Clash of Clans: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
ALL of the basics, for the player literally just starting out.
Too long; didn’t read
There are quite a few topics to cover even in a summary guide like this, and some are important whereas others are not that important, so I’ll just quickly run through the most important things very briefly here.
- Always keep your lab and your builders busy, unless you’re keeping one available to turn excess loot into wall upgrades. This game will take literally years to get through.
- When attacking, deploy high hitpoint units in front of high damage units. Save “medium” ones for the middle of the fight.
- Be prepared to fight super high level enemy clan castle defenders. Lure to a corner, and then a ring of archers with wizards on the outside works well.
- Clear some side buildings first with small squads so your main army walks straight into the main enemy base. This is called “funneling.”
- Don’t rush your town hall unless you know what you are doing.
- DO NOT MISS YOUR CLAN WAR ATTACKS!
- DO NOT DONATE THE WRONG UNITS. IF THEY SAY “HIGH LEVEL” IT MEANS YOU SHOULD NOT DONATE UNTIL YOU ARE HIGH LEVEL!
- Take part in Clan Games and, if possible, Clan War League. Those will help you advance the most rapidly, and you might really help out your clan!
- Gems are only for builder huts. Do not use gems for anything else until you have all 5 builders. In fact, sell your other things to get there faster!
Table of Contents
In order to navigate this article easily, simply use “control + f” “find” command and look up the heading of the section you want to read.
i. The fundamentals of attacking - Army Composition - Effective Troop Deployment - The Clan Castle In Battle ii. Other functions of the clan castle iii. Builders and Laboratory iv. The Types of Resources (Loot) v. Sources of Loot - Sources of loot 1: Mine, Collector, Pump - Sources of loot 2: Raiding other players’ bases - Sources of loot 3: League and Star Bonuses - Sources of loot 4: Clan Wars - Sources of loot 5: Clan Games - Sources of loot 6: Clan War League - Sources of loot 7: Gems and Magic Items vi. What To Build And Upgrade First vii. When to Upgrade Your Town Hall viii. Joining A Clan That Is Right For You ix. Good Clan Etiquette
i. The Fundamentals of Attacking
The main essence of this game, and the part we will therefore start with, is attacking. When you attack an enemy base, you steal resources from any resource buildings that you destroy. This is the main way to progress in the game. However, those buildings will be defended by enemy towers and traps! In order to have a successful attack, you will need to use your troops efficiently against the enemy defenses.
Before we talk about how to perform a good attack, IT IS CRITICAL that you take your time using the “next” button to find a base that has a good payout and low enough defenses for you to clear it confidently.
Alright, so you’ve found your jackpot base and you really want to make sure you get all the loot. When you are choosing how to attack, there are two main things to consider:
- Army Composition: what troops, what spells, how many of each?
- Army Deployment: positioning and timing of using troops and spells
Army Composition
We will begin with army composition. There are three main categories of troops: “tanks,” “brawlers,” and “nukers.”
- Tanks have high hitpoints, but slow damage output. You will want to have these guys up in front taking hits for everyone else. Enemy towers are stupid, and will target the first thing that gets in range, and then keep hitting it until it dies or they die. After that, they target the closest. Tanks are troops designed to withstand enemy tower shots, and to position themselves to get hit first by enemy towers.
- Brawlers have medium hitpoints, short range, and high damage output. You will want to deploy these midway through the attack to be available to burst through the tough, central core of the enemy base and to clean up straggler towers afterwards. They can withstand a few hits, but they will get ahead of your tanks quickly after deployed, so don’t deploy them too early, or they won’t survive to the core.
- Nukers have very low hitpoints but very high damage. These absolutely must have a tank in front of them, as they will very quickly die if targeted. However, they are necessary to deal enough damage to take out the enemy base in time to win. Place them behind your line of tanks immediately after the tanks are in place.
When you are composing your army, you will probably want about a third to a half of it as tank units, a third to half nukers, and the rest brawlers. Don’t take my word for it. Start with what I said, then tweak it and find what works for you!
If you have unlocked spells, you will have to choose which ones to bring. Certain spells work very well with certain troops, and not well with others. We won’t go into it all here, but here is a quick rundown:
When you have joined a clan, you will also have access to request reinforcements from clanmates. The troops you get may be very much stronger than what you can build. Build your army around supporting your donated troops, instead of requesting troops to augment your army.
Effective Troop Deployment
Now that you have a general idea of what troops to bring, we’ll talk about how to deploy them correctly. I’ve already mentioned the timing, but it’s worth saying again:
There is an important concept called “funneling” with which you must become familiar. Basically, when troops destroy one building, they will move on to attack the next closest building.
What this means is that if you put your troops all in one spot, they will quickly destroy it and then form two clusters that each move sideways around the enemy base, taking lots of damage without eliminating the main defenses or getting to the town hall.
In order to avoid that happening, what you need to do is start out with a line formation that clears a whole side together (start on the corners and fill in the middle alternating sides), “funneling” your troops forward instead of sideways. If every building to each side is already destroyed simultaneously, the only way remaining to move is forward! That’s how you get your guys to go straight in to the middle.
The Clan Castle In Battle
As a final note, you should also be aware that some enemy bases will have troops stationed for defense in their clan castle. You cannot tell whether a base has castle defenses or not until you get close to it, so you may want to test with a single archer or barbarian before you deploy your main forces.
If you want to defeat a base that has defenders, try to use an archer or a giant to activate the castle defense, and then a series of archers to lure them to a corner where you can kill them without enemy towers interfering. Use a ring of archers to soak up their attacks and then some wizards behind to deal out damage to kill them. If you have it, also poison them!
After they are destroyed, make sure to get some tanks in front of your guys before they get in range of the enemy towers! And then begin your funneling as normal.
*Note that if you are in clan war, you can see if a castle is stocked, but not what it has in it. Make sure to plan on taking out those castle troops first before you try to take on the towers!
Alright, that’s enough to get you started on attacks. There are many more guides and videos you could study for specific composition tactics, but I recommend practicing and experimenting to get a feel for it before you try to get specific advice.
ii. Other Functions of the Clan Castle
The clan castle serves many functions in the game Firstly, this is where you find the menu to join a clan, and you will need to join a clan for most of then fun and best bonuses in the game.
Once you are in a clan, you can request troop donations as often as every 20 minutes (15 or 10 if a high level clan). This is a very big deal, as it gives you a minimum of 10 more army space, and 45 space when it’s maxed out! Not only does it let you have a bigger army — you can receive super high level troops if you have super high level clan mates! Early on, just a couple of max level troops might take out a whole enemy base on their own!
Instead of using your troops on offense, clan castle troops can also be left to defend against attackers. If they survive the battle, they will be available to defend again, or even to attack! You can also set the castle to “sleep” and then your troops will stay safe instead of trying to defend.
Make use of the castle all the time! It is like a free army camp that holds super troops! Don’t be pushy about getting fast donations, though. You could become annoying and get kicked.
The clan castle is also a very important tool for your resource management, because it only loses a tiny fraction when it is raided. This makes it easy for you to save up a few million loot in the castle so that when you are getting close to affording a tower, you just take the castle loot out and instantly get it. This allows you to avoid being raided for large amounts of loot when you are getting close to the amount you need. Make sure to leave the loot in the castle until you are about to use it! It gets raided faster in storage.
iii. Builders and Laboratory
These are the most important aspects of progressing in this game. Builders and the laboratory are the only mechanism by which you can unlock the rest of the game and increase the power of your offenses and defenses. You only start with two builders, and additional ones cost gems to unlock, permanently increasing your rate of progress. Don’t spend a single gem on anything else until you have all 5 builders!
You should be aware that the times for buildings and upgrades continue to increase dramatically at each TH level. By the way, “TH” means “Town Hall.” For example, early on, upgrades take a few hours, but as you progress, upgrades will be measured in days. By the end, upgrades take 12–18 days each.
This game is going to take a lot of patience. You would need to put in thousands of dollars to buy your way through quickly. If you want to advance rapidly for a reasonable price, definitely consider the monthly pass; as of this writing, it is much more valuable than any other deal on offer, by a very large margin — like 5–20 times better. But, the most important thing is to get all 5 builders as fast as possible and keep them busy building at all times.
(Note: many players like to keep one builder available to work on walls, which are extremely expensive, but are upgraded instantly. If you don’t keep a worker available, you might max out your resources and not be able to do anything useful until your builders become available.)
iv. The types of resources (a.k.a. loot)
There are three resources in this game: gold, elixir, and dark elixir. Note that dark elixir is not unlocked until TH7 (town hall level 7).
Dark Elixir (DE) is used for building and upgrading a separate, second set of offensive troops and spells, as well as building and upgrading heroes. The first hero is available at TH7, and there is another every two TH levels (9, 11, 13).
Dark elixir (DE) costs are much higher compared to how quickly you acquire dark elixir, so when you get to TH7 and up, you will need to invest substantially more time collecting resources to afford the upgrades. That works out pretty well, because upgrades start to take a while, too.
So, the dynamics tend to work out this way: when you first upgrade your TH, you will want to work quickly to upgrade your offenses, because they upgrade the fastest and help you get more loot, so first elixir will be the most valuable to you. Once you’ve got the elixir buildings maxed out, you’ll need a lot less elixir, and gold will become more useful to you for advancing your defensive buildings.
Once you get to TH7, you will find that offensive upgrades (elixir) get done first, followed by defensive towers (gold), followed by heroes (DE), then troop upgrades (elixir and DE) and last of all walls (gold). So, depending on where you are in developing the townhall level you are at, different resources will be the one you are really looking for while you are raiding.
v. Sources of Loot
There are a variety of ways to acquire loot.
Sources of loot 1: Mine, Collector, Pump
This is a completely passive way to collect resources. You don’t need to play, you just need to log in and tap on it. You should be aware that when somebody destroys your gold mines or elixir collectors, 75% of what it has will be emptied out. So, if you want to maximize your loot from these, make sure you collect the loot before your shield runs out.
If you are very active as a player, you will probably be annoyed by how long it takes to upgrade these collectors for how little they give compared to raiding. You may want simply to ignore them and work on your offense and defense.
Sources of loot 2: Raiding other players’ bases.
The best way to gather resources in this game is simply to attack enemy bases. Obviously, try to use cheap troops to increase your profits. When you destroy a mine or a collector, you receive 75% of what it had in it. When you destroy storage, you receive a much smaller percentage, capped at a certain flat amount (so nobody ever loses too much).
When you are looking for an enemy base to raid, it is definitely worth your while to spend some time using the “next” button a lot to find a base that has full collectors/mines and hopefully storages as well. It is also a good idea to look for a base with weak defenses or weakly defended resources so you can be sure to collect as much of the loot as possible.
Note that you can see by looking at it if the loot is in the collectors/mines, or the storages, or both, so make sure you are going to be able to get the buildings holding the resources when you plan your attack. If you destroy the wrong buildings, you don’t get the loot!
For a detailed analysis of looting, check out this article.
Sources of loot 3: Star and League bonuses
A little bit of context here. Every time you attack an enemy base, you gain or lose trophies depending on the outcome.
If you lose the battle, you will lose trophies as you would win for 3 stars. If you get 2 stars, you get 2/3rds of the normal trophy gain. If you get 1 star, you get 1/3rd of the normal trophy gain.
Additionally, if you’re higher trophy level than the enemy, you gain less or lose more.
If you’re lower in trophy level than the enemy, then you gain extra or lose fewer.
In this way, over time, a good rate of wins and a good rate of 3 stars will make you rise to a higher trophy league, and a bad rate will make you fall to a lower trophy league. Trophies do not actually have much of a function in the game, but they determine how much loot you get from star and league bonuses. Higher leagues give bigger bonuses.
Once you win enough trophies to make it to the bottom league, you will receive a small loot bonus for every successful attack against any opponent, in addition to the amount of loot you steal from his buildings. You don’t need to get the full 100% for the full league win bonus, but it does scale up the more of the base you destroy, to a cap. The higher league you get to, the more loot you get from the league bonus.
For the most part, this loot bonus is fairly small compared to the amount of loot that you will need for upgrades. However, some players make an effort to push to a very high league with a low level base, until the league bonus becomes useful as a serious farming tool. That is much harder to do, however, and takes a lot of time playing. If you are more casual, you’ll probably just mostly ignore league bonuses.
However, the league bonus per attack is also connected with the daily star bonus that you receive for collecting 5 stars each day. The higher a league you get to, the better a star bonus you get, and it can actually be quite substantial if you push trophies.
In addition to the league bonus, there is also a “star bonus” which you can get once per day. Its size varies by what league you are in. Note that the star bonus can “save up” two days worth of star bonuses available at a time — the one from yesterday and the one from today. So, if you play every two days, you can still collect all of the daily star bonuses.
As another note, the bonus from the star bonus goes to the clan castle instead of the storages, so make sure you have room in the castle before you earn it! And don’t empty your clan castle unless it’s about to overflow, or if you are immediately going to use the resources, because the castle loses the least resources when destroyed. The loot is safer in the castle than in storage.
Sources of loot 4: Clan Wars
Clan wars are a special kind of battle that takes at least 5 players on a team to play. Your clan can do a maximum of one war every two days, and they must take players in increments of 5. Each player receives two attacks, and each team tries to 3-star as many of the enemy team’s bases as they can.
During the attack, the enemy base will be stocked with very small amounts of loot, so you will not receive much from destroying it. However, if you receive at least one star against an opponent, you will receive bonus loot to your clan castle at the end of the war. Make sure you have space for it!
If you win, you get the full amount of loot listed. If your clan loses, you only get 3/7ths of the amount. In case of a draw, each team gets 4/7ths of the listed amount. The way that works out, generally you get a little bit more from winning a war than from a regular attack, and significantly less if you lose a war attack.
Important notes: If you get at least 1-star against a base that was already defeated, you DO STILL GET THE LOOT ANYWAY!
Note 2: You might be tempted to attack higher up than you can 3-star, for better loot. Most clans will be very upset if you do this when there was a lower target they needed somebody to 3-star. So, many clans will drop you from war or even kick you out of the clan if you do selfish “attacking for loot” especially if it cripples your team’s chance of winning. Check with clan leaders before you decide where to attack.
Sources of Loot 5: Clan Games
Clan games unlock at TH6. This is a weeklong event that occurs in the last week of each month, minus a few days, and it is definitely worth rushing to TH6 to make sure you can participate.
During clan games, all clan members work on a shared pool of missions, each of which gives some number of points. For example, “earn 3 stars in multiplayer for 100 points” or “earn 3-stars using giants for 175 points,” etc. Each player can only get 4,000 points, but to unlock all the rewards, the clan needs go get to 50,000 points combined! Help out!
At the end of the games, everyone who completed at least one game will be able to select what prizes they want. Note that resource rewards from clan games go to your castle, not storage!
Read here and here about how to max out clan games easily.
Sources of Loot 5: Monthly Rewards
Monthly rewards unlock at TH7, and they are very similar to clan games, but done individually instead of as a clan, and you can claim the rewards as you go, instead of all at the end.
You should not collect resource rewards until right before you use them, because if you move them into storage and get raided, you will lose some.
If you want to collect the full monthly rewards, it’s best to make sure you do at least one attack in builder base and one attack in multiplayer each day, and try to donate at least 15 troops every day.
Hint: donate troops that use more space to get to 15 from a single request.
In this game, you’ll hear a lot of talk about “maxing” vs. “rushing” your base. That doesn’t really apply at lower levels. It’s good to get to TH7 as fast as possible so you can start getting all the rewards from Clan Games and Monthly Rewards sooner, and because offense and defense both really start to kick off at TH7 such that anyone TH6 and below is practically worthless in wars with anyone TH7 and up.
Sources of Loot 6: Clan War League (CWL)
This is the most incredible source of loot in the Free-to-play part of the game. It is only available during the first week of each month. Not only are the loot amounts gigantic (like, double normal war), but also you receive League Medals at the end of the clan war, which you can use to purchase magic items or resources.
For an analysis of the strategy involved, check out this article.
At lower TH levels, you will get more value from buying the 2.5 million resources packs or, if you are very active, from the training potions. At higher levels, you will get much more value from hammers. For a detailed analysis of the league medal shop, check out my other article.
Everyone on the clan roster for the league will get 20% of the possible medals plus 10% for every star they score. Thus, to get the full league medal bonus, you must score at least 8 stars in total through the 7 wars.
Note that Clan War League must be either 15v15 or 30v30 at a time, so unless you have exactly one of those two numbers of clan members, some players will not be included in some wars. Make sure you have strong offenses to be an asset for your team, so they will include you!
Sources of loot 7: Gems and Magic Items
Gems are not directly part of the game economy, but rather the currency that you use to purchase things in the game. They can be used to fill storages, skip timers of almost all kinds, and purchase magic items, as well as skins that have no in-game function other than style.
You can acquire gems directly by paying money to Supercell, but in my opinion, this is a waste of money for anybody who makes under $250k per year. For a deep analysis of the gem economy and monthly pass value, check out these other articles.
The summary, however, is that you should save up your gems to unlock all 5 builders, and then if you are very active you should probably buy training potions. If you are less active, you should probably buy books of heroes. If you are thinking about using gems for fast donations, perhaps you should consider rushing a mini base, instead. Every single other use for gems is way over-priced.
You can get gems a few different ways. The first way is by clearing obstacles that generate on your land over time. The rate looks randomized, but it’s actually 100% reliable. Check out this site for the details, and browse around for a gigantic collection of data about the game.
The next way is by building the gem mine in your builder base. It tells you straight up how many gems it makes per day and how many it can hold before you need to collect them.
The next way to earn gems is unlocking the achievements, each of which lists the gem reward for it. Most rewards have three levels of achievement, and after you finish the first one, a much longer one appears. The longer ones are worth more gems, and these boosts will very quickly get you all of your builders if you work on them deliberately. Check out these guys again for the full details.
There are also periodically short, random events throughout the month which will say, like, “win 20 battles using 3 of (some troop)” and you’ll usually get a few gems and a magic item for completing those.
One of the biggest boosts to gems is potentially clan games, especially if your clan completes all 7 tiers of rewards. You could easily get a 200 gems or more, depending what prizes you choose.
The last way to earn gems is by selling your magic items. However, you should be aware that you usually get only a tiny fraction of the value of the item you sell. Nothing can be sold for more than 50 gems, but those same items could cost you as many as 3000 gems to buy! It is typically better to use your magic items strategically than to sell them.
For example, training potions, power potions, and hero potions do not give resources, but they make your armies more powerful or your attacks more frequent, allowing you to raid stronger bases more often or win wars you might have otherwise lost, increasing the rate at which you gain resources from the same amount of game time.
Resource potions obviously double mining income (as long as you log in to get it before somebody raids you!)
Runes, even more obviously, fill your storages completely, and that can be worth a huge amount of time raiding *IF* you wait until you’ve emptied them before you use the runes. Also, the higher you upgrade your town hall before you use them, the more loot you’ll get, so patience is a virtue.
Note, however, that some magic items deplete resources faster instead! The books allow you to skip a whole upgrade timer, so if you start another timer right away, you don’t have that time to reaccumulate resources in between. Similar things occur with the builder and research potions, but with a lag that gives you time to farm loot in between. So, make sure that you use these items when you have a surplus of resources! If you clear a timer fast and then let the builder sit around, you wasted the item!
Remember, also, that you can only hold one of each magic item at a time, so make sure you find a good time to use one before you earn another!
Alright, that’s it for all the ways to acquire loot. I remember back in the day when I started, there were only three ways to get loot! You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it!
vi. What to build and upgrade first
Offense vs. Defense
There are two main parts of this game: your attacks and your defenses. As it happens, you use the same builders to upgrade either one! Additionally, when you are raiding for resources, you’ll often have to prioritize gold (for defense) or elixir/DE (for offense). So, you will often be faced with the choice of whether you want to improve your offenses or your defenses.
This is a matter of opinion, in some ways, but in other ways I can demonstrate that you should focus on offense first.
The biggest case for offense is just that it takes a lot less time. Upgrading your army camps, clan castle, spell factory, and barracks will take much less time than upgrading all of your defensive towers, especially after you get to TH8.
What I’m saying is that putting 10 days into upgrading offense will increase your power by as much as putting 40 days into upgrading defense would upgrade your toughness. If you do offense first and another guy does defense first, you’ll crush him much more easily than he crushes you.
Next, offense is more important because you get to choose how many times you attack (increasing your loot), whereas there is a hard limit on how many times you can be attacked (decreasing your loot), because your shield will go up when your base is smashed, and then you can’t be attacked.
Strong defenses might protect you from players at your level, but they will be useless against higher level opponents, so you will sometimes get raided for 100% anyway, no matter if you capped your towers before your army camps. Meanwhile, if you have attacks that are more powerful, you’ll be more likely to get the full loot from every attack you make, and those can be as often as you like. Thus, for controlling your own ability to gather resources, offense is much better than defense.
Next, offense is more important because in clan wars, you are a new player, and will be on the lower end of the roster. This means that your base will get 3-starred no matter what! Your only way to be useful in the war is to 3-star at least one opponent, on offense. Thus, your offensive capabilities are primary until you are at the top 5 of a clan’s war ranking and can reasonably be expected to mount a 2-star defense.
Next, offense is more important because in clan war league, you are competing against other clans in such a way that you compare 7 of your attacks and only 1 of your defenses against each other. Offense is basically 7 times more important than defense, in clan war league.
Next, offense is more important if you want to push trophies. You will find that the average level of your opponents increases the higher you push in trophies, and their defenses will be stronger, to match. In order to continue pushing upward, you must win your attacks. Again, you can be destroyed by higher level bases no matter what you do, so you cannot realistically decrease your rate of losing trophies by much through defense, and anyway it only happens once every 12–16 hours at the fastest.
Next, offense is more important because almost all of the Clan Games and monthly quests and random events and achievements are based on successful attacks, not successful defenses. You will be better able to participate in these and earn those rewards by focusing on your offense over your defense.
Finally, offense is better (opinion) than defense, because you actually get to use it actively. Your defenses are just something you arrange passively, and there’s not really any “playing” while your base is defending. It just goes automatically. So, offense makes the game more fun while you are playing it as opposed to defenses, which make the game more fun while you are not playing it. Now, it’s kind of crazy to think that the game can be fun while you are not playing it, but it can be! My opinion is that the playing part is better, though. And — that’s offenses. Focus on your offense. Your defense literally plays itself.
A generally recommended upgrade order
First, get your castle and army camps upgraded. After that, when you are choosing what to upgrade, you have two options that you can implement in varying proportion. You can either upgrade all your troops and spells evenly, or you can focus on maxing out some first, and then bringing others up to match them.
I recommend picking certain troops for one kind of attack that you’re confident with and pushing those without worrying about the rest. If you’re using an air attack, your ground troop levels don’t matter, for example. If you’re using pekka and giant, why upgrade golem? You’ll progress much more quickly through the game and become much more powerful much faster if you prioritize some troops over others. However, you’ll also get boxed into using those same ones for a long time. Suppose Supercell nerfs your only good troops in an update — then what?
Either way, it’s really a matter of personal preference which you should do. I prefer to rush a mini (dragon/balloon/lightning/rage/freeze, or Miner/Heal/Healer/Rage) while I do completionism on a main account, to have the best of both worlds, but to each his own! Generally speaking, upgrade the things that are the biggest “housing space” proportion of your favorite army, first.
Defense Order:
You’ll hear about “war weight” as you play this game, especially if you mess yours up, so here’s the deal: when the game matches you in war, it matches you against somebody with the same “weight” as you. Each tower and each upgrade for each tower has a certain weight attached to it, and when you add those all up, that’s your total weight.
So, if you want to keep your weight low so you don’t get matched against very strong opponents before you are ready, you should always upgrade traps, mines, and storages first (they add almost no weight), followed by single-target towers, then multi-target towers, and then special TH10 and up towers last. Walls add no weight so upgrade them as you please without concern.
For a thorough discussion, see this other article.
vii. When to upgrade your town hall
There are a lot of considerations for this. You can unlock a larger army, new troops, higher level troops, more defensive towers, possibly heroes, and more! But, on the other hand, you get less loot from each base you raid at lower levels, you face opponents with stronger bases, you get raided by stronger armies, and, of course, you can’t go back to lower level afterward, so you need to make sure you know what you want before you act. If you rush your base, you might also have trouble finding a clan to accept you in war, if you aren’t weighted well. (Feel free to join mine!)
The most important downside to upgrading your town hall is if you are not ready to defeat bases at the next town hall level up, and it can match you weirdly in unbalanced ways in war — but that doesn’t affect loot. Remember, however, that in regular matches, you get 90% loot from hitting 1 level below you, so as long as you can already 3-star at your own level reliably, you’ll even more easily be able to 3-star for 90% loot if you level up, too.
Therefore, if you are able to 3-star a base with capped out defenses at your same town hall level, that’s when it’s time to upgrade your own, until you are one level below the highest level base in your clan. For a more thorough discussion, see these other articles.
viii. Joining a Clan
As you might expect for a game called “Clash of Clans,” there are a variety of benefits to joining a clan. The most important is probably just the ability to request troops for your castle. Note that in clans level 5, donated troops increase a level, and in level 10 clans, they increase two levels!
So, if you swap donations with somebody, not only do you both get bigger army capacity, you also get higher level troops! Clan perks for higher level clans also include partial loot rebates for donated troops, higher storage capacity in the castle, and more frequent requests allowed. Make sure to use your clan castle for requests often! Just don’t be pushy about expecting it filled quickly if you’re picky about what you get.
You also need to be part of a clan to participate in clan games, clan wars, and war league. But, probably more importantly, being part of a clan gives you a community of players who are part of an alliance with you, and that makes the game a lot more fun. People you can work with together on shared goals, and share in each others’ triumphs and losses, etc. Make sure you find a good clan, because the a nice atmosphere can really improve your gaming experience, or it can really make it toxic.
There are many, many kinds of clans focused on different aspects of the game and with different expectations and chat culture. If you need help finding a clan, check out this other article. If you need help starting a clan of your own, join my Clash of Clans Discord and ask me!
ix. Good Clan Etiquette
Okay, so you found your way into a really good clan, and you want to make sure they don’t kick you for some reason. There are some things you should understand, as a new player:
- Most players expect that you will probably just leave or quit the game soon, so until you’ve been there for a month in the same clan, they may not think of you all that seriously. This is a game for patient people, remember? A month is nothing to the people who run clans.
- Their armies take a lot longer to build, and their builders take a lot longer to get stuff done, so they are much less likely to log on all the time. Be patient about getting those high level troop upgrades.
- You are only useful in certain ways to the clan until your base is as developed as the higher level players. You can be just as helpful in Clan Games, but you will not be able to contribute as much by way of donations or war. Just be patient, you’ll get there. Your leaders will appreciate that you are active and helping where you can.
- Don’t put down clanmates for things. If you think you know what they are doing wrong, explain how they can do it better or keep your mouth shut. Feel free to build people up, though, with compliments, even if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
- Ask for advice about how to improve your attacks and what things you can do for the clan. That is one of your greatest contributions; as the experienced players teach you, they will share with each other, as well, and everyone will improve as they combine their knowledge.
- Don’t ask for promotions: ask how you can earn a promotion. After you’ve earned it, then you can ask.
- Make sure you follow through with things you say you will do, or apologize if you don’t. Yes, it’s just a game, but it’s also just an apology. Don’t be stingy about accepting blame when you deserve it, and you’ll be surprised how easily people forgive you.
- Be kind and treat others as they would like to be treated!
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed and learned a lot from this guide! There is a lot of information, and this is really just an introduction. I’m sure you noticed that I linked many of my more in-depth specific-topic articles, and I recommend that you check out the ones about gems and league medals and rushing, especially, as those will have impacts on long-term decisions you are likely to make soon.
Check out all my articles here at Mr. Way’s School of Clash!
https://discord.gg/ZekS3uEFNs if you’d like to ask questions directly.
