2. Offense is the best defense (and vice versa!)

2. Offense is the best defense (and vice versa!)

Your upgrade and build order will vary significantly based on if you want to sit back and collect resources, or take the fight to other players. Odds are you'll regularly be bouncing between these two stances. If defense is your primary interest, your first upgrade should be your town hall, then walls, then defensive structures - first mortar, then archer tower, then cannons. Mortar and air defense are your most important towers, so make sure they're close to the middle and have lots of protection. After that, start working on your various resource production buildings, and make sure they're fully upgraded. Some players intentionally leave a few elixir gatherers and mines outside the walls so other players can farm them without destroying everything they have, though it's often practical to leave lower-priority buildings like those outside your walls so you can make sure the important stuff is better-protected with overlapping fields of fire rather than covering a wider area.

Also, remember that players with higher level town halls earn less from raiding lower-level players - don't be in a rush to upgrade your town hall if you're playing defensively. Just because you're playing defensively doesn't mean you should neglect your barracks - in fact, you can queue up troops to train there, and then get a refund on those in the queue later on, turning your barracks into a kind of temporary, unraidable elixir storage.

If you're getting aggressive, the order is similar. First build up your town hall, then get your elixir production up and running so you can start stockpiling resources right away. Then get your barracks and camps upgraded so you can get started on building an army. Neither of those structures provide resources to raiders, so feel free to plant them outside your walls. After that, flesh out your defenses with walls and cannons.

The only things left would be the laboratory for upgrading troops, spell factory for added offensive power, and gold mines for upgrading structures. Since matchmaking is based on trophy count, some players intentionally keep theirs low so they can clean up against lower-level players, so be careful about which fights you pick early on. If you want to farm players that are lower level than you, intentionally lose trophies by raiding with a single unit.