This is How Clash of Clans Helps You Improve Your Decision Taking
It’s just not a game but a full-strategy experience.
Taking Decisions on a Daily Basis
Every single day in our lives we have to take decisions. Be it trivial or important, we have to do it.
What to eat for breakfast, lunch or dinner? Which clothing to wear? Should I send this email now or should I wait a few hours? Sure, these can be very normal and pretty simple decisions that one can solve in a matter of seconds.
Let’s try more important ones.
Is this copy for the Facebook Ads campaign alright to be sent? Based on the customer requirements, Is this the right price for developing her an app? What could be better for the development team, to get a new powerful server or to spend more time reviewing the source code? And so on.
Previous examples are taken from my daily working days. Maybe you have to take more important decisions whereever you are and whatever they are, it’s really important to take them. And sometimes you can’t afford having bad ones.
Yeah, sometimes—and for some people—decisions are crucial in their jobs and daily routines. Let’s say a doctor or a surgeon. A police officer. We are told we should take decisions quickly. We are told to take decisions that benefit both parts—when posible—but, taking decision isn’t that easy. It is learn as the time goes on. As we grow professionally and personally. Every single day lived gives us experience. It gives us data to bear mind nex time we have to make the call.
Decision taking improves with practice. In a certain way you could see it as the trial and error method. Have an hyphotesis, test it, see what happens, and then improve based on the results. We can learn to take decisions in a similar way and as we get older—and wiser—we take them based on previous experiences.
We can as well improve our decision taking process doing some kind of sports, playing board games, even poker can help. Now, I want to give you a brief and interesting way you can opt-in to improve your decision taking. It is by playing a popular mobile game.
What is Clash of Clans?
This mobile game isn’t far different from any other strategy. You have to take care of your own village whilst get money and resources to improve your tropps so that you can hit harder your rivals when raiding their resources. Yeah, in this game you have to steal. The Wikipedia has a simple explanation of CoC:
Clash of Clans is an online multiplayer game in which players build a community, train troops, and attack other players to earn gold and elixir, which can then be used to build defenses so as to protect the player against other players attacking them. The game also features a pseudo-single player campaign in which the player must attack a series of progressively more heavily-fortified goblin villages.
CoC is really easy to play, you don’t need to invest lots of time on it and it gets really challenging as you advance in the game. At the very beginning everything gets better quickly and you don’t need to spend lots of resources to grow your village, but, once you reach a certain level, gold and elixir will start to get really, really important if you want to be better, resist attacks and hit hard when you attack other villages.
Buildings get expensive as you play. First, 5.000 elixir, then 10.000, 45.000, 500.000, a million… And it gets more interesting because you’ll have to improve many things: storages, campments, walls, traps, mortas, canons, towers, collectors, and so on. You’ll have diferent troops to train when you decide to attack and you will need to bear in mind all the advantages and disadvantages each troop you’ve trained have.
Strategy is key. Decision taking is KEY.
Let’s dig deeper in some of the main principles to succeed in Clash of Clans which are the reason this game helps you get better in taking decisions.
Note: all upgrades are made by builders. A hard-worker character that you’ll have in a limited amount. Beginning with one to five as maximum.
Buildings
There are four diferent buildings in CoC. You’ll be investing your gold in defensive and army buildings, resource buildings and some kind of unique buildings. In order to improve defensive buildings you’ll need gold, to improve army buildings elixir is the way. Resource buildings are improved in a special way: gold collectors and gold storages get better with elixir and elixir collectors and elixir storages with gold. Finally, Town Hall, Clan Castle and decorations require gold.
Take a minute to check the list of buildings you can create in your village and the amount of workers you have initialy(1). Now, let me tell you that each building have many levels to be upgraded and each level requires even 3 times the first amount of resources required.
Situation: in order to upgrade an Archer Tower, you need to get gold. If you need gold, you need a gold collector and a gold storage to keep it safe. Bear in mind that if a player attacks your village, she can raid lots of gold from both collectors and storages, and in order to protect your gold you need strong defenses… Ah! Forgot to tell defensive buildings are unusable while upgrading.
What a predicament!
That fictional situation was just the tip of the iceberg. In the game, normally you’ll need to upgrade three to five archer towers, canons, mortars, traps, bombs, army camps, walls, and so on. Each building has many levels and each level upgrade needs a greater amount of time to be completed. In CoC time can be ridiculous. From 8 hours to complete a building to 8 days to upgrade Town Hall level 7 to level 8.
Giving priority to some buildings could benefit you depending on your game strategy. If you want to have more troops for your attacks, you’ll have to upgrade army troops and army camps. If you want to resist attacks to prevent your resources for being looted, you’ll have to upgrade defensive buildings and walls.
You can’t have both things at the same time. You gotta choose. You gotta decide and it all dependes on your game style. From the very beginning of CoC(if you want to play it seriously) you’ll be taking important decisions.
Troops
You count with a nice plethora of troops to attack other players. At the very start of the game you can only use Barbarians, then, as you gradually upgrade Barracks, you can have Goblins and Archers to attack in the Goblin campaign or other online players.
Each troop has unique capabilities, cost to train them, they occupy housing space in the army camps(from one space up to 25) and they take a different amount of time to be trained(from 10 seconds up to 45 minutes). Troops can be upgraded via the Laboratory —which you can get at Town Hall 3— and it’s not a cheap process. Upgrading troops takes some days as well and everytime you do it, updagred troop increases it cost, heart points and damage they can deal.
Now, we aren’t in the Buildings section described before, however, you need to think carefully about the troops you’re going to use in a future attack. You have to bear in mind your camping space and the housing space each troop needs. Barbarians, Goblins and Archers just use one housing space; Giants use five; Wizards use four; Ballons five; Dragons twenty.
Play carefully with the numbers, the available space, the cost of trainings some troops, the quantity of troops a Barrack can train, the number of Barracks you have. When you start playing this game it can take some time to get used to the system, know the advantages and disadvantages of each troop and come out with the offensing strategy that best fits you.
You’d need to take decisions more seriously as you progress in the game. Sure, you could avoid all the complicated stuff and play at will but if you want to be a great contender, loot lots of resources, beat other players in Clan Wars, well, taking decisions will be really important.
And it gets even more interesting. There are already Barracks where one can train troops from Barbarians to P.E.K.K.A but you can have more fighters. There are the most powerful of all them. They are called Heroes.
This dude drank a lot of Dark Elixir(something I have yet not mentioned) and grow bigger and stronger than the rest of Barbarians. You see, Dark Elixir its a special kind of Elixir used to create Dark Troops in the Dark Barracks. This is where it gets more interesing. There are more troops to train and Dark Elixir is really difficult to obtain.
At Town Hall 7 you get the Dark Elixir Storage but it is until Town Hall 8 when you can build Dark Elixir Drill. This special drill only extracts from mother earth 20 of dark elixir each hour at level one and to get Barbarian King you’ll need 10,000 of this special elixir, which means you need to raid it or earn it in Clan Wars.
Using this kind of Elixir a player can train Minions, Hog Riders—most interesting troop in the game, IMO—, Valkiryes, and more.
Troops trained in the Dark Barrack can also be upgraded using the Laboratory, however, you’ll have to invest Dark Elixir that, as I just told above, it’s hard to get.
There could not be a King without a Queen. The Archer Queen is way to expensive to obtain. She’s unlocked at Town Hall 9 and costs 40k Dark Elixir to summon. She can be upgraded until level 40.
Ok, getting Heroes couldn’t require decision taking at all but once you’ve got them, using Heroes will need some strategy planning and attacking decision to use them wisely.
Attack
The moment in which warriors face glory, reach victory and meet live or death. Sir Lancelot would’ve been proud of you if he’d be alive in this era. You have the most powerful warrios ready to attack an online player’s village, raid her resources and leave homeless the villagers. Then, in the supposed glorious moment you do everything wrong. You didn’t plan your attack. You took yourself as the strongest and the best and forgot your enemy could have traps, strong X-Bow defenses, Inferno Towers, Maxxed-out Mortars and a pretty badass level 40 Barbarian King and Queen.
You fucked up a glorious attack and your warrios went to a massacre. Lucky you this is just a game and you can attack again. And better :D
In CoC you just don’t attack for the sake of attacking. You do it seriously. You plan your strategy cautiously. Train the right amount of troops taking care of each qualities. You’re going to invest a lot of resources so you can afford to lose a battle. You have to win and raid hundreds of thousands of elixir, gold and dark elixir when possible.
In CoC when you plan every single step and take in mind all the possible results, you’d be a step closer of being the best. Sure, you can have a level 6 P.E.K.K.A and use several of them to attack but your enemy’s defenses can beat them if you underestimate their power… Ok, maybe not. P.E.K.K.A is almost unbeatable.
Clan Wars
The mother of all fun thing in the game. Behold the main reason to the name of the game. What could be of Clash of Clans without Clan Wars? It’d just be Wars.
Join clans of up to 50 online players located in any place of the world. Ask leader or co-liders to seek for war and then get prepared for the most intense 24 hours of intense decision taking powered by Clash of Clan’s Clan Wars.
In Clan Wars players are located in a war zone and each player has the right to use two attacks and to earn 6 stars as maximum. The war is won by the clan that earns more stars in the 24 hours the war lasts. This is the heaviest demonstration of the decision taking because it needs you to care about what you do, how you layout your village in the war, the commands the lider and co-lider can give, who you attack, how you attack, timing, the amount of stars one should contribute to the clan and more.
Sometimes a war could be seen won because the rival lets you get a huge advantage just to make you cry out when the tie the thing and then leave you behind. It’s when everything gets crazy because there’re players who didn’t do their job earning stars and now the clan could be defeated in an already won war.
In Clan Wars the most important thing is to earn stars. The rewards will come with them.
It’s pretty awesome and crazy. And it’s important to win Clan Wars because they reward with a lot of resources investing less resources and in just two attacks but if you don’t take it seriously, you can lose resources and being defeated is not funny at all, is it?
When you fight in a Clan War seriously, you’d see yourself taking more attention to the details, planning ahead, considering each troop advantage and disadvantage, being open to advice from higher level players and by the time the war ends, you’ll be a much better player. That’s for sure.
Clan Wars is a new level. It’s for the Pros.
It’s important to notice you can improve your decision taking process in many different ways different to playing a video game. It can be reading, watching, going to a seminar, learning along people who take important decisions. Whatever. My intention here is to demonstrate how Clash of Clans, a simple, fun and free game, can help you get better whenever you need to make the call and it’s because in CoC you always need to choose between one or another. There’s no inbetween, besides you can carry CoC in your smartphone or tablet and play it at your leisure.
So, my final suggestion if you want to get better at this stuff, play Clash of Clans. It’s pretty fun everything here ☺.
