Clash of Clans – Why Don’t Characters Operate on Defense When Village Is Attacked?

When you are attacked, several things happen:

• You lose resources, depending on how much the attacker "destroys". If the attacker destroys everything, you can lose up to a maximum of 50% of Elixir/Gold in your collectors, 100% of Elixir/Gold in your Town Hall, and 10-20% of Elixir/Gold in your storage containers depending on your Town Hall level. You also lose 75% of Dark Elixir in your collectors, 5-10% of loot in your Clan Castle and 4-6% of Dark Elixir in your storages This is a worst case, and can be significantly less if the opponent is higher level than you, or does not fully succeed in destroying your buildings.
• You lose trophies, depending on how much the attacker "destroys" and also the relative amounts of trophies you and the attacker have. Attackers get 1/3 of potential trophies for each star they receive. Potential trophies are more if the attacker started with less trophies than you, and are fewer if the attacker started with more trophies than you.
• Your buildings are not actually destroyed, even when the opponent "destroys" them. Buildings regenerate after attacks.
• Troops in your Army Camp do not participate. Troops in your Clan's Castle will fight if any enemy troop is deployed in its radius.
• There is a range of who can attack you. However, this is based on the number of trophies you have. This makes it possible for high level players to attack you. These players have just simply purposefully lost a bunch of trophies so they can "pick on" low level players. Bear in mind though that pairing is random, so in order for a higher level attacker to attack, they have to be randomly paired with you. Note this does not apply if you've previously attacked them, since they have a "revenge" option.

The game's meta shifts pretty quickly, so unfortunately there's not just a few types of troops that you can upgrade and hope to be ready for every situation. My advice would be to practice some of the major strategies. When you come across one that is particularly effective and you can deploy it consistently, make sure you focus on unlocking the upgrades for that particular strategy first.

Let's be honest as well - for most people, the only thing that consistently pays out is collector farming with cheap armies. Clan wars and trashing bases for storages/trophies are nice for the "glory!" factor, but they're generally going to cost you resources, which costs you time and/or money.

That said, I'll try to cover a few types of attack that work well with the current meta, and what troops I personally prioritize:

• BARCH - this is the #1 farming strategy, hands down. You can throw in Minions and make it BAM if you want, but I find most of the time I get 80-90% of the resources out of a collector-heavy base with just barbs and archers.
• Giant/Healer/Wallbreakers - this is a decent strategy until around TH7 or so. By this point, bases are so large that giants really can't make it through the whole base, and the high level of ADs means that your healers won't last long.
• Mass Dragon + Rage - this is still a pretty good strategy for TH7-8, and maybe into the early stages of TH9. It's also really easy to deploy. I've tried being strategic before, and in wars I always find my cohorts who just drop a big mass of dragons get more stars than I do.
• Hogs - Hogs have been the subject of many nerfs recently, but they can still be effective if the base design permits it. Double big bombs and skeleton traps tend to do the most damage vs this strategy.
• Balloons + Minions (Ballonion) - This is a good strategy against bases where the AD is low level or improperly placed. You can also use dragons instead of minions if that suits you.
• Golem/Wizard/PEKKA (GoWiPe) - there are a bunch of high-end very high level DE troop strategies out there. I like GoWiPe, although I think GoWiWi (Golem/Wizard/Witch) is also popular. This is really for crushing bases that have a lot of stuff in storage, or clan wars if there's some really good reason to invest this much in resources.

Again, here, what I'd suggest is practice a new strategy, and if it works for you, then upgrade the troops. I'd also suggest upgrade everything before you bump your TH up, because you never know what the next meta will bring to previously useless troops. It's almost always easier to raid and save up for your upgrades at a lower TH than at a higher TH.