For those of us playing Clash of Clans for quite some time, we all know that the Heroes can do some odd stuff sometimes – with the Builder Base being released, the Battle Machine added a new level of weird situations and I thought it was about time to get this topic discussion started.
I think you understand that there’s not a magical solution to this, but sometimes you can prevent such odd situations and also some deeper understanding of the Hero AI might be helpful for you.
With that being said, let’s go.
How Hero AI Works in Clash of Clans
First of all, the Hero AI is not more or less “broken” in terms of creating weird behaviour compared to other troops – the thing is that their behaviour is more often discussed just because they are often in a high duty role or stand out at the beginning/end of the raid.
However, this makes it not less harmful for your failed attacks.
I think I could show several weird situations here (and each one of you can probably add countless more), but that’s not the point I want to make here.
In fact, I haven’t been seeing one of these situations and found out at the end that the Hero AI did exactly what intended (in the code), even when it looks very weird what the Heroes sometimes do. That doesn’t make it less annoying but also shows that you can prevent several situations with the knowledge what heroes will act like.
Here are some general things that not many people keep in mind.
Retargeting of Heroes
I think you might have seen several situations, especially in your Builder Base, where the Battle Machine walks straight into the core of the base to hit on some defending Guard Post troops.
Once your Hero is getting aggro from a defending Hero or troop, it will go straight after it. This also works in case one of your troops is standing close to the Hero will become a target of a defending unit.
Especially in your Builder Base, this occurs very often like you can see in this picture here
How to fix this?
With that knowledge, you can see this coming while planning your attack. Often times you’ll see the Guard Post next to a Crusher and you can be sure that this will happen. The easy way out of this is to attack from a different location so the Guard Post Troops will get dragged out on another spot than the Crusher.
Hero Sight Ranges
Ok here I have now an extreme example found in one of Powerbang’s video intros where a Cannon Cart is simply going nuts.
On the first look, this looks like a huge glitch, but when taking a second closer look you can see that the Cannon Cart retargets to the most closes structure which is different depending where the Cannon Cart moves.
I want to use this to introduce you to something that’s called Sight Range. You can imagine that as the distance how far troops and Heroes can “see” (also referred to as “Search Radius”)
Here are the values for your Heroes:
- Archer Queen: 10 tiles
- Barbarian King: 9 tiles
- Grand Warden: 10 tiles
I found this old screenshot on my device (some of you might remember the ugly blue look of the Level 11 Walls back in the days.
Naturally you’d expect her to go after the Gold Storage, like the Barbarian King does, which would then make her go for the Town Hall. What she really does:
The Warden Work Different
The Grand Warden works differently because he’s a supporting unit, so it’s useful that he follows around the largest group of troops. He will attack the building being attacked by the highest number/troop space troop and will continue to attack that building until it’s destroyed.
You can see that very good in this picture here where he completely ignores the Builder Hit and Drill right in front of him.
Queen Walk Fixes
Many people use Queen Walks because they are very powerful.
The classic situation is when your Queen walks in the wrong direction or you want her to go into the base, but she keeps walking around the base.
In the beginning, you can make sure she will walk in the direction you want by dropping a Wizard or Archer to destroy a building in the direction you don’t want her to go.
When you want her to enter the base you also have to break it open. The easiest way is with some cleaning troops and Wall Breakers.
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