Author: Cassie
Co-leader, The Current War
Co-leader, The Current War
Building Upgrade Priority
This is the upgrade order that we recommend as a war-focused clan. At TH8, it's not absolutely necessary for you to go the .5 route, but you should still focus on upgrading offenses before defenses. Hopefully, you've maxed out your storages so you can hit the ground running. While you're doing these (mostly) elixir upgrades, you can dump your extra gold into existing and new walls, new traps, and new defenses that don't take more than a day to upgrade. As you add the new defenses and traps, you'll want to redesign your base accordingly. Be sure to include a double giant bomb in your base to defend against hog attacks! Your first few builders should do the following upgrades:
Once you've finished those, or if you have extra builders, get them working on these upgrades:
Either while you're working on your offensive upgrades, or after, I'd suggest you upgrade your new storages and collectors. You get much more out of your collectors the sooner you upgrade them, plus it's basically free loot! Upgrading storages is useful because it then allows you to split up your loot even more, making it harder for raiders to take a large sum of it at a time unless they completely smash your base. By the time you've finished upgrading your offenses and resource buildings, your troops should be in a pretty good spot for you to hit mid-level TH8s, and you can start upgrading your defenses, which are a real grind at TH8. It helps if you've saved up the gems to get all 5 builders. Here is how we would prioritize the defenses.
What about Barbarian King?
At early TH8, you should save your dark elixir for hogs. Barbarian King doesn't add a whole lot to dragon and mass hog attacks, but you definitely want to get him to level 10 before you go to TH9. So after you get your hogs, upgrade BK whenever you have the dark elixir for him.
- Laboratory: You can't do any troop upgrades until this done, so this should be one of the first, if not the first, upgrades that you do.
- Dark spell factory to 2: Poison is very useful when dealing with the opponent clan castle, and taking your own quake is useful for zapquake.
- Clan castle: It's an extra 5 troop space that you can use defensively and offensively.
Once you've finished those, or if you have extra builders, get them working on these upgrades:
- New dark elixir drill to 3: The sooner you upgrade your drills, the better. It's pretty much 1000 free dark elixir a day, and you're going to want as much dark elixir as you can get so that you can upgrade your hogs and barbarian king.
- Dark storage to 4: You'll need the extra space in order to store your DE for your hog and king upgrades. Also, the extra HP makes it more difficult for opponents to steal your DE.
- 1 dark barracks to 4: Valkyries and golems can be useful as a more mature TH8, so it's good to have at least one dark barracks that can train these.
- 1 barracks to 10: Pekka isn't a great troop, but occasionally, you'll want to use it, so it's good to have a barracks that can train them.
Either while you're working on your offensive upgrades, or after, I'd suggest you upgrade your new storages and collectors. You get much more out of your collectors the sooner you upgrade them, plus it's basically free loot! Upgrading storages is useful because it then allows you to split up your loot even more, making it harder for raiders to take a large sum of it at a time unless they completely smash your base. By the time you've finished upgrading your offenses and resource buildings, your troops should be in a pretty good spot for you to hit mid-level TH8s, and you can start upgrading your defenses, which are a real grind at TH8. It helps if you've saved up the gems to get all 5 builders. Here is how we would prioritize the defenses.
- Air defenses: Get all 3 to level 6 as soon as possible to help defend against dragon attacks.
- Teslas: Teslas are also a great defense against dragons, plus, there are a LOT of tesla upgrades to do at TH8. A good rule of thumb is to always be tesla-ing. Basically, keep at least one builder on tesla duty all the time, since you have to catch up the new tesla AND upgrade all of them to level 6. It takes FOREVER!
- Catch up new defenses to TH7 levels.
- Archer towers: Once you max out your archer towers, your base will be pretty hard to dragon
- Wizard towers: These will be good against hog attacks and will help protect your loot in normal raids with the splash defense
- Cannons: These are the last point defenses that you need to upgrade, and they will help against ground attacks.
- Mortars: Mortars are useful defense against barch in normal raids, but in war, they're pretty useless and the splash defense means they add quite a bit of war weight, so for war, we recommend leaving these upgrades toward the end.
- Air sweeper: A well -placed air sweeper can ruin an air attack, but we don't see a huge benefit in upgrading this early on.
- Traps, walls: Once you finish upgrading your defenses, the real fun begins - the skull wall grind. It's helpful if you dump excess gold into walls between upgrades, but you'll likely still have a lot of walls to upgrade. The good thing is you'll also be swimming in more elixir than you know what to do with it. So train expensive armies, come up with new troop compositions, and have fun farming for gold to build those walls! Once you're close to finishing up the walls and your lab upgrades are wrapping up, you can press that upgrade button for TH9!
What about Barbarian King?
At early TH8, you should save your dark elixir for hogs. Barbarian King doesn't add a whole lot to dragon and mass hog attacks, but you definitely want to get him to level 10 before you go to TH9. So after you get your hogs, upgrade BK whenever you have the dark elixir for him.
Research Order
At TH8, your best war troops will be dragons at the start, then mass hogs, so research should focus on buffing those troop compositions. Here is our recommended research order:
- Dragons to 3: These will be your best troops for war as an early TH8. Upgrading to level 3 will make killing TH7s and low TH8s with level 5 air defenses super easy.
- Lightning to 5: In order to zapquake level 6 ADs, you'll need level 5 lightning.
- Hogs to 4: Level 4 hogs are probably the strongest TH8 troop in the game and you'll want to transition to using hogs as you start hitting higher level TH8s in war. True, double giant bombs can pose a problem, but there are often ways around them.
- Heal to 5: At this point, we want to strengthen our hog attacks. Upgrading heal spell to level 5 will help hogs last a little longer so you can cream any level TH8.
- Wizards to 5: Wizards to level 5 is a pretty big upgrade and will help you deal with the clan castle in a hog attack.
- Rage to 5: This can strengthen your dragon attacks and come in handy for some ground attacks.
- Player's choice: Giants, barbs, archers, and wall breakers are useful for farming. Govalo and gowiva are other strong TH8 war strategies, and if you want to use these, you will want to upgrade your golems, loons, and valks. We're not huge fans of gowipe, so the pekka upgrade can wait until the end. You could even do the last pekka upgrade while you upgrade your town hall to 9 and start the laboratory upgrade to 7, since the research will still go on while the lab upgrades.
Farming Strategies
I like to stick to troop compositions that train relatively quickly and are CHEAP! Dark elixir is somewhat challenging to get as a TH8, so I avoided troops that used a lot of DE like gowipe. Most of my farming was done in the Gold trophy range. Here are the main farming compositions that I used.
- Barch - this worked early on hitting mostly collector bases. Use two barracks to train barbs and the other two to train archers. You can also take some wall breakers to help get you into the base a little bit if there are easily accessible storage. Some people like taking lightning to take out a mortar, but I preferred taking heal or rage for the barbarians, if I used spells at all. Since this army is so cheap, you can mainly look for bases with 200k combined gold/elixir. Also, if you come across any bases with exposed collectors to be picked off, just drop some archers on them if you're not concerned about dropping trophies.
- Gibarch - I started using this more as I became a more developed TH8 to get deeper into bases and raid storages. I took 12 giants, 8 wiz, 8 wb, one hog to lure the cc, the rest barch and all heal spells and poisons. Use a giant or hog to lure the cc and deal with that accordingly. Then send in your giants, use wiz to funnel, wbs to break the wall. Once the wall is broken, you can send in the rest of your wiz and barch. You'll probably want at least one heal on the giants somewhat early on as they get into the core, especially if they're getting roasted by a wizard tower. The subsequent heals you can use accordingly, if at all. This army is a little more expensive, so you'll want to look for bases with about 300k-400k combined gold/elixir or about 800 dark elixir.