If you are seeking advice on how to dominate in Clash of Clans, you have stopped in the right place! As someone that has played Clash of Clans almost every day for the past two years, I can definitely say that it is one of those games that really sucks you in and gets you addicted due to its fun, yet challenging and strategic gameplay. The strategic gameplay and clan wars are definitely one of the main reasons that players are still so actively engaged in the game, as there never is a dull moment. This is thanks to the fact that Supercell are continually updating the game and providing new strategies and troop combinations to be found after every update.

Another reason that Clash of Clans is so compelling is the fact that you can communicate and engage with real players from all around the world. I have even had the opportunity to make friends with people from places such as America, Canada, UK, India and even Thailand.

With that being said, it comes to no surprise that since its launch in 2012, the free to play mobile game has been downloaded well over 100,000,000 times on the Google Play store alone. The Finnish developer, Supercell, even reported earnings of up to $1,500,000 per day in 2015. These figures don’t surprise me though and I can easily still see why the community for the game is still thriving in 2017.

So, without further ado, here are 15 ways that you too can dominate in Clash of Clans.

15 Collect Your Resources Frequently!

If you truly want to dominate in Clash of Clans, you are going to need resources and unfortunately they don’t come easy, especially, when players from all around the world are seeking just one thing -- resources. As soon as your village Shield ends, millions of players are waiting to loot your village for anything they can get their hands on. With each one of your resource collectors pumping out up to 3,500 Gold and Elixir every hour, you will begin to notice just how quickly it starts to add up. Despite rules being in place to stop higher Town Halls from looting all your resources, this rule does NOT apply to resource collectors, as anyone can loot 50% of the total amount that is currently being stored in your collector.

Although resource collectors only making up a small percentage of your total loot, you will quickly learn -- as you progress through the game -- just how precious the extra resources are when you have an Inferno Tower needing an upgrade worth 10,000,000 Gold.

14 Join A Clan!

If you are in it for the long haul, joining a clan is a must as it offers many advantages and opportunities that you just can’t go without. When joining a clan for the first time, you will often find that your overall perception of the game will change drastically, as not only do you get the chance to meet other like-minded players from around the world, but you also get the opportunity to improve and learn new skills that you may not have previously known.

Depending on the level of the clan you join, you will be presented with a number of perks that will change the way you play the game. The first thing you will notice is being able to request troops and spells, in which members of your clan can donate to your request. However, this isn’t the only major perk you will have access to as you will also receive -- depending on your clan level -- a lower donation request time, increased donation limits, a small donation refund of the troops training cost, extra treasury storage and also extra war bonus.

The perks don’t stop there as your clan can go head to head in a War to find out which clan has the better attack strategy. The winning clan --after 24 hours -- will receive a very generous reward in the form of Gold, Elixir and Dark Elixir.

13 Think Strategically When Upgrading!

Clash of Clans is a very strategic game that requires you to put a lot of thought into every aspect of the game, especially when it comes to upgrading your village. If you have decided to join a clan and partake in Wars, you will want to listen very closely as this can either make or break how well you fair in clan wars.

Supercell has given each defensive and offensive item in the game a number value that will ultimately increase your War Weight, a tactic used by Supercell to determine your target and position in war. Every type of item, being Troops, Spells, Heroes, Traps, Walls and Defenses all have different weights that will change each time you upgrade them. Essentially, if you were brand new to Town Hall 9 and decided your first upgrades would be Barracks, X-Bows, and Wizard Towers, your war weight may be considerably higher than someone that has 10 more other useful TH9 upgrades than you. This is simply because you chose three of the highest weighted items to upgrade first, rather than smaller, more usefully weighted items. This not only places you at a disadvantage, but it also affects your entire clan.

The upgrade order priority can be found below under the Town Hall .5 Strategy, which is a little later in this article, where we discuss more about making the most out of your village.

12 Don't Waste Your Gems!

As you progress throughout the game, you will find that Clash of Clans has a way of grabbing a hold of you and persuading you to purchase gems. However, unless you are made of money, you will find that more often than not you just can’t afford to purchase them. Realistically though, unless you are wasting your gems on pointless time reducing upgrades or purchasing resources, you should never completely run out of gems.

If you don’t have any gems left, don’t stress as they can be gained over time and completely free of charge from Gem Boxes, Removing Obstacles such as Trees, Completing Achievements and the most recent addition of Events where players not only earn gems but also resources.

If you are new to the game, the first purchase you are going to want to make with your gems is the fifth Builders Hut, as it is one of the most essential items needed to make the game easier and more enjoyable. For those that already own the final Builder, you should only consider spending your gems on 1 Gem Events and boosting your barracks as this offers the most value for money. With your barracks boosted and, depending on your Town Hall level, you should be easily looting a minimum of 2 million resources per hour.

You should never use your gems to finish an upgrade if you have a free Builder, to purchase resources or Shields as these do NOT offer good value for what you receive.

11 Read All The New Updates & Patch Notes!

If you are serious about playing Clash of Clans, you will want to keep up with all the latest information about the game such upcoming updates, events or game balancing changes. One of the best things about Clash of Clans is that the development behind the global sensation, Supercell, is constantly engaging with the community and providing continual support to the game every month in the form of server maintenance, updates, and game balancing.

Every time an update is announced or something is changed within the game, Supercell will post an update via the in-game news tab. Here they will detail all the major changes and provide a link to their website for all other details about the update. While continual updates and changes are a great thing for the game, it can also make your experience quite unenjoyable if you aren’t keeping up to date with all the latest information as strategies and techniques are changing instantly upon the release of new updates.

If you want to stay up to date and ensure you are playing the game in the best possible way, make sure you read all the latest news posted by Supercell.

10 Funnel Your Troops!

One of the most frustrating aspects of Clash of Clans is when your troops suddenly turn and start walking around the outside of the base instead of entering the core. To make matters worse, this only seems to occur when you are confident in defeating your opponent’s base for a three star attack. I’m sure you have all heard of the term funneling, but have always classed it as a technique that only master class attackers can successfully use. However, this is far from the case as the technique of funneling is much easier than you would have initially thought and is actually very easy to perfect with some practice.

The key aspect to achieving a successful funnel attack is to ensure that you break all possible paths for your troops to follow, essentially only leaving the path in which you wish your troops to follow. As seen in Blake's Guide To TH8 Dragon Attacks, you will need to set aside two dragons within your army to take out the corner edges of your opponent’s base. This will help break the possible outside paths that your troops can follow. The next step is to drop one more dragon on each side of the inside edge to help further destroy the outside path. Finally, drop the rest of your dragons on the remaining buildings between your broken paths and there you have it -- a successful funnel and an easy victory.

9 Keep Up-To Date With The Community!

Just as we mentioned earlier, if you are committed to playing Clash of Clans, it is also recommended that you keep up to date with the Clash community as this will usually provide you with an upper hand. Upon the release of updates, members in the community will find ways to make the best out of every update -- whether this is finding new base designs that work better, making changes to current strategies or changing up troop combinations to align with the latest changes to troops and defensive specifications.

You will also find that the Supercell forums and the official Clash of Clans Reddit Page are great ways to connect with other players around the world, gain help and advice from other skilled players, share ideas and requests for future features or even report an issue or bug you may have found within the game. While staying connected to the Clash of Clans community isn’t an essential requirement to succeed in the game, it does help you learn and improve on your skills.

8 Try Using A Town Hall .5 Strategy!

If you are looking to keep your war weight as low as possible, you will need to take into consideration which upgrades you perform before others. This, however, can quickly become tricky and the slightest mistake can ruin your entire strategy. When taking war weight into consideration, one of the best ways to go about making your village as low as possible is to follow the .5 strategy, as it offers some of the best war weight bases available. The .5 strategy will require players to be TH9, TH10 or TH11 as these Town Hall levels offer the best effectiveness to the strategy.

The key to having a successful .5 base is to ensure you keep your weight as low as possible while obtaining the highest level of offense your Town Hall can offer. This would mean that as a TH9 you could essentially have maximum level troops and spells, along with traps, bombs and air defenses and still be matched with a TH8 or a very low and rushed TH9. Not only will you be able to easily defeat these bases, but you will also be a massive advantage to your clan.

In order to have a successful .5 Strategy base, the following priority order should be considered: Laboratory, Army Camps, and Clan Castle all carry no weight and should be upgraded as soon as possible. Next you will start to upgrade your Troops and Spells to their maximum level, followed by building the new Air Sweeper, Air Defense, Bombs, Spring Traps, and Skeleton Traps as they offer the best value for weight.

Once you have completed those upgrades, you will now start to move up to the TH.75 strategy in which you will begin to add more weighted defenses to your base such as Walls, Hidden Tesla, Archer Tower and Cannons, followed by splash damage defenses. The Freeze Spell, Witch, X-Bow, Inferno Towers, and Eagle Artillery are the final upgrades you will make as they will significantly boost your war weight and officially end your TH.5/.75 Strategy.

7 Always Lure Clan Castle Troops Before Deploying All Your Army!

Clan Castle troops, especially in war, are one the biggest challenges that players face when attacking, as you are often left questioning whether the Clan Castle is even full, what is it filled with and also if you can even lure the troops without wasting your army. Because of these questions, players always need to be alert and prepared to take on, potentially, strong powered troops on any base they attack. In multiplayer, Clan Castles are usually empty, however, in war, Clan Castles are the most troublesome as they are almost, on all occasions, filled with the strongest troops available. To help overcome this, one of the first things you want to do before attacking a base is to lure the Clan Castle troops out before deploying your entire army.

The key to success when working with Clan Castle troops is to always eliminate them without losing the core of your army. To lure Clan Castle troops, you will want to ensure that you can trigger the Clan Castle’s radius. The best way to do this is to enter the radius with Hog Riders as they target defenses. Your next best option -- if you cannot trigger the Clan Castle -- is to use a Golem and Wall Breakers. Once you trigger the Clan Castle troops, lure them into an area where your opponents defenses cannot attack you. From there, place down your poison spell and begin to deploy your troops you have dedicated to killing the Clan Castle troops.

6 Try Not To Attack Until The End Of Your Shield!

We all understand the frustrations of being looted and losing time off your shield every time you attack. However, thanks to the new way the shield protection works, players can now take advantage of the system and make a profit by using their shield as a method to gain more resources than what you are losing through raids. In the current Shield system, players have the option to either attack during their shield and lose hours off their timer or opt to attack only when they have no shield or an active Village Guard, which will allow the player to attack as many times during this period without being penalized or raided by another player.

The Village Guard timer can last for 30 minutes in Master I and below or up to four hours in Titan I and Legends League. To successfully use the new system, you need to ensure that if you are attacking during your active shield, you need to be available during and slightly before the time in which your Village Guard is active. This will allow you to boost your barracks and heroes to make the most out of your attacks. Should you do this each time your shield ends, you will easily start to build up your resource storages despite being raided once or twice a day.

5 Always Attack With A Full Army Camp and Clan Castle!

If you wish to succeed when attacking a base, whether it be in multiplayer or War, you must always ensure you have a full Army Camp and Clan Castle. Without filling these two essential aspects needed for attacking, you are leaving yourself vulnerable to failure as I am sure we have all experienced a moment where we have destroyed 99% of a base and only needed one more troop to give us that final 1%.

It is important to understand that when attacking a base you need to take into consideration the cost of your army and spells, and also the total amount of loot that is available to be raided from your opponent. If attacking your opponent cannot gain you a profit, it is not worth attacking and you should continue searching until you find a base that can provide you with better loot. If this is a continual occurrence, you may want to consider changing your troop combination so that it does not require as much resources to train.

4 Find A Base Design That Suits You!

Typically, the community designs bases around four major categories that each provide the player with the opportunity to play in a different style. However, although the majority of bases are designed around the four core categories, this does not limit you from creating your own effective, working designs.

The first in the category is Farming, as this base design heavily protects your resources from potential looters. While this design works to protect the majority of your resources, it won't keep your Town Hall and the resources it holds within it safe as this base is the preferred target for Trophy Hunters.

Next is the Trophy Base which is designed to help you win defensive battles -- at the expense of resources -- to obtain more trophies. This base is targeted towards Farmers, who are looking for easy loot at the expense of losing trophies.

Third in the category is the Hybrid Base, which is a combination of both a Trophy Base and Farming Base and works to protect not only your Town Hall, but also your resources. This is a great base if you are looking for something in-between.

Last in the list is the War Base which is used to prevent three star attacks. These bases will usually defend against a specific style of attack and work to protect your Town Hall at all costs. The Clan Castle is also usually placed in the center of the base to prevent Clan Castle troops from being lured.

3 Strategically Place Your Spells!

Spell placement is an important aspect that can make the difference between no stars and a three star attack, as spells are an essential boost that can significantly aid your troops. Spell placement works closely with the troop funneling technique as you always want to ensure that your spell radius is available within multiple compartments and are placed in the path of your troops, rather than directly on top of them.

A great example of this technique is shown with the placement of a Rage spell. When the spell is placed directly over the top of your funneling troops, you will find that they quickly move out of the radius, making the spell redundant and useless. Whereas, if you were to place it slightly ahead of the path of your troops, you will find that they use the entire radius, rather than just a small percentage. 

The technique needed to perfect the placement of your spells will take some time to learn, however, once perfected it will make three staring your opponents a complete breeze.

2 Avoid Spamming Your Troops In The Same Spot!

When deploying your troops on an opponent's base, you should always avoid deploying them in exactly the same location as each other as this will unsurprisingly hold an unfortunate fate for your troops.

This unfortunate outcome is due to the splash damage that defensive items such as Wizard Towers, Mortars and Inferno Towers can inflict onto your troops. A single hit from these defensive items can swiftly wipe out an entire army of Archers and Goblins. However, if these troops were to be slightly more spread out when deployed, the splash damage radius given off by these defenses would not have impacted your entire army development.

Although this method of troop spamming does not work for lower health troops, it does however, work for the likes of Hog Riders, Valkyrie and especially Giants. If you happen to be raiding with Goblins and Archers, it would be wise to bring addition troops or Heroes to attempt to destroy defensive items that can deal splash damage to your troops.

1 Don't Rush Your Town Hall!

Rushing your Town Hall is easily the biggest mistake that you could ever make in Clash of Clans. Not only will you quickly regret this mistake, you will have also made the process much more challenging to upgrade and increased the overall length at which you must stay at the next Town Hall to fix the damage you have caused your village. Depending on the extent to which your base is rushed, you may simply be better off starting a brand new village from scratch as the process, if done correctly, will be much more fun and enjoyable.

You will quickly find that if you rush your Town Hall, you are not able to adequately protect your resources from being stolen as your defenses will not meet the standard that is needed for players at that Town Hall level. The disadvantages don’t stop there as you will also be hit with a Loot Penalty that will affect the way you loot resources. This is due to the fact that if you are two Town Hall levels above your opponent, you will only be able to loot 50% of their available loot, with this number decreasing drastically as you get to lower Town Halls.

If there is one thing that you take away from this list, it should be to never upgrade your Town Hall if you have outstanding items that need upgrading.