War Base vs Farm Base vs Trophy Base

The one question that sorts everything

Every base type answers the same question differently: what are you willing to lose?

A defence that protects everything protects nothing. The grid is fixed, the building count is fixed, and every tile you spend guarding your Dark Elixir Storage is a tile you did not spend guarding your Town Hall. Base types are not styles. They are different answers about what gets sacrificed.

War bases

A war base has one job: deny the third star. Two stars are a normal result and not a failure, because in a war a defence that holds one attacker to 99 percent has done exactly what you built it for.

That single goal drives every choice:

• The Town Hall sits deep. Not merely central, but expensive to reach. An attacker should have to spend real troops and real spells getting there, not one hero and a Jump Spell.
• Every compartment has a job. Stall, split the army, protect one key defence, or bait a spell. A compartment that does none of those is dead weight and gives the attacker a free path.
• The Clan Castle is dead centre. If it can be lured with a single troop at the edge, its defenders never meet the real army.
• The high value defences are split up. At Town Hall 15 you get 2 Spell Towers and your first Monolith; at Town Hall 18 you get 2 Super Wizard Towers and the Revenge Tower on top of that. Stacking them in one compartment turns them into a single target for a Siege Blimp or a Freeze plus hero drop.
• Traps go in the corridors you built. A trap that is not in an attacker’s likely path is a decoration.

The war hubs are laid out by level, for example /th17/war/ and /th18/war/. CWL wants the same principles with one extra constraint: your base is attacked for a whole week by a roster that has already seen it, so a base that only works by surprise stops working on day two.

Farm bases

A farm base flips the priority. The Town Hall is expendable and the storages are not.

• Dark Elixir Storage in the absolute core. Dark Elixir is the slowest resource to replace, so it gets the best protected tile on the grid.
• Gold and Elixir Storages in separate compartments. One wall break should reach one storage, not four.
• Collectors and mines outside as a sacrificial ring. They hold a small share of your income and they buy time by distracting cheap troops.
• Town Hall near the edge, on its own. Below Legend League, a raider who takes a one star and a shield has spent an army to hurt you almost not at all.

The design target is a base that is cheap to one star and expensive to actually loot. Full farm hubs sit at /th13/farm/ and every other level.

One caveat: this stops being sensible in Legend League, where the Town Hall is worth too much percentage to leave outside. If you are in Legend, you are not farming in the traditional sense anyway.

Trophy and Legend League bases

A trophy base defends percentage. Every one percent counts, so the target moves from “deny the third star” to “deny the second one”.

• The Town Hall goes deep and lands surrounded by splash damage.
• Storages get used as high hitpoint shields around the core, which is the opposite of farm base thinking.
• Compartments are deliberately uneven, so no single funnel sweeps half the base.
• Nothing valuable sits in a straight line, because straight lines are exactly what hero equipment burst damage is paid to hit.

Since the April 2026 split of Legend League into Legend I, II and III, the tiers run different Battle Modifiers, so the base that suits one tier is not automatically right for another. Check what your tier actually faces before you commit a layout.

Hybrid bases

A hybrid is the base most players run and it is the correct default. It protects the Town Hall and the storages at the same time by refusing to concentrate on either.

The shape follows from that: the Town Hall near the centre, the storages one ring out, the Dark Elixir Storage tucked next to the Town Hall so both are behind the same expensive path, and many small compartments rather than one large core. A single breach should never expose the trophies and the loot together.

The cost is real. A hybrid loses more Dark Elixir than a farm base and gives up more percentage than a trophy base. You accept that in exchange for not swapping layouts three times a day.

Progress bases

A progress base is for the weeks when your village is half a building site. Six defences are offline and the layout has to hide that.

• Upgrading buildings become walls, filler and funnel shapes, since they still block pathing.
• The working defences get spread so there is no completely soft quadrant.
• The Town Hall often goes out for shields, because shields are what keep the loot flowing for the next upgrade.

This is not a weaker war base. It is a different design brief, and treating it as one is why so many mid-upgrade accounts get farmed.

Fun bases

Fun and troll bases exist from Town Hall 8 upward and they are exactly what the name says: shapes, letters and pictures built out of walls and buildings for a clan showcase. Do not run one in war. Do keep the Town Hall reachable so you still collect shields.

How to choose in ten seconds

• In a war or CWL right now: war base.
• Saving for a big upgrade and losing Dark Elixir: farm base.
• Pushing in Ranked or sitting in Legend: trophy or Legend base.
• Several defences offline: progress base.
• None of the above, and you want one layout that copes: hybrid.

Then use your slots. You have three per village, so there is no reason to make one layout do two jobs. See base design principles for the rules that apply whichever type you pick. Keep a war base and a farm base in separate slots and switching between them takes seconds.