WitchDoctor910: Day 1 (Before you begin)

Before you begin anything, you need to know 1 important thing; how you gonna play this game. It can be either offensive or defensive style, normal or war, and trophies pushing or farming.

1st Step: Offensive/Defensive

Offensive focus on attacking power while defensive focus on defenses. The aim would be the same which is gaining resources to develop your village. In offensive, you will spend most of your time raiding other villages and looting their resources. In defensive, you will depend on your mines and collectors to fill up your storages. Knowing this will determine your overall game framework as you will be forcing to selectively upgrade your buildings to achieve that aim. Offensive will force you to upgrade troops and spells level, army camps, barracks, clan castle, spell laboratory and heroes. Defensive will force you to upgrade mines, collectors, drills and most defenses. Is there anything in the middle (balance offensive and defensive)? Of course there are. But since resources (time and builders) is limited, you cant do all at the same time. In most cases, balancing strategy is very difficult to achieve. How you determine your strategy is balance is not an easy task either? If you realize however, upgrading clan castle and heroes also can be defensive as it can be used to defend your village. I felt that dividing strategy into 2 distinct group is much easy and practical. For beginner, this is much helpful of course. As experienced player, I also felt the same. So, lets start with these two only.

2^nd Step: Normal/War

Offensive/Defensive have huge influence whether you will focus on normal or war game play. If you focus on offensive while minimize your defensive, this means you be able to have big advantage in war. Thus, you should focusing on war in general. Focusing on war meaning you will upgrading armies that powerful enough to beat at least your mirror opponent (same ranking as you). Since you will be ranked lower in most cases as your defensive is low, you probably overpowered your mirror opponent. If you can fight and beat better rank opponent, this will give huge advantage to clan overall. Ultimately, you, clan mates and clan itself will gain benefits of war. Due to introduction of Treasury, bonus loot become highly valuable than ever before. Therefore, game play focusing on war bring very good experience and income to you.

Other than that, you can also focusing on normal game play which means normal search and attack while progress steadily in war. As your armies is not that powerful and your defenses considerably higher upgraded, you will not get advantage during war. However, since we can only have 1 war in 2 days while we can play anytime in normal mode, focusing on normal mode can be beneficial, easy and less stressful. You can also enjoying COC as you village progressing slow yet steadily becoming stronger. In this mode, you probably can try many strategies you like using many troop combination and composition. With this knowledge, you will become powerful player that well informed about troops, base layouts and strategies and counter strategies.  

3^rd Step: Trophies Pushing/Farming

Final step is to choose between trophies pushing and farming. Usually, you can change this throughout the course. If you time constraint person, trophies pushing could be the answer. You only need to do couple attacks that give good loot and benefit from league win bonus. If you can spend time online, farming is much better choice as it should give better loot if you know how to farm. Farming is a strategy that only focuses on loot while ignoring trophies. Collecting resources from gold mines, elixir collectors and dark elixir drills is consider passive farming. Sometime, this method will allow you to upgrade without need of attacking other players. This method however is very time consuming although you don’t need to online a lot. This is the different between passive farming and active farming. In active farming, you need to constantly attack players to gain loot. In short, if you cant online much, trophies pushing and passive farming is the solution. Generally, the term farming apply to active farming that is when you can online longer thus actively looting.

Diagram 1.1 What kind of player you want to be? Mar Andoc

Diagram 1.2 What kind of player you want to be? WitchDoctor910

In Summary

It is very important to determine what kind of player you want to be in order to progress in achieving what you aim for. For me, offensive + war + farming is much more suitable as I will progress much faster to becoming stronger player. I have time to spend on COC, thus this strategy is better. In that case, I play aggressively and can be considered as REBEL mode! Diagram 1.1 illustrate Mar Andoc's focus which obviously on REBEL side. Since Mar Andoc have many time to spend, Mar Andoc can achieve TH8 in 3 weeks. Currently, Mar Andoc is war oriented account thus overpowered in every war. As for WitchDoctor910, I plan to enjoy more and spend less time in building powerful armies while focusing on strategies.

This post to tell and advice you that you should have plan before playing this game. This will help a lot during the course of becoming best COC player. If you already started (most of you should) without having these goals, you should stop and give some time to think about it. There is no need to start all over. What you need is to set up your goal and using existing account, gear up and moving towards that direction. Cheers.