Anti Hog Rider Base Designs and Tactics | Clash Of Clans | TEC Clashzz

Hog Riders can be a huge pain – they deal good damage, have quite a lot of health, are fast and can jump over Walls. In several regions they are a very popular raiding setup that gives a lot of base owners a pain to deal with. In this post I want to show you how you can make you base Anti Hog Rider proof. In the first part I want to explain how the Hog Rider attacks work in their basic mechanic (mass Hog Rider and surgical Hog Rider), so you understand what makes them strong and also what makes them weak – in the next part I will show you how you can build a successful anti Hog Rider base with some simple tricks. The last part shows some finalized great anti Hog Rider base designs you can use, in case you don’t want to harden your base against Hog Rider yourself. In case you’re looking for a new base design I’d recommend reading the first part anyway.

How to defend against Hog Rider attacks?

Let me start from the basics and show you how a Hog Rider attack works in the very simple mechanic. This will help you understand why they sometimes work very successful and sometimes not. From understanding how the attacks really work I can show you what they rely on and how to stop giving them a free raiding ticket on your base.

How Hog Rider attacks work in general (Surgical and mass Hog Rider)

Hog Riders are always targeting the next Defense from the point where they’re staying right now – ignoring all Walls in their way, because they can simply jump over them. With their good damage and high hitpoints they’re able to take out the Defenses of your base quite fast. A general Hog attack has 3 different steps, when I break it down to the very basic:

1. Start destroying Defenses and grouping up
2. Going through the bases Defense one-by-one and get supported by Healing Spells
3. Clear out the base (can get supported by other troops and Heroes)

I think with this simple process in mind we can now start putting a spoke in their wheels.

How to defend against Hog Rider attacks

In order to defend against them you have to get the Hog Riders killed. That sounds more easy than it is, because with their quite good amount of hitpoints and being inside the area of a Healing Spell, you’re almost defenseless against them. So we actually have only these possibilities:

1. Dealing more damage to a Hog Rider than the Healing amount can compensate
2. Killing a Hog Rider right away; Healing is useless
3. Stop the Healing effect

The crucial part of any attack is when the Healing is running out and you see the Hogs dropping one-by-one. I used Hogs a lot back in the days when I was pre-TH10, so let me show you what I learned from my failed attacks there.

Deal more damage than the Healing Spell can heal

Lets have a look at the Healing Spell first. They pulse every 0.3 seconds and heal 15-40 with each pulse – spoken in simple DPS that’s 50-133 PER troop inside the range. When you now look at your Defenses you can very easily see that it’s almost impossible to deal that damage – especially considering that there are like 20 Hogs in the range. I think this approach can’t be very effective, but luckily we have 2 more topics of our anti hog rider methods left. I only wanted to show you how powerful the Healing Spell is and why we need other methods to deal with Hog Riders – please don’t be disappointed now and close the page, I promise you will see some very good anti Hog Rider activities now :)

Killing a Hog Rider right away

As we now know that we’re almost helpless against the healing effect, we need something else. The simple solution is simply wiping out the Hog Rider right away – no healing applied, problem solved. There are two great ways to do that I want to show you now.

Spring Traps kill, not only deal damage

Spring Traps are the best way to wipe out troops right away (unless they’re Heroes or Golems). I think it’s nothing special I recommend here, but the Spring Trap placement is crucial to its success, because you want as many Hog Riders to step into a single Spring Trap as possible.

A lot of people place the Spring Traps at the very outside, but experienced Hog Rider attackers will always deploy single Hog Riders first to test the water (as seen in my post about testing the water). You need to let the Hog Riders group up together and then watch them walk into your Spring Traps.

That’s why you need to place them more in the second row, inside your defensive line.

Using Giant Bombs against Hog Rider

Giant Bombs deal great damage and if a  group walks into them, it’s even more. They also have the great effect that they deal 50% extra damage to Hog Riders – sounds like something to use against Hog Riders :) simple smile

Now a Hog Rider has between 270 and 475 hitpoints and you only see successful Hog Rider attacks with Hog Rider Level 3+ (hitpoints 360+). The Giant Bomb deals 262 to 375 damage to Hog Riders (I already added the additional 50% damage they deal to Hog Riders. A lot of numbers, let me put the essential, important things into some simple stats:

1. A Giant Bomb Level 4 (max level) can kill Hog Rider of max Level 3
2. To kill a Hog Rider level 5 you’ll need at least 2 Giant Bombs Level 1

The last one is the important thing to know when you want to fight Hog Riders with Giant Bombs: Never place them alone! Hogs will walk through them and get healed up from the healing Spell – you always need to place 2 of them next to each other!

Unfortunately the Giant Bombs take 2×2 tiles and can be spotted very easily in your base – and when you place them outside you will again have the problem that experienced attackers will trigger them with a single Hog send in front of the others. Luckily you also have your Hidden Teslas, which also leave a 2×2 tiles blank space in the view of the attacker.

My best choice is creating multiple 2×4 tiles within your base and some of them are filled with Hidden Teslas (or nothing), while other are filled with your double Giant Bomb combination.

Using the Archer Queen

The Archer Queen is a deadly enemy of the Hog Riders and can really blast a mass Hog Rider attack. She deal crucial damage to a single target and don’t get attacked by the Hog Riders because they try to destroy all Defenses first.

Archer Queen shoots down Hog Riders one by one without getting attacker

Place your Archer Queen in the very inside of your base so her attacking radius is covering a big part of your base and make it impossible for the attacker to lure her out and kill her with Heroes or anything else. You will see her decimating the Hogs one by one and make the attack very hard to be that successful.

Using Inferno Tower

Last but not least, if you’re TH10 you have also a very great anti Hog Rider Defense – the Inferno Tower in Multi-Mode. The Inferno Tower prevents that any Healing effect get applied to the troops and as soon as the Inferno Tower targets 5 Hog Rider they’re doomed.

Hog Rider getting blasted by a Multi-Target Inferno Tower

Any attacker with Hog Riders ever tried that a couple of times and will not attack your base anymore as soon as you have 1 Multi-Mode Inferno Tower in your base. Unfortunately this Defense is TH10 exclusive and if you’re not TH10 you need to rely on the other anti Hog Rider methods shown above – but no worries, they work great and will help you dealing with them anyway.

Anti Hog Rider Farming Base, War Base and Trophy Base Designs for all Town Hall levels

Now that we have discussed some methods that will help you defending against Hog Riders, I want to show you some great base designs you can use – if you plan to implement the methods I’ve shown earlier you’re also good to go, but sometimes this would need a huge redesign. Simply check out my personal favourite anti Hog Rider base designs for War and Farming bases.

We start with TH7 bases as TH6 not really has to fight Hog Riders that hard and also, with TH6 you have very little chances to fight back at them, simply because you’re missing some very important Traps.

TH7 Anti Hog Rider Base Design

We start with a Clan War base against Hog Riders, a very popular attacking style in that Town Hall region because it’s easy to use, only one single kind of troops and also not easy to defend:

This base uses the double Giant Bombs on the left side. Some players starting with Hogging tend to bring also a Dragon along with their Hogs to clean up, so they also will start to attack from the Air Sweeper side. The Spring Traps at the entrances make this base also hard to attack for the other very popular TH7 attacking strategy – Giants and Healer. In the first place the Hog Rider will not be attached to them, but when going around and cleaning up the base they will step into them sooner or later – and at that point they are grouped up very closely.

In this farming base the Giant Bombs aren’t settled in a double pack, but considering that the Hogs that will attack you aren’t full level and the splash damage is very concentrated it will work as well. Also I don’t see lots of attackers having their Healing Spells handy because they will still deploy troops when the first wave steps into the Giant Bomb – and then the Mortars and Wizard Towers will hit. Design working.

Town Hall 8 Anti Hog Rider Base Designs for War Base and Farming Base

The War Base I will show you is in my view one of the best War Base Designs out there for late 2015. It’s great against Hogs – what you will see a lot – but also working like a charm against Dragons and PEKKAs:

Lets talk some details of the base. You have basically everything in there I told you in the beginning of post. You have the doubled Giant Bombs on the opposite side of the Hidden Teslas – it’s a guessing game where the journey for the attacker end – sooner or later. There’s nothing helping the Hogs getting killed by the Giant Bombs. Also the third Giant Bomb is located next to the 4 regular Bombs – they won’t take out the Hog Rider, but throw them back and hopefully get them killed if the attacker is not watching very carefully. The Spring Traps are also placed good enough to get lots of them blown up – many attackers tend to deploy their Hog Riders by tapping down their finger(s) until all are settled. Great base, try it out!

TH9 Farming and War Base against Hog Rider with 2 Air Sweeper

Town Hall 9 is the breaking point for Hog attacks. Now there’s a new player in the game I introduced in the beginning of the post – the Archer Queen. She will really hunt down those Hogs and it gets harder and harder to really destroy those bases with Hog Riders and little knowledge about how they work.

This War Base works great against Hogs, because the double Giant Bombs and the Archer Queen in the middle. I don’t see any possibility to 3 Star this base using Hogs and wouldn’t attack it with Hog Riders – the best anti Hog Rider War Base for Town Hall 9 you can get.

This Farming Base for TH9 also offers the deadly double Giant Bomb (say these 4 words 3 times in a row, 😀 ). The Archer Queen is not centered, but also quite hard to pull and kill unless someone brought some extra troops. Only the Barbarian King won’t do the job and once she is settled for the Hogs, it’s over.

Anti Hog Rider for Town Hall 10

Let’s be honest – anybody attacking a TH10 with an Inferno Tower with Hog Riders is not the brightest one. You also have the Archer Queen – hopefully at a decent Level 10 or above – and shouldn’t see real Hog Rider attacks. The only thing you might see is someone using Hog Riders to snipe away certain buildings – called surgical Hogging. If you’re really having issues with lots of Hogs apply the double Giant Bombs and place the Archer Queen in the center of your base and you’re good.