Clash of Clans

[K9]

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.

[Rasix]

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 

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.

[K9]

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

[Rasix]

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

Alexander.  He randomly spams chat at times.

[Samwise]

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

[NowhereMan]

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

Also TH8 is killing me, I've got 3 Teslas on their second upgrade set and it's 8 days each. Then another level 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.

[K9]

Also TH8 is killing me, I've got 3 Teslas on their second upgrade set and it's 8 days each. Then another level 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.

[Rasix]

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

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.   

[NowhereMan]

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

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.

[Reg]

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

[Strazos]

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.

[NowhereMan]

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

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

[K9]

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.

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.

[Samwise]

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.   

[NowhereMan]

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.

[Samwise]

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

[K9]

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.

[Samwise]

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.

[K9]

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*

[Samwise]

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.

[NowhereMan]

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.

[Samwise]

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.

[dd0029]

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

[Samwise]

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.

[Reg]

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

[Samwise]

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

[Tairnyn]

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*

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.

[K9]

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.

[Samwise]

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.

[Rasix]

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. 

[NowhereMan]

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.

[Rasix]

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. 

[Reg]

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.

[K9]

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. 

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

[Samwise]

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?