Everyone has done a great job at reaching T9 levels. As a clan, our next goal is to raise the efficiency of all of our clan-mates by educating our team on proper stacking. As members of TRU, we all want to have a great gaming experience, spending time with and learning from one another, but our mission is to have an aggressive progression mindset. Each of us depends on the others to do their part in advancing the clan, and there must be an expectation to deliver efficient damage results.

Each attack you send has several inherent costs: silver for troop training, dragon coins for monster training, gold and/or potions for revival, and the cost of lost troops during the revival phase.

The goal of stacking properly is not only to maximize damage, but to also minimize the associated costs. Less resources spent will result in the ability to carry out more attacks for the same cost. 

More attacks result in faster leveling, and a shorter path to the leaderboard for event titles. Faster leveling results in an easier path to climb the Hall of Fame ladder through leveling captains, which leads to much harder hits, and so on. 

The mindset for most players is to send an attack and get the maximum valor. This is trained in to us in the early stages of the game. The goal should be maximum damage for minimal cost, which is the way to faster progression.

So what makes a great attack? 

A great attack will always result in every single one of your stacks hitting, except for your sacrifice stack in the case that the enemy hits first. 

Read that last line again. If you launch an attack,  and one of your stacks does not hit, other than your sacrificial stack, you are bleeding efficiency.

The path to a great attack is a result of more hits in the battle. A great attack will last more rounds, and your hardest hitting troops will survive more rounds to increase your efficiency. If you have stacked your troops mathematically, and stacks are dying before delivering a single hit, you are losing efficiency. If your monsters die in the first round of the battle, you are wasting valuable resources.

In the early stages of the game, there are several myths that are trained in to us. 

Using quick math…x flying, 10x mounted, 20x archers and melee, will make an acceptable hit. This works well early on, because we don’t have great armor with great gems and enchantments, as well as highly developed captains with great artifacts. 

By G5 level, you probably learned that you would need to adjust that number slightly to control the order of loss, something more along the lines of 1.83x. 

By the time G6 comes along,  the bonuses for armor, gems and enchantments,  as well as the modifiers imposed by talent point allocation, research levels and artifact attributes make these calculations unruly and inefficient.

Another myth that we learn early on is that when sending monsters we should send stacks in base 10 numbers, because losses are at a percentage of troops sent. 

The idea that the losses from rounding will be lowered seems plausible on the surface, but this is a huge efficiency killer. 

Proper stacking will rarely, if ever result in an equal number of all four types of monsters being sent, so the choice you make is to either lower the size of all monster stacks, or raise most of the stack sizes.

If you lower them, you lose a huge amount of damage, and if you raise them, you destroy the hit order, which also results in huge losses in efficiency.

The final myth I will address is the engineering myth. 

Early on you were told to never send engineering, except for citadel walls or player city walls. 

At T9 level you should always send a stack of E9 Josephine II cannons for your sacrificial stack when attacking Epics. 

By including a stack of Josephine II engineering, your average hit will become much tighter. In many cases, it will repeatedly be exactly the same.

This results from the Josephine II's never hitting. In the case that the enemy strikes first, they will kill the josephine II's. In the case where you hit first, the typical attack will have the enemy hit whichever of your stacks hit first and then the Josephine II's next.

If you have held off on engineering strength, health and march speed talents and research, you should make a point to maximize these as soon as possible. 

Sending E9 will result in an additional stack to hit in each round of your battle, and the benefit far outweighs the cost. This only applies to epics.