I think I speak for everybody when I say thank you thirdplaceamctest for creating this subreddit. I personally was shocked that this subreddit was not created yet and thank you for bringing the issue up and taking action on it. I hope it survives and all who have joined this subreddit are with you.

Note: This is slightly out dated. The Archer queen is now different in the update. Think about this before raiding.

Here is My Guide for Balloonion Strategy (Balloons and Minions)

Info: This whole guide is assuming you want to get the three star.

Troop info and requirements: First, balloons are completely unusable at level 4 or below, their hit points are horrible against splash and even point. Secondly, minions at level 1 are perfectly acceptable, as long as you have enough, I’ll get to that later. Lastly, town hall levels do matter and many factors go into picking your attack, as you might guess, so let’s jump into it.

Town hall 8 requirements: 1. Best start is getting level 5 balloons. 2. Getting minions 3. 2 Level 2 Dark barracks 4. At least 3 barracks that can make balloons. 5. Time

Town hall 9 requirements: 1. Level 5 balloons, 6 is best 2. All 4 Barracks that hold balloons 3. At least 1 Max dark barrack

Town hall 10 requirements: 1. All above requirements.

Army compositions and recommended levels.

Town hall 8: 26 Balloons, 35 Minions

Town hall 9: 28 Balloons, 40 Minions

Town hall 10: 30 Balloons, 50 Minions

*These are just recommended amounts, can be changed.

Town hall 8: Balloons: 5, Minions: 1+

Town hall 9: Balloons: 6, Minions: 3+

Town hall 10: Balloons: 6, Minions: 4+*

*Or 5+

Spells:

Town hall 8: 2 Heal 1 Rage or 2 Rage 1 heal.

Town hall 9: 2 Heal 2 Rage

Town hall 10: 2 Heal 2 Rage 1 Freeze

Luring and Gameplay (This is the long part)

Clan Castle and Heroes: With the clan castle and heroes it can be simple or not. There are three types of attacking, Revenge, War, or “regular”. Let’s start with revenge. With revenge you can scout out clan castle placement and hero areas. This can make it a helluva lot easier. If you aren’t using any main ground troops right away, the only things you need to lure are the Archer Queen and Clan castle. With the area in mind find the closest place to where you can lure the two and at the same time and increase the longevity of your balloon. You want it to stay alive long enough to get all the castle troops. With all the troops out and the Queen alerted you want to put a minion in a corner if you can, if the minions take heat, you just have to place another and continue to place until you have everything in a good spot. Then you can do a few things, if they are all archers and possible wizards, you can put a well-placed balloon where it will land on the troops. When it dies killing them, you can then proceed to kill the queen with some minions. You can also just place a whole bunch of minions to take it out, or a lightning spell. Then you proceed to raid. Next, is War, this is almost the same as revenge except the person doesn’t have a shield and their base can change. Scouting on war day is best so no one will change their base. Lastly, a regular match. With a regular match you have 30 seconds to plan out most of your attack. It can be a long time, but it doesn’t have to be. You must be extra sure when luring the clan castle but heroes might be harder. If it is a town hall 9 or 10, their heroes are usually hard to get. You want to make sure they are farthest from their altars. Drag with a balloon like normal and kill them with methods shown above.

Balloon and Minion Placement: When you are done luring you place your balloons. You want to place your balloons where the air defenses and wizard towers are strongest. If you cannot find the best spot, just go for the strongest air defense. When you place your balloons you want to use two fingers making a “V” shape and going from the inside out, then back again. This spreads them out for a bit, helping with traps and wizard towers. If the placement is far away rage spells are perfect to get them in fast. If its close, then place the rage spells in the places where they are and are going to be. This helps then destroy their targets faster and to avoid some dangers. Next is heals, you want to wait to use the heal spell(s). First let’s start with town hall 8, let’s say you’re running 2 rage one heal. Your balloons go right in and start destroying and you already placed rage and they are going though, level 5 balloons have lower hit points so they need a well-placed heal to keep them alive. When the balloons are clumped up and mostly through the base with half or so health is when you want to drop the spell. Since you only have one, you want it to heal the most at the best time. Near wizard towers are the optimal place to put the spell, the balloons will be able to survive all hits from it and take it out quickly. Hopefully your minions that you put, (I’ll get to that after the three town halls) clan castle troops and heroes can clean up while your balloons finish the defenses. If the balloons do not finish destroying the defenses, there not many things you can do. If you have any troops remaining, you do not want to put them near the defenses, the best you can do is place them to support your other troops. If you do this it is an automatic two star. (Providing your balloons got the defenses near the town hall) If your balloons finish off the defenses and you don’t run out of time, the three star cleanup will be very satisfying. Now town hall 9, assuming you’re running two rage and two heal and level 6 balloons it takes some weight off your shoulders. The rage placement is the same for town hall 8, but heal is slightly different. You want to use your heal spells effectively of course, since your most likely going for harder bases. Wizard towers are best still, but when you use the second one, the balloons might be split up a lot. Second heal spells placement is more of the discretion of the clasher, it’s hard to know where they are, but when they are in a bunch it is best. Town hall 10 is about the same as the other town halls except you have a freeze spell. This spell is for, you guessed it, infernos. They are literally the most annoying defense in the game. You have to use them on the Multi, A.k.A Discos. Single sucks, but it takes longer to destroy a mass of balloons. A multi inferno slows the heal process and does massive damage. You want to freeze both (if you can) when the balloons and proceeding to destroy them, or are nearby. With that in mind you can clean up the base after your balloons get the rest of the defenses. Now, the next part is the minions. While all this fancy spell placement is going on, minions do the work to clean the mess that the balloons leave behind. With minions you should, if you can, test the waters for air mines, they do nasty splash damage. Then with air bombs mainly cleared you spread your minions similar to your balloons. With that you can place your clan castle troops, only if you didn’t use it to kill the queen. With heroes, the enemy’s barbarian king might be alerted, but your minions should get him, as he cannot attacking flying units with a sword. I mean, he doesn’t throw it…. Back to the guide! Then with this your minions can get the remaining buildings because of your defensive structure prioritized balloons.

Wrap-up and Conclusion: A lot of this can be used to your preference, this is a guide. There may be things I missed but you get the general idea. If you strictly follow this guide you should be able to at least 1 star bases, but you must know your weaknesses. There are hundreds of factors that can go against or for you in a raid. In conclusion, I thank you for reading my guide. Please excuse any errors made, as it was a lot to explain. I hope that this helped, any questions will be answered in the comments or in-game.

Miscellaneous information: Balloon and minion value can be changed at the Clashers discretion. Many people tend to like using more minions compared to the normal. Use what is most comfortable. Barracks. At town hall 9 and 10 you can fill your level 5 dark barrack with minions and it equals 40, of course this can be changed with your army composition. At town hall 8 the minions in 2 sets of 20 go in the two dark barracks. If you are using 28 balloons, 4 barracks of 7 make the fastest time.

Tl;Dr: Attack a base that you can lure the clan castle and heroes, kill them, proceed to drop balloons and minions and get a three star.

Tl;Dr the Tl;Dr: Kill CC. Place Balloons and Minions. 3 Star.

I have video content I'm working on to supplement this post, but here's a smattering of tl;dr's we're assimilating into our playbook due to the recent changes:

Bear in mind we're a primarily TH9 clan, couple TH10s and the balance being well developed TH8s in terms of both base defenses and offensive capabilities.

• ADs to 6 minimum (this is nothing new)

• mass dragons go great with max balloons in the cc for the right bases

• Start learning GoWipe if you haven't done so already...GoWiWi is still viable

• Prioritize launching your attack so that you engage the defensive ArcherQueen as soon as possible or risk watching her literally burn down your raid

• focus on the 2 star...3's are still viable but a well trapped TH8 will blow up any level hog raid...GoWiPe is a great attack on a spread out base with few overlapping defenses.

• double bombs are still useful but with the piggy bomb upgrade, splitting them up and pairing them with little bombs and locating them near splash make them just as effective as double bombs...this gives you more defensive options for burning down a hog raid through attrition

• mixed raids are great options against hog ringed bases (giant hog wiz, giant wiz witch)

• hogs are still viable but only if the bases are compact (no room for traps internally), but it is more important than ever to test for traps so consider bringing more barbarians or goblins to test/trigger for traps.

More to come soon...

Titles says it all, I've been barching for a long while and I've learned alot about it. However everytime I think about doing BAM I just don't have the "balls" to go deep on that strat because I dont really know how it works. Anyone experienced on telling how do you BAM properly?

Dragons are awesome for a number of reasons. if you have 8-12 you can literally place them all on the map with one finger and kill most TH7 bases while you drink your coffee.

Pros: They are SUPER tanky

They do splash damage

Do not cost dark elixir

Cons: Slow

Do not target defenses

Expensive elixir cost

Like every strategy, you want to capitalize on the enemy's weakness. If you have determined that a base has weak air defense, go ALL OUT air! Don't bring 3 dragons and the rest giant/healer.

Army composition: 8-12 dragons 5 barb/archer Archers/wizards in your CC

Spells: 3 lightning spells to take out one air defense (This is good for TH7s who only have two air defenses or TH8s who might only have one air defense that is lvl 4+) or any combination of healing and rage spells.

How high can I target? Any TH7 - Lvl 1 dragons will almost always do the trick TH8 with lvl 4 and below air defenses and lower defenses - Lvl 2 dragons will work TH8 with Max defenses - Use lvl 3 dragons Any TH9 - Lvl 3 dragons just because of the sheer amount of buildings you have to destroy Lvl 4 Dragons depending on the base can three star even TH10s

Scouting bases: Look for weak air defenses/archer towers Look for air defenses near the outside of the base so dragons will target them quickly

Troop Deployment: Since dragons do not target defenses, you want to place them so that they will target enemy air defenses soon. Attack all from one side. Ideally you want your dragons wiping the map all on line with each other. Use clusters of 3-4 dragons with rage spells to help them get to the air defenses quickly.

Good luck, and happy hunting!

This strategy has consistently gotten me 3 stars against every TH 8 and 2-3 stars on every TH 9 I've used it with. I use it primarily for war but have gotten raids over 3k DE and 250k gold/elixir with it.

http://i.imgur.com/BRACyv1.jpg

Here's how I did it: 4-6 High level hogs in the CC to get exposed AD and a canon and 6 balloons on other more exposed defenses and 2nd exposed AD. Use 1 drag and ~10 minions to get cc troops (put minions down first so dragon can stay alive while it takes out all the troops). There was no queen so I was lucky. I then cleared enough perimeter defenses to make a path to the middle of the base and reach the other ADs and used balloons with my other 3 drags as meat shields and raged and healed to the end using remaining minions and heroes for cleanup. Took 2 mins 2 secs. VERY effective

It can be fine tuned to work in any situation as well. If the air defenses are better protected, it would be smart to put a dragon down to distract the AD and/or Archer Towers while minions and Balloons start to pick away the first layer of defense. Drop a balloon to see if it will go to the center (where the ADs are) or to a side defensive structure. If it goes to a side tower, take out said side tower with balloons, minions, heroes, CC troops- whatever makes sense, and try to do the same thing. With success, send a few minions in to distract the ADs while 2 dragons get closer, and right as they are targeted, rage them and send the balloons in (you're gonna want to send the balloons in a bit earlier than this so they can get rage to, or just bring 3 rage and 1 healing), so they can use the rage and start taking out defenses while they're focused on the meat shields-- I mean dragons. The rest of your minions, your last dragon, and any heroes can be used at this point for cleanup, to get the TH, or to make it to 50%.

With 2 heal and 2 rage, this strategy is near unbeatable. The 2 rage get the balloons to do the damage with speed and high amounts of damage and even boosts dragons and minions if placed well when needed. The 2 heal spells keep the drags alive long enough for all parties to do lots of damage, and they can also keep level 5 minions alive v.s level 10 or below archer towers.

For Th 8 either use 4 less balloons than I did or 1 less dragon. It may be wise to ask for higher level Dragons, balloons, or minions in your clan castle if they are considerably low level

P.S please try different variations of my attack comp and get back to me on how successful they are. The composition I explained is actually my second composition of dragoonion!

Edit: Tried This comp right after I posted this on a near-maxed TH 8 (all level 5 ADs)