and have an ultra-vulnerable Town Hall.  It's only got Level 2/3 walls around it.  Meanwhile my resources holders are stuck in the middle of my tightest defenses.  You have to steam roll my entire base to get at them.  In the last few weeks I've had that happen all of three times.  Most folks get a one-star or two star win by razing my TH and mines and then fuck off.

The only draw-back being I have to remember to check-in every 12 hours so they don't get all my shit from my mines and pumps.  When I go 2-3 days without checking it out

Check out lower-case "M" merusk.  Upper-case is my son.

I leave my TH exposed and booby trapped (often lower level attackers will receive no stars). I think I need to just drop rank after I get around 2-3mil. I hover in crystal 3 even when farming.

Which one are you in Bat Country? Assuming you are of course...

Think he(?)'s not since we don't have anyone in Crystal 3.  I checked because I wanted to see how much gold was in storage so that (in all likelihood) I could smugly say "you missed the part about diverting all your gold into walls while you hoard elixir".   :awesome_for_real:

I've just recently finished all my DE lab upgrades and am on track to finish my current round of tower upgrades, after which point I'll be following said plan and maintaining a low gold balance so I can rack up the 6M+ elixir needed for each of my several remaining lab upgrades.  Would be there already if the new Tesla levels (a bargain at 5M each, have two of them in progress already) hadn't moved my goalposts, but I'm excited because the tougher Teslas will make my decoy TH that much more lethal.

I just became aware of this thread I am in a random clan that are awful. Joined them because they have won a great many wars and win. half mil in resources every 48hrs isnt bad.

What is the game mechanism behind this?  If the trophy count is low, do you no longer show up when high level attackers do "Find a Match"?

I'll quote myself:


The "level" you get from XP from doing random stuff doesn't affect anything as far as I know; trophy count is all that matters for determining who you get to attack and who gets to attack you.  More trophies = harder opponents and more loot.  Fewer trophies = easier opponents and less loot.  It's very easy to game your trophy count, so find the balance that works for you.

I'm pretty sure trophy count also matters for whether you make the cutoff for clan wars - if you are in a clan of say 37 people, only the top 35 by trophies will be matched for wars. I got this recently since I was de-levelled for farming and wound up missing out on a war. My clan is a bit full of overlevelled trophy hunters though, I'm something like 40th by trophies, 5th by base value (which is how I assume the bases are ranked on the war screen?)

The new change to heroes makes them more of a pain to deal with during attacks. You can't really pull them anymore, and the AI is so bad on troops that they'll happily bimble around the enemy base whacking at walls before worrying about the giant Barbarian King chopping them to pieces... Thank fuck they haven't applied the same logic to clan castle troops.

With respect to farming, I leave my TH(8) in a corner of my base, completely undefended. Every 12 hours I get an attack that kills the TH and I loose 1000/1000 gold/elixir and get a 12 hour shield in return. Occasionally when I have stored up larger amounts of resources someone will take a poke and hit my base, but my layout has my gold and dark elixir stores at the heart, with walls and defenses all around. I rarely get hit for more than 50%, and largely I get to keep most of what I harvest from my extractors. Clan Wars can also be a decent source of income, depending on how terrible or not your clanmates are.

Just FYI spending gems on boosting barracks/spell factory is a great way to pile up the gold quick.  You can train up a full army of crap troops or balloons/minions every 8 minutes and constantly attack never going offline while watching tv or knitting or something.

I did this last night and got 3 million golds in the 2 hours.  Think I'll employ this as regularly as my bushes allow.  Best use for gems I've seen yet.

In case anyone didn't notice, there's a special 7 day boost for 1 gem available for all mines and extractors. They're doing it to celebrate the second anniversary. Seems like a no brainer to me.

200-400k every cherry picked fight, bonus good.

New update brings some nice changes:

1) Just when Samwise thought there were no more goop upgrades  :grin:
2) Can cancel spells with no penalty
3) Can use gold or goop for wall upgrades

#3 is huge for me...it means you can dump extra gold and goop into the walls to prevent it from being stolen overnight while you sleep. :)

It never fucking fails.   :awesome_for_real:  I'm all set to start the last PEKKA upgrade today and after that I was going to be done with goop.  I really like that I can dump it into walls now, though.  Previously I've just dumped it into dragons, which are mostly a waste.

You missed the new troop type -- flying, heavy, targets anti-air, splits into smaller things when killed.  Since anti-air is the main counter to healers and dragons I'm thinking it's a way to make those troops more viable.

That unit only does 10 damage:  I get the impression it's sole purpose is to tank for ballons and dragons?

Wow, yeah.  Although when it explodes into smaller things the smaller things do a lot more DPS and they'd probably be able to take the tower out on their own.

Wonder what a couple hounds and swarm of minions looks like.

Did they change healers? Mine have been locked on to my giants like leeches and completely ignoring anything else lately.

I didn't see anything in the patch notes about healer AI changing.  My recollection is that they just target the nearest damaged thing, so if your giants are continually taking damage a healer is going to tend to stay with it and ignore things that are getting hurt further away.

Created a splinter clan. Keeping it small and active. You don't have to be on every day kinda thing, and we're restricting nublets to not having stupid layouts. Anyone wants in, look up Cereal Killers. Blue flag, white diagonal stripe. See ya on the field people.

I'm loving the new loot bonuses.  Even on a loss I make my money back on most war attacks now.

Finished the goop upgrades (again) so being able to dump spare goop into the walls is gonna be huge.

Also, if you've missed the couple of replays I've posted showing hounds, they're fun.  My favorite thing about them is that when they explode the pups are dispersed across a very broad area, meaning they'll trigger mines before your minions do, end up in random blind spots where they can plink away at buildings unopposed, etc.

My understanding was they changed healers about 2-3 patches ago to follow clumps of units rather than single injured units.  thus giant clumps get healer support, which i think i prefer to them attempting to split heal everything.

I've come perilously close to this a few times only to have them add more stuff at the last second, but I've actually finished all my big money upgrades now (just now started the new giant upgrade they added recently), and it only took me about two and a half years.   :drill:

I'm protecting my town hall now and switching from resource stockpiling to trophy farming so I can get that achievement for hitting the top league. Apologies to those in the clan for sticking us with harder clan war targets.   :why_so_serious:

(edit) Current state of the union -- same basic layout I posted about a year ago on page 1 of this thread:

I'm not sure what they use in war selection and ranking, but doesn't appear to be trophies. Possibly base value?

The algorithm was described in an official forum post (http://forum.supercell.net/showthread.php/237478-Clan-Wars-FEEDBACK-here).

I've gotten burnt out on CoC in case you guys were wondering.  And so begins the long search for a replacement.  Have yet to find one.

Seems like there's a million clones out there now so it shouldn't be hard, rite?   :awesome_for_real:  Should I boot you from the clan or are you still dabbling?

Nah, keep me in unless I'm a drag.  I figure my defense is enough to keep a few people occupied without getting completely pwned.  I'll try to pop in more.
As for clones, I've stayed away from them... looking in other genres.  There's a serious lack of quality and definitely not anything we haven't already tried.  I miss the good ol' days of The West, Die2Nite, and so forth.

I'm still playing Minethings, aka EVE But More Boring. :awesome_for_real:

I know Samwise will hate me for posting this, but some "farm" calcs I made:

• For 6 level 12 collectors, we have 3500*6 = 21K per hour goop/gold, or 504K per day
• A 250 gem, 1 week shield gives a total of 3.5M goop / gold, or 14K resources per gem
• A 1-week shield, fully boosted, yields 7M goop/gold, or 7M gold for 10.8K resources per gem
• Gem cost to instantly buy this comes out to 2K gems for 8M gold, or 4K resources per gem

These are per-resource - in reality, it is 28K per gem total resources (gold + goop), etc

So if you want to increase resources quickly without a lot of attacks, the 250 1-week gem done once per month is the most gem-efficient way of doing this.

I don't hate you for it, it's just a waste since shedding trophies gets you the same immunity from attacks without costing any gems.   :awesome_for_real:

As a side bonus it makes our clan war matchups easier.

Clash of <X> seems prominent in my Mobile Apps store.

Shed down how far?

The matchmaking matches you within 220 trophies. So if you shed down far enough the only people who can attack you will (theoretically at least) be too weak to defeat your defences.

The best way to be immune is to do what the top clan did which is to set up an alt alliance and use that to keep hitting your real bases (using the revenge function). Do 40% damage to get a shield but without triggering any stars and without stealing any resources every time your main account shield drops.

But how would that even work, since you cannot directly select your initial target? Do they just keep hitting "next" for hours until their primary base comes up?

Until you stop losing resources in raids.  Put your town hall outside your defenses (which still cover your resources).  Attackers will go for the free town hall win (this will also trigger your shield), but if your trophy count is sufficiently low they'll be too weak to take any resources from you.  

Even if they're able to take your resources they might not bother if they already got a win off you with minimal investment, since they can take the rest of their army and go attack someone else instead.  The more trophies you lose the weaker the attackers will be and the less likely they'll be able to go for your resources even if they wanted to; you'll figure out pretty quickly when you've reached the appropriate equilibrium.

The downside to shedding trophies is that you'll earn less resources in the attacks you make -- but if you buy a one week shield you can't make attacks at all (since attacks would break the shield).  So there's no benefit in doing the shield thing vs the exposed town hall and lose trophies thing.  But do what makes you happy, I won't hate you for it.   :awesome_for_real:

The alt alliance thing sounds like it would only work if you were making a HUGE number of random attacks looking for the right targets, but maybe it's easier when you're way up there in the trophy rankings since the pool is smaller.  Either way I don't think that's a realistic option for filthy casuals like us, and it feels like cheating anyway.

Destroying the HQ will win a star but it won't automatically trigger the shield. Shields are based on percentage of the base destroyed and not on stars. There is a window where you can lose and not get a shield.

The alt alliance thing worked because they were the top players on the server and in a very small pool of trophy points. They would take it in turns to drop from the alliance and join the alt alliance and would then hit next opponent over and again until they got one of their friends. Because there were so few of them in the matchmaking pool, it didn't take all that long for this to happen. It's not a thing you can do if you're further down the ranking. I did chat with one of the top 10 players who said he had a Lego robot attached to a capacitative stylus that kept his iPad alive (he had one dedicated solely to running the CoC app 24/7) when he was asleep or away from his desk. Being constantly online makes you immune to attack also. You can decide how much you value your sanity.

I deconstructed the fuck out of CoC as research for my last project.

You've got it backwards, I think.  The shield is triggered on any loss (even if it's only the TH) -- I have observed this many many many times.  I make an attack, my shield breaks, a few minutes later somebody attacks me for a 4% win, and I have a 12 hour shield.  The shield is ALSO triggered on a successful defense if the destruction is above 40%, so there's a window where you get a shield AND a win, not the other way around.  This is so that if somebody reams you for half your resources but doesn't quite tip it over into a win, you at least don't get double-whammied by somebody else immediately after.

This is also easy to observe from the attacker's side because it tells you when the defender's shield has been activated.  It's quite possible that the mechanics have changed since you did your research; all I know for sure is that's how it works now.  :)

This actually has happened to me a few times:  I once was reamed for 200K resources with 35% damage, followed by another 200K resources with 37% damage, then a complete steamroll for 250K.  650K of each resource looted in the span of about 45 minutes.

I do actually have my TH mostly exposed: guarded by only a single Xbow.  I found if it was completely exposed, people would kill the TH, then use whatever troops they had left for opportunistic leeching from the resource collectors.  Moving it closer as to be covered by a single Xbow (and close enough so that any archer shooting at the TH gets hit) means most people burn through 100+ troops to kill the TH, then leave with their 1K loot.

I didn't realize about the 220 trophy count thing:  I'll try dropping down into the 700's and see if I have better luck.  I was always consistently staying around 1K trophies so that I would find targets with more loot, but it doesn't offset the losses.

Yeah, I do something similar using teslas and traps, although it's more to prevent base streamrolling -- sniping resource collectors isn't an issue since there's not usually very much in them (average time between when I make an attack and collect all my resources to when I get raided is about 15 minutes).  The one downside of not having the TH be completely undefended is that weaker attackers (who pose no threat of rolling you over) may pass you up, increasing the chances that a stronger attacker will be the one to hit you.

Dropping trophies should help in either case.

Yikes, can someone give me the 60 second pitch on this game? Time investment? Comparisons to others (Travian)? Necessity of clans? Etc. I see this is highly rated though it lacks the supermodel Athena (sarcasm).

You could look at the first post in the thread from two and a half years ago.   :awesome_for_real:


To answer your specific points: time investment is short bursts of maybe three minutes at a time (takes about that long to make an attack, then there's enforced downtime while you wait for your barracks to build troops for another attack.  Unlike Travian, you don't suffer permanent damage to your village if you go inactive for a while and someone raids you a lot; you also can't be targeted by a clan and griefed repeatedly because matchmaking is randomized.  Being in a clan gives you some minor cooperative benefits (you have a spot for extra troops that can only be filled by donations from clanmates, and you can do "clan wars" which give you extra loot), but it's completely viable to play solo and ignore all that stuff.  Being in a clan does not make you more or less vulnerable to attack.

One feature that I'm really wishing for:  a saved "army" configuration.

I typically train the following troop load (220 housing):

1) 8 wallbreakers (2 per training center)
2) 8 giants (2 per training center)
3) 44 barbs (11 per training center)
4) 120 archers (30 per training center)

Having to type those in every time is a real PITA.  I wish there was a screen with up to 4 "army compositions/loadouts", and I hit a single button and it trains all 220 worth at once.

For wars, I have been trying:

1) 12 baloons (3 per)
2) 4 dragons (1 per)
3) 40 minions (20 per)

Yeah, I'd love for it to be easier to queue troops up.  I tend to use army loadouts where each barracks is producing one type of troop and the ratios are a function of training time -- in other words things where I just max out each barracks's queue with one kind of guy.  Currently I do 1 lava hound, 55 minions, and 20 balloons.  (Only annoying thing about that loadout is that 1 dark barracks will only queue 45 minions, so if I don't remember to come in and top up the queue before it finishes, it throws things off -- not a big deal, it just takes a little longer and I end up with a few more balloons.)

Note that you can add and train an additional unit beyond what your barracks will hold. I would queue up my normal stuff (IIRC, Dragons, healers, bombers and then a mix of barbarians and archers) so that each queue was about the same length then add another dragon to the end once there was room. That way the dragon would be ready as soon as I had barracks space saving me the training time after a battle. It also placed the elixir needed to train those units out of stealing range.

Yeah, with my army setup it should in theory take 45 minutes because of the lava hound but in practice it takes about half an hour to field a new army because I'll usually have a huge head start from having one already in the pipe.  That's one of the main reasons I keep it simple and just dedicate each barracks to one troop type, it's easier to keep the pipeline full.

For raiding, I'll generally go with:

8 Giants
8 Wallbreakers
8 Wizards
2 Healers
Rest Archers

For CW, if I'm desperate to generate stars, I might go with something like:

14 Hogs
6 Giants
8 Wallbreakers
8 Wizards
Rest Archers

I will sometimes go cheap on raids with a mix of Barbarians, Archers, maybe 6 Wizards, 8 Wallbreakers, and a smattering of Goblins.

I've been hesitant to routinely use Minions or Hogs, as I really need to DE to upgrade my Barbarian King.

Minions are a pretty good value IMO (costs a little under 1000 DE to make a bunch of them, so I limit my targets to ones where I think I can loot at least that much), but my theory is if you're going air you need to go all air.  That way a bunch of their defensive buildings are completely inactive rather than having everything firing at you at once.  If you throw a few air units into a ground army, they just get picked off by the AA towers.

Just in case people doubt the efficacy of the exposed TH strategy (and in case Iain needs convincing that I'm not making up the shield mechanics), here's a representative section of my defense log:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Clash%20of%20Clans/Photo%20Feb%2011%2C%2012%2053%2019%20PM.png)

Note the low destruction % (because they only get the TH and a few defending buildings), the low amount of loot taken, and the length of time between attacks (because each one activates my shield, which stays up until my next attack).  It's a very effective strategy and I can't recommend it highly enough to people who are having trouble keeping their loot safe.

Note also the relatively cheap troops used in the attacks -- these are not armies that would be capable of taking my resources if they wanted to.  Part of this is having a (relatively) low trophy count, and part of it is that even at high trophy counts there are a lot of people trawling for cheap wins with cheap armies, and the exposed TH greatly increases the odds you get attacked by one of those rather than someone with a dozen dragons looking to flatten someone.

No, I realised I'd got the shield thing backwards when you posted before. It's been a while since I last played, I don't think I've seen any of the last few updates.

I broke down and started up a game of this just to have something to play on my tablet. The timing mechanics are making my OCD tendencies a bit crazy, I can only make two things simultaneously and it means I hate the idea of downtime. I have been sorely tempted to set a 3am alarm just to make sure I can get that Level 7 gold mine started a few hours earlier...

Haven't restored the Clan Castle yet, is there much point making that a priority or should I try to get level 4 Town Hall upgrades finished up a bit more?

If you build the castle you can join bat country and people can give you troops to help out.

I'll get started and bolster Bat Country. I too often play these things without an Alliance.

Edit: Wow. Activision really did make this game with a Call of Duty skin. however they did add Predator missiles and Chopper Gunner... but turned Captain Price into an abomination of himself.

The game doesn't consume too much bandwidth on my phone so I ought to be an active member.

Hah, they got Liam Neeson for their commercial. I wonder how much he got paid.

Mobile game companies have been doing a lot of commercial video marketing. I guess that means they are turning a good profit?

Supercell reported $890M revenue in 2013. So it is just possible, yes.

Thanks lots for the archers. Attacking someone else and getting wtfpwned by their clan supplied level 5 archers persuaded me of the value of it. Might need to look at base layout soonish, got a very simple one with mortar in the middle, resource storage around that, pockets for my towers on the corners and the town hall also pocketed but it leaves a 1 tile gap in my wall (with traps). I'm guessing it's made me more trouble than it's worth to attack since I haven't had any since I started despite having several thousand in resources lying around waiting for builders.

Any general tips on how fast to tech up? Should I try to level all my tech and buildings to max before upgrading the town hall? Or are there some I can ignore a bit?

Im running two accounts, and I had a better go of it by leveling the th to 5 and then maxing everything before upgrading the th again. Leave your hall outside your walls, keep the clan castle central. Always upgrade your clan castle first. It is your best defense. Otherwise, walls are the most important in general defense, air for clan wars since people seem to think dragons are the poo.  You will occasionally get steam rolled. It happens. If it starts happening too often, drop trophies asap. When attacking, try and draw castle troops first before you plop your whole army down. Castle troops will fuck you up. Learn to recognize a loss and dont be afraid to hit end battle before killing all your troops. It's a fun game. Enjoy!
 

At lower levels where upgrades are still fairly cheap, the best defence is being poor. Keep your resources low and just build up through battle and/or shields when you need to pay for something more expensive like a TH upgrade.

Burned 10k a little early but request sent to BC.

Maven as a tip one you've got to town hall 4 or so raiding becomes a much, much faster way of getting resources. With a couple of lucky matches I made 70k over about an hour and a half this morning. You can also have troops queued that start producing as soon as you deploy any. Is also cool because those ridiculously high level players that have dropped loads of trophies sometimes have their producers outside defence range and you can talk up 5 or 10k with a few archers.

Now if only I had more than 2 builders, first time I think I've been getting resources faster than I can talk think about spending them.

You only need to complete a couple of quests/achievements to get enough gems for a third builders hut I think. It's doable by the time you hit TH5 or 6 pretty easily I think.

You get 450 gems for getting to 1,250 trophies, which is Silver II I think. I did this around TH5, just ground out trophies for a little bit at the expense of resources, then de-trophied once I got the achievement. I've had three builders since, and that's generally been enough to see me through TH9.

I am on track for third builder and just hit TH4. I will be raiding, I imagine there are fat unprotected casuals ripe for plundering. Build speed is my current bottleneck.

I have five builders and nothing left for them to upgrade but walls (which are instant) and heroes (which there are only two of, and it takes at least a couple of weeks to save up the DE to upgrade one at this point).  I'm kinda looking forward to them inevitably adding another TH level.

I'm having trouble accumulating resources now at TH8. Seems like a lot of work just to try and get the 1M+ coin/elixir needed to upgrade anything while also making sure you hold onto the loot in between fights while rebuilding lost forces.

I'm kind of in the same boat. You might try tanking either gold or elixer, so that you're not a super-juicy target. Also, get that TH outside of the walls - some will burn tons of troops to burn the TH down, then stop the attack and give you a simple shield.

Winning Clan Wars makes building up resources a lot easier.

Having finished all my level 9 walls, the cheapest thing I can build now is... level 10 walls, at 3M gold/elixir a pop (250 sections, which means it'll take me a long while to do all of them).  Curious to see if this means I start actually getting hit for resources again, since now I can't spend down until I'm at 3M, which is more than a third of my storage.

Holy hell inflation with level is insane in this game. 1/3 of your storage for 1 wall section? I was super happy about getting my walls all maxed at TH5 in a couple of days. That would require some severe catassing resource purchasing. Also this seems to be the point where progress starts to slow down as upgrades are starting to move into 1 day territory. I know, I know, 1 day will seem super quick later.

I still have yet to ever buy gems for this game, or do silly shit like using a drinky bird to keep the screen active.  I'm just patient.   :awesome_for_real:

Clan levels and the ability for individuals to opt in and out of wars in the new patch.

Oh, also even bigger cannons.

Yay new cannons.  I've been waiting for them to add a level to match the latest archer tower boost.  Gives me something non-stupid to spend my gold on.

---

So on the clan war thing, I mentioned this in the game chat, but here's the system I think is easiest, given that I can't force the "opt out" flag on people who I know aren't gonna make their war attacks:

1) If you don't have a league, I'll skip you for the war.
2) If you "opt out" of war, I'll skip you for the war.

Everyone else will be in.  

So if you DO have a league but DON'T wanna be in the war (i.e. you know you're not going to be able to make two attacks on war day), please go to your profile and hit "opt out" so there'll be a little orange thing by your name when I'm picking and I'll know you don't want in.  You only have to do this once, and you can change your mind any time.

If you DON'T have a league for some reason but DO want in the war, just make an attack, that puts you in a league and makes it easy to see you're active.  Otherwise I assume the lack of league means you're playing very very infrequently and/or never make attacks, which means you probably don't wanna be in the war, and you just haven't bothered to "opt out" yet.

Once I have the "in" list, it'll be rounded down to the nearest multiple of 5 (because that's how wars work) based on trophy count.

Cool?

What level do Balloons and Minions need to be at to be effective? Is 5/5 good enough. Going to pick up Lava Hounds too when I get enough elixir for the Barracks upgrade.

Depends.  Effective vs what?   :why_so_serious:

Bigger is always better, but you gotta start somewhere.

Sent a clan request.  Still no idea what I'm doing in this game other than building shit.

I've been using 10 Giants / 60 Goblins to farm. I find a juicy target (100k+ resource), distract turrets, and feed. It has been working so far.

You could probably get by with tier 3 minions I think? Also depends on your potions.

I'm opting out of the wars for the moment, spending too much time upgrading defences (are they still out of commission for Clan War attacks like regular raids? Haven't checked) Also going to be out of town for a week or so and not sure if I'll have any connection.

All buildings and heroes are active in war defense, even if they're upgrading/sleeping/unloaded in your main village.

So far I gotta say I'm loving the new war roster mechanics.  We won that last one by what, 2 to 1?  Looking forward to more loots.   :drill:

Let me know how I can help.   :awesome_for_real:  I realize that I'm a year or so behind the rest of you. 

I have only been going for a couple weeks but the Clan War matchmaking accounts for that. You'll be in it sooner than you think, though Sam are you doing ten-mans from now on?

Mostly TH8/TH9 bases in Crystal 2-3. Might just try it; I see all the top players are doing it, and I'm assuming it's because Lava Hounds are OP?

I've been doing all air (minion/balloon mostly) since long before lava hounds.

For now we're doing 10 man wars because we don't have 15 actives.  Needs to be a multiple of 5.

We could start letting in active randoms to pad our numbers for wars...

I am being more active lately, and in a few weeks when I move out of Poland, I'll only have my tablet/iphone and no computer to keep me entertained for 2 months.  So I'll be even more active.   :awesome_for_real:

So please add me back into the wars when ever we have the numbers.

Sam

(http://media.tumblr.com/dd6b90b38715c2442a1ef27c469f08bd/tumblr_inline_n5gxc3r1mR1rrzg0n.gif)

 :awesome_for_real:

 :why_so_serious:

Merusk if you could logon and get one or two Clan Wars stars that'd be great!

Yeah this is a wholly different game with an active warring clan. Good fun, constant upgrades.

Capital Merusk is Merusk Jr, I don't think he's reading this thread.   :awesome_for_real:  He wouldn't have been able to get any stars off the guys who were left anway.

We actually had 100% participation on that last war; I really dig this pick and choose thing.  Means we can actually go toe to toe with srsbsns clans without having to kick people who aren't srsbsns.  I'm hoping some of the new meat helps us get more clan XP.  We'll see how it works out.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRvCwtLLV6I (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRvCwtLLV6I)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

OK, anyone got some lowbie survival tips?  I was winning a lot of early defenses, but it just appears people were raiding me for supplies.  Once I tightened up my defenses, someone just flattened my base.

And do my lowbie shit troops help at all?  If so, what variety of lowbie shit troops do you prefer?  :awesome_for_real:

My standard advice is to pick between gaining trophies and gaining resources.  If you want to save up resources to build, arrange your village so that your resources are protected but your town hall isn't, so people will squish your town hall but not make it to your resources.  A determined attacker at your level can generally make it through at least half your base; make it so the more attractive half to hit is the half you don't care about as much.

As far as troops, lowbie archers make excellent all-round defenders.

Lowbie survival is an oxymoron.

(http://s23.postimg.org/va94z4eu3/20150303_135645.jpg)

May be giving this game too much attention.

Just stick your TH outside, trophies are easier to get than lose, so I wouldn't worry about it.

Priority for behind walls at low(ish) levels are:

1) Storages
2) Air Defense
3) Mortars
4) Wizard Towers
5) Archer Towers
6) Cannons
7) Collectors

...

x) Everything else

Clan castle varies a lot depending on whether your clanmates actively donate. A level 1 castle with 5-10 level 6 archers, barbs, or minions will wreck most low-level assaults.

Don't over-level your Town Hall before getting your other buildings levelled up. Having a higher TH level lowers your reward against other lower level THs (which if your troops are underlevelled will be the only bases you can knock over) and having more low-level defenses is generally worse than fewer levelled defenses

Ditto this. Always have your clan castle central to your base. A valk in your castle will straight fuck most attacks. (Except air.)

Keep your aa leveled.

Thanks for the tips.  I went from getting attacked and raided constantly to only getting attacked twice last night.  They only got a few thousand gold, and I got a free shield.  The donated troops helped greatly.

I need to beef up my AA.

Should probably swap out a cannon for an air defense, then...

REMAKE THE CHART

For some reason, everyone thinks dragon attacks are the shit. Keep your aa leveled and your resource containers by your aa, and you'll fuck em up and they won't know why.

How many times have I complained about lazy-ass dragon drops?

I actually end up having more of a problem with 15-20 giant drops - just cannot get enough DPS on-target before they make a beach head into my base.

Spring traps in strategic locations really fuck giants up.   :awesome_for_real: 

If you've ever seen my main base setup, it's got a little configuration specifically designed to wipe giants out -- tesla, row of traps, tesla.  They bunch up attacking the first tesla, then when it's dead they all move en masse to the second, they trigger the traps, and they're all gone in a blink.  I can almost hear the screams of frustration when I watch the replays.

I don't have a problem with lowbie troops when I request stuff. I don't really ever use CC troops for attacks so they're just a little distraction for attackers and can at least get them to waste time eliminating them.

Some general defence tips:
Prioritise and sacrifice. Look at that priority list and decide how much of it you can actually get inside your walls. Generally at low levels everything except storage and defences should be outside and is just there to slow down your enemy while your towers hammer them. Personally I'd say stick your Town Hall out there too. I never understand players who have things like army camps all together in a corner somewhere.
Compartmentalise. Try to separate different parts of your base so that getting troops through your wall doesn't let them run riot on everything. Also AI prioritises targets based on what they can reach, so if a horde of barbarians breaks into your main base they will not try to take out towers killing them until everything in that compartment is dead.

General playing tip: Raid whenever you have time, collectors take forever to get resources together so you really need to raid.

I actually prioritised levelling up my collectors and haven't regretted it; you can cap them out pretty early on, and it's steady income even when you can't raid. I'm perpetually baffled when I see so many TH9 and TH10 bases with level 4 collectors or some shit... The upgrades aren't even expensive, they pay for themselves in a day or two and after that it's just free income.

Those are the folks that buy everything with gems, and buying collectors with gems just isn't efficient.

I can see your point but I've been rushing advancement as much as I can and have had enough time to spare farming other players. When you've got that income spending the day or two of builder time on collectors isn't a very good use of their time. Once you're getting to TH 6 or 7 fully upgrading all your collectors takes a week or so of builder time so it's a bit of a speed bump. By that point it's also a lot slower than farming (fully upgraded collectors are getting in maybe 10K per hour, one good raid can net you 100K and you can do 3 or 4 an hour at TH6).

Just wait.  You'll be wishing you could level up your collectors more.  Believe you me sir.

Now that I can start collecting Dark Elixir I feel less an incentive to rush Town Hall.

At TH8 I am finding raids to be prohibitively expensive at times - often, targets have shit for loot, and those that do are typically TH9/10 with defenses I cannot reasonably crack unless I do lazy dragon drops, which drives me nuts.

This becomes less of a problem once you get to the point of being able to win at master 3 rank.  The 100k/100k/500 win bonus means i just have to win and i make a guaranteed small profit.  The down side is i get flattened about 25% of the time when i start to get close to the 4.5mil i need for my next upgrade.  Losing 400k makes it hard to get there.

This can be mitigated somewhat by leaving loot in the cc until it's enough to put you over.  It's much safer in there.

My strategy re: building collectors was to split my builders up between building stuff that was as expensive as possible and cheap but slow stuff (i.e. collectors).  If I had three builders, I'd keep one builder on upgrading collectors at all times, and then try to have one big gold construction job and one big elixir construction job going at any given time -- ideally once a builder finished upgrading a tower, I'd have amassed just enough gold to upgrade another tower, and with multiple options I'd just pick the most expensive one that I was able to afford at that point so as not to leave that builder idle, and spend any leftover gold on wall upgrades first if available.  The idea is to not have idle builders or overflowing stores, obv.  If you can avoid both of those you're doing great.

Obviously using your gems on more builders should be top priority so as to speed all this along.   :awesome_for_real:  Before I bought my 5th builder I wouldn't even spend gems on the "cheap" boosts when those specials came around.  Eyes on the prize!  But then I'm a cheapskate who never actually buys gems and just lets them run in at a slow trickle on their own.

So, what sort of levels / protection do you need before it's a good idea to opt in for clan wars? 

Depends a lot on the opponents, below TH 9 you are almost guaranteed to get stomped by someone (and quite possibly at TH 9 if there's a TH 10 on the other side) so it's more a matter of being high enough to be able to at least get a few starts off someone. At TH 6 with max army camps and a couple of max barracks I can be pretty confident there will be 2 or 3 opponents I'll be able to to 2 or 3 star. At TH 5 it's a bit dicier but I think there's an algorithm to try and make wars competitive so any time is good as long as your defences are well upgraded for TH level.

That.  As long as you're fine at pvp relative to your general level war should work out okay.

*shrug* It's free income, and as long as you don't upgrade them you're missing out.

At TH9 with six level 12 collectors I'm getting 21000 of each resource per hour. Even with a cheap raiding setup (24 Giants, 100 Archers, King, Queen, 3 Heal, 1 Rage) I need to clear bases at a minimum of about 100K elixir to break even, and there just aren't that many bases with that many resources that are easily cracked. Also, depending on how many spells I use, I'm looking at 45mins-1.5hrs just to rearm between fights. So at this level I'm incredibly glad of the extra income. Just overnight I net maybe 200-300K of each resource, that's not trivial when your cheapest upgrade is 2.5mil.

You're right that upgrading your extractors is a speed bump, but it's one that pays for itself so stupidly quickly that you'd be daft not to imo.


TH8 is a pretty rough spot. All I can say is that probably 40% or so of the bases I see at Crystal III are TH8 (the very occasional TH7, mostly TH9, plenty of TH10), and not all are very good. I think many rely on the fact that they simply cannot offer enough reward to be worth attacking by higher-level players. You get 35,000/35,000/100 bonus per fight, which I imagine would defray a decent chunk of your raiding costs? I slogged out most of my TH8 time down in the low silver leagues, feeding off dead bases with full extractors, and easy targets who were saving for upgrades, safe in the knowledge that most of the other players were too shit to raid me. I think the same could work up in the higher leagues, I don't know how far you could push it. The tradeoff is that on the one hand, the higher you go, there will be fewer and fewer people to whom you represent a profitable target, on the other hand, the bases you can crack and win (accounting for the bonus) will decrease. I think the worst thing is to sit in the middle, where you get raided by better players, but there are fewer shit bases to prey on. THe worst of both worlds.

At master3 (and crystal 1 to some extent) the win bonus covers the troop cost so you just have to win and care a lot less about what resources the target base has.  Priority is bases you can crack.  Inferno towers suck.

I get your point and I imagine it's true at higher TH levels (sounds like maybe from about 8) when upgrade costs start getting bonkers and raiding becomes harder work. Thing is that at 6 or below (can't speak to higher levels with experience yet) it's not hard to raid a bit and get the resources for most upgrades. It's a little more efficient (I think) in terms of builder time to keep teching based on raiding income and spend the builder time for the collectors when it's becoming difficult to get the cash for the big upgrades. That way while you're trying to save for your 2million gold cannon upgrade or whatever you can keep your builders busy improving random collectors.

Of course that's coming from someone with a bit of an ADD mindset to things like this where I'm 'wasting' builder time if they're not doing anything. It's also just as valid to take things a little slower and tech everything up at once, you get to the exact same place eventually.

Any opinions on my new layout?

Looks really good for TH8, can't see any obvious improvements!

My son has started playing this.  He's 5.  He also wants to to join a clan. 

This is going to be fun.   :awesome_for_real:

But can he write a haiku?  :grin:

I don't think he knows what a syllable is yet.

Well, my first clan war attacks didn't go so well.  Do I get a participation ribbon?

BTW, thanks for letting the boy in.  He's having fun, although miffed that you're not including him in wars.  :awesome_for_real:

I don't even remember what his login name is, but here's my completely fair system for who goes in wars:

1) You need to opt in.
2) You need to have a PvP rank.
3) After people have been weeded out by rule (1) or (2), I drop people from the bottom till we have the required multiple of 5.

So if he's not being included in wars he either needs to gain some levels (which'll happen quickly enough over time) or he needs to attack other players once in a while (which is good practice for being in wars anyway, because it's exactly the same gameplay and it takes a while to learn how to do it well).

But you need to attack at just the right time so that you have a rank on during war selection.  :grin:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Macros/waaah.gif)

On average you've got 24 hours in between the league reset (every other Monday) and the start of the next war (which is roughly every 48 hours at no particular set time).  24 hours is the length of a war day; if you can't make one attack within a given 24 hour period, you're probably not gonna be able to make your two war attacks during the following 24 hour period either.

The league rank is the best at-a-glance indicator I have of whether somebody is actually playing and doing PvP (as opposed to being idle and/or a carebear, which is totally fine but also is not the people who should be doing clan wars).  There are other indicators, like who's active in chat, whining about being left out of wars, donation counts, etc, but I can't see that stuff while I'm in the war roster screen, and I don't want to spend time writing all your stupid names down on a piece of paper so I can separately track who should go in the war and who shouldn't, and my memory isn't good enough to keep track of 20 people so inevitably I'm going to forget one of you special snowflakes and there'll be bitching and moaning that I'm playing favorites or some stupid shit.  Much easier to just uncheck people who don't have a rank.

I guess what I could do is wait to start wars until Monday night on league reset days, giving everyone a full day to get their rank back before I pick rather than leaving it up to the whims of the preceding two weeks worth of timing offsets.  On the other hand if I just go ahead and start the war ASAP, it's only 2 days till the next one.  So I've just been going for the "start the war ASAP" option.  More wars means more clan XP.  Opinions?

In a perfect world I'd be able to just opt people out of war; then all I'd have to do is put everyone in who's opt-in, and at the end of the war opt-out people who didn't make their attacks so I'd have a roster of actives the next time.  Alas.

I guess the difficulty for me is that with my schedule, I typically come home in the evening and log on to a lengthy shield. Moreso in the past than now, but I'm not necessarily inclined to drop the shield if I'm close to starting an expensive upgrade.

The interface could use some work I guess, or they need to give clan leaders more tools.

I think better tools for clan leaders would help but it also comes down to how well organised clans are. If Sam could rely on people opting in or out reliably it wouldn't be a problem but it is kind of a pain if you drop all that elixir on 2 strong attacks and then the clan loses the war by 1 star with some people not having made any attacks at all. Then again some of you higher level guys take all the low hanging fruit and no-one else can make any attacks with a prayer of getting more stars :mob:

I'm not sure what the conditions are to be able to dump goop into walls. I got the option the other day to use elixir or gold on wall upgrades, does it only come up if you've got a certain minimum amount or if your elixir count is higher than gold or something?

Goop for walls only shows up once you start buying level 9 walls. There was a short bit when it showed up at lvl 6, but that made for sad pandas.

Was that like two days ago? If so sad pandas indeed.

Nah like a month or so.  I prefer it this way because more goop to steal.

I looked into it, wasn't going mad. Apparently the last patch broke it so that TH6 and above could upgrade with goop for about 6 hours until they fixed it.

I'll try to keep my son from emojii-bombing chat again.  :awesome_for_real:


He just needs to level.  He attacks everything constantly.  He attacks so much that he forgets to upgrade buildings.  I try to stealth upgrade shit while he's sleeping.  :awesome_for_real:

And like I mentioned, he's young.  The finer strategic points evade him.  I don't think he's figured out how to pass when attacking.  He just hits whatever pops up first. 

Oh mine bombed chat a shitton a while back.  Chat could use bombing every now and then imo :)

So Im really hating lavaloon. Any of you guys having success with this bullshit? Seems good for one star, but 2 or 3 is too much of a crapshoot.

Lavaloon?

(edit) Oh, hound + balloons?  I usually do pretty well with that as long as I don't pick a target with upgraded infernos.  I also throw in a lot of minions, because you need something that'll target defenders, resources, etc and the lava pups ain't gonna cut it.  1 hound, 20 balloons, 55 minions is my standard loadout.  Queue hounds on one barracks, minions on another, balloons on all the rest and that's the ratio that comes out.

Lavaloonian I think. (http://www.gadihh.com/lavaloonion-guide.html)

You use it in wars Sam?

Yeah, luckily I'm not in a super serious clan that requires me to bring my tryhard game every time.   :awesome_for_real:  Like I said, I don't go for high level targets with that army; if they have max defenses air doesn't provide enough power unless you go all in on spells (freeze/rage) and mix in some dragons.  The lava/balloon/minion combo with a heal and a rage is decent against anyone at TH9 and people who are just starting the TH10 defenses though.

If I were putting together a tryhard army I'd go heavy on golems, with a couple of witches to provide chaff and wizards for DPS.

IMO doing well with the hound/balloon combo is all about where your balloons go.  If they can get the air defenses early and if the xbows are pointed down then you can 3 star, but if they go the wrong way you're hosed.  Air bombs on your minion clump also leaves you hosed.  I can reliably 3 star th8 but th9 can be a total crap shoot with me sometimes sucking and sometimes pulling off a 3 star.

Golem/wiz/witch is far more reliable and is almost a guaranteed 2 star on th9 even with my crap leveled stuff.  Just more expensive.

You should come back Walrus, we're a lot more competitive now that the inactives and the don't want to's are not in the wars.

Im in a really good friendly clan. We war twice a week, and its pretty tryhard, but oddly relaxing. Everyone uses both attacks and chat is very active and donations flow freely. Think I lucked my way into one of the best clans in the game for the not super serious. Only issue I have is no cussing. Hard to restrain myself after a shit attack.

And yeah, my other account uses th8 max gowipe, its a beast.

It's really boring, but I still use giants and archers and I comfortably 2-3 star most of my bases in Crystal I.

24 Level 6 Giants
100 Level 6 Archers
Level 10 King
Level 7 Queen
1 Level 5 Rage
3 Level 6 Heal

For wars I sometimes switch to 36 level 5 hogs + archers or wizards. If the base is laid out densely enough and I can reasonably predict the locations of the giant bombs.

See, my theory on just mashing the war button constantly is that if you lose, you still get most of the clan XP (which is my main motivator for war these days), so even consistently losing every two days is better than consistently winning every 3.5 days.  Plus we actually do win sometimes.   :awesome_for_real:

I'm quite content with the Bat Country system.

TBH, the matching system seems really funky; since SuperCell have never actually given many specifics about how it works it's hard to say why, but my impression is that it matches based on the total investment in base structures and unit/spell upgrades, but ignores walls. It also uses these values to rank the bases within each clan. I concluded this after seeing myself ranked above bases with millions more invested into walls, but less into base defences, or vice versa.

If this is the case (and it could very well not be) then it makes for imbalances as the strength of walls can significantly affect the outcome of battles.

This is close.  

PSA: if you were on the clan at some point and are now inactive, you probably have some attacks you can use on a hapless 21/22 rank sporting a lvl 5 town hall.  You too, Strazos.  :awesome_for_real:

On another note, my son is totally incapable of dealing with valkyrie defenders.  "no.. don't send all your barbarians... and now they're gone."

Valk defenders are one thing I don't have to worry about with my air attacks.   :awesome_for_real:  The equivalent for air is the goddamn air mines, but I've gotten pretty good at managing those.

I'm surprised at how well we're doing given that I just put the whole roster in there (including all the inactives that I usually filter out by dropping unranked people).  But the fact that each active gets two attacks means that we could theoretically manage with a 50% active team as long as we make every attack count.  Should I pad things out more in the future?  Maybe just include a few coma patients from the bottom so we get more easy targets?

Likely.  Although a mid tier afker sometime gets them to waste an attack or two chasing 3 stars.  I don't care either way.  I like being not serious but occasionally caring if we win or lose.  Foreigners, I just figure we'll lose to.  The Chinese don't fuck around.

We did good. I honestly didn't think we'd pull this one out as toe-to-toe, they were a lot stronger in the mid to lower tier.   I probably should have 3 starred that 18, but I had one of my typical troop placement brainfarts and neglected to place all of my giants out. Wasted 2 spells on only 3 of them.  

My tier seems to be that if someone has dragons, I'll lose.  I just can't repel a squad of lvl 2 to 3 dragons backed up by balloons.

Yeah, dragons are rough where you're at. They peak off around late-late TH8, early TH9, especially once you get that extra air defense and XBows.

Last war went well!

From what I've seen once you've got 3 lvl 6 Air Defences dragons really become a 2* attack, even before that with 3 lvl 5 ADs they need good placing to 3* reliably. Prior to that they can pretty much roll any base.

I believe Supercell changed their war matching algorithm recently to take walls into account although they're not a huge impact, previously they didn't register at all. I've seen reports though that things like ADs don't have a huge impact (presumably because they're very specialised) while Archer towers or cannons do, even though at certain points (like early-mid TH8) those ADs make a big impact on how well your base can deal with the most common attacks. I'd say it's really just an imperfect science trying to match. Usually they do a good job but every now and again it's a bit  :uhrr: to see someone with ridiculously low level walls and no ADs being matched above someone who has a base that can actually deal with an attack.

We lost by 11 stars but attempted 20 fewer attacks.   :ye_gods:  I think we had one or two regulars that didn't attack.  This is fine, it happens.  We have like 8 people in that 25 man stack that haven't ever attacked from what I've seen. 

I don't mind losing, but we're putting ourselves at a pretty significant handicap.  If anything, we can probably win 20s, but leave out the inactive higher level folk.  Some of our lower levels reliably attack and can be counted on for at least one 3 star attempt.

Yeah, I did 25 for that one because at those numbers even a loss would tip us over to level 5.   :awesome_for_real:  I'll do 20 from here on.  Except for right after the league reset, when it gets hard to figure out who the inactives are -- for those days I've decided to just put everyone in so people don't whine about me not being able to keep track of them.

(edit) Just confirmed that donated max-level troops do not benefit from the +1 level bonus.  I didn't actually expect that I'd be able to give people level 7 fire-breathing minions but had to check.

I always enjoy it when Merusk's son attacks. You never know what new and exciting combo of troops he's going to use! And to his credit, he's decently effective  :awesome_for_real:

Inactives are killing us for sure.

I've come to the conclusion it's a delicate balance -- if we run with ONLY the actives, which was my policy for a while, we get matched with clans that are pound for pound a lot tougher (tryhards who are willing to go all in with dragons and freeze and fury etc).  If we run with everyone, we get lots of soft squishy targets but we don't have enough people to exploit all of them.  I'm thinking that knocking off the highest level inactives but leaving some padding at the bottom (for matchmaking purposes) is the way to go.

That seems like a pretty reasonable policy; in most of our matches we go more or less even in the top 5-8 bases - aside from those occasional super-tryhard chinese and korean clans - so tinkering with the bottom end inactives sounds like a decent idea.

It's a TH9 v. usually a dude with no walls.  But hey, he's attacking every time.  My son likes to attack first or Merusk jr. will have taken his preferred target.  That's when I can convince my son that attacking the #1 is a bad idea until he's done a real attack.

Which one is your son? They're both about five years old right?

Alexander.  He randomly spams chat at times.

Capital-M Merusk is Merusk's son.  (lowercase merusk is Merusk Sr.)  I think he's a little older, like 10-ish?

Alexander is about 5? He's doing well figuring out some general strategies. I wasn't sure if he was someone's son the first time he started posting replays so bit my tongue over snarky comments :awesome_for_real:

Also TH8 is killing me, I've got 3 Teslas on their second upgrade set and it's 8 days each. Then another level :ye_gods: I've just about been able to keep raiding enough to keep gold and lix rolling in quickly enough to have something for builders to do when they're free. Mostly because I hadn't upgraded my collectors at all so they're all level 9 now. Also our midfield lineup seems kind of weak in wars. I'm reliably getting matched with people who have maxed everything and need to drop 3 or 4 slots to find someone with a less upgraded base. Also I think I've gotten to the point where dragons aren't great any more, although level 3 is cooking.

I really want to try using hogs but keep reserving my DE for Barb King upgrades. PEKKA next week though so maybe I can try GoWiPe with Giants instead.

I had a look at your base, it's really not too bad, although the layout could always be optimised slightly.

You're hitting one of the tougher stretches where your income from enemies is going to plateau; from late TH8 until late TH10 you're mainly going to be seeing raidable bases in the 120,000-240,000 G/E range, but your upgrades keep getting more expensive. You'll get the odd whale with uncollected resources where you get 400K or something, but otherwise the way to really accelerate your income is to get into a higher league. I waited until I was at TH9 to grind my way up to crystal, but judging by some of the bases I see you'd probably be fine with what you have. Honestly the attacks on you won't change dramatically, but getting an extra 20,000+ loot on your attacks really helps. Crystal I would probably be a stretch (I usually have to go through 20+ bases to find something cost-effective to raid) but Crystal III might be a decent thing to aim for.

Don't know whar to suggest for troops. Giant+WIzard+Pekka seems unlikely to be cost-effective, although it could be very effective for grinding trophies. At TH9 I can three star a decent number of bases in Crystal I with 100 Archers[6] 24 GIants[6], BK, AQ, Three heals and a rage, which seems to be a pretty cost-effective setup.

I use level 5 hogs for wars; they're pretty awesome. You just need to be sure to blanket their path with heals and learnt o anticipate where the big bombs are likely to be.

Otherwise I'd suggest:

1) Maxing out your collectors. The upgrades are cheap, and it's free income.
2) Grinding up to Crystal III
3) Go for TH9 once you have all pink or better walls, and level 9+ cannons and towers.

Just turned 6.  Yah, he's doing OK.  Loves the game and is somewhat obsessed with it. 

As for his replays... yah, he doesn't quite have a good grasp on ROI.  All he sees are wins and losses, and this is precisely why he won't stick his TH outside the walls.  He'd rather lose 200k elixir and win.   :|

Base layout, I find on my phone it's just a bit of a pain laying out a new base. I figured grab something decent off the net and play around with it a bit. As long as it makes it an uninviting target and minimises how oftern I get stomped by TH9s I'm happy with it. For farming I'm just barching with a few Wall breakers, trying to minimise downtime which is fairly cost effective. The GoWiPe suggestion was really just for wars, I think I'd only use it on raids for practice.

The Crystal suggestion might be worthwhile, without really caring about trophies and leaving my TH exposed I seem to be staying around Gold III/II so could probably get to Crystal pretty easily. Current biggest pet peeve is trying to get CC troops for war attacks. If I want to train war troops I have to drop my shield to use up my mens, this inevitably gets me raided and my CC drained before I go for a war attack and we're not the best clan for troop donations.

I can't complain too much though, I'm almost always just donating archers.

Why don't use just use up your troops in the single player campaign? Fighting there doesn't drop your shields.

My typical loadout is something like 12 giants, 12 wizards, 12 breakers, rest archers. For wars I sometimes toss in a healer and less archers, or play with the ratios a bit. Rarely, I'll try with balloons and minions, but they both need additional upgrades I think.

Now, I'm usually donating 2 wiz/4 archers to each participant.

..... I'm an idiot and forgot that even existed. Thanks

Balloons, like Hogs, seem to be pretty iffy before max level, where they have enough HP to survive burst damage. BElow that it's too easy for a mortar/wizardtower/bomb combo to strike at a bad moment and wipe the whole clump of them.

20 more hero upgrades and I'll be donating lots of max level dark troops, since at that point I'll finally have nothing left to spend it on.   :grin:

Great news Sam, the next update is going to feature a Dark Spell Factory among other things so you'll probably have something else to spend DE on.

My guess is the upgrade costs for that thing will be way less than the hero upgrades are (150k-ish at level 30).

Looking at the features they're announcing a lot of it seems like good quality of life stuff. The new spells seem REALLY medicore though.

The earthquake spell at max level seems to do ~8% of a building's current hit points, which is pretty pitiful, but they have to keep it low enough that people can't just snipe Town Halls with combinations of lightning and earthquake spells. The poison spell might be good, but generally there are better ways to deal with garrisoned troops (see how lightning spell use drops off pretty much to zero once players have rage and heal). I guess if it's cheap you might take one with you, but doesn't seem like a must have. Haste seems beyond useless; getting my troops from point A to point B quicker - even allowing for all the quirks of pathing - is rarely an issue. If anything the speed increase on rage means that units run out of it's AoE before using all of its potential. I can't see how a gimpy version of this will be that good. Maybe there'll be some cheesy strategies that use hasted goblins to dodge mortars, but since most base defenses don't take time of flight into account on their projectiles, I really don't see the use.

Sure the new spells are cheaper and you can carry more of them; but their utility seems (on the face of what I have seen so far) pretty limited.

Dragon level 5 might mean it sees some play again in wars; but it's not going to be cheap.

No more using lightning to take resources!  I'm happy about that one.  Glad it's coming at the same time as the new dragon upgrade, since building up the full 8M elixir (I assume) is going to be hard enough without people zapping my goo vats.

Is this even a thing?

I skimmed the Supercell forums for comments on the update and everyone seems to be having histrionics over 'DE Zapping' which is something I have never experienced. Having a base shielded 99% of the time thanks to TH outside the walls helps, but I have never once seen anyone try and lightning any of my storages.

The people on the supercell forums are weird. They also seem all very obsessed about raiding for loot in the Silver leagues, which doesn't seem particularly likely to be efficient to me, but maybe I need to drop down and have a look.

*TOUCH WOOD*

It doesn't happen to me that often, but when my DE is near full (when I'm saving up for a hero upgrade) every now and then I'll get an attacker who just drops 5 lightning on it and takes about 3k.  It's infuriating because there's absolutely no way to defend against it.  Lightning on the other resources isn't as big of a deal, especially if they're spaced out so they can't hit more than one at once, but all the DE goes in one basket so it's a very tempting target.  And when elixir vats are full you'll easily pay for the cost of a lightning spell by zapping one of them.

The Dark spells take up 1 spell slot, regular spells now take up 2 (with 11 slots I believe at TH10) so those haste spells are making LoonIon look a bit better (2 haste spells instead of 1 rage to get balloons through defensive building range). The earthquake spell also seems like it might do extra damage to walls, potentially at TH8 it could also kill an AD with 2 lightnings so would free up a spell slot if you usually go for 3 lightnings plus dragons or something.

Edit: Poison, will have to see what it's damage/duration/spell slot cost is like in practice I think. The damage stacks and it takes a while to go so might actually be really useful for taking out high HP CC troops or royals. The Second air sweeper should be interesting, takes a lot out of the lvl 4 dragon upgrade though for fighting other TH9s.

The one complaint I've seen about this update that's been consistent is pretty much that it still doesn't make Royals usable in war while upgrading. I'm kind of torn over that as it's a pretty substantial handicap for wars for TH9/10s but I'm really not sure what the point is. It's not enough of a one that anyone would ever choose not to upgrade their royals (more likely to just opt out of wars) so it's not a choice at all, just an annoyance. You've also got that handicap for farming, which seems reasonable.

I'm of course very annoyed by inability to use heroes in wars while upgrading, since each upgrade hobbles me for 3 wars, but like you say, it's an annoyance, it doesn't change my strategy any.

The new army training interface is kind of neat with the tabs and the hammers to tell you when something is upgrading.

The speedup in spell brewing time is very nice.  In a typical attack I drop a rage and a heal, which used to take about twice as long to rebuild as my troops -- now it's more or less even with my troop training time.  If I can win an attack without using my heroes I can attack almost twice as often now.

I don't much care for the increased elixir cost of level 4 basic troops.

Oh man, being able to queue spells when they're full is another great addition.

When they updated the matchmaking algorithm to favor those with a TH level close to yours, this increased the benefit of going to Silver League. Before, as a TH8-9 you would find a lot of low level THs in Silver, which meant the loot penalty made it not worth the time and effort to find a base worth attacking. Now that the matchmaking favors similar THs, there's a better chance you'll find a dead base with a high TH that has been dropped in trophies, which means free collector loot.  The downside was that it's still possible to get matched against TH7 opponents who have no chance at getting trophies from you, but can drop 3 lightning on a chock full DE storage to steal 1k+ DE.

Definitely an awesome change that will change the dynamics of the leagues and how people raid. I wouldn't be surprised if they now try to find a way to remove the "farm base", making it so that having only your TH sniped doesn't give you a shield. This will make attacking another player a strategic encounter that requires a full army, and reduce the benefit of being in higher leagues simply to get nice loot bonuses when sniping a TH.

The increased archer/barbarian costs, coupled with a small buff to archer towers, seems to be geared towards discouraging players from "barching" (archer/barb armies) as the primary method of raiding, and encouraging more diverse armies on a regular basis. This is the 2nd archer tower buff now, and the first one made it harder to do serious damage with a relatively cheap 2-unit army. I haven't had a chance to try it out, but I have read the barch seems more difficult now.

Ah that's interesting, I guess that makes some sense then.

I really hope they don't touch TH shield dynamics. I don't think it's particularly bad for gameplay, and certainly I think Boom Beach suffers by having a much simpler win/loss condition combined with no shield system. Being able to dump trophies, and get shields seems to be part of the meta that makes the game more enjoyable. But then I'm biased, since I have my TH exposed since it's far more profitable for me.

Perhaps if everyone shifted to exposed TH's they might change it, but based on my back-of-the envelope maths, the proportion that does is still fairly low. Even accepting that exposed bases have a shield uptime of roughly 95%+, the number I see in matchmaking is tiny, probably around 1%. I guess that would translate into maybe 25% or so playing with this style? I could be totally wrong.

I'm amazed by how few exposed THs I see in my league.  It doesn't seem to be very common at all -- abandoned bases are a far more frequent sight and those are still very rare.  Given the huge benefits of that strategy I don't know why more people don't use it.

Nasty town hall surprises in this match up.  Proceed with caution.  

Silver was a gold mine.  I'd find people with junk walls sitting on 100-200k worth of easily gotten resources.  I'm not a very efficient raider, however, I don't really change up my normal setup from wars.  While raiders end up leaving my base with a loss (if they don't bother picking off the exposed TH), I usually 100% whatever I attack. 

Yeah, I'm firmly in the barching for efficient raiding camp, though this doesn't work so well when I'm time limited as getting 100k of each off a raid doesn't matter when half an hour later someone hits me for like 250k gold and lix and 1.5k DE. This update might force me to try some cheaper but more varied combos. Plus for a bigger raids I really need my BK along, which is going to get less common as he levels up and spends more time sleeping between raids.

Edit: Actually thinking about some of the changes, if we saw an increase in elixir cost for basic troops and a slight reduction in some of the others (maybe Wizards/giants?) I could see turning to more varied army formations. Currently barching is simply so simple and pretty efficient as well as giving me a bit more to do when I've got free time with the game. Mixing it up is going to force longer wait times and seriously discourage hitting anyone who doesn't have relatively full storages rather than being happy taking 100k/100k from collectors. Mix that in with taking away TH shields and I can see the game becoming much more frustrating for any kind of farming so I really hope they don't go that way.

Also I think the new spells are going to have a substantial impact but it seems like they only really come into their own at TH 10 where you can level them up enough and have a large enough number for their stacking to really pay dividends. 4 earthquakes will destroy high level walls and seriously damage buildings in that area making them a pretty viable alternative to jump spells. Haste is going to be necessary for balloon attacks to deal with the extra airsweeper I think.

So, when should I move to TH8?  My last non-wall gold upgrade finishes in about 32 hours.  I can level barracks and have about 2.75m elixir in research upgrades I can do (on troops I don't use).   Seems like we can use a solid 7 still as our drop off after TH8 is pretty steep.  We don't have a ton of lower level folks that can reliably 3 star a built up TH6 or a lower TH7, and TH6s still pay OK in war bonuses.

War victory is still pretty much coming down to participation.  Glad we pulled this one out, however, as the guys we were facing were pretty sad.

My son was elated that their #3 went slumming and bulldozed his base. 

My family clan just went up against a clan whose war participants had obviously decided to stay at TH7 and win wars. Every single one of them was a fully developed TH7 with fully trained troops. They 30 starred us almost immediately because we have a TH8 who upgraded way too soon, 6 TH7s in various stages of development and a couple of lowbies. :) We lost that one but we've been winning most of our wars simply because we're disciplined enough that we do all of our attacks.

THe next tier of walls (blue crystal) will last you into TH9 well enough. It might be nice to have some more fully developed TH7 bases, but frankly I think if you'll have more fun moving on to TH8 and building up then I'd do it.

I think that unless everyone decided to fully minmax then there's not much benefit to matchmaking considerations.

Fun > Minmaxing

My personal win condition is "BUILD ALL THE THINGS".  What's the point of winning wars if you aren't using your loot to build more things?

Build all the things! Personally I just took it as builder time being the main concern, I had finished all upgrades so tried to time the TH8 one to finish with my final few buildings. It did mean the first few weeks at 8 were a bit crazy trying to keep up with the gold and elixir needed though. If you've got all your defences and troops maxed though there's not much reason not to upgrade, though getting the walls and some gold stocked up would make the first few weeks of 8 a bit easier.

I'm wondering if we should move to a "fast troop" / "slow troop" war donation scheme?

I see in most replays that it's trivial to get a bunch of wizards and archers to bunch up in a nice knot and drop poison / AOE troops and finish them off quickly.  On the other extreme, minions + balloons in the clan castle are almost impossible to bunch due to the massive speed difference:  but fairly useless since balloons just end up chasing everything else around while getting picked apart.

I wonder if we split between minions and archers if our war defenses might be more effective?  Minions are fast which means after a few seconds catching all the CC troops in a single poison spell might be more difficult.

It's generally not too hard to bunch troops regardless IMO; just drop cannon fodder one by one at the corner of the map to keep all the CC guys coming that way, then drop your spells when they're all together.  Poison makes it even easier since it's a wider AoE and guaranteed death for everything inside.

Level one poison won't one-shot max level balloons. Two balloons can be a real pain to deal with, even if it's just a matter of wasting the attacker's time. If they don't kill them though they will absolutely wreck things like Giants or the King. I'm not sure how good minions are as CC troops. I think ideally a mix of balloons, dragons, valks and wizards is ideal, but that's also pricey I realise.

I admire the donating enthusiasm, but there is quite a lot of junk getting donated for wars. There''s been a couple where I've tried to build dragons for war CCs but they're all blocked by level 4 barbs or some such. Hey ho, I can't complain too much about people donating though.

Also;

Dudebro
dudebro

Yeah, should we boot Dudebro?  He's sort of active I guess, but he seems pretty useless and I don't think we know him.  Do we?

I don't know much about him other than the fact that he once told me to shut up, and he likes to spam his name in chat. Also when someone told him off for telling me to shut up he donated four level 3 barbs as a sort of apology, I think?  :awesome_for_real:

Are we sure he's not somebody's 6 year old son?

I'm not positive, that's why I ask... but I don't think anyone has claimed him so far.

Not my kid.  Although my son does like to donate useless troops. He's helping!  :awesome_for_real:

With the OP poison spell now I feel like CC troops only serve as a fear factor for people to consider in wars. Either we'd need to move to high HP/cost troops like Dragons and Valks or just cheap stuff to tie up some enemy troops emptying the CC like Barbs/Archers.

I really need to donate more for war CCs too, on the other hand I'm finding since the update my elixir farming has been crap. Like on good days I'll be making 1/3 or so as much as I am gold and on bad days when I'm getting raided almost every time my shield drops because my gold is so high I'm winding up with less elixir. On the upside I've got one last Tesla upgrade to start and have all my ADs and Mortars upgraded so I guess I can try and get enough elixir for every other upgrade while wall grinding. Getting Pekka lvl 3 is going to be a nightmare though, I need maxxed elixir for that one :ye_gods:

I'm working on maxed elixir for the new level of dragon now.  It always gets to be really slow going as you near capacity, because you become a very fat target and successful hits take more off you than you can expect to make back in your next hit.

As a new clan member, any rules regarding war donations?  I'm more than happy to donate, just don't want to step on any toes if that's already handled.

Nope but we should probably come up with something. I don't donate war troops that often but being in the middle ranking I should probably try filling some of the lower level CCs with stuff. Maybe a list of suggested troops and level differences for war donations? Obviously there's not a lot of point donating lower level troops.

Remember we've got that clan perk now that upgrades troops by 1 level when donated.   :drill:

I typically try to donate 2 wizards and 4 archers to everyone during war prep.

I donated some balloons.  Usually I donate archers or wizards, but typically not until people need to restock.

I mainly just donated the balloons to mess with attacks.  I didn't give any to higher level folks (I don't think), because even boosted to 5, I figure they may not be sturdy enough to get the desired effect.

edit:

For like the last 2 weeks, I've been almost exclusively raided.  No one is just hitting my town hall and leaving.  Was there a change to match making or do they just not give you a shield for a hit and run anymore?  It's getting annoying.  I was trying to stockpile resources for post TH8 and eventually just had to use gems on a 2 day shield.

The matchmaking change a few weeks ago was restricting it to THs 2 levels above or below you and increasing the chances of someone your own level. I think they may also have been a bit more aggressive at weeding out abandoned bases as I find full collectors a lot less frequently. There's still a shield for hit and runs on exposed THs but like I said earlier it seems people are getting pushed more towards doing storage raids and base wipes as bases with full collectors are becoming less common. That's anecdotal though, I'm not sure if they have or not.

Abandoned bases with full collectors get less common as you move up through the ranks because those bases naturally fall down due to not being defended and not doing raids to regain trophies.  I almost NEVER see ghost towns any more.  You might just be moving up in the world.

Yikes, so obviously i need to make some adjustments in my war attacks.  Vs TH7 & early TH8 opponents, it was quite simply full dragons = win.  Having just dinged TH8, I'd been quite successful in my previous Clan using GoWiPe, but I was the #1 member, and I was facing little in the way of CC war defenses/troops.

Any suggestions on dealing with CC troops? I think I need to work on kiting and nuking them down?

Help!

You think correctly.  Fighting CC troops one by one in the middle of their base with defense towers DPSing you at the same time will mess you up unless you're really quick with lightning and/or poison (assuming they're killable that way).  CC troops you've lured to the edge of the map can be dealt with at your leisure.

Luckily, unlike heroes, once you've pulled CC troops out of the castle they'll go wherever the action is, and then stand there like dummies if there's nothing to attack.  All you need to do is get one of your troops in close enough to pull the defenders out of the castle; then drop cheap troops one by one in whatever spot you want to lure them to.

This Poison spell video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klrPDsG4_EM) has a pretty good coverage of ways to deal with CC troops, assuming it's not like 1 Valk and a dragon or something.

I hope I didn't prevent anyone from getting the last attack in on that 14.  Figured I'd try to use my son's account to desperation star it.  He didn't have all of his troops trained and no spells.   :oh_i_see:

I really didn't think we'd even be that competitive in this one.

edit: my phone has been repaired, happy days

As I'm sure has been noticed, I've pretty much stopped playing this game a month ago.  I might jump back into it again someday, but for now interests have shifted off elsewhere.  So don't expect me to contribute anything during wars and what not.

The reason I don't put people in wars who don't have league ranks is that there's no way I can actually remember who's playing and who isn't on a day to day basis.   :awesome_for_real:

As an aside, walls are pretty important.

I've almost got a solid layer of level 10 wall now.  Shit's getting real.  Real expensive.

Oh shiiiiit new lightning upgrade and 25 new wall pieces.

Those 25 new wall pieces are a gift and a curse.  Now I need to come up with whole new layouts that make good use of them.   :drill:

I realised that I had run a joke base layout by accident in the previous two wars; what's most impressive is that it sort-of worked against one attacker.

Is lightning ever going to be good though? Heal and Rage just seem so much more powerful and versatile than a few thousand damage in one spot. Poison is still better for dealing with CC troops I think.

Yeah, I haven't used lightning since poison became a thing.  The only advantage of lightning is that it can zap buildings, but using multiple lightnings to take out one or two buildings isn't generally nearly as good of an investment as throwing a rage on all your troops.

The update notes did say they changed how lightning works, so maybe it's more useful now?

hey guys

If you play occasionally but not daily, the next time you're on, please do this:

1) Tap the little blue "i" by your name in the upper left
2) Tap the green "Clan Wars" button
3) Tap the red "I'm Out" button

If you don't play at all, don't worry about it.  I can already see it because there's a grey spot next to your name where a league rank would go, and I'm already skipping you for wars.  You're good.  No need to post here to tell me you're not playing.  Even if that were helpful information I wouldn't remember it.

What's messing us up now is people who play just often enough to keep a league rank, but not often enough to make attacks in wars.  It's a pain in the ass to keep track of you people in my head (the UI unhelpfully doesn't let me see the stats for the previous war while I'm picking people for a new war or I'd just do it based on that), so please use the thing that the game helpfully provides to indicate you don't do wars, kthx.  Don't post here to tell me "well I'll be in wars sometimes but this last time I was busy blah blah blah."  That's also not helpful.  Just uncheck the thing in the game if you're too busy for the thing.  It's cool.  Turn it back on when you go back to having ten minutes on the shitter every day.

Thank you.

also, do we know Elliott or is he a rando?

What happened to bein in it for the chieves, and not caring bout the win?

Such bitterness in you!   :awesome_for_real:

Trying to strike the balance of achieving the very low-effort win when possible.  Also trying to help people who don't seem to realize that "opt out" button is there and instead keep trying to tell me their schedule in chat.

Also I'm pretty sure Elliott is a troll -- he specifically asked me to put him in wars and hasn't made an attack since.  He also asked for a promotion, which is always a bad sign.  :oh_i_see:  Wanted to make sure he's not someone's kid before I boot him.

Drop the hammer.

http://neurogadget.com/2015/11/16/clash-of-clans-town-hall-update-sneak-peek/19967 (http://neurogadget.com/2015/11/16/clash-of-clans-town-hall-update-sneak-peek/19967)

Th11 and other stuff coming in dec

Fuuuuuuu oh well at least my five builders might have something to do for a while.   :awesome_for_real:

Wonder what the new hero will be.  I'm hoping for some kind of super dragon thing, I usually roll with all air so it'd be nice to have something that synergizes with that better than the land heroes do.

Word i heard was that it was a wizard hero.  I think a goblin loot grabbing hero would be perfect.

Wizard hero seems kinda redundant since there's already a ranged DPS hero, unless his attack has a really massive AoE (doing less damage) to differentiate it.  Or maybe if he were a "controller" type, throwing some kind of debuff instead of damaging directly?  THAT could be interesting.

I read that it's a support hero which helps spread troops out and slows down the rate of fire of defenses. Could be complete nonsense, but given that there's already a tank and a DPS, some sort of healer/support would seem natural...

hay guys wanna login and do some war?   :awesome_for_real:

I can get 2 more prolly, maybe thats enough

God dammit K9
(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;attach=4767;type=avatar)

I'm really sorry, new job and generally being really busy these past few weeks has cut into my time for wars  :cry:

It's cool, thx for pushing the opt-out button.   :heart:

They updated today. You're going to want to redo your home base layout. Tons of loot is now stored in your TH. My lvl 8 TH now stores 5k DE. Fuck losing that outside. Might be a good time to raid before people figure that out though.

Cant do my second attack.  No wifi within 30 mins.  Hope it doesnt matter.

 :drill:

Still working on saving up gold for TH11 so I can get flying buff wizard dude.  I've attacked a couple of people who used gems to get the new stuff early; that eagle artillery thing is complete bullshit.

The TH shield/loot change is really fucking with my income; switching over to a slightly modified version of my war layout didn't work that well since it's not well suited to protecting all the resource buildings even after swapping things around. 

I think the new version of the old TH cheese is going to be to offer up an easy 50% destruction victory, so my new layout has all the defenses and loot in a small area (with lots of wall "cells" to make it hard to crack through) with the useless buildings in a wide radius to make them easy to pick off with archers.  I could probably do better but will wait for a few attacks to see if I'm on the right track.

Yeah, I haven't quite figured out this new system yet. When I search for bases to attack the targets all have a LOT more resources than before, since you're not just browsing through the 30% of players too dumb to have a farming layout. On the downside there's a lot more unassailable bases; so I'd say that it's roughly a wash in that regard. The new loot-bonus scaling system is an arse though, as it makes efficiency calculations even harder.

This update killed the game for me. I don't have the time to raid consistently, and got most of my loots from war wins. Now, I'm getting steamrolled every time I get attacked, because it seems like you only attack if you know you can wipe the dude. Really fucks the casual players hard. Oh well. Fun game while it lasted.

Yeah, that's what I'm noticing. I've lost like 7k DE in the past day because any attack is a complete roll.

Did they talk about this attack change somewhere? I'd be interested to read their reasoning.

It definitely favors people who can play a few times a day, yeah.  They did nerf the tactic of staying online 24/7 to make yourself immune to attack (by forcing you offline after a certain point), but the shield changes provide a pretty strong incentive to attack multiple times over the course of several hours rather than making one attack every twelve or whatever.

My funky layout with all the nonessential buildings crammed along one side of the map as a sacrifice actually worked pretty well a few times and is worth experimenting with if you want to try to recapture the old cheese.  It requires much more of a space/material commitment than the TH thing though.

I'm getting really tired of this update. I get to choose, lose all of my DE in one fell swoop by hiding my TH and getting 100%'d or go for the just as annoying death of a thousand cuts by leaving my TH outside and get raided for 200 DE every 14 minutes.

Yep. My god, it's full of stupid.

When I first figured out the TH cheese tactic lo these many years ago I thought "nawwww this is so cheesy, they'll have to patch it out".  I'm actually impressed that they finally did.   :awesome_for_real:  There's no choice at this point -- if you leave your TH out there you're just giving away loot.

Cheesing with a big block of exposed buildings doesn't work as well -- it's not as obvious of a target so people don't necessarily cooperate, and those "filler" buildings are actually pretty important defensively so it's difficult to defend the rest of your goodies if the filler stuff isn't mixed into it to slow down attackers.

Overall I think my net income is about the same or even a little better now since I can attack multiple times for each time I get hit and I tend to get more out of each one (the loot bonus is huge now).  It's pretty common for an attack to take 3K DE from me, but then I can go out and make three attacks for 2K a pop before getting hit again.

No loot bonuses worth the effort down here at gold 1.

I'm actually looking at getting back into it. Reasoning behind the TH thing apparently was they considered a world where the TH didn't give a shield and they made the change and suddenly 3/4 of bases disappeared behind cheap shields leaving only people not trophy pushing or the small number whose shields had expired open to attack. They figured people would say that was a dumb change so they decided to undo it.

That said my enthusiasm for starting up again made it as far as reorganising my base, clearing out the trash and emptying my collectors yesterday and I haven't actually attacked anyone yet.

I like the change too for the reasons Sam gave.  Its a lot easier to upgrade now, progress is guaranteed as long as you can sneak a quick attack here and there.

I have a lot of people dropping trophies against me deliberately, so now my new attack strategy is not to think about stars, but just to find some rich base and aim to kill 2-3 of the storages. This is usually good for about 100K loot. There's a lot of rich bases which I can do about 30-45% damage on which payoff anyway since the only thing I lose is stars. It's not wildly satisfying, but it sort-of works.

I think the real problem is the power curve and balance at high-levels. TH10 bases are pretty much impossible to seriously assault for anyone due to infernos, I have no idea how much worse the new eagle bazooka makes things for TH11 bases. At TH9 it's possible for an equal-level base to 3* targets though, it's beyond that where it all gets out of whack.

Reduced rearm costs are welcome though.

90% of the attacks on me are just people dropping trophies.  I've only had one serious raid happen.

So here's a new bullshit error. Last time I logged in was this morning. I just got the message about the war starting and I figured I better log in and que up the war army. The game is all, no fuck you for not getting raided and I get a message "Personal Break Villagers need a short break due to being too long without Shield." No other notice about what this means.

Might have happened in error, but the "personal break" thing is a fix to the thing of people leaving themselves logged into the game with an orange on the screen to keep themselves "online" and prevent attack while their shield is down.  Now if you've done that for long enough, it forces you offline as a "personal break" to give people a chance to attack you.  Doesn't sound like that should have happened in your case, so is probably a bug.

Got my Great Warden.  Looking forward to bullshit long range attack victories -- from watching replays against me it seems like he's even better at sniping than the queen is.   :awesome_for_real:  His upgrades start at 2.5M (vs the 6M for the initial build) so I should be able to get him up to level 5 pretty quickly to be able to try out his "tome" special.  On defense he has "air" and "ground" modes that toggle him between walking and flying -- not sure why you wouldn't always have him be flying on defense, maybe he has fewer HP in that mode?

Still nine days to go on the eagle artillery, but it already counts as done in my war base so I'm hoping someone attacks me in today's war to let me see it in action.  

I figured out the Great Warden thing -- the air/ground toggle affects attack, not defense, but you set it in your village before you make an attack.  On defense the warden is always grounded (and stationary like a building).  As an attacking unit you want him to match the setting of your tanks -- learned this the hard way when he got shot down by AA early in a golem-heavy attack.   :awesome_for_real:

That's pretty awesome  :awesome_for_real:

He's basically the TF2 medic.  Healing aura for friendlies, and the special you unlock at level 5 is an ubercharge (a few seconds of invulnerability for everything in the aura).  Comparatively weak attack but the range on it is great, so he tends to do a good job of staying behind the tougher units.

So a while on from the last major update what do people think? I'm liking it, I'm finding I get rolled for resources a little less frequently (especially since before if I was getting near targets for expensive items it was 50/50 after an attack if I'd get rolled before my troops were done training for the next one and I was losing more resources than I was gaining). Being able to attack and keep the shield is a big help. There also seem to be more dead or idle bases than after the last matchmaking change. It's making it feel a lot less two steps forward, one step back in resource collection.

That said I've upgraded all buildings, all regular troops except Goblins and am currently grinding DE for those and gold for walls. It looks like I'm going to get the 60K DE for Golem 2 long before my Hog upgrade is done though. Might end up getting bored with the wall grind though, I'm not all purple yet and haven't even started thinking about 500K a pop upgrades to skull walls :ye_gods:

Now that I've hit a high enough score due to lowbies failing to kill enough of me or people dropping trophies intentionally, I've been getting rolled every time my shield is down.

I've run into the problem that my remaining upgrades at TH are all 2mil+ gold (just finished all purple walls), and I'm always floating around 2million saved goop. There's almost no reason for people not to attack me.  They'll always at least draw even with the amount of elixir they can get off me.

Ohh well.  If I had more time to raid consistently and use all of this elixir, this might not be so bad.  As is, I'm just a very attractive target and it's making it difficult to save for those remaining gold upgrades.

It may be anecdotal evidence, but I'm so glad I upgraded my walls to level 8 before leveling to TH9, I think the walls alone discourage a lot of farmers from attacking my base. Those who do attack it roll me, granted, but I've had nights with no shield, and I wake up in the morning and my base was left alone for 8+hours.

I know when I'm farming, I look for Lvl 7 walls and below as primary target bases. Level 8 and above walls, I generally pass unless they have a ton of Dark Elixirs, which I'm currently farming like mad in an attempt to get my Queen to lvl 10+. 

I'm enjoying this update.  Even though a greater percentage of attackers roll me for lots of resources, I think I'm actually netting more overall, between the increased loot bonuses and the ability to attack multiple times through one shield.  I also find that I get attacked less even when my shield is down now that I've got scary-looking defenses (that eagle artillery is ridiculous).

The new TH level came with a bunch of new buildings so I've got a lot of stuff to upgrade before I get back to upgrading my walls, but they're 3M each for me.  The level 2 bird gun alone is 10M, which is going to necessitate upgrading all my storages (which will itself cost 10M in total).   :awesome_for_real:

This extra long one gem boost bonus is dangerous. Saving for upgrades is going to seem real tedious when it's over.

Worked out really well with my th11 upgrade.  I got a week long shield and Im gonna have enough for the birdgun, old man hero and probably most of the 4th xbow on sunday.

I think the update is a bit of a wash for me, there's some long-overdue new stuff, but the mechanics changes aren't totally thrilling me to bits. I guess I'm in a place where I can weather them well enough, but I don't really feel that my relationship with the game has changed at all for me.

In contrast I feel that the Boom Beach team has really moved the game forward, and it actually severely outclasses Clash for both the diversity of things to do and the fun to be had doing them. Clash has raiding other players, the clan wars (which can be fun, but are also a bit of an exercise in frustration), and a one-time PvE campaign. Boom Beach has a mix of two types of PvP raid (player bases and resource bases), constantly refreshing PvE bases, a daily PvE challenge (Dr T, Hammerman, or the Weapons Lab) and now they've just added the Mega Crab, which is really fun and a bit of a loot pinata. All in all there's a lot more to do in boom, the meta feels less stale, and I feel like I'm progressing all the time. I'll always have an upgrade on the go and a building being improved, whereas in Clash it feels like I spend huge gaps where I'm just saving for the next incremental increase.

This new treasury mechanic looks good on paper. I'm also looking the daily 5* reward, which is 200k/200k/1000 for crystal II. Could be a decent and needed resource boost.

They still need to think about new game modes though, because Boom Beach is far more fun on that front

How long have you been playing?

I burned out on that game so fast once I was attacking like 12 times a day to retake the same islands over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.  I noticed that pattern with myself, any game where there's enough to do to eat up an hour or more straight becomes a chore eventually.

According to my achievements, about a year and a half of Boom. Judging by your description I'm guessing you quit before they made the changes to Dr. T. There's now a a daily event which cycles through four different formats, and there are the taskforces, which are clan PvE stuff. There's also the new Mega Crab event which was another different challenge. And you've still got the islands, but honestly you can get plenty of loot from the events, you don't have to obsessively clear. It's a much richer and more enjoyable game now imo.

Okay. Where did everyone go? I'm clan less. Took a month off and boom I'm gone.  :ye_gods:

Strange. A restart and I'm back again. Silly games (bhodinut)

Welcome back!

I also like this new "treasury" mechanic.  And the "loot carts".  Anyone know how "safe" the treasury is?  Is it completely impregnable?

The Warden is a lot more fun now that I've got him to level 5 and can use his special.  Dropping 3 seconds of invuln on all my dudes is pretty awesome.

The treasury appears to be based on your clan castle - I lost my (lv1 ignored upgrading it) clan castle, and lost about 5% of my treasury loot.  So now I'm upgrading my clan castle...

5% is still a much better percentage than the standard loot stores.  Nice.

Found online... "One major difference, however, is that destroying castles offered attackers 5 percent of their contained loot. With the Treasury, that number has been decreased to three."

So, 2% buffer, not bad at your levels Sam, but I'm hearing grumbling from TH11s that it stores too little to be much help

Mine holds 3M gold/goop and 15K DE, which is a pretty significant help IMO.  Doesn't trivialize the task of saving up 10M gold, but not having to sit at 9M for a long period while trying to save up that last million (and getting raided for a half million at a shot or whatever) is going to be nice.

Update today.  New rock tossing DE troop, another level for valk, goblin and hogs, some other crap.

Barely a week after I finished all those TH11 buildings.  No rest for my builders. :drill:

Valk's also got switched up a little. Lower HP, higher Damage but also significantly decreased attack delay so they should be much more effective.

Skeleton's got nerfed, they had their HP reduced and no longer set off traps so archer towers should be able to 1 shot them if the level isn't too much higher and witches are now vulnerable to a variety of traps.

Not super impressed by the bowlers so far.  The bouncing rocks trick is neat in theory, but their AI doesn't take particularly good advantage of it.

Okay, I need to start manually tracking a shitlist of active people who opt in to clan wars and then consistently don't do their attacks.  Usually I'll make a quick mental note of who flaked on the war after it's over and try to remember to not pick them for the very next one, but by the war after that I can't remember any more.  I keep asking people to just opt out, even calling them out by name, but either they're non-English speakers (although the ice cream test is supposed to weed those out) or they think they're funny.  Either way, I'm thinking for habitual offenders I'm going to wind up giving them a quick boot with a message saying they're welcome to rejoin, but please opt out of wars first.

The metric I'm thinking I'm going to track is how many attacks each person has made (good karma) vs how many they've forfeited (bad karma).  Once bad karma exceeds the good by 10 attacks or so, they get a warning kick.  Does this sound like a reasonable thing?  People with small children in the clan, speak up (or borrow their phone and opt them out) before I hurt their feelings.  :P

 :why_so_serious:

I already figured that at least one of them is you trolling me, Walrus.   :oh_i_see:

My son has control of my account at the moment.  He probably opted me back in. 

According to the tally from the last two wars, the only ones who might be in need of a swift kick are Jacob, Brennan, and Ariel.  Everyone else who's opted in has made at least one attack at some point.

I doubt people who get kicked can rejoin

No, there's nothing stopping a kicked person from sending another request.  I don't think the game even has a "ban" feature; if someone wants to spam you with requests the only way to stop them is to set the entire clan to "closed".

I'll admit I do miss some wars, sorry about that. Having them non-stop doesn't always align with life though.

Currently have my mass-valk exploits on pause while I try to save enough DE to get them to level 5. After that it's valk time baby!

Try prunes.   :why_so_serious:

Sounds reasonable to me. My big issue is usually getting raided an hour or so before I'm ready to launch a war attack and then not getting CC troops until most way through a war (cause everyone's training troops for their own attacks).

Also apparently Supercell is currently cracking down on modders and hackers, quite a few of the 'high level' clans have disbanded or seen like 2/3 of their members just up and quit because they can no longer do practice attacks or keep their device on-line as much as possible.

I saw that notice and was pleased.

I'm getting ready to apply the boot to Ariel and Jacob.

I will probably rejoin the warring soon, needed the break to actually upgrade a bunch of stuff.

I went 2/0 in the last war and now I'm out  :grin:

On another note, I have no idea who Jeff is. This may have been a ruse...

(http://i.imgur.com/9QM5X4Z.jpg)

He makes his attacks, so whatever.   :awesome_for_real:  Maybe he confused you for a different K9.

I'm sure there are many of us

Fuck yeah.

(http://i.imgur.com/CwBS1Ie.jpg)

Grats! That's the long hard road you've taken. Zero dollars down right?

Now you can stop being a cheap pleb in wars and start doing mass Valkyrie attacks, yeah?  :why_so_serious:

Yup, zero dollars!  I still gotta max my queen (5 levels to go) and do a few DE lab upgrades, but with the king maxed out it feels like the end is in sight.  Witch donations for all!

I enjoy this game. If Bat Country falls apart, PM me...we got a pretty active crew of guys in my clan. Anyways, CLASH ON

This new builder base thing is weird -- basically a "new game plus"?  But it is nice to get to build stuff in 10 minutes again.   :awesome_for_real:

The model of no resource stealing makes the stakes feel lower.  Which I guess is nice when you're trying to build something up from scratch, but it takes a lot of the strategic element out of the base building IMO.

Yeah, I don't get it... but maybe the gem mine is useful for the old base.

Came back to try the Builder Base. It's not bad. From what I've read it's Super Cell's attempt to bring refined mechanics and gameplay lessons learned from Clash of Clans, without actually doing a Clash of Clans 2 and retaining their player base in one game.

Really wish I could clear out debris without upgrading the BB, but I'll manage.

Once I figured out that (for now at least) a good base is more important than a good attack everything got easy. I get my daily bonus in ten minutes and spend it all on upgrades. I'm amazed that some people my level still haven't enclosed their bases.

Yeah, that makes sense.  I probably wouldn't install a whole new game but having this new thing to mess around with is fun.

Figuring out fun stuff to do with the push traps is pretty cool.  Most people use them to push the troops away; I'm using them to catapult them further IN to my base (straight into my smasher) and that's working really well.   :drill:

Working my way through Builder Hall lvl 3, upgrading all the things until I move to BH4. Still enjoying the small-time aspect and simplicity. I can login, get my matches in, and then spend the rest of the day upgrading things.

Playing around with the BH had enticed me to revisit the home village and start playing again. Is anyone still kicking it around here, or should I venture around elsewhere for a clan?

Bat Country is still going, although a bunch of the f13ers are inactive and K9 just left (splitter!).  We're actually doing better in wars now though due to the way matchups work.   :awesome_for_real:

Yes, I decided to stop boat-anchoring the clan wars so it should be better.  :uhrr:

I'll be back at some point... but not yet.

Reached BH5 last night after maxing out everything for BH4. After weeks of going against people with the multi-mortar and hero mech, I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!  :drill:

That hero mech is pretty great.  Of course now that I've got that, I'm up against people with flamethrowers and two smashers.

That's what I love about BH vs TH combat. You can switch up your army right at the start of battle to counter whatever layout you encounter.

That said, until I get research going again, 2x Giant squads, 2x Bomber squads and the mech are carrying me to victory everytime. Combined with a swank home defense, I'm quickly rising out of the upper 1xxx and into the mid 2xxx.

I've also been messin with the builder base on my two accounts. I got into the 3500's with max baby dragons and level 5 battle machine. On my other account I'm trying to level Archers/Barbs to see how that plays out.

Necro for TH 12 update!  It was about time; I'd been in wall-only upgrade mode for a while.

Anyone seen one of the new siege gizmos in action yet?  I'll be able to start producing them in another couple of days (yay for builder books, I'd been holding on to one for just such an occasion and was able to get the TH upgrade built on day 1) and will be handing them out to anyone with clan castle space for one.   :drill:

10 years in and I think I've hit the "okay, that was fun, but I might be done now" point.    :awesome_for_real:  Seems like a good time for a retrospective!

Seeing the posts in this thread about the builder base as being a sequel inside the original game is funny; that may well have been their intent, but clearly it didn't work because they completely stopped development on the builder base a while back.  More recently, they added a "clan capital", which is a collection of bases that the whole clan upgrades and raids with together.  As with the builder base, it doesn't really integrate with the home village very well, except to act as a resource sink for extra resources at the home village (which you can "forge" into capital resources).

Looking back, the thing I always appreciated about this game was the fact that it put very few demands on my time, favoring short bursts of gameplay that were spaced out, without any major penalties for wandering away from the game for a while (i.e. nothing you build ever gets lost, and lost resources are easy to regain).  Building the base felt like a tower defense game -- you have four archer towers and twenty wall pieces, or whatever, figure out how to arrange them to protect your treasure hoard.  The stakes were just high enough to make the base building engaging, but not high enough to make the progression feel frustrating.  Perfectly tuned in many respects IMO.

The intractable problem that I think Supercell was stuck with was "now what?"  Once people have built everything they can build, they're probably going to stop playing (I remember originally thinking "okay, I'll play until I've fully upgraded all my walls to the ridiculously expensive level").  So the natural solution is to add more stuff to build.

Just adding levels to the existing structures only gets you so far, so you also add new structures -- and eventually you have to expand the building footprint to accomodate the new structures.  I'm not sure exactly when it was, but at some point I remember going from "oo boy, a new defensive tower thingy to add to my layout" to "ugh, now I need to redo my whole layout to fit this new thingy".  Because once the complexity gets past a certain point, it's no longer a fun little puzzle, it's a big boring puzzle.  Big and boring enough that most people outsource it by going to Reddit to copy standard base layouts from the small percentage of the population that gets off on pushing pixels around for hours.

So they realized they were hitting a wall with just adding more stuff to the existing game -- what's next?  Adding a new game inside the game (the builder base), with different units and buildings, and different rules.  No more delays between attacks, no more stealing loot.  You can scroll up in this thread for the pros and cons of that -- it was fun for a bit to experiment with the new options, but the lack of any stakes at all made it get boring pretty quick.  There hasn't been anything added to that game mode for a while, but it remains in the game as an obligatory "clan game challenge" thing (basically, it's become a minigame that gives you rewards in the main game).  I feel like there's a principle to observe here about the pitfalls of adding stuff to your game that most people find boring and then trying to force engagement with it -- it's nowhere near the scale of holocron grinding, but I think some of the same reasoning went into it.  The end result just feels like busy work that distracts from the fun stuff (or in the case of holo-grinding, it distracted from the lack of fun stuff by promising fun stuff to come).

The more recent clan capital thing was interesting at first due to its potentially collaborative elements but got boring even faster than the builder base did.  The clan capital is not one but a whole series of villages, and I don't want to spend time fiddling with the layout of any of them because, as with the builder base, what happens on defense doesn't have any stakes whatsoever.  Dumping resources into the upgrades is mildly fun in a "number go up" way but that's about it.  Again, it ends up feeling like a set of chores being added to the game, rather than an enhancement to the game itself.  The little bits of the original fun gameplay elements are like butter scraped over an ever-growing slab of bread.

So: what could they have done better?  I think I end up coming back to my theory that the best route for a game with persistent progression (at least from the point of view of "what would I enjoy as a player", which is probably different from the point of view of "what will make them the most money" or even "what would MOST people enjoy as players")  is to reset it periodically, with some kind of prestige system. 

Either that or show a "you win!" screen and let the game die a natural death.   :awesome_for_real:

isn't that basically Diablo 3 (and other games) Seasons?