Everything you need to know about anti 3 star bases
Specific buildings :
Barbarian King
This guy is useful for putting extra defense in an area where you don’t want another defensive building for pathing reasons (eg. the short side of a dgb). Alternatively you could put him near the queen to help defend her.
Wizard Towers
It’s a good idea to make sure your wizard towers cannot shoot hounds that are hovering over an air defense, since this allows them to fire on groups of balloons. In addition, lvl 7 wizard towers one hit lvl 5 wallbreakers, and putting them slightly behind the outer walls let them take maximum advantage of this. On the flipside however, being able to take out multiple wizard towers in the kill squad stage provides an advantage for hybrid air attackers, so be careful.
X bows
X bows are remarkable not for their dps, but for their hitpoints and range. Traditionally they are placed near the center of the base to help stall attackers trying to reach the TH, but in the anti 3 star world there are better things to defend with them, such as the queen. They don’t really need to be anywhere near the centre: if you have 6 tiles of range pointing into free space that might be slightly wasteful, but use them to stall attacks. Another neat trick for x bows is to have them poking out of the perimeter wall specifically to discourage queen walks: the constant Xbow damage will require frequent rage spells to overcome.
- Air or ground?
Unless you know what you’re doing and have a great reason, they should be on air. 99 times out of 100, you can’t afford not to have the extra 150dps vs air attacks.
Air Sweepers
Generally, an air sweeper pointing in two different directions can’t put you too far wrong, but remember that pointing them towards air defenses that are likely to be taken out by a kill squad is largely pointless, and if they are in the path of a kill squad, they may as well not be there.
Mortars
Pretty useless if you ask me. Their only helpful property is that they lose targets if they approach too close, so put them on the outer layer of the base (or even outside the walls…) to shoot over the golems at wizards and witches.
Bombs
Lvl 6 bombs are the arch-nemesis of the wallbreaker. Place them between two peripheral buildings with a one tile gap between it and a wall, and watch those ground attacks flop as the wallbreakers “magically disappear”…
Spring traps
Enemies getting round your dgbs? Fear not! There is one more powerful defense against the hog rider, and that is the spring trap. Obviously, place them right on top of likely paths for your hogs, but it’s also advisable to concentrate them in places that are unlikely to be trampled by a golem. Ideally a spring trap should be funnelled just like a small dgb to guarantee maximum hog trolling, and be aware that you can use neutral buildings to help path the hogs over them!
Air Bombs and Air Mines
One of the most common errors in war bases is the grouping of these two traps. Ideally, you want mines to hit hounds and bombs to hit loons, and placing them together is a surefire way of failing one of these objectives. Since hounds target air defenses, it makes perfect sense to place your mines around them. A common tactic is to put double air mines on the two air defenses least likely to be taken down in the ground stage of a golaloon attack. As for air bombs, they are completely wasted on hounds, so you want them as far away from air defenses as you can manage (within reason). A further trick for air bombs is to position them on the side where the kill squad is likely to come from, since with any luck the hounds won’t make it that far.
Skeleton Traps
Larry traps are easily underestimated, and have most of the same applications as teslas (see above) with the exception of pathing of defense targeting troops. It is however wise to separate them.
- Air or ground?
Unless you know what you’re doing and have a great reason, they should be on ground. Any argument that can be made for air larrys vs loons can also be made for ground larrys vs hogs. Apart from the fact that hogs are arguably more dangerous, the deciding factor for me therefore is that the kill squad is always ground based.
Storages
A note on storages. As most vigilant attackers know, they are a pain to get through, and so can be used to stall the dps section of the kill squad and separate it from the golems, giving your defenses that much more time to shoot them down. Concentrate storages around likely kill squad entry points.
Farms (for the brave)
“What on earth is a farm?” I hear you cry. Well, a farm is simply a concentration of dps in a small area of the base with the intention of massacring (or ‘farming’) lots of troops quickly. The most common variation is a tesla farm, which groups all the teslas in one corner of the base for an insane 350dps. Although it is the most common, it isn’t necessarily the most effective. You only have so much dps to play with, so the more you put in one area, the less there is for the rest of the base. Remember however that the tesla is not the only damage dealer in your arsenal. Any point defense or even a wizard tower is a good contribution for a farm, and x bows can help keep units inside the farm for longer, increasing the total damage from whatever other defenses are there. You may argue that a tesla farm is the most effective because it can’t be seen in a blind attack, but placing a pair of teslas among a seemingly harmless spread of point defenses can have the same effect! Finally, consider using this strategy in conjunction with the section on heal forcing above.
What should I put in my clan castle?
Well, I don’t know? What does your base look like?! There are a miriad of successful combinations but it is in fact partially up to the lurability of your CC: if your CC is completely unlurable then a hound could be a great choice, but if an attacker can use 2 hogs to get at it, then you might want to consider using more, smaller troops.
- DO dedicate some of your space to splash damage troops of some kind. (Unless hound)
- DO consider what an attacker might do if he knows your composition. A PEKKA for example is fanta stic as a surpise, but can be easily manipulated on a cleanup attack.
- DO consider the following: It is (nearly) always a bad idea to completely fill your CC with units that will be quickly wiped by a poison, but going completely the opposite way and rendering a poison spell completely ineffective encourages the attacker to bring 4 eqs as part of any attack strategy with a sizable kill squad, and this will still allow them 3 elixir spells! This is simply OP. By contrast, subtly encouraging the use of a poison spell with a 4eq strat brings this number down to a more manageable 2. Think about that the next time you’re about to load a hound…
- DON’T fill your CC with the same setup as everyone else in the clan! If you see that a clear majority of players are using, for example, the drag/loon combo, consider yourself banned from using it. Always keep the attackers guessing.
- TRY filling your CC with a mixture of ranged and melee air and ground troops to give wizards a hard time shooting it all down.
- TRY reading my guide on CC composition!
My base got 3 starred! What do I do?
- DO something. If it was 3 starred once, it could be 3 starred again.
- DO correct any weaknesses you find from the replay, but you must make sure you don’t expose any new ones along the way!
- DON’T automatically throw away the base and make a new one.
- TRY making a new base if the weakness is too difficult to correct.
And that’s all. Thanks for reading and clash on!
