Every base in this guide follows the same six-step process the Goblin Family teaches new builders in its clan's Base Building School: identify your key defenses, rough in a skeleton, apply reachability and deadzone rules, fill in the rest of the base, understand how different troops path through it, then finish with baits and counters. It's written with TH15+ bases in mind, but the same process holds at lower Town Halls too — you'll just have fewer buildings to work with.
1. Identify your key defenses
Before placing a single wall, know which defenses actually anchor your base. At TH15/16, that's the Town Hall, Eagle Artillery, Monolith, Scattershots, and Inferno Towers — the same list applies at lower Town Halls, just drop whichever of these you haven't unlocked yet. At TH17, the Eagle Artillery merges into the Town Hall, so the key-defense list becomes Town Hall, Multi Gear Tower, Firespitters, Monolith, Scattershots, and Inferno Towers. At TH18 it grows again: Town Hall/Guardian, Revenge Tower, Crafted Defenses, Multi Gear Tower, Firespitters, Monolith, Scattershots, and Inferno Towers.
X-Bows, heroes, Spell Towers, and the Clan Castle aren't "key defenses" in this sense, but they still matter a great deal to how a base plays out — they just aren't the buildings the rest of your layout gets built around.
2. Build a skeleton
A skeleton is the outline of your base — the foundation everything else gets filled in around. It's a combination of your key defenses and walls, usually with a home already picked out for the Clan Castle and your heroes.
Building a skeleton first, before touching anything else, keeps the process from turning into cluttered guesswork: place a few key defenses, wall them in, find a spot for the Clan Castle and heroes, and that's the skeleton done. From there you can already see roughly how the finished base will look and play, before committing to every last building.
There's no single "correct" place to put your key defenses — it depends entirely on the style of base you're building and what you want it to do. A good starting point is looking at other builders' layouts for inspiration and adapting the pieces that fit your own style, rather than copying wholesale. The one fixed goal: the base has to defend.
3. Reachability
Reachability is why your walls end up sitting a specific number of tiles away from your key defenses instead of hugging them directly. At the Town Hall levels this guide targets, there are two troop ranges worth designing around: the Archer Queen (5 tiles) and Throwers (6 tiles). In a straight line, both are simple to check by counting tiles. Once your wall line has corners or wiggles in it, use one of two methods:
- Trap/builder hut method. Place a spare trap or the Builder's Hut at the perimeter of the wall you're checking. If its radius doesn't touch the building in question, that building is unreachable from that spot.
- Pythagoras' theorem. Count in an L-shape from the tile nearest the edge of the building to the tile the troop would be standing on (not including that tile itself) to get two straight-line distances, x and y. Then x² + y² = z², and you compare z² against the range squared. For example, 5² + 4² = 41, which is greater than 6² = 36 — confirming that spot is out of a Thrower's reach. The same math works for the Queen's 5-tile range.
4. Deadzones
A deadzone is a group of tiles enclosed by walls with no buildings inside — a deliberate empty space. They earn their place in a base for three reasons: creating gaps between key defenses, creating a wall segment that can't be targeted at all (a direct counter to wall breaks), and redirecting or complicating troop pathing.
You could, in theory, skip deadzones entirely and just make every compartment fully unreachable on its own — but that tends to produce a linear base with very predictable, direct pathing, which is exactly what you're trying to avoid. There's no single right or wrong deadzone shape. Apply the same reachability rules from above: build out the required number of tiles, form a square, then "wiggle" the corners — nudging each corner tile inward by one, then two, then three, then four tiles — to break up the straight lines. A plain squared deadzone works too, and costs fewer walls if you're tile-constrained.
5. Fill in defenses, storages, and trash
With the skeleton and its reachability/deadzone rules in place, it's time to fill in the rest: remaining defenses, storages, trash buildings, and anything else not yet placed. Decide before you start what pathing you want, where you'd like the attack to stall, and where your traps will go — the layout won't be perfect on the first pass, and that's fine; a few rounds of testing and tweaking is a normal part of the process.
A rough rule of thumb for where things go:
- Defenses mostly sit on the outer layer, with a few placed on inner layers, to reinforce how defense-targeting troops (dragon riders, hogs, the Royal Champion, and similar) are pulled through the base.
- Storages go in the base's highest-value, highest-damage areas — near the Monolith, Scattershots, X-Bows, and similar — since that's exactly where you want an attacking army to slow down.
- Trash (collectors, army camps, and other buildings with little defensive value) is almost always pushed to the exterior. The exception is using trash to fill inner-base gaps you'd rather not turn into defenses.
6. Troop pathing
Different troops target differently, and knowing what you're likely to face is what makes the earlier fill decisions make sense. Some troops (dragons, for example) will attack any building; others (dragon riders and root riders, to use the current TH15 meta as an example) only target defensive buildings until none are left. Once you know which kind of troop you're planning around, you know what kind of pathing to build for it.
It helps to think of your base's defenses as forming three rings:
- Red rings — non-key, minor defenses like cannons or archer towers. Useful, but not what your base's defense is built around.
- Blue rings — a deeper ring formed to protect vital key defenses such as the Town Hall or Eagle Artillery.
- Green ring — the last line before the attacker reaches the Town Hall, designed so defense-targeting troops path around the Town Hall rather than straight into it.
Non-defense-targeting troops behave differently: they'll hit defenses along the way, but won't focus on them exclusively. This is where storages earn their keep — they stall these regular-targeting troops while the defense-targeting troops continue on elsewhere, splitting and weakening the attacking army as it spreads across the base. Trash buildings do the same job, just with far less stall time — fine for shaping pathing, not a substitute for real stalling.
7. Baits and counters
This is where everything comes together. A bait is an area of the base built to look like good value, specifically trapped or arranged so that going for it costs the attacker extra troops, spells, or hero abilities — or convinces them to abandon that plan entirely. A pocket of high Giant Arrow equipment value defended by Teslas and Skeleton Traps is a bait; so is an exposed key defense that looks like easy value but is trapped accordingly.
A counter is built to shut down value from a specific attack approach, most often equipment. Spreading Giant Arrow value along one axis of the base while leaving the corner tiles empty makes it harder to sweep up all of it in one pass; placing Teslas in an area with strong Rocket Spear value can stall the Royal Champion's jump long enough to deny the grab entirely.
For general trap placement: Spring Traps, Giant Bombs, and Bombs are effective against a Royal Champion; Seeking Air Mines and similar air traps are good at forcing hero abilities like Healing Tome or Eternal Tome early. The best way to trap a base is to plan out how you'd attack it yourself, trap accordingly, then test and repeat until that plan gets meaningfully harder to execute.
The must-trap areas worth prioritizing first: the Town Hall, the Eagle Artillery (or your TH17/18 equivalent), and your Scattershots and Inferno Towers. Since most attackers go after the Eagle with a champion-lure-style approach, weighting your ground traps toward that area pays off; a Town Hall poison usually brings healers through, so Seeking Air Mines nearby are worth the investment too. Everything else gets a lighter scattering of traps to reinforce whichever compartments need it.
Put it into practice
Reading through key defenses, skeletons, reachability, deadzones, and pathing only gets you so far — the fastest way to actually learn it is to build. Open the free ClashGoblin builder to lay out your own skeleton with live defensive range overlays, then check your finished base against the attacking side of this same coin on the attack strategies by Town Hall pages.