Clash of Clans: Raiding Tips for Beginners

Clash of Clans has a lot of moving parts, from designing your base to upgrading your buildings, to joining and participating in a Clan, but perhaps the most important part of the game, if you’re trying to grow your village and get stronger, is raiding. But raiding can be a little intimidating to a beginner, and if you’re just starting out it’s more than possible to waste a bunch of time and elixir going after the wrong targets or using your troops poorly.

If you’re just getting started, make sure you’ve done a few levels of the single-player campaign – the Goblins. Here are some tips and tricks for beginning Clashers to help you get started on raiding.

Don’t Be Afraid to Hit Next!

This is probably the first thing you need to learn about raiding, and the one technique that will save you the most frustration. As with so many things in life, patience is the key to success. Yes, it does cost gold to keep looking through enemy villages, but it’s absolutely worth skipping over villages that are too difficult or offer too little in the way of resource rewards. The gold you spend looking will absolutely pay for itself.

You don’t have a lot of time to examine other villages, but here are the things you should look for while you’re scanning for your next target:

• Where are the resources? You can get a glimpse of how much is available in the upper right corner, but check out the visual indicators on their collectors – if all their resources are stored in well protected collectors, this might not be the right target. (See below for an example of full vs. empty collectors)
  
• Are the resource collectors and/or storages exposed? There’s no reason to be a hero when attacking. There’s no shame in waiting for an easy target.
• Are there tombstones on the map? If the player hasn’t been back since an attack, then their traps are probably still sprung, making this an easy
• Does the base look rushed? If there are low-level defenses, incomplete walls, and other signs that the player rushed to the next TH level without fully upgrading, you can be sure that their defenses aren’t going to be up to snuff (the base below is a example of a very quickly rushed TH).
  
  
• Are defenses being upgraded? Especially with lower-level bases, if you can catch one while a mortar or wizard tower is being upgraded, you have a good chance of achieving two or three stars when it might be hard to get past one.

Raiding Goes Both Ways

Let’s face it – you’re going to get raided. This can be a huge setback if you’ve been stockpiling resources for an upgrade, but there are ways to make sure that you don’t suffer too greatly from the inevitable raid. Make sure you’re thinking about the following when you start raiding seriously

• Spend down before you go offline – whether you’re going to bed, heading to work, or just going to be unplugged for a while, try to spend as much as you can. Especially once you get into higher TH levels, it’s a good idea to leave one builder free to use on walls.
• Build a smart base. You don’t have to have the perfect layout, you just need to make the prospect of going after your resources unattractive. Upgrade your walls and defenses and keep your storages somewhere safe.
• Take your revenge! After you’ve been attacked you have a golden opportunity to strike back at your attacker. You aren’t always going to be able to effectively strike back, but you have one huge advantage – as long as you want to look at their base. Tailor your army to take advantage of their weaknesses and get your resources back.

Be Efficient!

It doesn’t matter if you land a huge haul while raiding if you spent more than you gained on the troops you used or if you spent hours training, planning, and executing the assault. There are lots of easy things you can do to improve your efficiency – you don’t need a spreadsheet or anything, just a little knowledge and preparation.

• Know how much your troops cost. Pay attention to the elixir cost of your army and make sure that you’re getting what they’re worth. If you’re not, you might need to adjust your troop composition or search for jucier targets. Also, feel free to keep some troops in reserve if a smaller number can clear 50% and get the resources you need – you don’t have to spend your whole army on every attack.
• Queue up troops. Even if your camps can’t hold them, you can queue up a whole barracks worth of troops. If you start a raid with troops in the queue, you’ll get a head start on training while you’re on the offensive. (This can be a really clever way to safely store Elixir as well)
• Use your time wisely. It’s a better use of your time to hit three small targets quickly for 30k than to spend that time hitting one big target for 100k. If you’re not finding nice big targets, feel free to pick on smaller ones using cheaper/fewer troops for a while.

Know Your Army

Over time, you’ll figure out what types of compositions work for you, but there are some tried and true army compositions that are cheap, proven, and effective. Try these out if you’re having trouble:

• Barch: Barbarian and Archers. The composition varies anywhere from 25 to 50% barbarians, so feel free to tinker with the numbers. The strategy is simple – use the barbarians to soak up damage and archers to take down collectors and storages. This composition sometimes includes wallbreakers if you need to smash into the first layer.
• BAM: Barbarians, archers, and minions. A slightly more advanced composition, this isn’t necessarily more effective than Barching, but it has the advantage of being very fast, since you can have more barracks working at once. Good for fast farming and picking off easy targets.
• Giants + Healers: No nifty name for this, but this strategy opens up at T6 and is great for base-busting, but slower than Barchers or Goblins. If you need to absolutely squeeze every last drop out of a raid, this will do the trick, at least for a while.
  
• Loonions: For high-level players, Balloons and Minions are a great raiding composition, but you need to have highly upgraded versions of each before it becomes effective.
• Mass Dragons: When you absolutely need to raze the base. Not recommended for regular raiding, but if you have a juicy revenge target, this might be just the thing.

Feel free to mix and match as well. Throwing giants in with your Barchers or mixing in some goblins here and there can be very effective. There are lots of options available to you, so experiment, see what works, and have fun!