Choice Architecture

For most of the past 100 years the world of economics was dominated by rational choice theory.  The idea being that people made the best choice of the given options.  But in the past 10 years a better theory has emerged.  Actually it is not a theory, its based on empirical evidence. People regularly make bad choices. Occasionally they make good choices.  It is not all bad, but in general a non expert will often make a bad choice.

The game we play here exploits that aspect of human beings with just about every update.  you can’t count on the attack you are using to today working after the next update.  But the big issue with people is inertia.  Folks resist change more than anything.  So we had the guy who ran mass hogs months after they were shown to be ineffective.  He would regularly find a dead farm city that he could run mass hogs on and show the replay to prove that they worked! except he always euro starred in war with that att and blamed it on “bad luck”.  And after a few months of eternal bad luck, he quit the game.

Of course the problem wasn’t bad luck.  The problem was the old solution was now the new problem.  But human inertia was the culprit.  avoiding change at all costs to your detriment.  So this is not an argument to even do what is best for the clan, though it is.  The real argument is do what is best for you in terms of success.  And people left to their own devices and under the bone crushing pressure of personal inertia just…willl…not…change.

The problem is change takes work and usually results in initial failure until the new process is integrated.  it is a preference for the “devil you know”.  The problem of course is that devil makes you ineffective.  Lets say you have 3 players at th 9.  One runs drags.  That player can 3 star maybe 3% of th 9’s.  The next player runs giheho.  He gets 3 stars 50% of the time.  The last runs hogs with golems and wizards (I call this gohogs, others call it hogowi) and gets 3 stars 70% of the time.  Anyone with basic math skills can see that you want a 50% or better chance of success to be effective in war where you get 2 atts.  The really low probability atts are doubly trouble.  They don’t help the clan win.  And they tend to make people opt out of wars as they are not happy about continued “bad luck”.

so this is the current thinking on choice architecture.  You need to limit people to healthy choices (in economics they use a program called Save More Tomorrow where you increase your savings automatically as your salary goes up.)  We have had to simply ban atts in the past because, due to good old inertia.  So right now the probability of 3 starring a th 9 in war with drags is like 1%, 3% and 10% for drags 3, 4 and 5 respectively.  its a poor choice, so like the mass hog ban, we need to go to a drag ban at th 9.

But the other part of this choice architecture is this.  You have to take the edge off of failure.  Having experienced this first hand (I ran my first ever golem att in war with no practice, just some coaching) I can tell you that learning new atts in war with the outcome on the line is a whole lot more pressure than you need in your day.  Yes, it is easier to learn this in farm mode or in a training week.  But there again we have inertia.  so the most likely way to get this plan into effect  is run a couple wars where the choice architecture gives you two “healthy” choices.  These will go down as practice wars so there is no pressure to execute any one att.  The pressure is to learn an attack that has at least a 50% chance of getting 3 stars at the 9 vs level.

Welcome Beowolves!

 

Just a quick note to say hey to our new arrivals. Feel free to hop around amongst our clans. Each one has a different feel, activity level and war difficulty. Given that, you may find one more suited to your tastes. So if where you first land doesn’t have the feel you are looking for, we can adjust. DCW and DCA are either “more relaxed” or “a bit anarchistic” depending on your world view. But that may be just the right fit. Anyway, here is a current shot at our rules for reference. We vetted these with your leadership.

1. Have fun and respect each other.

2. We work as TEAM.

3. Only donate the troops that are requested.

4. Only request troops that you can build (except for War Clan Castle and war attacks)

5. In War Clan Castle only high level players are to donate so we get level 5+ troops for defense. Fill units requested  please be specific in your request.

6. In war we work as team. Do not attack just for loot, attack to improve number of stars for the clan. First offense is a warning. Second offense is a kick.

7. Elder and leader spots are earned. Get a sponsor to start your path to elder. Become a sponsor to start your path to co-leader.

8. Be active and donate. Help your clan. Share good and bad attacks. Ask for help and help others when you can.

9. Promotions and demotions will be discussed in the leader room, not in general chat. Elders do not kick players.

10. Join us on Kakaotalk within 48 hours of joining clan. Kakao mandatory to be on war roster in main clan.

–War schedule , DCW wars constantly.  DC and DCA generally war on a 1 day break with battle on different days (not a rule per se, just information).  We use clashcaller.com in DC and DCA to assist in war planning  to avoid crossfire. In DCW crossfire is, I think, more of a feature than a bug.

 

Cheers

Greg

 

Cutting off your nose

So my mom used to use the expression “cutting off your nose to spite your face”. When you are a kid you hear stuff like that and figure it’s just something old people say. Then you get old. Then you get educated. And well it’s not just an expression.

The was a nun who became a saint (uh yay?) for cutting off her nose. The nun was part of a convent in Scotland ( no offense Reiver).  She heard the Viking’s were coming. And decided to cut off her nose and upper lip so the Vikings could not cause her to break her vow of Chastity. The other nuns followed her lead

It worked. In a sense. The Vikings were so disgusted they burned down the convent with the nuns still inside. So the Vikings replaced rape loot and pillage with murder loot and pillage. Vikings, God bless them, adapt to the situation. Saints on the other hand, stick to the rules and see their clan collapse.

It may sound like I am coming down on the side of the Vikings here, but that is not the case. Not a fan of the whole murder thing. In fact the only relevant question here regarding the Saints and Vikings (both th 9’s btw) is “do they use both war atts and do they have an attack that can 3 star a 9?”

These are international clans. We have Saints and Vikings in our midst! And both can 3 star th 9’s!

So here is a general way to look at a rules system in the real world. Follow the rules unless it causes you to do something Barbaric.

This is the argument one of our co’s was making. ” we spent a week discussing kicking an active player on a donations issue?”

We do have “super donors” in our clans. Let’s just call them saints. Since this is a zero sum game, when you have super donors you are going to have super receivers. Let’s call them Vikings.

If we can accept the fact that the two factions are both useful in war and that too much of one or the other is unhealthy, then I think we can continue on pretty well. If the saints try to incessantly convert the Vikings or the Vikings start killing the saints we have a real problem.

And to some degree we do have a problem. We have a number of players who respond by just not opening the app and going inactive. And there is the issue. The idea that war clan sees people doing nothing as being ok. And people being active as a problem. Well that is cutting off your nose in a very slow way.

Rules and Problems

I am in favor of useful rules.

I am not in favor of counterproductive rules.

A number of people hold the opinion that rules solve problems. I am of the opinion that rules select problems. When you make a rule, you decide we are more likely to have a certain problem and less likely to have another problem.

Historically we have had a number of rules that we used for a while and then discarded or modified. The biggest rule was ” no mass hogs”. That in the end was a good rule as we couldn’t win a war running mass hogs. We needed to learn new attacks. And people of their own volition would have run mass hogs until the cows came home, I think.

But we of course lost a couple players who could not believe that every problem could not be solved by the proper application of that attack. These guys were not likely to stay, but..

In the end, we don’t have a clan (or clans ) without active players.

We do have 3 clans with different rule sets. This is in recognition of the rather unoriginal observation that “people are different”. Some like tight rules. Some moderate. Some prefer near anarchy.

I hop between DC and DCA as there are enough rules there that we are effective. But for me anyway, not so many that we are hamstrung and can’t have fun.

So with the merger going on I want to go over some of the rules and why we have them. Or in some cases don’t have them.

I have for a raft of reasons, avoided donation rules of any kind. Donation rules are fine in other games. But here they select more problems than they solve in some cases.

One of our co’s commented that “The only donation problem is a request that goes I filled a long time”. In practice in DC and DCA that is not far from the mark. And that rarely ever happens due to a lot of good donators in those clans. Dcw however is renowned for low donation rates. The infusion of the merger players may mitigate that problem as it appears they are good donators.

But there is a worse donation problem.  That is the wrong unit donation.  We hardly have that problem. But the way we avoid that is we hardly ever accept new players. As they are possible wrong donators. And when they do donate the wrong stuff we have this time consuming forensic exercise to figure out who the problem is. So my point is we lose people naturally over time. And our rule system makes it difficult to add people to the group. Over time you can see the issue with this. The numbers dwindle and the group fades away.

So as part of our recent discussion another co suggested that an over abundance of rules can submarine the merger. That shocked a few people, but it is real possibility. The idea that every issue can be solved by adding one more rule needs to be balanced against what I call the traffic law problem.

A police officer once explained the problem. If you apply ever traffic law on the books in this town, there is no way to legally drive down this street. That set of laws has two huge problems. First it makes it impossible to be a law abiding citizen. And second it replaces the rule of law with the rule of man. Basically the police in that town decide who to stop and selectively decide who to fine. That allows for all kinds of biases to creep into the system and it ends with the idea that summarizes a good legal system ” if the law doesn’t protect all of us, it doesn’t protect any of us”.

Ok this is part one of this post.  The point of this post is, you can’t look at a rule in isolation. And the rule itself does not “solve the problem”. It selects problems. And it also sets up an enforcement mechanism that can be worse that the original situation.

You need to integrate over all the rules. And see what you get. Right now DC is one heck of a high functioning clan.  We have functioning rules. But before adding more, we need to take a look at not just the rule, but the entire rule structure.

ok enough for this block. Next I will get to the saints and Vikings problem (spoiler alert it has nothing to do with Minnesota or New Orleans)

Lead Balloons

http://qais.rocks/how-to-weigh-your-base-in-clan-wars/

 

This blog post above has the weights of all your defenses.  You can download it as an XL file or you can download as a Numbers file on your iPad.  Heck, you can maybe download to your abacus or slide rule.

So we have a horrid match in DCA this war.  We have zero TH 11.  The opponent has 5. FIVE.  If they show up at all we are pretty much doomed.  How oh how did this happen?  as Mark said “why even bother?”

Well our friend Pogo has the answer.  The enemy is us.  To be specific the enemy is Mark, Reiver (X2) and Greg.  Yeah that’s the problem.  We have 4 monster 10’s that attracted 5 semi halfway upgraded th 11’s.  But the 11’s have enough positional defense with the eagle artillery that we are outgunned.  And enough offense with the warden that if they do not lose connection in atts they win.  So what is the answer?  Draw and Quarter Mark, Reiver and Greg?

Nah. Mark and Reiver are fine people.  And me, I will leave that to posterity.  The problem is us old timers came up in the “max all your defenses” schema.  And now we are here in the max all your offense world.  And we can’t destroy defenses. But Mark has Ja and Reiver has Come as You are and I have Famous.  You perhaps see where I am going here. Or perhaps you are going for another beer. If so, please grab me one. Thanks.

Right the problem is our super maxed guys get us wars with some maxed cities that have higher TH.  In DCA the 11’s are all cities with very low walls.  But with the latest upgrade to the eagle giving it 3x damage vs golem, you can see that ground pounding vs 11 is limited effectiveness.  And that leaves air, which the eagles tear up.  which leaves us with Mark’s original refrain “why even Bother?”

Well boys and girls let me paraphrase Mr. Roger’s here

Some are fancy on the outside.
Some are fancy on the inside.
Everybody’s fancy.
Everybody’s fine.
Your base fancy and so is mine.

Ok, I don’t think Fred ever expected to be quoted here.  But the essence of his thinking is that we are all ok is the point.  No need to get all medieval.  No high treason involved here.  Just the usual noises that surround a world where the old way is causing is problems in the current wars.  It is not the players. It is that the players bases get us drawn into conflicts that are somewhere in the range of small chance of winning to no freaking chance in hell of winning.  Once again, not pointing fingers, as well I am us as pogo would say.

Ok enough with the pop culture allusions.  We have some good players who have defenses that get us into wars where we have a very low chance of winning.  WE DO NOT WANT TO LOSE THESE PLAYERS.  But realize that the game is an irreversible process.  The best thing, for most folks is to reroll in this situation.

If you look at war right now, you see that we have already evolved to where we can not only 3 star every 8, but in many wars 3 star every 9.  That means the imbalance at 10 and 11 is the decisive factor in war.  And if our 10’s draw 11’s, well there you have it.  The 11’s 2 star our 10’s and our 10’s 1 star their 11’s.  And there goes the war.  So back to ground zero, how do you build a clan?

Well since every 9 is a likely 3 star in the future, no need to really upgrade through 9.  Just do enough to get a shield.  At 10 and 11 you need defense.  so at 10 you want enough to limit your damage to 2 star.  we do that with about half our 9.1 in war and our 10’s with inferno rarely go 3.  Then our 11 we want them to stay in the 1-2 star range on defense.

So we would, if we had a clean slate, build a mix of high offense specialists at 9.  A few max giheho.  A few max lava loons. a few max gowiwipe.  Everyone leans to low walls and as high as possible hero.  Basically you are doing arbitrage on the imbalance in the weighting system.  Wiz towers and mortars are trouble.  Low archer tower, cannons and tesla are not much of a problem.

But maxing all defenses as we did in the past is the issue.  We did that back when most attackers were not skilled and defense could carry the day.  Now most attackers are solid and the defenses only cause us to get paired up with futile matches.

So there you have it.  To be effective in war, stop upgrading offense you don’t use.  Stop upgrading defense once you get shields regularly.  Then push the defense once you are the highest or second highest level in the game.

We have very, very skilled players here.  Just trying to keep them from negating their offense skills by having them upgrade in a way that makes wars barely winnable.

See ya in the neighborhood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upgrading after the Update Settles

The “point 1” upgrades seem to be doing OK.  My 9.1 city, Famous, is just about to knock out the biggest purple upgrade left on the agenda, Pekka 5.  That is an 8 Million purple upgrade.  Granted upgrading is tougher now than before this update.  Back in the day it was pretty simple to get all the purple upgrades done with no problems as we had the TH snipe bonus.  Without TH sniping, the Lab just ends up shutting down for a few days.  Also I got the drag 5 upgrade going under the old system, so I had one of the big purple upgrades done.  Still you can get there with this approach.

The “no defense” city really seems to be in trouble after this upgrade.  Awake tried to play oddball after this upgrade.  But chatting with him today, he says if we don’t win a war, he can’t farm after the war.  Granted we were about 19-1 with him in wars in DCA, so it was not a huge problem.  But it is clear that we are not going to win every war.  River has added some low defense to his TH 7 city, so the bottom line seems to be that the no defense city is nearly unworkable.  But the low defense city may still be playable.

Looking at the 9.1 idea, you can see a path forward.  Once all the offense is maxed at 10, it seems the right answer is to do the same thing again.  Upgrade to TH 11 and just add the Warden and maybe get the witch and minion upgrade.  You get the offense upgrade without adding to your defense weight in war.  A couple of cities with th 9 defense but th 11 offense could be handy.

This “difficulty disparity” does make a degree of sense.  The low levels of the game have to be easy to get new players on board.  Then toy keep the game rolling at the high levels it has to get harder.  Right now the game at high master level is a bit of a train wreck.  It is back to where it was the week after the update.  All the big guys running full spell war type atts in farm mode to pick up the 5 star loot bonus.  Even with the high bonus up there it looks like it is taking 3 atts to pick up the bonus.  Not sure that 1/3 of that bonus coming every couple days is enough to offset the difference.  That is, it is still more lucrative to run that full att in war (a winning war) than to farm with that full on attack.

If the math is still a bit off, you can expect 2 things to happen.  Another wave of players dropping to lower leagues.  And over time this idea of full on 7 spell farm atts will fade if it is not paying off.  In fact, now more than ever, dropping cups is even a better idea.  Yes your league bonus and 5 star bonus drops.  But for just that reason there is less reason to really clobber you.  And that is what I am seeing more of with my 9.1.  Far fewer really hard hits with the lower star bonus in lower leagues.

Anyway, that is where I see us today.  Expect a week or two for this star system to reshuffle the decks of what leagues people are in and at that point it should hit more or less a steady state condition.  Until the next update.

Update to the Update

So  the first update performed as expected.  Clash dropped out of the number 1 spot for apple mobile games.  A mild drop to number 2.  But that is the kind of thing that gets people’s attention.  Yes there is always a fair amount of noise about change of any kind.  But the original update was clearly an over correction that somewhat wrecked the economy of the game.  So there are two fixes in the system now that do what I was making noise about.  They generate resources during attacks.  Or more to the point they generate enough resources that attacking in farm mode is not a totally boneheaded thing to do.

That was what I was seeing after the initial update.  The more you attacked, the less resources there were in the game.  People were draining the game of purple and gold to pump up DE.  So of course the 1 gem boost came in and everyone with a brain boosted the DE drills and you saw the results of that.  Most our big guys hopped to DCA and fought hero down.  Now that episode of our history is drawing to a close.  But it was clearly there in the DCA war vs punak where all our big guys had one hero down.  That war went about as badly as you would expect.

Anyway we are getting back to normal now that the gem boost is over.  The update gave you the treasury which is rock solid.  Unlike the prior CC rooftop storage, this is unbreakable.  In my case I can cache 2.6 Million of resources there.  Meaning for an 8 Mill upgrade I only need 5.4 million in the lootable storage.  That is huge for the low defense cities.  Famous is a 10 playing without inferno’s.  So this makes that 9.1 construct of ours much more viable.  Lab does go down for a few days, but I am pretty sure I can get all my upgrades done.  In general what I do is try to clean 9’s in war with golems when I am trying to save up for a big purple upgrade. Much cheaper than Drag 5 atts. Right now it is Pekka 5 that I am holding for.  It will be a day or two more but it is looking like I will get there.

So the two loot generators are the loot cart and the star bonus.  The loot cart, if you are attentive, cuts your losses to 80%.  You have to find that cart (at times it seems to lurk in the shadows) and empty it before your next attack.  This is a problem in the ghetto leagues where I often get hit 5-6 times before a shield pops up.  Hence the cart is not as reliable low because you have to empty it after each att.  It works better in the higher leagues at least for me.  In general the loot cart covers the cost of rearming traps and a bit more.  But the main thing about it is that it generates loot during an attack.  It is a tax rebate effectively.

The other boost is the 5 star system.  It is advertised as a “daily quest” but in practice that is not how it plays out.  When I first heard about it, the rational thought was that daily 5 star meant if you got 5 stars in a day you got the loot bonus.  Then I expected another would start the next day on a 24 hour cycle, kind of like the leagues work.  It would reset every day at 9 pm kind of deal.  But no it’s not like that.  You have as long as you want to get 5 stars.  It’s is not limited to a 24 hour period. But once you get the stars there is a 24 hour hour timer until the bonus pops up again.  For guys like me who only attack twice a day in farm mode for 1-2 stars that is a bonus that pops up 2-3 times a week at best.  Once a week if my work is really busy like it was this last week.  None the less, it is a healthy bonus especially at the high level leagues.  Here is a link with a bit more detail on the system.

star system

One of the nuances is you get the bonus of the league you are in when you get the last star.  So with my 9.1 i often drop to 1000 cups to farm.  But i drift up with all the folks dropping past me so it is easy to pop up to 1400 or 1600 to collect the bonus then dive back again to lower levels.

I have spent the first week in the 3100 cup range with my full up th 10.  Prior to this star system I was getting 0 to 1 star attacks on me that had that account drifting towards champion with almost no effort.  When this update kicked in i saw a return to the full on war att in farm mode up there. My argument was that this level of attack just did not pay off under the old system.  But now it is less draining to the overall economy with the 5 star bonus.

In fact, full war atts are all i have seen this week on my high account.  I am hearing gibarch is still running in crystal, so I may drop back into that range here in the next few days.

Bottom line though, they needed this update to the update.  And so did we.  Cheers.

 

Clan Engineering 2016

Engineering was huge for us in 2015.  The update hit one aspect of engineering very hard, but overall the principles still work.  And there are quite a few clans that were already engineered, so i don’t see it going away.  But it is being modified by two aspects of the update.

So the basic idea behind engineering has been to get cities at a th level that are going to be 3 starred in war no matter what, then use that no matter what to our advantage.  This gave rise to the Oddball account in DCA.  We were all but unbeatable with that account in the war in the last months of 2015.  So no surprise it has been hit hard by the update.

The way that account worked was simple.  Max drills, max dragons and spells, ignore defense completely.  It showed up as effectively a th 5 in the war list, but could clear any 8 and many 9’s.  But under the new system the zero defense approach is so weak that same level cities can hit him for 100% without using 1/3 of the army.  Meaning, never gets a shield and can’t hold resources.  Under the old system he would raid an hour or 2, get his next upgrade going then get the 16 hour shield.  It was both very playable and very devastating in war.  But that was 2015.  Now that account is the one casualty of the update.  He has to do something.  The 3 options are

1. Abandon ship.
2. Minimal Defense.
3. Upgrade to TH 11 and get that Warden.

I have been recommending option 2 as that may still give us the edge.  Just add incremental amounts of defense until he gets shields 50-60% of the time.  That may bring him into war opposite a 6 or a 7, but that is still a huge edge.

I haven’t advocated option 3, because that involves I think buying a 1 week shield or some similar cash outlay.  But right now that account is a toddler playing in traffic.  I would never recommend a zero defense city again.  But low defense is still very, very playable.  That is Reiver’s th 7 alt in DCA.  It shows up low on defense but has pretty decent offense.  It will take some additional defense to survive at th 8.  But right now he can run a pretty good drag 2 attack from very low on the list.

The upgrade plan for that city can go as far as th 9 as I see it.  You have seen in DC that we typically 3 star half to 2/3 of the th 9’s.  In the next year I expect all 9’s will be pushed to 3 and all 10’s to 2/3 thanks to the addition of the th 11.  What I am saying is you can, I think, run a low defense city up to 2 TH levels lower than whatever is the max TH in the game, because going forward max -2 is the th level that is a non negotiable 3 star to be a winning clan.

We have maybe 6-8 of these engineered cities in the clans right now.  It will be on the players to figure out just how much defense you need.  I expect these cities will mostly hang out under 1000 cups.  Right now you can find DE down as low as 900 cups, so it is possible to build DE in this range.  It seems to dry up quite a bit below that, but that can also be exploited.  if everyone knows that, pop up to 1000 to raid then drop down to 500-600 and put gold and purple outside kind of thing.

Now that we are playing under boost, we are good on just about all front until 7 January.  After that I expect farming to get rough.  I am still seeing a lot of really stupid atts where the attacker generates a loss for themselves even after the league bonus and causes a net decrease in resources in the game.  Every time one of those attacks goes down, it is worse for everyone involved.  But this is mostly at the TH 10 level.  At lower levels the game is still very playable.  And that itself may be a pretty good argument for rolling up a low defense th 8 or th 9 in 2016.

Cheers.

 

 

Low Is the new No

I know, I know.  It is a sad day.  The old “No defense cities” are toast.  Oddball was the backbone of the recent DCA winning run with his no defense TH 10. Now he just gets hammered for 100% loss and no shield in farm mode.

I hate enough that they killed TH outside.  But now they also kill no def cities?  What is up with that?

My Immediate thought is that I now know where these guys ended up..

Das Leben Der Anderen

Yes, the Stasi were driven out of East Germany and found a home in Supercell??  Really?

It has that very grey, very East Berlin feel to it. Monolithic grey apartments that house workers who wear equally grey apparel kind of thing. Ok maybe the Stasi has not resurfaced on the staff of supecell, but whoever is driving these changes is of the same mindset.

Vee Vill comply.  Vee vill all be the same.  There vill be no rogues!

That of course is why I watch that movie every year.  Of course there will be a rogue that rages against the machine.  Of course we don’t all have to be monochrome copies of the government defined “norm”.

But there is a cost to be in this world as an outlier.  And I have to admit that that is how it should be.  Those who choose the safe middle of the road life are rewarded with a safe middle of the road life. Or cursed with that.

You swim against the current, its a tiring proposition.  But uh, it is also where we win.

Clan Engineering is not a cheat, but it is an exploit.  Just like chaos was an exploit in valor.  But you have to pay for the exploit.  And the price just went up.

Do I still think engineering is a good idea?  No, I think it is a great idea.  Engineering is huge.  Most wars go to the most engineered clan.  We lost two war today and we were outengineered in both.  We were a 1-2 point underdog in SCA and lost by 2.  Terrible war in DC and at least a 5 point underdog and lost by 6.  Conversely DCA is like 14-1 with Oddball in the lineup.  The effects are huge.

But it appears the trick now involved even more math.  You can be low defense, but not no defense.

How much defense do you need to get the 30% loss and force the attacker to use 1/3 their troops? That is how much you need.  My rough cut to start a Bayesian Analysis is 20%.  Shoot for that number.  Have 20% of what a max city at your TH level gets.  Then watch the defenses.  Once you get up to where 50-65% of your defenses get you a shield, you are probably there.  There being a place where you can hold on to enough resources to war, but not so much defenses that you draw and enemy that can smash us in war.

That’s the Idea.  Reiver’s alt did this and is doing ok with very, very low defenses.  At th 7 just enough isn’t that much.  but at each higher th level it will take more defense to get a shield.

So that is the new world order.  Not happy, well you can complain.  But I don’t think that will do as much as upping your defense just enough to get shields.

Cheers.

 

 

 

 

Drags Famous

 

Ok me here on city 5 in DC war.

City 5

On the surface, this is not a good drag city, right? Right?  All the AD cover the TH and there is a single target inferno next to CC.  MOst would say pass on drag’s here.

Then there is me.  What did I see? All the storages lined up from 6-9.  That was enough.  That plus the fact that Matt and Swan gave us enough of a lead that a miss here didn’t matter.  It was a gamble, but it worked out.

The AD are deep enough that you can’t snipe them.  So this is a suicide hero start to clear the sides.  You have to attack from 12-3 to be opposite the wall of storages, so the decision making is simplified.  You are running into the teeth of a sweeper so that might be a freeze drop.  But at this point  I still only have freeze 3.  So the crux of this attack is speed.  Rage and haste to get to TH fast.  With no storages in the way, raged drags will blitz to TH.  And they did.  Had a haste and quake in there also as I knew the CC was a hound.  Did my outside clean without tripping CC.  Usual rage drops and just go for it.  No point saving reserve drags on this layout because you need max velocity to th and to get that you send all drags.

In truth I may have missed a freeze drop on this one.  Matt said in chat that the drop surprised him.  But my general plan was to freeze in the core somewhere depending on what I saw.  Think I froze an X bow when I meant to get the xbow and 1 AD, just missed the AD.  But in the end it got the 2.  Main thing in these runs is once it gets rolling, get all your spells out.  The rages are always in the traingle pattern vs a 10.  But it is the freezes that vary from city to city and in some cases you are dropping them on the fly reacting to what you are seeing as the drags approach the TH.