XJam-8’s Guide to Loot Raiding

There are three good reasons to go into a Multiplayer “Find a Match” battle:

1. To get more loot to build up your base!
2. To learn how to fight battles better and better (including clan wars)!
3. To get more trophies and eventually outrank your Clan Leader!

Getting more trophies leads to larger daily 5-star war bonuses. Those bonuses help a lot in getting loot too. But there are times when all you really need is loot. Here we’ll talk about Loot-AND-Trophy raids, but also about Pure Loot raids which lose trophies but can make ridiculous profits.

For Loot-and-Trophy raids, you want a strong army that is not too expensive. For Trophies, the goal is to always get at least 1 star, but for Loot you need an army that costs less than the Loot you earn on the raid.  (If your army costs more than what you steal, you are LOSING MONEY!)

You can think of your village as a business.  Each day you have some production, MINUS whatever you lose from getting raided, which you can’t really control except by making an awesome base.  But you ADD whatever you get from raiding, MINUS what you spend on your raiding armies.  When you put all that together, you get your daily profits, and it’s those daily profits that add up to cool upgrades, new units, and higher town halls!

The first step in boosting Daily Profits is to always upgrade your collectors as fast as you can.  The collectors work for you all day, every day… Sometimes you can boost them cheaply with gems, too!  By comparison, an army fights once and is gone.  It is not hard to earn more in loot than you lose from raiding, but it’s easy and free to get the loot your collectors already make for you!

Here are some examples of Loot-and-Trophy raiding armies at different Town Hall levels:

Town Hall 8:  4 Pekkas, 6 Wallbreakers, rest Wizards, supported by heal spells. (Toss in a golem or some valkyries, or 4 quake spells to totally rip apart walls, if you want to spend some Dark Elixir to make higher profits on Elixir.  I avoid Rage spells because they are more expensive…)

Town Hall 9:  Golem, 4 healers (queen walk), Pekkas, Wizards, 4 quakes, heal or freeze or jump for mobility. 

The next step is only attack bases that have MUCH more loot than that army cost!  Because you won’t always get all the loot…  Look at your Quick Train menu and it shows you the cost.  Getting more loot  requires some patient searching with the “Next…” button, but it is totally worth it because your base builds up much much faster with fewer raids overall!  

When some troops are “on sale” (build cheaper) due to Events, USE THEM!  You earn a lot more loot that way.

LOOT WITHOUT TROPHIES:  Alternatively, you can forget about the trophies, and just build a few healers, and split the rest between archers and minions.  Instead of looking for bases with high loot levels, find bases where the elixir storages are totally EMPTY, but there’s still a lot of loot.  If it’s not in the storages — it’s in the collectors!  And a lot of players leave their collectors way on the outside, where a well-placed archer or minion can attack them without even getting shot at!  (Minions are great for attacking collectors that are guarded only by cannons or mortars…)  I’ve done raids where only 6-12 archers and minions have brought home as much as 600,000 in total loot!  And since archers and minions are so cheap, even a lowly 50,000 or 100,000 loot raid is a great deal, because almost all of that is PURE PROFIT.

At TH7 and up, there’s an extra bonus:  the Barbarian King.  (And then TH9 with the Archer Queen!)  The heroes make it possible to clean out groups of collectors that are somewhat defended.  They soaks up damage from defenses for several precious seconds.  That extra time allows archers, minions, barbarians or goblins to raid with abandon before they get shot to pieces.  This trick works especially well against players who are silly enough to put all their collectors neatly in a row, rather than spreading them out all around the base!

This “Forget the Trophies, Bring Me Loot!” approach is especially helpful when you’ve gotten too excited and spent nearly all your elixir on your latest Research project (or Barracks upgrade). No elixir, no army?  Nope!  No elixir, no problem!  To build up your elixir again , just remember:  build archers and minions, look for EMPTY storages but plenty of available loot, and then go after undefended collectors!   Then you’ll be able to afford a fresh Loot-and-Trophies army, or fight the winning last battle in the Clan War after all!