Derpy & Scott’s TH10 base building guide is a good start to learn how to design war bases. This Th10 Base Building guide will help you to build your own bases. Covering the placement of buildings as well as ideas to defend popular attack strategies. Derpy & Scott can be found on the Base Building server for more information and tips. #clashon #clashofclans
Learning
Multi Infernos are the make or break of a good base. Therefore having a good setup for a multi compartment will guarantee you do well in base building. There is no specific designs and standards you have to uphold as with the queen so it’s a bit more simple.
The range an attacking queen can hit an inferno varies from other buildings, leading to a really weird compartment shape as a result.
If you use said idea in a base, it would actually break people’s brains. Furthermore it would push the limits of a multi compartment to a new level.
Multi inferno compartments are critical to a structured design. So here are various multi inferno compartments in my experience have treated me with well fortune. Be creative with your inferno compartments because there’s not many wrong ways to do it
Pathing to infernos are important. Let me show you what I mean.
Simplistic pathing
Without any defenses around this, you can path towards the inferno easily. You don’t want that at all.
Structured pathing
Harder to path to the inferno with loons or hogs.
Having a very elaborate pathing setup in long term will annoy most air and ground users. If you’re going to give away an inferno in an extremely easy compartment setup, ensure that it takes 4-5+ defenses before it actually gets there. Also if you are trying to stop a slammer ensure a seeking air mine is there as well.
Queen compartment
In general, having a relatively closed and hard to queen charge queen compartment is good for defending most strategies. Having an open, and wide area near the queen or with the queen compartment can lead to 2 issues.
(1) Queen charge users will more likely attack your base (counterable)
and
(2) Giving way too much value near the queen (fixable).
As you can see both of these can be fixed and arranged. Let’s learn how to fix and help prevent queen chargers from destroying your base.
Fix open compartments
To fix open compartments near a queen, turn it into a queen charge bait base. I don’t recommend keeping and pointing a sweeper towards the compartments. Simply because a sweeper doesn’t actually do anything but make the charge harder. It doesn’t negate the queen charge at all. To actually do this, bait an obvious queen charge so 90% attackers will push in the 1 location, because it’s open and easy to charge. Therefore, have both of your multi’s and all of your traps away from the charge.
Value near the queen
Find the value that is near the queen and decide if the user will do lalo or hogs. More users in this meta are accustomed to queen walk lalo so expect most people to do that over hogs. Use the correct trap placement for the corresponding defensive traps. They will have a hard time in the 2nd half of the attack. Make sure an OP kill squad cannot get extreme trap and base value. (Trap good angles where kill squad won’t be sent and 2nd phase will)
To fix too much value being given from inside the queen compartment, look at the compartments around the queen and what she can reach. Can she reach 2 x-bows and a multi inferno? That’s not good. Can she reach both air sweepers and a wizard tower? Pretty good value if you ask me. After you ask yourself this and wonder what needs to be changed and what you can do to sustain a high DPS near the queen and at the same time, not give value. The best way to do this is make sure the attacker can’t get a multi and queen very easily. With how compact you want a good base this won’t be possible. Just make it hard. Have good multi coverage and have good compartment shapes and sizes and a good trap layout.
Queen placement
This is key to attackers. If you have a queen in the pathing of a wall wrecker, then the wall wrecker will most likely be deployed. If your queen is super exposed near the town hall. Expect a suicide stone slammer with valks. It’s all about balancing your queen placement. Have her kind of offset but not exposed and kind of near the core but not in the core and not near the other value. Confusing but it works best. My #1 tip for any player right here and right now is to have the town hall near the queen side.
Siege machines
Wall wrecker
Targets the town halls location, even if destroyed, in a straight line from the dropped location. (DOES NOT TARGET WALLS). Used in cases where attackers can get very simplistic pathing towards your town hall. Try to make it awkward for them to even use this by creating bases that have L shaped turns and the path a wall wrecker would go isn’t direct, it’s akward. Similarly having the town hall inside the base ensures they can send a wall wrecker from a lot of places.
Peboho, sui miners, ww ks lalo, and pekkabobat are popular attacks with the wall wrecker. There is not much you can do to counter a wall wreckers HP with a single inferno as they can just bring a freeze for their kill squad. You can bait a wall wrecker if you want but the base itself will only defend one hit because you really need a hound CC to be able to defend a good kill squad.
Blimp
Targets the town hall in a straight line from the dropped location. This siege machine combined with the wall wrecker is the reason I say honestly you should have the town hall on the queen side. If you try to bait a hog kill squad then electrone will destroy. However, if you try to defend electrone a kill squad lalo will destroy you. Electrone is the only viable strategy with the blimp from my knowledge and if used correctly you can obtain half of the base with little value used. furthermore a blimp can get hit by black mines and take severe damage. Wouldn’t recommend baiting electrone mainly because of said reasons. In contrast with the most recent update where the blimps have received more HP, they’re still not in this meta.
Stone slammer
The most versatile and overpowered siege machine. Targets defenses like a balloon, drops a bomb from the air that 2 shots most th10 defenses, and instantly destroys walls near defenses like an earthquake. 2 black mines almost takes slammer out. While the slammer is slow it does extreme damage to places without SAMS or Air defenses. As a result this is probably the reason why making an insanely good base is impossible now. Preventing a slammer is hard. It’s not entirely possible to “prevent” either. As a result the idea is just to figure out what stage of the attack they will use the slammer in.
When people use slammers
People use slammers at the start, middle and end because it’s just that good. It’s used in lalos, dragbat attacks, kill squads, and even miner attacks! To make slammers harder without prediction, just make sure your likely slammer spots are SAM’d and air defense protected. Luckily for you, there’s a lot of strategies you can do!
To understand this idea you must understand how far slammers can hit. They can hit walls touching buildings. It’s better to have them break the 2nd layer here because they won’t be able to enter with any troops without using wall breakers or a jump spell. Combine this with an air skelly and a seeking air mine to defend electrone.
As you can see this amps up the slammer protection extremely well while the only downside being extra cost in walls.
Easier strategy for beginners
This strategy is the easier for beginners. The zones where a slammer will get sent is most likely your areas without air defenses, which is crucial to have when making an anti lalo base. So you should have protected seeking air mines there. The key to defending lalo is having these anti lava hound areas. So don’t try to have ad coverage all over your base. The only thing that is bad about this is you will have red air mines near seeking air mines.
Harder strategy for proficient builders
This isn’t for the novice builders. Baiting a slammer is difficult and extremely hard. In general, you want to do this after you make the base itself and double stack protected seeking air mines somewhere near the first layer where they can not be lured by a balloon. The place where people like to place slammer varies on the type of base you make. Hence if you make a hard to slammer entry base expect a mid raid to end slammer, but if you have an easy slammer entry except maybe a slammer KS or sui slammer. Dragbats also uses a slammer as a funnel kind of. They use it for a corner area on the base adjacent to the side they will send their dragons on. If the dragons hit the seeking air mines, that is a plus towards the defender anyways.
Compartments
What are some standard compartments and deadzones that I would recommend using? These compartments have been tested extremely well and show better use than others. Make sure to try to mix it up with some deadzones and be creative. Do not just make a square base
Compartment size 9 x 5
Standard compartment size. Good for pretty much everything. Have 5 of these in your base at least. Try to keep the spacing (see next). The only exception to having no spacing is when you want to deter wallbreaker pathing so they don’t get an easy charge. Don’t do with 2 defenses.
Compartment size 5 x 5
This is an okay sized compartment if used correctly. Don’t use alone, can be used to screw qc wb spot up, can be used as a deadzone towards core. (1 wall inside) can be used as a splitter in a 9×9
Compartment size 9 x 9
Best used on edges or core of the base with deadzones. Do not let them hit a lot of value from inside these compartments. Probably the best compartment size to bait a queen charge.
Compartment size 13 x 5
Best used on the outside sides of a base facing on the flat side, do not face them towards the core. That will lead to easy value. Also best used for the deadzone multi.
Compartment size 10 x 5
Good for fitting GB’s inside the base and splitting zappable AD’s
Deadzones
Deadzones are used to split troops, cut off value, and generally make any base better if used correctly. The length can vary but the width is the key. Having them with 1 space or 2 space is the most common, but if you want, you can do 3 spaces with walls or builder huts in them.
How to defend the current most popular attacks.
Witches
Gb + 3 SB’s is not my style because it wastes mini-bombs. I just use bases with a lot of L shaped turns and that have good outside multi coverage. A good example would be the inferno decoration glitch, it reaches outside the base a lot.
Bats
Bats are super overpowered and need a nerf despite that being done already before. Having a very specific wizard tower setup can help you counter bats, witches, and even still defend hogs and lalo. Here are my tips for dragbats from my discord server, where of course there is more tips to come.
Peboho
Very strong army, while very easy to defend though.
First of all, my opinion on this attack was easy to counter, but as the meta progressed more pekkas started to be used. I think the best way to counter this is having good deadzones, good trap placements, while having the town hall in an awkward location near the queen, as well as dps covering the core that can’t get bounced easily.
QW lalo
Best hit in the game.
Queen charges cannot get fully countered. Therefore you want to ensure that they just can’t get all of your value too easily, and have 2nd phase traps away from the charge locations at the same time balancing the killsquad locations. Multi compartments should force a freeze or a jump. Storages can slow down the queen while DPS makes the queen rage.
Detailed trap placement
When finishing a new build, you should be aware of how to properly place traps. Proper trap setups will be key to defending, especially against more skilled attackers.
Spring traps
As many of you know, the primary purpose of springs it to defend hogs. The first step before placing any spring traps is to look at your base – or maybe have a friend look at it – and decide where the most probably kill squad entry will be. Based upon that, you will place spring traps away from the kill squad area.
When placing springs, it is important to understand hog pathing. You should already have a general idea of where hogs will go from each defense to another. Typically, if it is defenses that are 3×3 tiles large, you would put the spring between both defenses, on the center tile. However, there are exceptions to this rule:
Exception #1
Picture this. A mortar in front of a 9×5 compartment with 2 defenses, protecting it so they cant path directly to the defenses. If they hog from the mortar side they will go to the side tile of the defenses after they jump the wall, meaning most of them will travel at closest top tile as they will not be in a direct line towards the center. Place the spring on the top tile if the attacker will start the hogs from that side.
Exception #2
Staggered defenses will cause hogs to path slightly differently. For instance, you have a mortar and an archer tower outside the walls of your base; The archer tower (defense A) is 1 tile to the right of the mortar (defense B), but shifted above or below. Hogs will move from the mortar to the second tile of the archer tower, as a result your spring should be placed on the center tile of the archer tower.
Exception #3
The last exception is when hogs are traveling from one defense into a compartment with 2 defenses next to each other (with a 1 tile gap between them). For example, hogs are traveling from an x-bow (defense A) into the compartment that runs parallel to it, containing an archer tower (defense B) and an air defense (defense C). The hogs will split from defense A between defense B and C, meaning the hogs will go to the nearest corner tile between both defenses (in that 1 tile gap that separates the defenses).
Giant Bombs
Giant bombs serve two purposes at TH 10: (1) you can use them to do something called “out-heal-zoning” your opponent, or (2) you can use them for something called “witch bombs”. Personally, I believe witch bombs are a waste of traps. The reason for this is because it requires a combination of 1 giant bomb plus 3 small bombs. In the next section, we will discuss this a little more and why it isn’t practical to use witch bombs.
Out-heal-zoning
This is the most efficient way to use giant bombs in my opinion. The idea for this is to defend hog attacks. Just like spring traps, you want to have your giant bombs away from a kill squad entry. This doesn’t mean you should have all 5 giant bombs on the town hall side, but it would be ideal to rather have at least 3 or 4 on the back-end of a kill squad entry. Typically, 3 giant bombs could be found on the Town Hall side, with 2 giant bombs on the sides of the base. That’s just one example, but the idea is to prevent a kill squad from easily taking out 2 or more giant bombs.
Common error to avoid
One common error I see among new base builders is the use of multiple giant bombs inside the base. This can make your base vulnerable to hogs if too many giant bombs are inside the walls of the base, because this puts giant bombs closer together, making heal zones overlap sometimes. A good general rule for placing giant bombs is to have at least 3, preferably 4 or all 5 of them outside your walls. The reason for this is so the giant bomb will damage hogs before they make it inside your base. If placed well, a multi inferno or wizard tower will cover the area where the giant bomb exploded. This will cause hogs to thin out much faster and before making it to core defenses, such as an x-bow or inferno.
Bomb towers and giant bombs
Another thing to keep in mind is this: Bomb towers act as somewhat of another giant bomb. For this reason, you want to keep giant bombs away from bomb towers. A general rule of thumb is to make sure one heal spell can’t cover both a bomb tower and a giant bomb at the same time.
Witch Bombs
While I personally find witch bombs to be a waste of traps, they are an effective way to defend frozen witch and other witch-based attacks. Witch Bombs are the combination of 1 giant bomb and 3 small bombs placed next to it. If a witch triggers all 3 small bombs and a giant bomb at the same time, she will instantly die as a result. This can ruin a frozen witch attack, because an entire side flank of witches will die instantly. Below is an example of a witch bomb, as well as an example of how to properly place all giant bombs on a base (with the use of 1 witch bomb):
Small Bombs
Small bombs are probably the most overlooked trap. Believe it or not, a single small bomb can ruin an entire attack. Therefore it’s important to make sure these are placed properly in order to help stop a queen charge attempt.
Small bombs should be kept either 2 or 3 tiles away from a wall. In order to understand how best to place small bombs, you need to understand the basics of wall breaker AI. To keep it simple: wall breakers targets buildings. A wall breaker will go for the nearest wall with a building behind it from the place the wall breaker is deployed.
2 Tiles away from wall
This is the most common method of placing small bombs. Say there is only 1 trash building in front of your wall. In this case, you would want to keep the small bomb only 2 tiles away from the wall. The reason for this is because if the small bomb was 3 tiles away, a test wall breaker won’t have to travel far in order to trigger the small bomb. While placing it only 2 tiles away would give an archer tower enough time to kill the wall breaker before it can trigger the small bomb (unless the queen or funneling troops are tanking the archer tower).
3 Tiles away from wall
This is the safest way of placing a small bomb, because if a test wall breaker is running through a rage spell, it will NOT be able to do damage to the wall it is targeting before the small bomb kills it. However, it is recommended that you have 2 layers or trash outside your walls where you have placed a small bomb 3 tiles away. The reason for this is the same as above: it gives an archer tower time to kill a wall breaker before it can trigger the small bomb. Below are pictures of proper small bomb placement:
Red Air Mines
These are arguably the most important defense when it comes to defending a lalo attack. Red air mines should be placed outside the base, with maybe one red air mine inside the base that has little splash or multi coverage. Below are a couple things to keep in mind:
Air defenses and red air mines
Red air mines should be placed away from air defenses. If a red air mine covers an air defense, then it is too close to an air defense. If a red air mine is too close to an air defense, it will be tanked by a lava hound 90% of the time, as a result the lava hound would trigger the red air mine before a balloon can.
Point defenses and red air mines
Red air mines are most effectively placed near point defenses that are covered by either a wizard tower or multi inferno. The purpose for this is so that the loons will take significant damage before taking out the wizard tower or multi inferno, which are the two main defenses used to defend lalo attacks. In order for loons to not die, the user will be forced to either heal the loons or freeze the splash damage or multi inferno. For this reason, it would also be ideal to have multi infernos covering the majority of wizard towers, with wizard towers covering point defenses (cannons, archer towers, or teslas). Below are example pictures of properly placed red air mines:
It is also important to remember this when placing red air mines: they should be spread out. You never want two red air mines to have overlapping ranges, as this would create good value for a heal for the loons.
Black Air Mines
Black air mines serve 2 major purposes: (1) killing healers during a QC lalo attack and (2) killing stone slammers/ hounds.
Killing healers during a a QC lalo attack
As many of you may know, Queen Charge Lalo is a very popular meta strategy for attacking in various leagues. For this reason, it is important to take out 1-2 healers with seeking air mines. In order to do this, you must decide what the most probable area for a queen charge is. Based upon this, you should have 2 seeking air mines in this area that would be in the most possible path for healers that follow the queen.
There aren’t really any rules for this. Some players choose to use seeking air mines that are closer to the edge of the map. Others tend to keep their seeking air mines a little closer to their walls. In my opinion, it is important to make it difficult for a single balloon to trigger a seeking air mine. If the seeking air mine is too close to the edge of the map or along the edge of your trash buildings, a single loon will easily take out a seeking air mine. However, if the seeking air mine is a little closer to your walls and less exposed, the loon may drift off to take out a defense and completely avoid the seeking air mine. On the other hand, an air defense or archer tower + tesla duo could kill the loon before it serves its purpose.
Killing stone slammers
With the implication of stone slammers a while back, it has become crucial in base building to have seeking air mines near your teslas or heavy splash damage areas, as those will be the most probable areas for an attacker to deploy their stone slammer. The idea is to deal heavy damage to a stone slammer before it takes out too much value, so you need to have good seeking air mine set ups.
A general rule when running tesla farms is that you should have 1 seeking air mine for an area with only 2 teslas (and another defense) or 2 seeking air mines (that don’t overlap) for an area with 4 teslas and a couple other defenses. So that the stone slammer will go down before making it too far into the base. If a stone slammer gets deep into the base, it acts as a tank for loons.
Killing lavahounds
Another thing for defending with seeking air mines is to help take out lava hounds as soon as possible while they tank an air defense. In order to do this, you need to have a general idea of where lava hounds will be deployed during a lalo attack. Generally, you should have 1 seeking air mine close to an air defense, as this will do heavy damage to a lava hound and cause it to pop shortly after making its way to the air defense. However, you need to ensure there is a balance of seeking air mines between tesla farms, splash damage, and air defenses. Ideally, you could have 2 seeking air mines for air defenses, 2 for tesla locations, and 1 for a heavy splash damage area.
Below is a picture showing good seeking air mine locations/ placement:
Skeleton Traps
Skeleton traps are good for both air and ground defense. While knowing the current meta of queen charge lalo/ drag bats/ spam attacks, you should have a balance of air skellies and ground skellies. Personally, I think a good balance is 2 skeleton traps set to air and 1 set to ground.
Air skeleton trap
When placing an air skeleton trap, you should have it away from the air defenses. Therefore when placing them, make sure the air skelly does NOT cover an air defense. The reasoning for this is the same as it is with red air mines. Air skellies are best located near teslas, which should be covered by a multi inferno or splash damage (wizard tower).
Ground skeletons
Ground skeletons are a bit more difficult to place well. When placing ground skellies, you should keep hog and miner strategies in mind. Because of this, I find it best to have a ground skelly near my teslas, king, or near my highest DPS area. If you have them near the teslas or king, that will be very helpful in defending hog based strategies. If it is in an area of high dps (preferably with the king nearby), the skeleton spells will do a great job of defending miners. This will keep miners distracted long enough for an area of high DPS to really thin out the group of miners. Sometimes this can ruin an attack if you have very concentrated DPS near an area with a ground skelly.
(Air and ground works in this scenario)
Fully trapped base example
Making a base
So, you’re ready to make a base. Before you make it. Let me show you how the easiest way to make a base in my opinion is, as well as a LIVE build as of 5/21/19
Two styles of starting a base I personally think is the only two ways. Also, I find it easier to start 1 by 1 but people complain they run out of walls, but you can only break that by practice.
1. Queen area first.
2. Inferno compartment first.
Live build
I chose to build the queen compartment first mainly because it’s way easier.
I realised I forgot the town hall near the queen. Also, that elixir storage sure poses as a good spot! Next I needed to branch off. Let’s do a CC compartment. And inferno compartment with some small 9×5’s for DPS.
At this point I removed the wall spaces because I ran out of walls and the design I currently had was looking solid without them. I tweaked a few things.
I already have AD and wizard tower placement plus x-bows placed first.
Finally, let’s finish the rest of the base. You get the idea here.
Now let’s do the traps. With the trap guide you can make really good trap placements which I did not do, because I am really stupid.
Analyze and review
There are always flaws in builds. That’s why you need to learn to analyze it to help you understand more on how to build better. I posted it in the Pro-Chat of the Builder Base Discord and asked for reviews. We agreed that the sweepers were too much value to have near the queen compartment and it was vulnerable to a heavy KS. Therefore I should run an ice golem cc to really annoy the kill squad.
Better! Even good can improve / make mistakes! This base is weak to miners (underused), ks hogs, and maybe a sui slammer. Damage CC probably would be good maybe with a stall. Maybe hound CC too if we are trying to be risky
TH10 CC fills
Baby drag mix
Best fill in the game. Can be used in any kind of base to really annoy the opponent. Do not mix these with loons. Mix these with ice golems, valkyries, archers, wizards, goblins.
Ice golem mix
Good at burning time. Basically half a lava hound. Use this wisely to slow kill squad and queen charges while at the same time keeping a damage cc.
Hound loon CC
Good for defending 1 hit. Good attackers know how to respond well to this.
BB Ape Event Winner
This is a special winner from an Event hosted VIA my discord (link at the end of the article), make sure to join it if you aren’t already in it. The winner was Thomas, and no he isn’t an Ape, he’s my test monkey. I’m going to show him and you how anyone can build as good as I can and even better than some league clans.
This is his base he submitted.
Fixing Thomas’ base
Looks nice actually, I want to fix it up so let’s get started. First of all notice his base layout itself. There’s a few wall layout and value split details I want to fix, so I took away everything, and fixed the wall layout. Then I filled some of it to get started.
The first thing to notice is how detailed those L shaped turns are in the base rather than having all the turns so close, this makes pathing, sieges, and many other things harder. Also notice my wizard tower and air defensive setup, the 2 wizard towers. 1 touching a multi, and one touching an air defense. I have made the splash coverage even all over, kept freeze value hard, and also kept my wizards away from air defenses. So, let’s finish the base except for all of the traps (some gbs and teslas I do place)
Notice I moved the king. The king being way too close to the queen is not the best decision. He is in a remote location right now around the backend, next to some DPS and splash to annoy attackers. Also, let’s notice how much more clean my trash layer and how efficient my pathing is compared to what Thomas had. Let’s fix some more, and finish trapping.
A kill squad would come from 12-3. So I trapped accordingly, that double giant bomb was way too much value, so I moved it elsewhere. Now it’s complete, and you can already see how different my version is compared to Thomas’. Thanks for submitting your base to my event and I hope you learned something!
If you have any questions, feel free to direct message me. In my opinion, we are an insanely good base building duo and this guide took us a lot of hard work so I do thank you for your time.
The End
Thank you for reading this guide. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Scott and I wouldn’t be where I am without trying everyday to get better. You can easily do the same if you have the same determination as I do. ~Derpy
This guide was written by:
Derpy#7936 – Owner of base building discord.
Scott | APT#3053 – Moderator of base building discord
