Got some good progress since the TH13 upgrade from yesterday. I’m also receiving the x4 bonus from dailies which is nice in helping me get some precious resources for the initial round of upgrades. But I’m feeling a plan emerge as all these elements come together.
The first I want to talk about is how good having the Royal Champion feels, even though she’s just started her upgrade to level 4. But with the 5 day Hero/Troop boosts, I’m able to see her potential starting to emerge. I’m still using Super Dragons as my primary offense but I might switch to Queen Walk/Hybrid once the Siege Barracks level 2 completes. Nonetheless, the thing with Super Dragons is that once you understand which bases to locate and how to utilize your attacks in creating a specific funnel, they become extremely reliable.
Adding now the Royal Champion, my usage for her is a clean up act on the opposite side of where I set down the bulk of my troops. With the bases I attack, I generally can three star many of them. But once in a while the funnel doesn’t go as planned and you end up with the Super Dragons veering off to one side and getting distracted. Because the Royal Champion is incredibly strong and can effectively knock out a few key defenses with her ability, she makes a really good clean up fighter if you’re struggling for those last few seconds.
And this makes me very eager to get my Clan Castle and Army Camps upgraded because that will provide another +25 Housing Spaces for my army. With my Super Dragon composition, I’m most likely going to use the extra spots for more Balloons. I could lower the number of Balloons and just go for another Super Dragon but I think too many Super Dragons ends up boggling your attack down because of how slow and short range they are. Four more Balloons on the camp means that I potentially have four more clean up attacks to aid my Royal Champion.
The other option would be to stick a Baby Dragon in to help out with early funneling alongside my Queen Archer. Normally, with both a Barbarian King and Archer Queen available (meaning not being upgraded), I’ll set them on two opposite ends of a base after using my Lightning Spells to take out the Air Defense and two Air Sweepers (and in this situation I’m constantly looking for reasonable rewards mixed with clustered bases that have Air Defenses and Air Sweepers in AoE range of the Lightning Spells). After deploying the Barbarian King and Archer Queen, I’ll also deploy two normal Dragons to take down any buildings along the side or possibly light defenses to the left and right in creating the initial funnel. What a Baby Dragon would do is help the Barbarian King out a bit especially if he can’t reach certain defenses behind a bunch of thick Walls or if there are straggler buildings and the King (or Queen for that matter) go in the opposite direction. I figure that the Baby Dragon probably can take at least 2-3 additional buildings down so that the rest of my troops will concentrate up the middle where the Town Hall is.
But I did mention I have a plan in the works. So in the next day or two, what I’m going to do is really push for my secondary account to upgrade its Workshop to level 3. That’ll give that account access to the Stone Slammer, which is the crux of my Super Dragon attack. I bought a cheap Book of Building and am waiting to get my Elixir up for that event. On my main account, I started my Royal Champion to level 4, which should take a little under a day (tomorrow) to finish. Then sometime early this morning (around 4am), my Gold Mine will complete on my main, thus freeing up another Builder. Since I have a Dark Elixir Rune waiting around, I’m going to first get my Super Goblins for my main account going, use the Dark Elixir Rune to fill up my storage (even though it won’t be at this TH13’s maximum amount) and upgrade my Archer Queen to level 66 with the Book of Heroes from the Season Pass.
I won’t have much Dark Elixir left (if any) so from there, I’m going to spend a good hour or two farming the hell out of resources with the Super Goblin Knife and aim for getting my Workshop upgraded on my main account. Hopefully, in the process, I will accumulate enough Dark Elixir for a level 5 Royal Champion which should give me enough time before her boost ends and thus allowing me to continue using her ability.
Before I do that though, I’m also going to Super Goblin Knife on my secondary account to accumulate Elixir for upgrading my Workshop there too. However, I will be using my Book of Building so that when I decide to start using Super Dragons again, I’ll still have the infinitely useful Stone Slammer available, even though it’ll be weaker than the one from my main account.
Unfortunately, the number of days required to upgrade the Workshop on my main account will be close to the end of the season where the Building Boost ends. In the meantime, once my Siege Barracks level 2 finishes upgrading in the laboratory, I’m hoping to go one more level since I won’t be seeing the Log Launcher anytime soon.
At least for my main account with regards to this season, once this season ends, I’ll probably use the Season Bank rewards for upgrading at least one Army Camp. I’m hoping to push two and possibly the Clan Castle. I do have a Cannon that I’m working on for another 7 days where once the Builder frees up, I’m going to move him over to the Town Hall. The Inferno aspect along with the on death effect will be immensely helpful against raids. Along the way, I’ll probably use a Gold Rune to place down the second Scattershot. I figure having both up is going to be massive and I want to take advantage of the current season’s Builder Boost to reduce the time cost while I have it.
Next season should be interesting too. The main irritation is the much longer upgrade times for TH13. I’ll probably not be able to see the benefit of the full +20/+5 housing spaces made available though the Army Camps and Clan Castle until at least midway next month. For certain whatever Books of Building I can obtain through the Season Pass next month will be used on these buildings.
Now, one thing that people might ask is why Workshop before the Laboratory? It’s mostly because of obtaining the Log Launcher. I’m guessing with the nerfs to Super Dragons, TH13 is going to be very rough on them. So the plan is to gradually switch to the Hybrid and/or Ice Golem/Witch attack. Also, TH13 is going to be very Elixir intensive because you need all the upgrades in the Laboratory as well as your Army Camps, resource storage units and of course the Grand Warden. I have a feeling it’s going to take at least a year before I even start looking at TH14 on my main account without significant monetary investment.
The other thing is that you’re looking at about a month before you can see the benefits of your first Laboratory level 11 upgrade. I estimate that the average upgrade from level 11 Laboratory is at least 12-14 days. So factoring in the time to upgrade the Laboratory along with the cost of a single upgrade, you’ll see more immediate benefits from having at least one Workshop enabling both the Siege Barracks and a low level Log Launcher rather than pushing the Laboratory up immediately. If I had a spare Book of Building lying around, then I would reconsider this statement. But all that would do, in my opinion, is just shorten that time frame up so that you can make use of a Log Launcher right now.
Also, why not push the Grand Warden if you’re spending Elixir? My Grand Warden is level 40 and at the moment, I don’t think there’s any immediate benefit to pushing him pass this point at least until I start getting more Book of Heroes. It’s bad enough to have a Queen Archer on the side lines but your Grand Warden is pretty much the clutch play early on in shielding your troops against the Eagle Artillery. But I do hope to get him leveled up just to keep that ability’s uptime as high as possible since those few seconds do add up fast when you’re charging into some heavy damaging zones.