Clash of Clans Farming at 3000 (Balloonions)

Clash of Clans Farming at 3000 (Balloonions) by zachUVA

Yep, a neat little aspect of this new loot system is that it is more profitable than ever to be nudging up against champions league. In fact, I think the profits are large enough to call it farming. So let’s go through exactly how this works and why it’s so cool…

Prerequisites

• TH 10, or maybe a very strong TH 9.
• Max level balloons, and ideally, max level minons.
• The time to raid in sessions.

Objectives

• Farm at least 600k gold per hour, on average. No, it is not as profitable as BAM farming, but for those who like farming with balloonions or just want to do a hybrid of cupping and farming, the profits are there.
• Maintain the cup count. The range is, roughly speaking, 2800-3100. I have found the best farming to be right around that 3k line, though, hence the title.
• A good raid should have: 350k+ gold won, 50%+ destroyed.

Combo (assumes TH 10)

• 20 balloons (5 in each barracks)
• 70 minions (35 in each dark barracks)
• 1 lightning, 4 rages on overnight spell builds.
• 1 lightning, 4 heals queued when raiding, although I rarely bring more than 2 spells into a raid.
• Heroes are optional, but are nice to have along.
• Train time for the army is exactly 40 minutes, and you can use approximately one spell per raid on average.

Mindset

• FORGET ABOUT THE CORE. Multimode infernos? Upward facing xbows? As long as they are in the center, it does not matter. This strategy does not allow you to get loot and still go around 2 starring bases. And from a farmer’s viewpoint, the core (excluding AQ/CC, but including defenses) might as well not even exist in many cases.
• Know your limitations. 20 balloons and 70 minions is a great combo, but without a full compliment of spells and heroes, it isn’t going to destroy every base (at least not while getting the loot). Don’t rush in anytime you see a 400k gold raid pop up, be patient, and if you aren’t sure that you can beat it, skip it.
• Raid slowly. Many balloonion users who cup hunt will often drop a whole line of balloons and rage them, dropping a good chunk of their minions behind them. Forget all that. Be patient, take your time. This strategy focuses more on precision than speed, and dropping all of your troops at the beginning of the raid usually isn’t the best idea.
• Don’t stress over winning every raid. It’s just like regular farming, once you win a few in a row, go ahead and lose one if you see a big raid. Fail raids happen too, and they are no big deal as long as you can still maintain your cup count.

Searching for a target (what to look for and what to avoid)

• If it has less than 300k gold (or 2500 or so DE), skip it. No need to even waste your troops on it, unless it’s an incredibly easy base. Better raids are out there.
• If the base is is one of the old anti-hog bases with a ring of resources in the middle layer, skip it unless all the gold is on one side.
• If you see a crab base with loot, raid it.
• Look for bases with lots of peripheral buildings. If a base takes up alot of space, it usually means you can destroy most of it without ever going near the core.
• Look for bases with uneven air coverage, or lots of upgrading air weapons.
• Look for exposed Archer Towers. If nothing else is firing on your balloon, one balloon will destroy one Archer Tower. That’s a trade you want to make as often as possible.
• The key is peripheral (or middle layer) gold storages. Most bases up this high actually have this, so it isn’t hard to find, but that’s your target, so always make sure you can get to it.

Here a couple examples of some pretty close to ideal targets (I raided and 1-starred both of them):

Deployment

• Destroy peripheral ATs first, if there are any.
• Lure CC/AQ as necessary. If you don’t have a lightning spell with you and archers come out, use the balloon trick. Lure them to the edge of the defenses, and drop a balloon so that it will be killed right over top of the CC troops, killing them.
• Drop one or two waves of balloons (5-8 each) to take out any ADs/WTs/ATs guarding the storages. Quickly follow this some minions. Dropping your spell (I usually only have 1 or two spells total) here is usually the best time for it.
• Drop one minion around each of the exposed buildings that remain, helping you get towards 50%. There should be quite a few of these by this point in the raid, and you should probably be in the 35-45% destroyed range by here.
• Use any remaining bloonions to go for any storages on the other side of the base, or to get those last few percent needed for the star.

Battle Logs
Here are quite a few of my battle logs for the last couple of days (note, there are some fails/mediocre raids in here):

GEMS SPENT ON THIS STRATEGY: 0

Dark Elixir

• Yes, this strategy is also viable for farming DE. DE storages do tend to be more highly protected than gold storages (although some people do use them as bait), but you can focus your troops towards one target instead of 4.
• DE drills seem to be very full up here, especially on bases with maxxed heroes who can afford to let it go.
• I have NOT been focusing on DE, but I do take it when it’s easy to get both gold and DE. I honestly don’t have a very good estimate of the DE/hour that can be achieved like this, but I will try to test that in the coming weeks.

Defense

• Don’t log off between attacks and expect to not get raided, at least not consistently.
• In all cases, your losses should still be less than or equal to what you get from a single raid. Even if you lose all 400k, that’s still just one raid to make it back.
• Obviously, this strategy is not for “casual” players, who like to log on, do a raid, and log off. It requires session raiding in most cases, although in the lower part of the range (close to 2800), a decent base can usually manage to not be attacked while the army trains, but that’s no guarantee.
• Base design is actually an interesting topic here, and one that I plan on exploring in a bit more detail later on (not in this thread), but for now I think it suffices to say that you will lose resources on defenses, but it will usually be in the 100-300k range, and not all 400k unless you have a vault base.

Let me know if you guys have any questions, comments, additions, or anything else! Hope this helped.