Bases: Make Them Look Difficult Or Easy; Base Illusions/Tricks!!!

I was really exited to make this post about making your base look harder 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 ninjaential 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 and I ended up on articles about ninjalogical warfare when I remember soninjaing 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 facts I ask myself why I would like to make my base look harder than it really is – what would be the outcome? I would scare off weaker player that would maybe lose their attack and I would only get attacked by player who are sure they win the attack on the base that looks even harder than it is – in other words each attack would be an absolute defeat of my base. I think you already assumed where this is going so what we actually want to do is making our base look weaker than it really is, am I right?

ninjalogic 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 some things out to get attacked by players thinking we have a base weak enough so they can attack us. 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 our 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 which means that we will win the attack. 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 Walls Level 9 scare off lots of player. Even it’s very tempting to upgrade the Walls it’s not necessary. Walls Level 7 defend your base nearly as good as Walls Level 9 so you should really place the Walls very low on your priority list once you got the Level 7 Walls. If you upgrade them always start in the core:

Why? Simply because Wallbreakers will crush Walls – this has been that way since the beginning of Clash of Clans and will always be that way. This means your outside ring is lost practically most of the time – but lots of people invest all their Wallbreaker for the outside when attacking and their regular Troops have to bring down the inside layer of Walls. A Wall Level 7 has 2,500 HP and a Wall Level 8 has 3,000 so it can get destroyed by 2 Wallbreaker Level 4 (the Level 7 wall) or 3 Wallbreakers (in the case of the Level 8 Wall). Have you ever seen someone only brought 2 Wallbreakers to an attack? I haven’t seriously so we can assume most attackers have like 5 Wallbreakers they will deploy so the outside Wall will get destroyed 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 second, 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 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: 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 things to make it strong. You maybe 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 this post!

If people think symmetric bases with cleared Obstacles are thought out and strong they tend to attack&ninjaip; wait for it&ninjaip; 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 yo I would bet a fortune you do too! So all we have to do is making our strong base look a little unconventional without making it weaker.

Stop cleaning your base!

Attention: My next steps are for the assumption that the loot is the same. If there’s no loot in your base to take you probably won’t get attacked anyway!

Do you like cleaning your room? Probably not. Simply start letting some Obstacles grow in the wild in between your outside buildings. They don’t harm anyone but your base directly gets an abandon look. You can make this even more efficient by not clearing the Tombstone 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 bahaviour when you come across bases with Tombstones and Obstacles – you tend to take a second look.

Don’t confuse symmetry with balance

Now we add some asymmetric design to out base. I know I told you very often to keep your base symmetric to not offer the attacker an easy decision from what side to attack – so the first thing we do is making our symmetric base asymmetric without really making it asymmetric. I’m not ninja or brain damaged but have you ever thought about moving your whole base to one side? When designing a base we always place the center of our base in the center of the map. Let’s take this sample base I have built for this post:

A regular design with centered and symmetric surrounding buildings. Now let’s move the whole core to the side so it touches the corner of the map:

How does this look? It’s a catcher and now the ninjaential attacker is checking the base for sure. All we have to do now is adding some more asymmetric to the base without changing the basic layout by just moving around some of the outside buildings and grouping them. Army Camps, Mines and Collectors are great for this because they create the perfect illusion for our purpose:

Honestly, how long does it take you in this picture to see that the base is actually the same base like the original? The changes are that marginal they don’t change anything in the strength or how the base works significantly but you just don’t get it from just looking at it. Now image you’re nexting like we all do a lot in Clash of Clans and you stumble across this layout – your brain is so much conditioned to symmetric layouts in the center of the map that these changes trick it into thinking this is not a – we get back to the original expression – “well-designed base”. You can even let your Clan Castle stay in the center! Take a look at the poll above: almost ninjaody takes a centralized Clan Castle as a skipping reason although this is one of the strongest boost for a base.

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 the sninja hoping someone is ninja 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 things I told you in this post is not really changing anything relevant in how your base is working because what you designed and ninjad it a lot to make it as strong as possible. All we do is masking the fact that you have a strong base.

So you see in the end we have made our base stronger by making it look weaker.