Clash of Clans - Organizing Upgrades

Project Status: Workaround

Here is an easy way to line up your properties in Clash of Clans so that upgrades are a piece of cake. Doing this will make it easy to see what is left to upgrade before you start that town hall upgrade and also easy to see what properties have just finished building.

The important thing to note is that you can keep your home village setup any way you like. Here is my current farming base for example and as you can see with lots of properties it is quite tedious to keep track of which properties need upgrading and which are fully upgraded for this town hall level.

Thanks to a recent update we now have the option to setup multiple layouts for our village. What I recommend doing is using one of your village layouts solely to keep track of your upgrades. I never actually set this layout as active, I only use it as a place to organize my properties so I can checkout my upgrade progress at a glance. Technically you have six layout slots to choose from here because it doesn't matter if you use the home or war slots, so you should still have plenty of room left to play with your normal layouts. In this example I used my second home village slot to track my upgrades as you can see here.

What I like to do is place my properties in some imaginary layout in zones. I start by dropping all my completely upgraded properties in the center, these are the ones that have maxed out and cannot be upgraded further no matter what town hall level I have. I surround these with all of my walls. Walls help to divide the three major groups I have going here which are the completed properties, the ones I have upgraded as far as I can for this town hall and finally the ones still waiting for upgrades as soon as I have the builders and resources to do so.

The nice part about this setup is that once I get a builder to start working on a property upgrade I will move the property into a "currently upgrading" area. This way when the builder finishes I notice at a glance and move it to either the still able to upgrade area or the upgraded area it belongs to. Properties which cost gold to upgrade get moved to the gold zones, ones that cost elixir move to the elixir zones and of course the properties that require dark elixir to upgrade land in the dark zones.

The properties always get moved around as they upgrade, always trying to keep my builders busy in the currently upgrading zone and slowly moving all properties over to the upgraded side as they get to the point where they need a higher town hall to continue. With this process over time my three "upgraded" zones and my three "upgrades" zones flop from side to side. Each time I upgrade my town hall the zones start again on the opposite side as they did with the previous town hall. My town hall always stays on the side which has items waiting for upgrades because it is typically always the last property I move across.

I was really glad when the update to allow multiple village layouts came out a while back because I knew I could start getting super OCD with monitoring and optimizing my upgrades while not having to worry about people attacking a weak base. Actually what I use to do before multiple layouts were possible was to tap the button to remove all my properties and then scroll around the slider at the bottom which groups all of the properties by type and level. It was always super inefficient and frustrating to keep track in that way.

The workaround described above that I am currently using is pretty efficient and kind of fun to use. I would really love for Clash of Clans to incorporate their own solution to this as a part of the game. I doubt they will ever think about it, but some way of being able to list pending upgrades for your current town hall level would be very handy. Until then, this is my process.

Clash of Clans Anti-Spy

Project Status: Feature Request

Currently Clash of Clans has a sneaky little issue where players can easily spy on the opposing war clan once a war has started the preparation day. The development team could easily fix this problem by making it so that anyone who joins into a clan after a war search begins is unable to see the war map. Essentially revoking this player's access to the war details and leaving the spectator status only for members who were in the clan before the war search started but are not eligible for war.

Often times during the preparation day members of the opposing clan will try to come over and sneak a peek. Sometimes even taking screenshots of all traps and war castle troops. This is pretty sneaky and gives the spying clan a huge advantage during the war. Many times it is easy to spot and avoid because you can recognize the name of those trying to join as a member of the opposite clan. The hard part is that many times people will drop in with a second account and snoop around.

Making this easy fix, of blinding new members from the war map, would help to stop this form of cheating. It would not however stop the opposing clan from coming in and listening to the clan chatter. So overall the fix would make the game more fair by blocking this form of blatant cheating but still allowing those that love the idea of spying to listen in on clan chatter if they desire.

The best part about fixing this form of spying is that it will ultimately help clans to grow larger quicker. Larger clans tend to keep players more involved in game play, meaning more money coming in for those that run Clash of Clans. The reason being that right now the only way for a clan to rule out spying is to close up the doors until war is over. Often players leave during war and sadly by the end of each war it seems that clans get smaller and smaller. Spending a lot of time between wars trying to build a clan's size back up loses those war hungry fighters to more active clans. Then without your hardcore true-blue fighters the war losses start to pile up and the downward spiral of a dying clan continues.

Sure this fix will not solve all the problems with dwindling clan sizes, but it will sure help them to grow larger and stronger. It gives a clan more time to accept in the noobies and see how they mesh with the group before having to drag them into the trenches of war only to find out that they are flaky.

I hope this one day becomes a part of the game that I am currently so addicted to, but I doubt that it will. I guess it's just another pipe dream for now.

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