Defending Root Riders and RC Walks at TH14 to TH18
Why these two attacks set the bar
If you build bases for Town Hall 14 and above, two ground attacks decide most of your results. Root Rider smashes have been the most reliable ground core in the game since the troop arrived with Town Hall 16, and the Royal Champion walk that opens a lane for them is the version most top players run in war, Clan War League and Legend.
Both are ground, both are slow and both are healed. That is good news, because it means both can be beaten by geometry rather than by luck. What follows is the defending side of each.
The layouts built around this are tagged on the hubs from Town Hall 14 upward, for example /th17/anti-root-rider/ and /th18/anti-root-rider/.
What a Root Rider smash wants
Root Riders barge through walls with Healers stacked behind them. The attacker wants three things from your base:
- A straight, obvious lane from the outside to the core.
- Compartments large enough that the Riders and their Healers stay together.
- Air Defenses positioned so they never get a clean shot at the healer stack.
Give them all three and the pack walks in as one unit and keeps walking. Deny any one of them and the attack starts losing tempo.
How to deny it
- Layer the walls. Riders go through walls, so layering does not stop them, it makes them keep retargeting. Every retarget is another second under your splash damage.
- Build dead zones between compartments. Open space that the Riders cross without a building to hit is where they pull away from their Healers. That gap is what kills the pack.
- Hold two Poison Spell Towers on the likely lane. You have 2 Spell Towers from Town Hall 15, and Poison is the mode that matters here because it breaks the healer stack rather than the tanks.
- Point the Air Defenses at the Healers. You have 4 Air Defenses from Town Hall 9 and no more. Spread across the base, they should be able to reach a healer stack coming down any face, not only the far side.
- Keep the Town Hall away from the widest face. If it sits one wall break from the flat side of your base, that is the lane, and no amount of trap placement fixes it.
What an RC walk wants
The Royal Champion walk is the other half of the modern ground attack. She opens compartments on a chosen lane while Root Riders and Throwers follow her through the hole. At Town Hall 18 she caps at level 55, and with the right equipment she can clear a surprising amount on her own.
Her weakness is that a walk is a path. Paths can be made long, and a hero on a long path is a hero not in the fight when it matters.
How to deny it
- Split the Monolith and the Inferno Towers into separate islands. You have one Monolith from Town Hall 15 and three Inferno Towers from Town Hall 12. Grouped, they are one stop on her route. Separated, each one is a decision.
- Put dead space around the Inferno Towers so she cannot chain from one straight into the next.
- Set a Poison Spell Tower between the Scattershots and the X-Bows. You have 2 Scattershots from Town Hall 13, and slowing the walk through that zone is where the extra seconds come from.
- Make sure the natural walk lane ends away from the Town Hall. If the easiest lane happens to finish at your core, you have designed the attack for them.
The units that arrive with them
| Attack | What it is looking for | What breaks it |
|---|---|---|
| Root Rider smash | A straight lane and big compartments | Layered walls, dead zones, Poison on the lane |
| RC walk | A short route between the high value defences | Split Monolith and Inferno islands, dead space, a lane that ends nowhere |
| Thrower spam | Key defences within throwing range of the outer wall | Depth, double wall layers with filler between them, long range defences covering the outer ring |
| Super Yeti smash | One fat core to split open | Small uneven compartments, spread splash, two asymmetric funnel sides |
| Meteor Golem smash | Several defences sharing a compartment | Off grid compartment shapes, forced wide turns, no single stacked core |
The Throwers matter more than people expect. They lob over walls from outside the compartment, so a wall line does not protect what sits behind it. Anything within their standoff distance of your outer wall is free value for the attacker. The fix is depth and double wall layers with something disposable in between, so the throw lands on nothing that matters.
Where the traps go against ground
Ground attacks are the easiest thing to trap because they walk a path you built.
- Giant Bombs in pairs, in the gaps between defences that sit two or three tiles apart. That is where the pack lands after a wall break.
- Skeleton Traps in the corridors, so the defenders spawn into the pack rather than beside it.
- Traps behind the first wall break rather than on the wall line, because the wall line is where the attacker expects trouble.
Keep the Clan Castle deep and out of poison range of the outer wall, so its defenders trigger late and meet the Riders mid run instead of at the edge. A tanky flyer with burst support behind it is the usual choice for the defending Castle.
At Town Hall 18 specifically
Two things about Town Hall 18 change how you defend a ground push.
First, the Town Hall itself is not a defensive building at that level. Instead a Guardian patrols an area around it, and only one of the three is active at a time. That patrol has to cover something the attacker cannot ignore, otherwise they simply take the other half of the base and never engage it.
Second, the Revenge Tower gets more dangerous as your base gets destroyed, escalating as more of your buildings fall. That makes it a late phase defence, so it belongs in a protected compartment that is hard to reach early and hard to snipe from outside. It should not be sitting in a value stacked core where a Siege Blimp pays for itself by removing it and the Super Wizard Towers in one drop.
Together with the two Super Wizard Towers you get at Town Hall 18, that gives you three high value pieces that all need to be in different compartments from the Monolith. Spreading them is not a preference, it is the difference between one blimp costing the attacker a siege machine and one blimp winning the attack.
Test it before you trust it
The fastest way to find out whether your base survives this meta is to look at where the easiest lane ends. Trace the flattest face of your base inward. If that trace reaches your Town Hall, your Monolith or two Inferno Towers in a row, the base is not ready.
Start from a layout that already applies these rules on /th17/ or /th18/, or filter by the anti root rider tag in the finder. Every layout page shows the full base picture, so you can rebuild one in a spare slot without touching your working base. See base design principles for the rules underneath all of it.