Clash of Clans Guide

Part 5- Advance Base Defense

Advanced Base Defense
Advanced base design elements. Common base archetypes. Exploiting pathfinding and AI elements.
Are you a tempting target?
The best way to not get attacked is to not make it worth your attacker's time. There are several things that an attacker will likely attack to get, or not attack due to the presence of.
Large amounts of Loot!
Loot is the #1 reason people will attack at low levels. If you don't have much to steal, you're safe! Spend as much as you can on walls prior to starting any upgrade. Spend on removing obstacles when the builder is available. If you don't have a worker available, start a research project in the Laboratory (elixir ) or buy decorations (gold and elixir). Note that gold not collected (in Gold Mine or Elixir Collector ) can be stolen. Other ways to spend resources - Queuing units (even when your army camps are full), building spells, starting research, buying defenses (bombs/spring traps ), buying decorations (flowers and flags).
Having easily accessible loot
Accessible loot comes in two types - accessible mines/collectors and accessible storage. Both are bad. Make sure your storage is either empty or in the middle of your base. Make sure your mines/collectors are next to your walls (and therefore next to your defenses). Uncollected resources are easier to steal than collected ones - the buildings are more spread out and the buildings have lower HP.
You should also intermix your elixir collections and mines as well as your elixir storage and gold storage . If an opponent really wants your gold, and all of your mines are together in a nice line, it is much more tempting of a target as not as much needs to be invested to steal the single resource they are seeking. Similarly, make sure your two gold storage are not next to one another.

Looking like your base is difficult
Upgrade your walls as a high level as you can, the higher the level the more difficult it looks for players at your trophy level. Do not upgrade willy-nilly, upgrade each one, one-by-one, even though it's a pain.
Having a Good Base
See Flammy's Base Defense Basics for details (Common issues: not protecting your defenses, mortar and air defense placement, everything-inside-walls issue, spread out defenses). Also having defenses that are significantly below the 'normal' upgraded amount for your trophy count/level. Here are a few more common bases and what I think of each.
The Standard Base
The standard base follows all of the rules laid out in Flammy's Base Defense Basics - Defenses and storage inside of the walls; army camps, barracks, mines, extractors, etc. outside of the walls. There is a single wall dividing your precious base from the hordes of horrors outside. Now What? How can you improve your base? Well this standard base is weak to giants as once they breach your wall, they can attack all of your defenses without delay. It is also weak to mass goblin attacks for the same reason - Once inside they can often outrun splash damage and steal all of your goodies, possibly leaving you with a victory, but with much less resources to spend.
The Pocketed Base
This base has the town hall in the center, and every defense around it is surrounded by its own 4x4 wall. They are good against giants as the walls slow them down, whilst keeping the defenses close together. They are best attacked with giants and archer support.
The Large Pocketed Base
This base is a variant on the pocketed base, where each pocket has 2-3 structures in each pocket. It is more efficient in terms of wall usage than the pocketed base, allowing for more buildings to be placed within the walls. People who love symmetry in their bases will like the 3 pocket base, as it creates a nice spiral with no wasted space or walls. The differences between this and the Pocketed Base are minimal. This base type is more common than the Pocketed Base at lower levels due to lack of walls.
The Bulkhead Base
A Bulkhead Base follows the rules laid down in Flammy's Base Defense Basics about kicking un-needed buildings outside of the walls, then uses extra walls to segment defenses into different sections allowing for greater protection in case one section is breached (especially by giants). Bulkheads are used in large boats to prevent the entire boat from sinking in case of a leak below the waterline - The flooded sections are closed off via built in bulkheads, containing the flooding to only the affected sections. In the same way, bases use this strategy to contain (or slow) the flood of enemy troops to the breached bulkhead - Where as with a single wall a breach would mean your village is headed to destruction.
The Split Base
A common (but poor) base defense strategy is grouping your defenses into two groups, with critical non-defensive buildings between them (Town Hall, Resource Storage). This defensive strategy seems to not violate the rules I've put in Flammy's Base Defense Basics, but it actually violates the rule of not keeping your defenses too spread out. Your defenses should be able to cover each other, ideally as much as possible - keeping them in two groups should be avoided. A split base defense is very vulnerable to giant attacks as they can clean up half of the defenses without taking fire from the other half. Split bases also mean that if either side is wiped out, your critical buildings in the center are very vulnerable to a few archers attacking from that side, effectively meaning your base is half as weak as otherwise.
Funneling for Victory
Funneling is critical to getting the best results out of your splash damage dealing turrets. It basically means using buildings (mostly walls) to make your enemy go where you want it to go, and then die as you want it to die.
The image to the right shows how my current base funnels enemies.
Upgrading multiple defenses at the same time
Your defenses don't attack if they're in the middle of being upgraded when you're attacked! Try not to be upgrading 40% of your defenses at the same time. This is doubly true for splash damage buildings (mortar, wizard tower ) and air defense .
Having a glaring flaw in your base
Such as a spawn point where you moved a turret out of but didn't put anything back. Or not having an air defense turret. Or putting your air defense turret outside of your walls.
Buildings outside walls are too spread out
At higher levels, more players start caring about trophies. If an attacker sees your base is easy to 1-star (kill 50% of the buildings) without having to place too many troops they will see you as a good target. Keep your buildings close to your walls (and defenses) to prevent this, if you care about maintaining your trophy count.
Turret Range Considerations
What can your towers defend? One of the goals of placing less valuable buildings outside of your walls is to slow down your attackers once they are within range of your defenses. NOT to make them spawn farther back - This is of secondary priority. This section covers what that range actually means. Range in this game is also sorta screwed up - Sometimes a turret will decide it can attack a unit standing in a given square, but on another base (with identical unit and turret placement) it won't attack. This ambiguity is why it has taken me about 2 weeks longer to post Chapter 2 than I was hoping. I still haven't figured out why it does this.
What can and can't be attacked without taking return fire is summarized in these pics.