Failed raids almost never come down to army level. They come down to a funnel that collapsed on one side, or a base you attacked without deciding where you were going first. The clash of clans strategy game rewards planning far more than it rewards spending, which is the opposite of what most players assume after a bad week.

This is a working guide, not a card list. Army compositions by tier, the funneling fundamentals nobody explains properly, base design principles you can apply to your own layout, and how to plan a war attack before the timer starts running.

What the Clash of Clans Strategy Game Actually Rewards

Three stars come from control, not power. You control where troops walk, when spells land, and which defenses are alive when your heroes reach the core. Every failed raid is one of those three going wrong.

The most useful habit is watching your own replays with the speed down. You will find the same mistake repeating, and it is usually that your troops took a path you did not intend about eight seconds in. Everything after that was damage control.

Clash of Clans Attack Strategy by Town Hall Tier

Below Town Hall 9, stop overthinking it. Giants with Wall Breakers and a wizard cleanup does the job, and the real bottleneck is your walls and your storages rather than your composition. Spend upgrade time there.

From Town Hall 10 through 13 you need one ground army and one air army you can run without thinking. Pick one of each, run them fifty times, and resist the urge to chase whatever a video called broken this month. Consistency beats theoretical ceiling at that range by a wide margin.

At the top the picture is unusually narrow right now, and Supercell said so directly. In the July 2026 balance update the team reported that Dragon armies led by Dragon Duke and Dragon Riders showed up in roughly 20% of Town Hall 18 war attacks, and that adding the second most popular army, Throwers backed by Healers, accounted for about 40% of all TH18 versus TH18 war attacks between them. Electro Dragons were underperforming and Meteor Golem had fallen further than intended after earlier nerfs.

That concentration is worth knowing because it tells you what every base you attack is built to stop. If the whole ladder is flying dragons, the ground army you practiced is the one nobody prepared for.

Funneling Is the Whole Skill

A funnel is not a tactic you add at the end. It is the reason your army reaches the core instead of walking a lap around the outside. You clear the buildings on both flanks of your entry point so the pathing has nowhere to go except inward.

The common failure is funneling one side properly and getting lazy on the other. Troops follow the path of least resistance, so a single surviving builder hut on the weak side pulls your entire army sideways. Clear both corners or accept the detour.

Use your cheapest units for it. Two or three troops dropped on the outside corners cost almost nothing and buy you the whole attack. Heroes are for the core, not for cleaning up the edges, and spending an Archer Queen on funnel work is how raids run out of time.

Base Design Without Copying Layouts

Most coc base strategy advice is a screenshot of somebody else’s layout, which stops working the moment it gets popular enough to have a known entry point. Principles travel better than copies.

Split your walls into real compartments rather than one thick ring. A ring gives Wall Breakers a single job. Compartments make them do it four times, and every extra second inside the walls is another second under fire.

Spread your splash damage. Two Wizard Towers next to each other die to the same spell. Keep air defenses inside the second compartment rather than the outer ring, and put your Clan Castle where a lure requires committing troops rather than poking one corner.

Then attack your own base with the army you use most. Whatever three-stars it in under a minute is the hole you actually have.

War Attacks Need a Plan Before the Timer

War gives you a scout window and most players waste it. Before you deploy anything, decide your entry side, name the two buildings you are clearing for the funnel, and pick the moment your heroes go in. Write it down if you have to.

Check the Clan Castle troop count and plan the lure before anything else, because a defending castle that never gets pulled has ended more war attacks than any single defense in the game. Then check where the Eagle Artillery sits relative to your entry, since that decides whether your spells go to healing or to damage.

Hero equipment is doing a lot of the work at higher tiers, and the Anime Fury update in June added a hero reward track in the Hero Hall, available from Town Hall 7, that pays out Epic Equipment, skins, and ore as your cumulative hero levels climb. If you have been ignoring equipment, that track is the cheapest way to catch up.

What to Fix This Week

Pick one thing. If your raids fail in the first fifteen seconds, it is the funnel. If they fail at the halfway mark, your army composition has no answer to splash damage. If they stall at 90% with the clock gone, you deployed too slowly at the start and never recovered.

The game is free to install and always has been, which is also why it is easy to spend a year not improving. If you want something with a shorter feedback loop, the mobile war strategy picks and the multiplayer shortlist both move faster. For deeper campaigns there is grand strategy on phones and the iOS roundup, plus more in our strategy guides and across Strategygame.org.

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