If you have been keeping up with our clan war update posts, (and who wouldn’t be following the statistical breakdown for a game they may not be playing or a clan they aren’t in!), you noticed that our last war resulted in a tie, a first for our clan. The tie highlights a few pretty critical design highlights about the game, and also serves as amazing motivation for everyone to progress and also improve.

I think the most important design highlight is that unlike many team-based games, in CoC success isn’t based on the weakness of our lowest player, but instead on the cumulative strength of our whole clan.

A weak player in CoC might not earn a single star, and give up 3 on the first attack against their base. That’s not good, but it doesn’t “wipe the raid” to compare things to another popular team-based activity. In the war we tied, all based outside the top 15 were 3-starred, so one weak player isn’t a huge issue. Now, they do matter, because a tougher base might have required more than one attack, which in turn means fewer attempts at other bases. Just like had they scored a solid attack, it would have freed up someone else to hit a different base. But the important thing is that at the end of the war, you can’t look at any one weaker player and really say “we lost because of person X”, like you can should someone wander into the whelp pit or fail to run away from the raid while being the bomb.

On the other hand, there were a lot of opportunities for hero plays. As the war was winding down, each attack was a nail-bitter in terms of the attacker being able to pull things off. A lot of times its someone hitting a really tough base, so failing is the expected result, and success is an awesome surprise. The same applies to base design; not giving up three stars against an attack that perhaps should 3-star you is an awesome feeling, while failing to do so might inspire some base design tweaks or a total overhaul.

The tie also highlights the depth of the game. In a blowout war (our current for example, where we knew we were going to win after the first dozen or so attacks), if you fail to 3-star someone you should, or your base isn’t as great as it could be, you might not notice because we won anyway. There isn’t that pressure, that motivation to improve. The same applies in a blowout loss; bases being crushed by overwhelming force isn’t teaching you much, nor is throwing troops into a meatgrinder of a base.

A close war shows that depth, and CoC has depth in spades. I think just from this war we had a lot of people notice the little details of really pulling off a great dragon attack vs just a decent one, or the difference between using three lighting vs heal/rage depending on the base layout. Our top-end guys saw the importance of securing down at least two stars, and how critical that might be. On the lower end I hope people were motivated to progress to at least these levels, where the game really opens up (though I would argue a TH6 attacking a good TH6 base is very interesting in terms of tactics and strategy).

What I’m most excited about is when our clan overall ‘grows up’ and wars focus more on TH9+ bases, as things then switch from trying to 3-star bases to pulling off 2-star attacks, and tactics expand from “probably dragons” to include golems, pekkas, hogs, loons, witches, etc, and army composition starts to really matter vs “all dragons, go!” Just watching some war review videos from clans made up mostly of TH9 and TH10 bases has me very excited for our future.