Recently, I came across several bases that made me remember this article that is now more than 2 years old and it looks like more and more players use this tactic today. To be honest, this was one of the posts I was proud of most, so I decided to rework it a little bit and I hope you enjoy it.
I was really exited to make this post about making your base look stronger than it is with several tips, but in the end the post took a hard turn. I was researching different layout structures and things that might scare potential attackers off – like the small fishes in the ocean that gather together in swarms to look like a huge fish.To be honest, I was searching myself nearly to death because there is absolutely nothing around. I ended up on articles about psychological warfare when I remembered something from my time back a few years when I was playing online poker:
Would you rather sit on a poker table together with very good or very bad player?
In fact, I ask myself why I would like to make my base look stronger than it really is – what would be the outcome? I would scare off weaker players that would maybe lose their attack and I would only get attacked by players who are sure they can win the attack on a base that looks stronger than it is. In other words, each attack would be an absolute defeat of my base. I think you can already see where this is going, so what we actually want to do is make our base look weaker than it really is, am I right?
Psychologic Base Design in Clash of Clans
I hope I didn’t confuse you too much in the intro and you didn’t leave this post. 😉 Let’s work towards the goal of getting attacked by players thinking we have a base weak enough for them to be successful. First, I will start off with a poll I found in the official Forum which deals with the question what makes people skip a base instead of attacking it:
So here we have the main reasons why people are skipping our base or, in other words, why they think our base is (too) strong.
Remember, we don’t want them to skip our base because, when they skip, they think they would not win the attack resulting in a defensive victory. We will now take some of these points and think what we can do to make it look less dangerous (without making it less dangerous).
High Level Walls
It’s no secret that higher Walls scare off lots of player. It’s very tempting to upgrade the Walls, it’s not necessary. You should really place the Walls very low on your priority list once you get the Level 8 or Level 9 Walls. If you upgrade them always start in the core:
Why? Simply because Wallbreakers will crush Walls – this has been true since the beginning of Clash of Clans and will always be that way. This means your outside ring is lost practically all of the time, but lots of people invest all their Wallbreakers for the outside when attacking. The regular Troops are then left to bring down the inside layer of Walls.
A Wall Level 7 has 2,500 HP and a Wall Level 8 has 3,000 HP so it can get destroyed by 2 Wallbreakers Level 4 (the Level 7 wall) or 3 Wallbreakers (in the case of the Level 8 Wall). Have you ever seen someone only bring 2 Wallbreakers to an attack? I haven’t. We can assume most attackers have 5 Wallbreakers or so that they will deploy to the outside Wall destroying it right away – Level 7 or Level 8, doesn’t matter. The 500 additional HP of the Wall can hold back some Giants for a couple of seconds, important seconds your defenses can reduce the Giants health.
Base Design Illusion
As we can see most people skip a base when it’s a well designed base – sounds reasonable, right? Of course it does, but what does well-designed mean and why do they skip?
I took some time to watch my own behaviour of skipping and raiding and my answer is: designed well doesn’t mean strong. When I see a base that is tidy (no Obstacles or only outside ring of Obstacles), symmetric and I have the feeling that someone invests a huge amount of time in his base design I think twice before attacking. I asked myself why I tend to do that and the best answer I found was that I assume that if someone is investing that much time in his base he probably has invested also a lot of time in setting up the Traps and testing his design with different setups to make it strong. You probably noticed that I don’t know if it’s strong – I only make the very obvious connection between “looks thought out” and “is thought out” only by some small indications. To give you the unromantic end – each base I attacked offered the strength I assumed, but this is great for the purpose of this post!
If people think symmetric bases with cleared Obstacles are thought out and strong they tend to attack… wait for it… unconventional bases because they – watch your own thoughts – tend to be weaker. I’m not speaking of the lunatic Batman- or Skull-Base designs, I’m speaking of base designs like this:
If I see a base like this I always take a second look and, if you watch yourself, I would bet a fortune you do too! So all we have to do is make our strong base look a little unconventional without making it weaker.
Stop cleaning your base!
Do you like cleaning your room? Probably not. Simply let some Obstacles grow in the wild in between your outside buildings. They don’t harm anyone, but your base directly gets an abandoned look. You can make this even more efficient by not clearing the Tombstones of the last attack. Instead of this:
our base now looks like this:
Fine. We now created the first eye-catcher for the skipper. If there would be a statistic how many people look at your base and how long they look at it before they next it you would see an increase in the scouting time. Again, watch your own behavior when you come across bases with Tombstones and Obstacles – you tend to take a second look.
Attention! You can let the Tombstones also stay in your base, but if they surround an outside trap you should remove them because it reveals trap positions!
I have come across a base recently that game me a hard time – I spent about 10 seconds to figure out the general layout:
I was pretty amazed why it gave me such a hard time. The base has no crazy layout, but it’s hard to see everything at a glance. The walls make it hard to see the wall breaks, the outside lines are hard to focus on with the walls and obstacles around it.
Even if I attack the base, I wasted half of my scouting time simply trying to figure out something that I normally figure out in 2-3 seconds!
Don’t confuse symmetry with balance.
Symmetric bases are always better in multiplayer (not Clan War!), because it’s harder for the attacker to decide from which side to attack.
You can easily make your base look weird when you move it over to a corner with the “move all” tool in the base layout designer.
This is also positive, because an attacker doesn’t like to deploy troops directly on the outside, so he will tend to attack from the side with more space – a great opportunity to place more traps there.
Here’s a method that works well for that:
Don’t burn your wings by taking this too far.
This is the point where I stop.
I know there are lots of other things out there like the Sink Hole Strategy which points all damage on one spot hoping someone is stupid enough to fully deploy the whole army in there:
Or also the semi-exposed Town Hall that has everything around it to defend:
From my experience this is an All-In situation and if it fails you’ll lose, so I simply can’t recommend that and I also never had a good experience with it. All the techniques I have mentioned in this post don’t really change anything relevant in how your base is working. All we do is mask the fact that we have a strong base.
Special Thank To TEC -Clashzz Team:)
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