How to Protect Your Village in Clash of Clans

Last Updated: February 17, 2023

If your goal in Clash of Clans is to fend off attacks and create a powerful defense, focus on building a variety of defensive buildings and keeping your most valuable resources in the center of your village. A well-structured village with a strong perimeter and several layers of defense will place you in higher leagues, award you more trophies, and bring you victory.

Method 1

Method 1 of 3:

Defending at Lower Levels

1
Build walls effectively. The first aspect to a great defense base in Clash of Clans using all of your walls, and using the walls effectively. At lower levels, you won’t have a lot of wall to build so you want to put your most valuable resources inside your walls.
- At the beginning of your village your three biggest resources are your elixir and gold storages, and your Town Hall.
- For defense-minded players, the Town Hall is your most valued asset. If your attacker cannot destroy your town hall, the most the attacker can get is one star. Town Halls also have the highest hit points of any building, except walls.
- Focus on building walls around your Town Hall and other defense weapons to protect it.
- If you leave any gaps in your walls, enemy troops will walk through the broken area.
- Don’t place all of your defenses and resources inside your walls. Aim to eventually build several layers of walls around your most important buildings and resources.
2
Use other structures as a defense. Archers, Wizards, Hog Riders, and flying creatures are capable of shooting or flying over walls. Use less important buildings to create a buffer for these attacks, delaying your enemies’ progress.
- Use your cannons, Archer towers, and mortars as a buffer. Place these units inside your walls if you can. If you don’t have enough walls, use these defense buildings to complete your outer defense.
- Your Archers and cannons should be on the front lines of your defenses. These units are capable of firing quickly and will draw attackers in.
- Keep your mortars and Air Defense units in the center of your base. These units deal splash damage, meaning the attack targets an area of troops, not individual units.
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3
Join a Clan. Build a Clan Castle and join a clan for extra defenses. The Clan Castle is extremely helpful when defending your village as you can request troops from your clanmates to fight in your village when it’s being attacked.
- Keep your Clan Castle near your Town Hall if you are playing defensively. This will allow your troops to start close to the action and add an extra defense against your most important resources.
- Keep your Clan Castle Upgrade priority high as you gain levels.
4
Place your defenses within range of one another. Think of your defenses like a chain. Enemies like Archers, Wizards, and Barbarians have no preferred target and will attack the closest building. Therefore, create a chain to deal consistent damage from the front to back.
- These troops will attack your walls, Archer towers, and cannons first if these buildings are at the outside of your village. Place your cannons near your Archer towers so the cannons can attack along with your towers as troops invade.
- Place your mortars more in the center of your village, but within range of your Archer towers and cannons. The mortars can deal splash damage while invading troops are busy attacking walls and outlying structures.
5
Leave unnecessary buildings outside your walls. Army camps, barracks, spell factory, laboratory, and even gold and elixir mines should stay outside of your walls. At lower levels, you won’t have the quantity of walls to encase every building; most of these buildings don’t offer any resources worth protecting.
- While gold mines and elixir collectors will house some resources, it isn’t usually enough to concern yourself with, especially if you play often enough and frequently empty these buildings.
- Use these exterior buildings as another layer of defense. Enemies like Archers, Wizards, and Barbarians will attack the closest target. Place a cannon or mortar within range of these buildings to get some early attacks in before your enemy destroys the outer building and sets in on the walls.
- Try trapping your enemies in your base by making space inside your base to spawn and putting traps in it. Then put your useless buildings outside the base - and if you want the town hall, too. Then when they spawn in the base, they have to spend time breaking the walls, during which you can attack them.
6
Protect your gold and elixir stores. Like your Town Hall, your gold and elixir stores house a large number of your resources. Put these buildings close to your Town Hall and near mortars.
- It’s also a good idea to place bombs near your stores to get a quick attack in when enemy troops move to attack your stores.

Method 2

Method 2 of 3:

Defending at the Middle Levels

1
Upgrade everything you can before you upgrade your Town Hall. Once you get into the middle levels, having a Town Hall of level 4-7, you want to maximize your defenses before trying to upgrade your Town Hall. For a defensive minded player, focus your resources on your Clan Castle, towers, walls, storage, and mining structures before your army.
- Focus on upgrading your walls first. Walls are the most expensive buildings to upgrade, but will provide the best defense against all ground troops. However, don’t focus on maxing out your walls as this won’t allow you to upgrade anything else.
- Upgrade your mortars and air defenses. Once you get to higher Town Hall levels, you’ll be attacked by airborne creatures like dragons. Additionally, your enemies will send flying healers to aid troops on the battlefield. By upgrading your air and splash damage defenses you can counterbalance new enemy troops from breaking through your walls.
- Upgrade your Wizard and Archer towers next. Wizard towers have a relatively short range, but are powerful and can be hard to take out at higher levels. Put your Wizard towers near your Town Hall, storages, and mortars to develop a powerful back line of defense.
2
Create room for advanced defense buildings. As you level up your Town Hall, you’ll gain access to more versatile and powerful defense buildings. Air defense towers, the Hidden Tesla, and the X-Bow are more defensive buildings that can provide your village with a lot of defensive power. Make sure to edit your base when you can buy these items.
- The Air Defense tower becomes available at level 4, and exclusively attacks air units like Dragons and Healers. Place your Air Defense towers towards the center of your base to combat incoming airborne attacks. Be sure to protect your Air Defense with walls and other defensive buildings.
- The Hidden Tesla becomes available at level 7 of your Town Hall. It has a fast attack speed which is effective against light units like Archers and Barbarians. It’s also hidden which means your enemy cannot see it when attacking. Place your Hidden Tesla on the perimeter of your base to pick off Wall Breakers and Archers before these units can deal a lot of damage and open an attack path.
3
Redesign your village as needed. As you get to higher Town Hall levels, you’ll not only have more options for buildings, but you’ll be able to build multiple buildings of the same kind. You’ll also be able to build more walls.
- Take advantage of building more walls as soon as you have access. There are several strategies to building your base as you gain levels and resources. A standard base puts defensive and storage units inside the walls. It also has only one large wall, which allows you to place a lot inside, but is vulnerable once Wall Breakers, Giants, and Goblins enter.
- A pocketed base surrounds each individual defense building with its own wall. During the mid-range levels this strategy will protect your Town Hall, Clan Castle, gold and elixir stores, and a few defensive buildings. Consider opting for larger pockets of wall that you can place several buildings inside. This will create several layers of defense, while still ensuring that you can protect your most valuable assets.
- Remember as a rule of thumb, to place your splash damage buildings like your mortar and Wizard towers towards the middle while your Archer towers hold the front lines.

Method 3

Method 3 of 3:

Defending at Higher Levels

1
Get as many defensive buildings as you can. Once your Town Hall is at level 8 and higher, you’ll have a lot of options for a variety of defense buildings. Spend your resources on upgrading your current defenses, especially your Clan Castle, but save enough to start adding a few new buildings as well.
- Don’t neglect to upgrade your walls which are still your best source of stopping power.
- It’s also a great idea to focus on your dark elixir. Dark elixir is rare to win in battle and almost just as hard to mine. By adding and upgrading your dark elixir drills you can quickly produce enough to get the Barbarian King. The Barbarian King can be used to guard your village and attack enemy troops. This unit is great for defending your gold and elixir stores.
- Build at least one more of each tower once you reach level 8. Keep your Town Hall and Clan Castle in the center surrounded by your strongest walls. Place your new towers in a square or circular formation as close to your Town Hall as possible, with the exception of your Archer towers, which should be lining your perimeter.
- Keep your Air defense and Hidden Teslas relatively close to one another.
- Get the Air Sweeper when it becomes available to blast airborne enemies back. Position your air sweepers away from other anti-air defenses. If you place your Air Sweeper too close to anti-air defense, it will blow the enemies out of range. Instead, try and place so it blows your enemies into an attack range.
2
Upgrade your new towers. Once you’ve attended your existing defense building upgrades, upgrade the new towers you’ve added to provide better protection.
- Upgrade these towers one at a time, and keep upgrading each one until it will take more than a day for the next upgrade.
- Focus on upgrades that won’t keep your Builders busy for several days on one project. If you try to upgrade two Air Defense towers at once, you’ll use up your Builder’s time and won’t have time to attend to your other buildings before being attacked several times.
- The same strategy applies to your mortars and Wizard towers. In addition, if too many of your defenses are being upgraded at once, you’ll have less defense units when you are being attacked.
- Once you have tackled the larger projects, focus on upgrading your traps such as your bombs, balloons, and skeletons.
3
Build the Archer Queen Altar. Once you upgrade your Town Hall to level 9 you can get the Archer Queen. This unit is similar to the Barbarian King and will defend your village.
- You can place your Archer Queen next to your Barbarian King and have the two fight together, or spread the two units out to cover more ground.
4
Continue to upgrade current defenses and build new ones. As you reach level 9 of your Town Hall you’ll also have access to a new X-Bow and more walls. Have one builder begin building new walls while another builder constructs the X-Bow.
- Add any other defensive buildings that are available next. If you’ve been diligent about upgrading your existing defenses, you should be able to focus on adding new ones without much of an added attack threat to your existing structures.
5
Add new gold and elixir storage. In order to hold enough resources for upgrading your new defenses, you may need to increase your resource storages. Before spending more resources on upgrading these new defenses, attend to your storage capacity.
- As you continue to make upgrades you’ll need to be able to produce more gold, elixir, and dark elixir quickly.
- Place your largest stores closer to the center of your village to protect your resources.
6
Rearrange your base as needed and continue to upgrade Heroes and walls. As you slowly build all of your defenses and make upgrades on the new ones, you’ll need to make sure that your Barbarian King and Archer Queen are powerful enough to defend your village during upgrades.
- You’ll also have to make more room for your new buildings following your previous strategy. Remember to keep mortars, Hidden Teslas, and Wizard towers to the center of your village. Place Archer towers, traps, and cannons closer to the perimeter.

Community Q&A

Question

How can I protect and increase my trophies?

Community Answer

Create a defensive base and add traps around your base. In order to increase the level of trophies, you have to earn them by battling other players and making an effective base so others will have a hard time trying to attack you and steal your trophies. Also, come up with different attacking strategies in order to take those trophies.
Question

How do I win defense in Clash of Clans?

Community Answer

Upgrade all defense buildings and walls. You should always put a defense building between and inside walls.
Question

How do I hack Clash of Clans to earn more gems?

Community Answer

There is no legal way to do it, so, if you find one, you'll risk being banned from the game if you use it. It would be better to either earn the gems or buy them from the store in accordance with the rules.