TH11 Upgrade Priority Guide (2023)

Updated 02 Feb 2020

Try to time your TH upgrade with season bank payout, so that you reach TH11 around the time you receive the 25/25mil (or 5/5mil) loot and that would make the first few days of TH11 much easier. If you can’t do that, having a rune of elixir would do just fine as well. If that is not possible (eg. overstayed TH10), just regular farming isn’t too hard.

TH11 has a fair few amount of upgrades compared to TH12 and for now is a really good stepping stone towards TH13. From TH11-12, almost all your growth comes from your grand warden so everything will be about maxinh the Grand Warden asap.

In reality, having a lvl10 GW will give you almost all his benefits for a small fraction of his cost. Lvl20 does not offer much more than lvl10, but its nice to have him completely maxed so that you won’t grow used to him. Because once you grown used to him, its quite hard to upgrade and lose him.

As a new TH11, you will not be able to protect you loot well. In fact, no matter how maxed you are in TH11, you will never be able to protect your loot well. Even if you are a maxed TH12, you will never defend well. So you don’t need to worry too much about defense for now. You’ll get the biggest growth from the Eagle and maxing your xbows so those are good upgrades to do.

One thing that would make your TH11 journey easier is the season pass. If you have it, you can use either the season bank and the discount to breeze past most of the grind in TH11. It is advisable to unlock the 10% discount so that you make the most out of the initial 25/25mil and then the 20% discount would help greatly in your 1-2 months stay in TH11.

I would suggest buying the season pass rather than buying the TH11 value pack. The value pack contains a lvl5 warden, an eagle and some DE. This will allow you to skip some of the elixir farming. If you already have a rune of elixir waiting, then don’t bother buying this pack. You can buy 4 season passes with the same money which is greatly more worth it. If you really have loads of spare money, you can choose to buy the packs if you want to.

Come into TH11, prepared with capped gold and capped elixir (8.5mil each + season bank) so that you can start many upgrades right away. Try to time it so that you have free builders during the first few days of TH11 so that you can jump start a ton of TH11 upgrades which are generally stronger and more impactful than lower level upgrades.

This guide can be done with 4 or 5 builders.

First priority upgrade:

1. Grand Warden. Grand Warden. Grand Warden. He’s the strongest hero in the game and always keep him upgrading. He will cost 8.5mil for the first two levels which is everything in your storages.
2. Lab. You’ll want to upgrade barbarians ASAP which gains almost 50% health, so upgrading your lab crucial.
   • This upgrade costs 6mil but your elixir storage cannot fit that much to start the upgrade immediately unless you came prepared (either with season bank or a rune).
   • Do note that you will need to upgrade your grand warden again in 12 hrs, so your total elixir required on the first day itself is 17.5mil
   • If you cannot afford this upgrade immediately, skip to the next upgrade below. Try to farm as much elixir as possible
3. Clan castle. One of the best things the developers did was to reduce the price of the clan castle. Now you can upgrade this without first upgrading your gold storage. Start this upgrade immediately and this would exhaust all your gold. If you have a book of buildings, use it here.
4. Tornado trap. This thing is a beast really, being able to trap even maxed TH13 troops, which is crazy. This costs 3mil, so farm up and build this asap
5. New archer tower, cannon and wizard tower. Better get them started immediately, they give most defensive value with the least cost because of their low level. Put one builder to upgrade these 3 things, from shortest upgrade time to longest. Upgrade till they are the same level of all your other defenses.
6. New walls. Use your remaining gold to build and upgrade all your walls.
7. Archer queen. I know you’ve just reached a brand new TH level, but you cannot neglect your warden. Besides, everything else costs gold and elixir, this means that you should have a good amount of excess DE for AQ. You are useless at TH11 without the warden, so seize this opportunity to upgrade your AQ as well.
8. Grand warden. He will reach lvl2 in 12hrs after reaching TH11, so you will need another 3mil elixir to upgrade again. Keep him upgrading until at least lvl5, anything less and he’s pretty useless.
9. For your 5th builder: Depending on what you can or cannot build, there are multiple things you can choose to upgrade on the first day of TH11, these are: (in order of importance)
   • If you came into TH11 with a rune of elixir and/or farmed a ton, you can start your first army camp upgrade
   • If you are a monster farmer, you can upgrade your BK as well
   • Elixir storage or your new Xbow. These cost gold so they won’t be competing with warden for now.
   • If you have a rune of gold, you can use it to build your new Eagle artillery.

All in all, the first few days of TH11 are the hardest because you need to upgrade lab and warden. This means you’ll need 14.5mil immediately and another 3mil after 12hrs in TH11. Luckily, TH11 is a breeze after this. Read about farming below if you want to know how to farm for your GW.

Second priority upgrades:

1. Grand warden. If you can afford to, keep upgrading him all the way to lvl20. If you really cannot keep up with the elixir farming (~5-7mil elixir/day in the first 10 days or so), then you may choose to pause him after he reaches lvl5.
2. Your lab should be completed around now, upgrade barch. Barbs lvl8 first then arch, the hp boost is greater than the puny gains of archers. If you have a book/hammer of fighting, use it to upgrade your barbarians and start your archer upgrade next. Barbarians will cost 8mil elixir which will take your entire storage. You might not be able to afford army camps next, so I think this is a good time to upgrade your tornado trap to lvl2 or some cheap defenses while farming the 7mil necessary for army camps.
3. Army camps. Upgrade all 4 army camps at the same time using 3-4 builders, they will take about 10 days and 7mil each. This will provide the strongest boost to your offense after a lvl5 warden. If you farm extremely fast and have all 4 upgrading in quick succession, consider using book of buildings to free up a builder otherwise you will overflow on a ton of loot.
4. Throughout this entire process, I highly recommend you to keep your AQ upgrading all the time. You don’t have any other DE requirements right now and TH11 DE is amazing, so try and keep her upgrading. If you upgrade her diligently, she should be able to reach a decent level for higher levels.
5. Build your new Xbow and Eagle Artillery. I think building the Xbow first is better because it completes faster but you can choose to do the Eagle first so that you can switch to a new TH11 base design. Either way, just use one builder to work on both of these upgrades. After both are done, use the same builder to work on your low level AT, cannon and wizard towers. Try to bring them to the same level as your other defenses (it was lvl3-4 in my case).
   • Any point after this, you can use a book to instantly complete lvl2 eagle.
6. Elixir storage. Start on these so that you can eventually store enough elixir for Grand Warden. Its lower priority because only the last 5 levels of grand warden cost more than 9mil. Even with the season pass, I think you should upgrade your storages so that you can store more loot between upgrades.
7. Barracks for electro dragon. Personally, I would save up 3-4 books and slowly book the barracks. Saving 8 days is fair value for a book, especially since your troop training speed reduces by 33% with one barracks down. With just one barracks upgraded, you can train overnight armies for electro-loon attacks for war.
8. Dark barracks for ice golem. Unlocking it early is good but you probably won’t use them often. At TH11, they can be good so at least get them to lvl1. At TH12, you need lvl4-5 for them to be useful.

Third priority upgrades:

Once you run out of things to upgrade in 2nd priority, move on here.

1. Grand warden. Yeap, just so you won’t forget, upgrade him. it takes 87.5 days without books/discounts to max him so I hope that you can manage to max him after stepping foot in TH11 for 87.5 days.
2. Archer Queen. Keep your AQ upgrading constantly. I recommend having at least lvl41 AQ because lvl41 takes out many buildings with 1 less shot. Don’t just stop a 41 though, keep her upgrading as high as possible. Bear the pain now and you can enjoy your fruits of labour afterwards.
3. Gold storage. You want to store as much as loot as possible between upgrades so just upgrade this. You don’t need it for most general upgrades anymore but having it is better than anything else.
4. Barbarian king if you have excess DE. Don’t sacrifice AQ progress for BK because AQ is far stronger. Even if your BK is only lvl10, that’s fine. Get your AQ to max so that she can contribute in farming. If you cannot find enough DE, you can do a cheap BK upgrade while farming for AQ.
5. The rest of your barracks and dark barracks upgrades. If you followed my guides, I’ve always told you to upgrade only one barracks to max and leave the rest at low level. Now you can slowly “catch up” and upgrade them to max. I still recommend using book of buildings for lvl13 barracks (electro), but don’t use it on lower levels because those upgrades don’t take as much time.
6. Elixir collectors and gold mines. If your DE drills are not maxed yet, work on those instead. For everyone else, upgrade your gold and elixir collectors using 2 builders to slowly max them out. Collectors are more important than defenses because they provide guaranteed income. Upgrading defenses does not guarantee that you will protect your loot.

At this point, keep working on your heroes and collectors until warden is maxed, AQ is maxed or walls are maxed. Head to TH12 immediately if any of those 3 are achieved. After finishing all first and second priority upgrades, I recommend the following:

• Builder 1: Warden until 20
• Builder 2: AQ until 50
• Builder 3: BK until 50 or barracks until maxed > dark barracks until maxed
• Builder 4: DE drills until maxed > elixir collectors until maxed
• Builder 5: elixir collectors until maxed > gold mines until maxed

After maxing warden, you have a choice to stay in TH11 for a little longer, or just head straight to TH12/13. The choice is up to you but I personally wouldn’t hesitate to go to TH12 earlier. In fact, one of my mistakes on TinySin was to overstay TH11 which resulted in a delay in AQ and warden. If this is your first time playing, you can stay in TH11 for a few months and go to TH12 about 3-6 months after reaching TH11.

If CWL is your priority, getting to TH12 even earlier is recommended because the giga bomb can stop many 3 stars even with far weaker defenses.

Fourth priority upgrades:

These are here if you maxed the above and still have warden levels remaining/want to stay in TH11 for longer.

1. Gold mines and elixir collectors to max. These still provide more value than any defense in the game. If you are still grinding heroes, keep upgrading these. These are so cheap that you can upgrade a ton of walls while grinding your heroes.
2. All traps/defenses which take less than a day. Just scroll through your list of upgrades and work on anything that costs less than a day. These provide the most value so that you can defend better.
3. Skeleton traps to max. These buggers are great at defense because they can harass hogs or stall electro dragons and pekkas. These do not really suffer from diminishing returns unlike most other defenses.
4. If you have spare books and don’t know where to spend them, use it to skip the upgrade time of Eagle Artillery level 2
5. Because of the prevalence of electro dragons in CWL, I recommend maxing both air defenses and air sweepers. Maybe just use one builder one air defense and another on sweeper so that they will be maxed eventually.
6. Some people like to abuse rushed bases by using miners. You can try maxing giant bombs and bomb towers to try nullify their attacks but usually its futile if the attacker is good. Instead, try to have CC loons/drag/electro to stop miner attacks
7. Everything else. You don’t need a guide for defenses, just upgrade what you like from here.

Lab:

Determining what to upgrade in lab is quite difficult in TH11, because almost all lab upgrades do not impact much at all in TH11. The most important lab upgrade you need is the Grand Warden, and I’m sure you’re tired listening to me go on about him. But he is THAT crucial. Lvl2 bowlers have 310 hp, lvl3 bowlers have 350 hp but lvl2 bowlers + warden have 465 hp. Almost all your offensive upgrades are locked behind the Grand Warden, so it makes many lab upgrades sub-optimal.

Furthermore, SC likes to buff and nerf troops that impact greatly in TH11. What I say now might not be relevant with the next nerf/buff cycle. Here’s a tentative order of upgrades:

Barb lvl8 > Arch lvl8 > Wall-breaker lvl7 > Electro dragon lvl2 > Balloon lvl7 > Miners lvl5 > Hog-rider/healer/Bowlers/pekka in any order

Walls:

Upgrade walls as you get the resources as per usual. There are 300 lvl12 walls to be done, they cost about 1.2bil loot so a good farmer should be able to complete them easily. Don’t fret if you can’t farm quickly enough, walls are really not important. A good farmer will easily finish them before everything else, I wouldn’t really ask you to farm super hard for these unless you enjoy doing so.

Farming:

Collector raiding is even more profitable for a TH11. I highly recommend any TH11 to collector raid throughout the entirety of TH11. Anywhere from G2 to M2 is good to find collectors and get your elixir.

1. Barch. You know your favorite barch comp already, do what you like. I like 96 barbs, 120 arch, 8 wall-breakers and rest wiz/min.
2. Mass miners, just simple 43 miners. Really easy army to use and trains faster than barch, but costs 3 times as much elixir. Barch with 5 spells actually cost less than miners without spells. Miners are also non-superior in terms of collector bases, they are only profitable in whale bases with >700k loot + 6k DE
   • Most people using mass miners end up with underleveled walls because they do not realise that the majority of walls are built using elixir

Recommended stay time:

30-90 days. I recommend players to get lvl20 warden in TH11 which provides ample time for you to finish most collector/barracks upgrades which you have been neglecting in lower levels. Finish up your warden and head to TH12. While you can jump to TH12 earlier, doing so provides minimal benefit except for CWL because almost all of TH12’s strength comes from lvl21-40 warden. Instead, maxing warden in TH11 allows you a good platform to rush straight to TH13.

It isn’t a bad idea to head to TH12 earlier as well because TH12 loot is comparable to TH11. The reason why I recommend getting lvl20 warden is so that you can skip straight ahead to TH13 instead of toiling away in TH12 with minimal strength increases. However, if you have maxed out your AQ or walls before warden is done, head to TH12 because you can actually gain more by upgrading in those circumstances.

Do note that while TH12 does not gain much, it gains enough that maxing TH11 defenses is still a foolish endeavor. Giga tesla lvl5 in particular can usually stop the 3 star better than all the upgrades you can make in TH11.

From here, you’ll want to read:

Pre-TH12 Checklist

TH12 Guide

From zero: (26th Jan 2019)

To hero: (12th Apr 2019)