Clash of Clans Base Upgrading Guide

Clash of Clans Base Upgrading Guide by Potation

This guide assumes that you have nearly maxed/maxed out your previous townhall, or that you want to max out your current townhall. Having a maxed townhall is crucial for staying competitive in clan wars.

This guide also assumes that you raid multiple times during the day and can keep up with the resource demands of keeping your builders constantly working.

I decided to write this guide because I just hit TH9 recently and have been struggling with what is important to upgrade and what I should upgrade next in order to start warring as soon as possible. Hopefully, these ideas that I am using will help you when you need help deciding what to upgrade. This guide will not cover laboratory order, but I might add those in later.

For those in clans that take war seriously, share this with your clanmates so that they may be prepared for their next upgrade!

Early/New TH Progression upgrades

Now each townhall is different, but a few things can be done regardless of which townhall you have just reached. I will list them in order of importance/priority.

I usually leave two builders open: one for heroes, one for walls. If I don’t have enough dark elixir for my heroes anytime soon, I might put it on a shorter upgrade. Otherwise, I leave it open.

Dumping extra gold/elixir into walls before you go to sleep every night will reduce the raiders on your base as there are no resources to raid.

1. Lab and Spell Factory
   This should be self explanatory. Getting those troops to the new max levels should be highest priority. An extra spell will help you regardless of normal raiding or clan wars attacks, but it will definitely help out in clan wars. Get these done ASAP.
2. Maxing Clan Castle
   This is your strongest defense. Not only that, but it is also an extremely strong “unit” you can use in attacks since you can get troops that are not only higher levels (unless you are maxed TH10), but more troops added to your attack as well.
3. Maxing out Heroes (Read for more information)
   If you get a new hero, get it to 5 ASAP. The barbarian king and archer queen allow for better raiding AND defense. The abilities are extremely strong as well. And the archer queen just allows for so much more when you attack a base. If you are in a constant war clan, this can be put on the backburner as long as you have level 1 barb king (BK) at TH7, level 5 BK at TH8, level 10 BK and level 5 archer queen at TH9. If you don’t have those levels, then you need to get them ASAP. If you are TH10, I think heroes can be on the back burner depending on if their combined level is 40 or not, otherwise get them to 20/20.
4. Getting walls to the max of previous TH level
   Walls are your first line of defense. Not only are these crucial for war bases, but will also slow down those attackers going for your loot. Troops stuck on walls might be the difference between a 3 star and a 2 or 1 star. Even though they can take very long to grind out, it will save you a lot of trouble later on. It also allows you to slow down the rate your war matchmaking score rises and give you time to practice attacks that can 3 star bases at the same non-wall progression.
5. Building all the new structures (getting them to level 1)
   Also pretty self explanatory, these will help out all around. I.e: From TH7 to TH8, you get a dark elixir drill, extra gold/elixir storage, dark barrack, archer tower, mortar, and a lot of other stuff that I’m not going to mention. Plus, they build relatively fast. They will help everywhere, so get them quick.
6. Maxing army camps
   Allows for more troop space, therefore stronger attacks. Absolutely essential in clan wars, so get these done ASAP.
7. Maxing dark elixir drills (optional: resource collectors)
   Helps get dark elixir used in your troop research/hero upgrades. Dark Elixir is much more rare than gold/elixir, so get these up as soon as possible.
   If you don’t raid very often, then these collectors will become a very large generator of resources, so you’ll want to get them producing more ASAP. I personally raid many times throughout the day, so I save these for later.
8. Maxing out 1 dark barracks (TH8, TH9 only)
   The new troops you get here are extremely strong. Golem at TH8 and witch/lava hound at TH9 will give more options for getting those beautiful 3 stars. At TH7, the minions and hogs just aren’t very strong. It’s better to save the elixir for normal barracks.
9. Maxing out 1 barracks (TH7 and under, maybe not TH6/TH4)
   The troops you get from maxing out your barracks are very important at these TH levels. I personally am not a fan of GoWiPe and think it is a 2 star strategy, so I left out TH8 here. Spend that elixir elsewhere if you do not use pekkas.
10. Get defensive structures to previous TH max level/Max out traps
    Read step 12 if you want to know why we don’t max defenses at this point.
11. Max out whatever non defensive structures that are not yet maxed
    Only things left are resource collectors/storages and barracks/dark barracks.These are not that important, but upgrading them will help in clan wars as they do get more HP per level, especially the storages. The barracks/dark barracks will allow you to train troops faster, so that will help as well.
12. Maxing Defenses or Max Out Walls
    Now this is tricky and it should depend on how much you care about winning clan wars and becoming a better war attacker. If you are struggling to 3 star bases that have the same progression as you, then you are dragging your clan down. Clan matchmaking is based upon offensive strength (troop/spell/hero levels) and defensive strength (trap/defense buildings/walls/heroes). Upgrading your defensive buildings will make your ranking rise higher than upgrading walls; this means tougher wars as you’ll be matched with opponents with the similarly leveled defenses. In clan wars, the best defense is a perfect offense; if 3 stars are hard to get, that means your offensive capability has fallen behind your defensive capability which means that your clan could get a better attacker of your base/TH level. This is where I recommend you strongly to upgrade and max out your walls before your defenses. It will give you plenty of time to practice attacks without raising your matchmaking ranking (i.e: #5 base in the war, #21 base in the war, etc.). Plus, walls help slow down enemy attacks in general. However, if you can 3 star bases that have the same progression as your own, upgrade your defenses until you start struggling with similarly progressed bases.

If you choose to upgrade your defenses, this should be the order:

Lab Upgrades

I was going to include a more in-depth lab upgrade section, but I am lazy and will stave that off for a later time. The general idea for lab upgrades is to first upgrade your normal raid a little bit, then start maxing ONE war composition that you use or want to use.

Based upon barch as the normal raiding comp, here is an example of simplified upgrade progressions at TH7, 8, and 9:

TH7: Barbarians -> dragons -> rage spell ->personal preference
TH8: Barbarians -> hog riders -> heal spell -> personal preference
TH9: Barbarians -> balloons -> lava hounds -> giants(for lure) -> hogs -> jump spell -> golems -> personal preference

Why barbs are better than arch in barch

Archers do not deal more damage but are the main damage dealers in BARCH, so why barbarians over archers?Let’s take a look at the math:

Barbarians:

Archers:

A th7 mortar will 2 shot the barbs and archers, regardless of level. They do 40 damage per shot every 5 seconds.

However, lets look at the wizard tower. It deals 26 damage per shot, every 1.3 seconds. Assuming that every barb will take a hit from one mortar shot and one wizard shot, a level 4 barb will survive an extra 1.3 seconds as a level 3 barb dies to one mortar shot and one wizard shot.

That’s a potential extra 1.3 seconds your level 3 archers could use to deal 12 dps. However, if you have level 4 archers, you’d lose out to that extra 1.3 seconds for an extra 4 dps per archer.

In my opinion, it’s always better to upgrade barbarians over archers.

You’ll see similar numbers at th8 and th9.

The only acceptable troop to not leave maxed before upgrading to the next TH is valkyries, and even then you should max it out at TH9.

This is the end of my guide. Thanks for taking the time to read this and hopefully you have taken away something from this guide that will allow you to become a better clasher.

Special shoutout to the TheHulkFiles for providing many of these ideas. He’s one of the most insightful players that creates content regularly, so if you want more help, I recommend checking out his youtube videos.

If you have any questions or comments about the topics covered in this guide, feel free to leave a reply and I will try my best to answer all of you!

Clash on!