There are probably as many theories about village layout as there are Clash of Clan players. Most put the Town Hall in the center, but some put it on the edge of the village, beyond protective walls, and some even stick it in a corner.
Unprotected Town Hall in corner of map is an easy target!
Believe it or not, there are good reasons for not protecting your Town Hall as much as you can. Because of the way Clash of Clans awards stars from battles, you can earn one star by destroying 50% of the village – or by destroying the Town Hall. And since you only need to score one star to win the battle, this means some players will wreck your Town Hall and then leave the battlefield, leaving the rest of your village – including your gold and elixir – intact.
You Won’t Have Enough Walls
At the lower levels that we’re covering, you’re simply not going to have enough wall sections to adequately protect your village and the Town Hall, so you need to think strategically.
One thing I noticed early on is that archers can shoot at a target 3.5 squares away, so if you just put a wall around your Town Hall or village, they can stand outside the wall and slowly decimate your town. For full protection from archers, you want to keep them at least 4 squares away from any edge of your Town Hall.
My common strategy is to have the Town Hall in the center of the map and surround it with a wall one square away from the Town Hall. I then build a second wall around that one, again with one square between the two walls. This makes it impossible for archers to destroy your Town Hall without breaking through the outer of the two walls. It’s been a pretty effective strategy for me. You can see an example of this strategy, slightly modified, in the image to the left. Despite some changes, archers cannot shoot at the town hall until they break through the second wall surrounding it.
The Town Hall is 4 squares by 4 squares, so the first ring of walls requires 28 wall units, and the second, 36 sections (64 total), so you’ll need a level 4 Town Hall to have enough pieces to begin using this strategy – and the rest of your village will be easy pickings, so wait until you have a level 6 Town Hall and have 125 wall sections before you think of implementing this idea.
In short, you will be beyond the introductory level before you have enough wall sections to make this strategy useful, so you’ll have to come up with other ideas. Walls just won’t be enough.
At the Lowest Levels
This is what a fairly low-level village looks like. The Town Hall is in the center, there are two gold mines and two elixir pumps. Gold storage is overflowing, and the village is protected by two cannons and an archer tower.
There are also two barracks, two builder’s huts, and one camp. The Clan Castle in the lower left corner has not yet been repaired.
Before you can build walls, your protection comes from defensive weapons and whatever buildings, rocks, trees, or bushes sit between your opponent and your Town Hall.
My strategy here would be to have the defensive weapons – cannons and the archer towner – right next to the Town Hall, then have gold mines and elixir pumps as close as possible. Put your builder huts, barracks, and camp outside of that, since destroying them does not give the enemy any gold or elixir.
Likewise, if they attack gold mines and elixir pumps, they only get a portion of the gold and elixir that has not already been stored in Gold Storage and Elixir Storage respectively. Your defensive weapons will last the longest and do the most damage when they are right next to the Town Hall.
At each Town Hall level, you should upgrade as much as possible before you upgrade the Town Hall itself. The higher your Town Hall level, the tougher the opponents you will face.
First Use of Walls Is Very Limited
You can access 25 wall units once you have a Level 2 Town Hall. It takes 20 units to surround just the Town Hall, leaving just 5 sections free. It might make more sense to build walls around two defensive buildings side-by-side, which will use 22 pieces of wall.
The only other possibility it to surround only part of your village, leaving it wide open to attack from the opposite direction.
As soon as you can afford to, upgrade your wooden stockade walls to stone at the cost of 1,000 gold per section. This makes the walls 2/3 harder to break through.
With a Level 3 Town Hall, you can use up to 50 pieces of wall, and that give you a lot of options. You can put a ring of buildings around the Town Hall and build a wall around that whole area, which requires 44 wall sections (12 x 12). Adding another row of buildings would require a 12 x 15 wall and use the remaining 6 wall pieces. This is probably your best strategy with a Level 3 Town Hall.
With a Level 3 Town Hall, you can also upgrade wall units to cut stone – level 3 – as a cost of 5,000 per section. Cut stone walls can take 700 points of damage, a nice step up from 500 points for regular stone walls.
You start to get a better range of options for protecting your village with walls once you have a Level 4 Town Hall. This gives you up to 75 wall units. One way to make walls harder to break through it to make them double-wide with one wall right against another. This essentially doubles the amount of damage needed to break through the two layers. (I’ve seen villages with walls 3 and 4 units thick!)
Level 4 walls are made of iron, can take 900 points of damage, and upgrade cost is 10,000 gold per segment.
With a Level 5 Town Hall, you can use 100 wall units, giving you still more defensive options. You also have access to level 5 walls, which are gold, cost 30,000 gold per section to upgrade, and can take 1,400 points of damage. That’s over a 50% improvement over level 4 walls, but at a steep price.
You’ll probably run into magenta elixir walls long before you can use them yourself. They require a Level 6 Town Hall, cost 75,000 gold per wall unit, and can sustain 2,000 points of damage. These are tough to break through with lower level troops, so your best strategy is archers shooting over the walls and balloons crossing the walls and dropping their bombs.
One thing I often do in my villages is use low level walls where I know the enemy will be going around them instead of trying to break through them. If you have an opening, attackers are far more likely to use it than attempt to destroy a wall, so even wooden walls can be effective.
Another thing I do is study attacks on my village to determine which wall sections are the most likely to be attacked and upgrade just that little bit of wall. Attackers are especially drawn to corner wall units and intersections of 3-4 walls at a single point.
Experiment. Be Creative.
Look at the villages you attack, both goblin villages and other players. Get a feeling for why they arrange things as they do. You may want to build a narrow corridor with bombs and spring traps – and entice enemy troops into it with gold or elixir storage at the end.
Also bear in mind that defensive strategies against ground troops are very different than against airborne troops. Your first attack by dragons will leave you feeling powerless, and you’ll want to put in air defenses, air bombs, archer towers, wizard towers, and hidden Teslas to give you a chance against them, as wall as the air blower you can build once you have a Level 5 Town Hall.
Consider mixing defenses with storage buildings, mines, and pumps. These will keep barbarians, archers, and goblins busy, although giants will head directly for those defensive buildings.
Next: Doing Battle
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