Clash of Clans, the online mobile strategy game app
that was so dominant
that its rival needed to hire Kate Upton
in order to make anyone notice it existed.
In honour of Clash of Clans' formidable success,
we offer an exploration into the unanswered questions
and unsolved mysteries that hover around the game
like so many Goblins around a Dark Elixir depository,
also the answered and solved ones as well,
we're equal opportunity like that.
Number one: Why play Clash of Clans anyway?
Hark, o listener, to a tale of the dark days of 2012
when casual gaming was dominated by Angry Birds,
Farmville, Candy Crush,
and the 11 billion clones thereof.
Woe unto those who craved a casual online experience,
a truly deep strategic layer
that fostered social engagement more meaningful than just
banning friends with annoying requests.
Into this dark domain entered Supercell
and their cartoonish fantasy warfare sim Clash of Clans.
Now in addition to clicking on little plots of land
to upgrade their buildings
and waiting for slow progress bars to fill up,
you could also team up
with guildmates in epic assaults on on enemy fortresses
and plan the deployment of multiple troop types
to overcome powerful defence structures.
It's called gameplay, folks.
Look it up.
Number two: What's the deal with all the jargon?
Pop into a Clash of Clans forum or the in-game chat
and you'll be inundated with bewildering acronyms
and inscrutable terminology.
I mean, here's a typical example from a strategy post
in the Clash of Clans subreddit,
"I think OP has 2 options: Govahog or Govalaloon.
The Gova phase needs to take care of the war CC,
the Queen and the core...
(at least the nearest IT if Laloon, both IT if Hogs)
so it should be a big part of the army."
Okay, does that make sense?
What the hell did I just say?
It all makes sense once you've realised
Clash of Clans lingo is designed to compress
maximum information into as few characters as possible
because typing is hard I guess.
So those weird words are just mash ups of unit names.
Govahog means Golem, Valkyrie, Hog Rider.
While Govalaloon means Golem, Valkyrie, Lava Hound, Balloon.
And all those acronyms,
well, that's simple, I mean, CC is Clan Castle,
TH is Town Hall,
TH9 is level 9 Town Hall, and so on.
For more info,
check out the Clash of Clans' Wiki's game slang section.
With a little practice, you too can be spearing forth
an intimidating fog of incomprehensible word salad
to keep newbies in their place.
Number three: How much do people spend on Clash of Clans?
Remember, freemium games are only free
because somebody else is throwing down cash to play.
I mean, game devs still got to get paid,
so don't judge, just be grateful.
Average users spend a whole wide range of money
from $20 or $30 to a few 100,
to an outlier like Redditer Cheif magiderp
who claims to have spent $4,680 on the game.
Stop it. Get some help.
A shock response from one fellow gamer,
"You spent 5 grand?
You're not even close to max TH9!!
WTF did you waste it on?"
Yeah, WTF indeed.
Anyway, at the high level, Clash can get pretty expensive
partly because you need lots of gems to bypass
the otherwise onerous waiting time
of upgrading buildings and training troops.
Former world number one
Jorge Yao spent over $250 a week on gems
before a clanmate offered to sponsor his expenses.
Another high-ranking player
who spent over $5,000 on the game,
claimed Clash of Clans actually saved him money
because otherwise he would have blown the cash
by going out drinking.
Now five grand on drinking, ah, I don't know.
We know that amount might be chump change.
A Business Insider article report said
unsubstantiated gossip
from the Engage London Conference
is claiming that an unnamed Saudi player
spent over a million dollars on Clash of Clans.
If I dropped that kind of scratch
on a frickin' iPhone game,
I wouldn't say what my name is either.
Stop it. Get some help.
Number four: Can you have any success
without spending money?
I'm not going to lie,
it's easier to do well at Clash of Clans
if you're willing to drop some real world dollars
on those sweet, sweet green gems to buy more builders
and speed up your upgrades.
Now that said, you can have a respectable Clanning career
without reaching for your credit card.
Acquire new gems by completing in-game achievements
and by upgrading stones and trees around your base.
Don't give in to the temptation to spend your gems
on quick fixes like accelerated upgrades
and troop trainings,
no, instead, devote them to buying extra builders,
a long-term investment
that will vastly increase
your base's efficiency over time.
Now gather your Gold and Elixirs often as possible
to transfer them to your storage buildings,
which are more defensible against enemy attacks.
And don't automatically upgrade your Town Hall
as soon as you can afford it.
Many experienced players argue
that it's better to upgrade other structures first.
Number five: What's the best time of day
to raid enemy bases?
In Clash of Clans, the best way to acquire resources
is to find hapless, poorly defended bases to attack
so you can burn their buildings down
and steal all their stuff, you know, nature's way.
But when to raid with maximum success?
Well, one theory is that the best time to raid,
at least in the US, is early morning or late night.
This is because during the bulk of the day,
the most vulnerable bases will already have been raided
and will be protected by an automatic 12-hour shield
that the game generates to help folks
from being hit over and over again.
So the trick is to get in your raiding
before those shields go up or after they come down.
Otherwise, you're stuck just raiding tougher bases
for a smaller amount of loot.
And if you want to get more scientific,
you can go to the website ClashofClansForecaster.com,
an unaffiliated third party site
that attempts to model loot availability,
broken down by time of day and country of origin.
A typical forecast reads,
"Loot available is terrible right now.
This will continue for the next 1 hour and 7 minutes
when it will improve to be okay."
Sounds rough, right?
Well, well, nobody ever said fun games
were all fun and games.
Wait a minute.
Number six: Why isn't my (insert unit name here)
doing what I want it to do?
The agonising thing about Clash of Clans
is that you can't control your units
as you might in a typical real-time strategy game
like StarCraft.
Your only control lies in troop selection and deployment.
Once you've dropped your little dudes and dudettes
on enemy terra firma, they're on their own.
Now this can lead to some frustrating moments
like watching all your fragile Goblins get smeared
by the splash damage from an enemy mortar,
but your Archers are wasting their time two cannons down
taking out a gun that's not endangering anybody.
So it helps to know your units' capabilities
before you plop them down into harm's way.
For instance, Giants will attack the nearest defensive buildings
and ignore enemy troops
even while being attacked themselves
while Valkyries will prioritise troops
and buildings that damage multiple targets.
A Lava Hound will always attack air defences first,
while a minion will attack the closest building
or enemy regardless of type.
It's a lot to keep track of
and that's before you get into the weird bugs
and inconsistent unit AI,
the documentation
of which is a cottage industry on YouTube.
Fortunately though, helpful Clashers have assembled
this info into complicated charts
for you to memorise.
There will be a quiz.
Number seven: What is the ultimate base layout?
As with basketball, you won't get far in Clash of Clans
without a good defense.
After all, millions of other players are out there
licking their chops at the opportunity
to swarm your hapless hamlet
and plunder your hard-won gold reserves.
At first splash, you might think
there's a single optimal base design for all circumstances,
but the truth is way more complicated.
For one thing, as your Town Hall increases in level,
the variety of available defensive buildings increases
as does the variety of troops
your similarly levelled opponent could smash you with.
An optimal defence for a TH4
might not work so well for a TH8.
Also, opponents will use different mixtures of units.
So what defends well against one combo
might fail against another.
A few key principles include using your walls
to build multiple compartments
that will slow down your enemies,
using walls to funnel troops down alleyways
towards your defensive structures,
and centralising your Clan Castle
so defensive troops can't be drawn away from the action.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Base building is a complex topic
that can take lots of practice to master,
and there's no one magic bullet solution for everything.
And if there was, you probably couldn't afford the gems
to make it anyway.
Patience, grasshopper.
Number eight: Was there really a haunted Clash of Clans base?
No casual gaming mega-hit would be complete
without a little Creepypasta weirdness
hovering around it.
In the case of Clash of Clans,
it's a base built
by the Malaysian user AngArkey Rikhi,
which was viewable to other gamers
but would cause system crashes
every time someone tried to attack it.
Social media went wild with speculation
because that's what social media does.
And they claimed that Rikhi was dead
and his ghost haunting the village
with builders still erecting new structures
in deference to the wishes
of a sinister supernatural identity.
Supercell addressed the mystery,
claiming that Rikhi was just a banned user
and that the base's visibility
was merely due to an unsolved glitch.
Way to take the fun out of life, Supercell.
I bet you don't even let your kids
lick the cookie dough out of the bowl
because they might get salmonella, too.
No fun.
Number nine: Does Clash of Clans contain
secret satanic imagery?
It's the oldest story in the book.
Make a successful game, get accused of Satanism.
It's just how it works.
It happened to Dungeons & Dragons,
it happened to Magic: The Gathering,
and it happened to Clash of Clans.
In September of 2014,
user BrunoNexoBrazil posted images
to the Supercell forum showing a strange animal face
visible to the grass tile patterns
at the corner of a base where two sides intersect.
Now users speculated that the face was that of Baphomet
a goat-like deity associated with devil worshipping
and the occult.
Spooky!
In fact, from screenshots taken at the time,
there does appear to be a face there
but it kind of looks like Simba from The Lion King,
which isn't really that scary.
But perhaps, there is a closet Disney fan in the art team
at Supercell, right?
I mean, aren't we all?
Clandestine disciple of Beelzebub sounds much cooler.
Either way, the grass design
appears to have been changed since then.
I mean, I've been pinching
and zooming all over my iPhone this morning,
hoping to get a glimpse of a prince of darkness
or at least a little lovable feline,
but no such luck.
Baphomet shmaphomet.
Number ten: What the heck is War Weight?
No, it's not how much you need to be able to bench press
before they let you sign up as a barbarian.
War Weight is a number calculated by the game
to aid with matchmaking.
When two clans hate each other very, very, very much,
they decide to have a war.
Supercell adds up all the villages
with their defensive
and offensive units in each clan,
and based on super secret algorithms
assign that clan a number.
That's the War Weight.
Clans of similar War Weights are pitted against each other.
Now as we all know, gamers like nothing better
than to whine about how the deck is stacked against them,
so thousands of words have been spilled online,
complaining about the unfairness
of Supercell's matchmaking system.
In effort to get a better grasp
on the secret War Weight formula,
some super users have attempted
to reverse engineer mathematical formulas
that approximate the Supercell's calculations.
How accurate these forums are
is of course another topic of online controversy.
It's a riddle wrapped in an enigma, wrapped
in a message board.
So ends our survey of the mysteries, controversies,
and persisting questions
surrounding Supercell's runaway monster
mobile gaming phenomenon.
I don't know about you,
but it makes me want to go Valaloon
all up in some TH10.5s.
You know what I mean.
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