Town Hall 18 Upgrade Guide

Town Hall 18 landed on 17 November 2025 and it changed the defensive centre of the game more than any level since Town Hall 12. If you are moving up from Town Hall 17, read the Guardian section before you copy a base, because the layouts that worked at Town Hall 17 are built around a Town Hall that shoots back.

What Town Hall 18 adds

• Guardians replace the Town Hall weapon. Smasher and Longshot shipped at launch, and the Logger arrived with the Sound of Clash update on 27 April 2026. You toggle one, only one defends, and all three max at level 5.
• Revenge Tower, a new defence that escalates as your base falls.
• Super Wizard Tower, a merge of two maxed Wizard Towers.
• Crafted Defenses at the Crafting Station, which the game now makes available from Town Hall 11.
• Meteor Golem troop.
• Walls upgradable to level 19.

The Guardian is the real change

At Town Hall 17 the Town Hall itself is the Inferno Artillery, so the core of the base is a defence. At Town Hall 18 it is not. The Town Hall is a building with a lot of hitpoints and nothing else, and the Guardian patrols an area around it.

That has two practical consequences for layouts.

First, the patrol zone has to matter. A Guardian that walks a lap of an area the attacker never enters is a defence you are not running. Place the Town Hall so the Guardian’s area covers at least one place the attack has to go through, usually the corridor between your two strongest compartments.

Second, the Guardian must not be ignorable. If an attacker can take half your base without ever entering the patrol area, they will, and the Guardian only wakes up when the attack is already won.

Pick by what you keep losing to:

• Smasher is melee with very high hitpoints and heavy splash, and it rages when the Town Hall falls. It punishes ground smashes that clump.
• Longshot is ranged with a large area of coverage and explodes when defeated. It is the choice when your losses come from attackers working the outside.
• Logger fires a slow piercing log that hits everything in its path and knocks units back a tile. It is best where a lane is narrow and the attack has to walk it.

While a Guardian is upgrading it stops defending in regular multiplayer, but the previous completed level still defends in Ranked, Clan War and CWL. That makes the upgrade cheaper than it looks if you are in a war clan.

The new defences and what they change

Revenge Tower. You get one, and it has two levels. It is inert at the start of an attack, then tiers up as your buildings fall, going single target, then bouncing to two, then hitting up to three at once. Supercell’s thresholds are 5, 20 and 40 buildings destroyed. So it is a late attack defence, and it belongs somewhere that survives to the late attack: protected, not snipeable from the outside, and not sharing a compartment with your other high value defences where one Blimp drop takes the whole set.

Super Wizard Tower. Town Hall 18 grants a sixth Wizard Tower, and four of the six merge into two Super Wizard Towers, leaving two free standing Wizard Towers. A Super Wizard Tower chains to as many as 15 targets, which makes it the best answer in the game to clumped troops. Put it where troops have to gather and make a decision, not on an edge where it dies in the first thirty seconds.

The counts you are working with:

Merges are permanent and require both source buildings at maximum level, so a merge is a decision, not a step.

Hero caps at Town Hall 18

Hero Hall 12 sets the ceiling for all six heroes.

What to upgrade first

1. Laboratory and Hero Hall. Both gate long queues that run while you sleep. Start them the day you upgrade.
2. Storages. Nothing else proceeds if you cannot hold the loot for it.
3. Air Defenses. They reach level 16 at Town Hall 18, and air is where a fresh Town Hall 18 leaks percentage first. See defending Electro Dragons and the Dragon Duke.
4. Inferno Towers, which reach level 12 here, then the splash cluster around your core.
5. The merges. Do them once the source buildings are maxed, not before.
6. Walls last, and only with Wall Rings and spare gold. Since the August 2026 update Wall Rings no longer need a free Builder, so wall progress no longer competes with a defence upgrade.

Supercharge levels are the last thing on the list. They are temporary micro upgrades that disappear when a real new building level ships, and the August 2026 update added them for the Builder’s Hut and the Monolith. Take the damage level on everything before you take a hitpoint level on anything.

Base changes to make on day one

• Rebuild around the Guardian patrol zone rather than around a Town Hall weapon.
• Split the Monolith, the Super Wizard Towers and the Revenge Tower into separate compartments. That trio is exactly what a Blimp is paid to reach.
• Keep the Inferno Towers apart so a Royal Champion walk cannot chain them.
• Break up any single fat core. Super Yeti and Meteor Golem smashes are paid by what shares a compartment, and the Meteor Golem splits into Meteormites that hop into the compartment behind.
• Give key defences depth against Throwers, which lob over a wall from outside the compartment. Anything within throwing range of the outer wall is free value for the attacker.
• Remember Crafted Defenses rotate. Season 4, live since August 2026, is Hot Candle, Hero Hunter and Cake-a-pult, so a layout built around the previous season’s modules needs its Crafting Station slot rethought. The Crafted Defenses guide covers where each module belongs.

For the two attacks that decide most Town Hall 18 wars, read defending Root Riders and RC walks and defending Electro Dragons and the Dragon Duke. If you are wondering what comes after this level, what Supercell has confirmed about Town Hall 19 sticks to public statements only.

Where to go next

Start from TH18 layouts, or go straight to TH18 war bases and TH18 anti 3 star if you are being weighted top of a war roster. Every layout page shows the full base picture to rebuild in your in game Layout Editor, and the finder filters by the attacks a base is built to stop.