“Clash of Clans” is a hugely popular PvP strategy title for the iPhone and iPad from developer Supercell. This “Clash of Clans” strategy guide will help you make more effective attacks, improve your defenses and maximize your gold, elixir and trophies.
‘Clash of Clans’ Attack Strategy
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The attack strategy you choose in “Clash of Clans” is dependent on your goals. Do you want to get the maximum amount of gold and elixir from your battles? Or are you on the hunt for trophies? The strategy you employ, and the units you select need to be tailored to what you’re trying to achieve. In this section of our “Clash of Clans” strategy guide we’re going to cover an attack strategy for maximizing your trophies while still delivering a decent haul of resources. Gold and elixir farming are covered separately below.
To earn trophies in “Clash of Clans” multiplayer, you need to win battles. You ‘win’ in two ways. 1) destroying >50% of the enemy base, or 2) destroying the town hall. You can win a battle without destroying the town hall as long as you reach 50% total damage. The more damage you can do, the more trophies you will win.
- Destroying >50% of the enemy base.
- Destroying the town hall. You can win a battle without destroying the town hall as long as you reach 50% total damage.
The more damage you can do, the more trophies you will win.
The first step in your “Clash of Clans” attack strategy is troop selection – choosing the right units is essential to success in multiplayer battles. The most important thing to remember is that each troop type has a preference for the types of buildings that it will attack. Wallbreakers go for walls, Giants for defenses, Goblins for gold and elixir while Barbarians, Archers and Wizards will attack whatever is closest to them.
One of the most effective troop combinations involves Wallbreakers, Giants, Archers and Goblins (+/- Wizards). Start out by dropping a single giant to distract the enemy’s defenses and then immediately drop 2-3 Wallbreakers (depending on the level of the walls you’re up against). Once the walls are down, flood Giants to take out the mortars, cannons and towers. As soon as the mortars are down, spam Goblins to mop up resource storage, mines and collectors.
Simultaneous to your main attack, place archers peripherally, one at a time, to find positions where you can attack buildings (such as barracks, builders huts, army camps and storage while staying out of range of the enemy’s defenses. Removing the outer buildings doesn’t just add to your overall damage percent, it also creates direct lines of attack to important walled structures, like gold and elixir storage. Archers and Wizards are also very effective for destroying walled defenses, such as cannons and towers that sit on the edge of a base.
Remember that not all bases are created equally, with certain defensive arrangements (such as extensive partitioning) much more effective than others. When searching for a base to attack, just keep hitting the “next” button until you find a base a decent with a decent proportion of undefended, or poorly defended structures. This is important, as when you’re playing for trophies you want to either take down the town hall as fast as possible or get to 50 percent total damage before your army is wiped out.
‘Clash of Clans’ Defense Strategy
Whether you want to protect your gold and elixir, or prevent someone stealing your trophies, a good defensive strategy is critical in “Clash of Clans.” The first thing to be mindful of when planning your base is to ensure that you have centralized your town hall and mortars. If your town hall is destroyed, you may not lose many resources, but you will lose the match.
Your mortars are your most important defensive structure. They deal a huge amount of splash damage and have a very wide radius of attack. If you lose your mortars, there’s a good chance the rest of your base will fall. Always wall off your mortars separately from other buildings, or ensure that there are at least two layers of walls that must be breached before the enemy can reach them.
Walling is an essential defense strategy in “Clash of Clans,” and there are a few key points to keep in mind. Always wall off your ‘essential’ buildings. Essential buildings include your town hall, mortars, cannons, towers (archer and wizard), gold and elixir storage. Everything else (barracks, army camps, laboratory, clan castle, builders huts) is disposable. It’s important to prioritize which structures you protect, because you never have enough wall to protect them all.
As you upgrade your town hall, the amount of wall that you can build increases and many players choose to wall-in their gold mines and elixir collectors as these can hold large amounts of uncollected resources at higher levels. You should aim to create as many partitions, or independent segments, within your base as possible with the amount of wall available to you – it makes it much harder for the enemy to penetrate your defenses, and makes it more costly for them to do so.
Your non-essential buildings should be positioned in a ring around your main base. This serves to creates a ‘barrier’ that must be passed before enemy units can reach your walls and allows your cannons, towers and mortars to take out troops that are in firing distance.
Other defensive options available to you include bombs and spring traps which can be placed at strategic locations to deliver good “bang for buck” defense. Place these structures close to what your enemy wants – your gold and elixir. While the standard bomb costs just 400 gold, there is also a ‘giant bomb’ which deliver a bigger bang, but are hugely expensive (50,000 gold). At higher levels, the giant bomb can be useful but never place them randomly outside the walls of your base. Use it smartly, and position the giant bomb inside your base where it can protect your gold and elixir storage.
“Clash of Clans” Gold Farming Strategy
Gold and elixir are the currency with which you fund new buildings, new units and big upgrades in “Clash of Clans.” Gold and elixir can be earned through mining, or they can be stolen from other players.
A big part of resource farming in “Clash of Clans” revolves around keeping down your trophies. Your trophy level determines the difficulty of the opponents you go up against, and generally speaking, higher trophies means better defenses. A common method of lowering your own trophies is to drop a single unit in to a new PvP match, and then end the game. You’ll only lose the one unit, and you’ll quickly drop down your trophies so that you can go up against lower level players.
When you are at a level that you are comfortable with, there are three units you are going to need to farm gold in Clash of Clans: Wallbreakers, Giants and Goblins. Giants distract the defenses and goblins take all the gold and elixir. The aim while gold farming is not to ‘win’ the match – the aim is to take as much of the other player’s resources as possible while minimizing your own losses.
When selecting a match and choosing where to attack, it’s vitally important to look at how full/empty the storage are. If the gold and elixir storage are relatively empty, but the player has a large amount of gold/elixir, then it’s all sitting in the mines and collectors. This makes for very easy money – you can simply rush the resource collectors with your goblins and ignore the storage which are often more heavily defended.
If you want to try and preserve your trophies while farming, the best strategy is to drop archers around the periphery of the base. Keep them out of range of the mortars and cannons and allow them to “steal” buildings to get across the 50% damage line and secure one star for the battle.
‘Clash of Clans’ Gems Strategy
The green gems in “Clash of Clans” allow you to buy new builders as well as instantly complete buildings, troop production and research. But, what if you don’t want to pay to play? Luckily, gems can be earned as well as bought, and there are a few useful strategies for acquiring free gems in “Clash of Clans.”
Firstly, complete as many ‘Achievements’ as possible. There are achievements for every element of the game, from tree clearing to gold stealing and each completed achievement rewards you with about 5-20 gems. If you manage to crack 1250 trophies in multiplayer you’ll be rewarded with a massive 450 gems. Also, be sure to clear trees, bushes, logs etc that surround your base as these commonly hold 1-3 gems.
Have anything to add to our “Clash of Clans” Strategy Guide? Share your own “Clash of Clans” attack, defense and gold farming strategies in the comments below.