Taking this into consideration, now is a good time to reevaluate your overall gameplay strategy, and move from attempting to complete upgrades and progress through the game as quickly as possible to being more strategic about what you choose to upgrade and when.
1. Using the 8.5 Strategy at the Start of TH9 is Strongly Encouraged
The idea behind 8.5 is to put off building most of your new defenses at TH9 until you've had a chance to upgrade your offense. This will help match you against TH8s in war until you're ready to go up against TH9s. There is a more detailed guide here, but the basics of it are that you don't build any new defenses except your air defense, sweeper, bombs, mines, and walls until you've gotten your offense up to speed. Whether you follow this path or not though, you should end up following the same basic upgrade order at TH9. See the full 8.5 Strategy Guide.
2. Get Your Queen, Upgrade Your Lab, Spell Factory, and Army Camps
After the spell factory and lab, army camps should always be your top priority. Getting 220 spots is more important than upgrading any of your troops or unlocking witches.
3. Unlocking Your Queen's Ability vs Level 5 Hogs
Once you buy your Queen, you have 2 main choices. You can either immediately start upgrading her to level 5 to unlock her ability, or you can start upgrading your hogs. The advantage to doing hogs first is that you can keep your lab busy while you use your elixir to finish your camps, or if you have finished your camps, you can start upgrading your drills or unlock witches. Max hogs also provide you with solid option for attacking other TH9s, usually as part of a GoHo attack.
4. Healing Spell
The healing spell is used frequently in raiding, and with many war armies. You may want to consider doing this early on, particularly if you are relying heavily on hogs.
5. Clan Castle Upgrade
Before you upgrade any of your defenses to TH9 max, upgrade your clan castle. The ability to hold a max golem or hound is a huge boost for your army, particularly in the early stages of TH9 when your golems are at best level 2.
6. Skeleton Traps
This is a quick and cheap upgrade, but should not be overlooked. The extra skeletons help distract troops while they are getting pummeled by defenses.
7. Golems, Witches, Hounds, Haste, and Balloons
Once your Queen is at level 5, you should prioritize upgrading the dark troops you use in war over any further hero upgrades (unless you went to TH9 with a level 8 or 9 Barb King, in which case it may make sense to make getting your Barb King to 10 top priority). Whether you start with golems or hounds will depend on whether you followed and how far you took the 8.5 strategy, and how comfortable you are with balloon attacks.
Even at level 1, witches are often more effective than level 3 PEKKA. If you upgraded golems to at least level 3 as part of the 8.5 strategy, you may want to prioritize upgrading witches as soon as you unlock them, and then go ahead and get golems 4 if you don't have them already. If your golems are still at level 1 or 2, however, then getting max balloons, and unlocking and then upgrading hounds and haste can be the quickest way to get a max TH9 war army.
9. Teslas
Because teslas take so long to upgrade, you'll probably want to alternate between teslas and mortars and/or cannons to keep your builders staggered, but teslas should take top priority. They pack a nasty punch at higher levels, and are particularly good for defending against GoWiPe, which is probably the most common attack at this level.
10. Archers, Cannons, Wiz Towers and Mortars
The common wisdom for defense outside of war is that splash damage defenses take priority, and indeed level 7 mortars are particularly effective at defending against max barbs and archers, but are also probably the least effective defense against most war armies. Wizard towers are slightly more useful, as a level 7 wizard tower will kill level 5 wallbreakers before they blow up, and are much more effective against level 6 balloons.
Archer towers and cannons are both more important for war defense though, particularly since your defensive weight becomes much more important at TH9, and a single upgrade to a mortar or wizard tower counts the same as multiple upgrades to cannons, archer towers, and teslas.
11. Air Defense and Mines
Even though lavaloon is one of the most effective TH9 attacks, you don't typically see it all that often. So while level 7 air defense has very little impact on your war weight, and can make a big difference against air armies, it really depends on how often you get air attacked. A lot of people neglect the air mines as well, but they are pretty helpful in taking out hounds. Bombs less so, but are good against balloons when clustered together near wizard towers or teslas.
12. X-Bows
While level 3 x-bows can be a pain to deal with, upgrading them has more of an impact on your defensive weight than anything else. Players that upgrade their xbows early on often end up getting matched against opponents with significantly higher offenses and defenses, which is why x-bow upgrades should wait until most other defenses have been upgraded.
13. Walls
Don't neglect them; they make a big difference at higher levels, and have relatively little impact on war weight. If at any point you feel like you aren't able to attack at the level you'd like, or you want to push trophies for a gem bonus or just to see how high you can get, it can pay to stop upgrading defenses for a while and just dump your gold into walls. Also remember that once you go to TH10, you're going to have a lot of other things to spend gold on, so you'll probably end up sitting with whatever walls you got at TH9 for quite some time.
Before Going to TH10
Once you're done all your elixir upgrades at TH9, you may choose to go to TH10 rather than spend too much on level 9 and 10 walls while you upgrade heroes, and the remainder of your defenses if you haven't maxed them all yet. Before you upgrade though, there are a number of things to consider.
- The earlier you go up, the more committed you need to be to a 9.5 strategy.
- If you don't have max witches, level 4 golems, and level 2 hounds, these need to be done first.
- At least two-thirds of your base should really be at least level 8 walls. Ideally, you'll have all level 8 walls and at least 25% level 9. Level 7 walls are just too just for TH10 troops to smash through. If for some reason you still have mostly level 7 walls, you need to spend more time at TH9.
- You'll now be exposing 400k gold and elixir and 3000 DE instead of 350k and 2400.
- Attacking TH8s won't be worth it most of the time any more.
- You'll see more TH10s in matching, and may have to farm slightly lower to start.
- Before you build your infernos, both your heroes should really be at least level 15.
See the 9.5 Strategy Guide.
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