We use our mid-week war as an opportunity for our less experienced players to practice war without the pressure of the whole clan on them. As such we don’t tend to win, but this week we played a great game, taking 27 of 30 stars, and subsequently got promoted to a level 3 clan. Well done everyone !

I thought I’d write an article on dealing with clan castle troops, in particular during war when you have time to work out a strategy. This is targeted at the few of our players who struggle with this skill. We all know what happens when you drop down all your giants and the enemy clan castle activates and out come valkyries / wizards / balloons ? Yes, dead giants and you get 0 stars. If you read this I hope we get less of our clan with bruises on their foreheads from continually banging their heads on the wall in frustration.

Let’s take as an example the #1 base from this week’s mid-week war.

There are two important things to notice here, i) the clan castle activation circle, ii) the amount of troop capacity in the clan castle. If you are TH8 and below and not using a dragon army then the activation circle is the most important thing to notice. In general it’s better to active the enemy clan castle before you start your main attack so you don’t get a nasty surprise. Here we can do this at either the red or blue cross without even breaking a wall.

So how do we do that quickly in this case without getting tied up taking down mines and collectors ? Easy, take something that targets guns (giants / hogs) that will bypass the clutter and head to the wall. You just need to get the enemy troops in play. Once the clan castle is empty you need to lure them in to a clump so you can deal with them easily. Note also that once the enemy troops are in play the activation circle doesn’t matter, they will travel to the next troop that is put down wherever on the map. Here’s an example from the same war where Jimmie expertly lured out a bunch of wizards with a couple of hogs, lured them in to the corner, and then deployed the dragon he had in his clan castle to take them down.

The result; dead enemy troops and a 3 star win. Now you don’t always need to use a dragon, a lightning spell works well on most troops (except dragons) and wizards and archers are also pretty good at taking down the enemy troops. And for players with bigger clan castles witches can be highly effective too.

The point to take away is that dealing with the enemy clan castle troops will greatly increase your chances of winning your war battles.

The second point is to know how many troops have come out of the enemy clan castle. Let’s say I know there is 25 capacity in there, I lure with a giant and 6 archers come out before he dies. Do I then just start my attack ? The answer is no, where are the other 19 troop capacity ? So I keep luring until I’m sure every enemy troop is in play.

The above is the basic lure strategy, and some of you TH9/10s will be thinking why hasn’t he mentioned attacking troops pulls, luring over splash defences etc.. ? Well let’s leave that for another article on advanced clan castle troop handling. If everyone can just get the basics right it would be a great improvement.

This weekend we were up against Cali Clasher$. The war looked fairly well balanced so it could have gone either way. Our opening attacks, by our lower trophy players, were fantastic with 5 consecutive 3 star attacks leaving no clean up required in the bottom third of the bases. It looked like a war that would be won by our TH10s if they could defeat their top bases. Very few people attack our top 2 or 3 bases, but not this week ! Their #1 and #2 attacked very strongly securing 2 stars on our #1 to #3, and 3 stars on our #4. Going in to the last few minutes of the war we were 3 stars behind but a final surge attacking 3 of their top 4 bases, and their #10, gave us 5 extra stars which delivered the win. Well played everyone.

We have had our clan badge for quite a while now and some players are requesting a change. The below graphic shows some examples of potential new ones and the old one. Add a comment with your vote, or suggest something different. The badge with the most votes wins.

My vote is for the final one that looks like sharp teeth ! 🙂

Well I thought we were back to winning ways but apparently not, with a very disappointing loss this week. It was a 25v25 war which didn’t look too difficult, however some poor early attacking left too many missed stars lower down for us to clean up.

A couple of people have asked how it’s possible to acquire lots of elixir so here’s a quick guide. The most important thing is to know how much you are spending to do a raid. Let’s take as an example my day to day raiding army :

Now I need to know how much this army costs and the easiest way is to get it calculated for you is by using the Clash of Clans Army Planner. Inputting my regular army shows the cost is 125,250.

Now assuming I win an attack I also get a league loot bonus of 50,000 elixir for Crystal 2 so my net cost is 125,250 – 50,000 = 75,250. So I must get at least 75,250 elixir for each raid for my elixir not to go down, and more than that for it to go up. Now this is assuming I don’t use spells, but let’s say I use one heal and one lightning in my raid, and that adds 44,000 elixir (22,000 for each lightning 5 and heal 5) to my cost, so now I need to raid at least 75,250 + 44,000 = 119,250 elixir to break even.

Just knowing the cost of your army will really help you choose the right bases to attack if you are trying to farm elixir, in particular for those huge totals needed for things like level 6 giants (6,000,000).

I also use the same system for calculating the win bonus required in wars, though quite frankly I never get close to the amount of dark elixir I spend.

I have never seen this much loot available before and luckily I managed to take the majority of it, and then add on the +50k gold/elixir Crystal 2 win bonus for a total of almost 1.5 million resources taken.

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After a couple of poor war results we’re back to our winning ways again. It was only a 15v15 war this week due to the absences caused by the Easter holidays. But it was a nice win despite a poorly steered zero star first attack on their #2 by yours truly, and our #1 having a connection failure, again (!) a few minutes before the end of the war.

Also I found it very encouraging this week that very few clean-up opportunities had been left on the weaker enemy bases, so there was some good attacking by our players with weaker bases and armies.

Over the last few days we’ve been discussing whether to do a war more than once per week. Our normal (senior) war will be weekly at the same time as usual. However it might be possible to do a junior war mid-week. Because of the cost of running a war for our highest level players we would not expect them to participate.

The mid-week war should be an opportunity for our lower level players or those who are not confident attackers to participate in a war without the pressure of the whole clan on them and also against easier, and hopefully less skilled, opposition. I was thinking that we should restrict it to players of level 60 or below, or perhaps TH5/6 and a few of the TH7s. Omer and Jimmy have kindly offered to run the junior war, assuming there are enough of our lower level players who want to participate. Please add your thoughts by commenting on this post and also whether you would like to be a junior war player.

Welcome to our new web-site. Over the coming months I hope we post lots of useful information for our visitors. The site will also be used for clan conversations too so if you want to know what we’re all about please follow us. Our clan has a core of approximately 20 players but we tend to have 25-35 members expanding and contracting as we remove inactive players and add new members. The clan was formed in early 2014 so we’ve been quite successful in keeping it together, and we’re a friendly bunch too, which we hope continues.