Previews

Hands on with Supercell's resource-hungry PVP game Clash of Clans

Week 1: building foundations

Hands on with Supercell's resource-hungry PVP game Clash of Clans
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| Clash of Clans

We've heard a lot about Finnish developer Supercell over the past 12 months.

After all, it raised $12 million in May 2011, launching its multiplayer online shooter Gunshine. But over the past eight months or so, it's been focused on iPad gaming.

The first game it highlighted was Battle Buddies, which is still in testing, while its first game to go live is the FarmVille-inspired Hay Day.

Much more interesting, however, is Clash of Clans, which is now available in Canada for all iPad models, with a global release pencilled in for the start of August.

It's an online-only mixture of city building and light strategy, but with a strong social elements in terms of its player versus player and clan structure - hence the title.

Build me up

You start off with your own little village that you slowly turn into a town by building and upgrading - notably to start with your gold mine and elixir collectors. These are the game's two main resources that act as limiting factors to how much building you can do.

As you'd expect in such games, you slowly collect these resources over time, quickly spending them to build new buildings and upgrade existing ones.

You need a builder for each building you're creating (each builder costs 500 gems to create and their numbers are always limited), and each building takes time to build. By level 10, you could be waiting up to 10 hours for certain buildings to be completed.

Still, you can spend green gems to have any time-based building or training activity happen immediately.

Of course, you can buy gems with real cash. The cheapest deal is $3.99, €2.99 or £2.99 for 500 (you also get 300 for free when you start the game), ranging up to the usual $99.99 maximum.

Gems are the game's hard currency so they can also be exchanged for gold and mana.

Two way split

Gold is the main resource you'll need for your city defences - walls, archer towers, cannon, mortar etc - as well as updating elixir buildings and your town hall, which controls what buildings you have access to.

Elixir is used to update your gold buildings and train your troops. There are eight types of troops, each of which is most effective against certain types of buildings.

For example, the basic barbarian attacks all ground targets, while the globlin heads for your enemy's resources, and the skeleton makes holes in walls to let the others pour in. The massive Giant will mash up enemy cannons.

All out attack

In this way, you create a mixed army that you can deploy in the single player mode to practise how to attack different types of villages, gaining loot and levelling up in the process. However, even if you're successful and some troops survive, you don't get them back, which is a little annoying.

Similarly, the simplest part of the PVP mode is that you can attack other player's villages to steal some of their gold and elixir.

In both cases, you select which type of the units that you've previously trained to deploy them, tapping on the screen to deploy each one in that location.

All the pathfinding happens automatically, which can be frustrating, but Clash of Clans isn't a hardcore strategy game. It's more about unleashing a horde of troops to overwhelm the enemy.

The game isn't just about you attacking others though. Other players can attack your village.

Again, you don't have detailed control over your defence. Your cannon and mortar etc will fight back as well as they can. Even if you're defeated, while your buildings will be damaged, they regenerate quickly, so you will have only lost some gold and elixir.

Once attacked, you are then automatically shielded for 12 hours so you have time to regroup. You can buy shields to protect you for a certain period of time using gems too.

All together

So far, so good, but the core of game is about all about joining a clan.

To do this, you need to repair your Clan Castle, something that will take cost you 40,000 gold coins, which will take a number of days of solid play to collect in-game, or dipping into your wallet to buy some gems.

Once you do that, you can join a clan.

These contain up to 50 players, who group together - either as known friends or random players - to protect each other and attack other clans.

After a week of playing Clash of Clans, I've just got to this part of the game, so we'll see how I get on with it next week.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.