Early Town Halls: TH2 to TH10
The first nine Town Halls are the part of Clash of Clans where advice is most abundant and least useful. Almost all of it comes down to the same four decisions, repeated at every level, and getting those four right matters far more than any per-level checklist.
The only four decisions that matter before TH11
Keep the Laboratory running. The laboratory upgrades on its own timer, entirely separate from your builders. Every hour it sits idle is progress you cannot recover, and troop levels follow you up through every Town Hall while a Cannon level does not. If you only remember one thing from this page, remember that an idle laboratory is the most expensive mistake in the early game.
Upgrade the Clan Castle early. A bigger Clan Castle means better donated troops, and donated troops are the single largest free power increase available to a new account. At TH6 a full Clan Castle can carry an attack that your own army could not finish alone.
Army Camps before defences. More camp space means more loot per raid, which means everything else gets faster. Defences protect loot you have already earned; camps earn more of it. In the early game, offence compounds and defence does not.
Buy every builder you can. The gem cost of the third, fourth and fifth builders is trivially recovered. Save gems for builders and nothing else until you have all of them — no decoration, no resource boost, and certainly no finishing an upgrade early, is worth as much as a permanent extra worker.
Is rushing fine down here?
Mostly, yes — and this is where the community advice is most often wrong. Below Town Hall 9, moving up quickly costs you very little, because the defences you are skipping are cheap to come back for and the loot available at higher Town Halls is substantially better. A TH8 farming at TH8 out-earns a TH7 farming at TH7 by enough to pay for the upgrades they skipped.
What you cannot skip is the laboratory and your heroes. Both run on timers no amount of looting speeds up, and both are what actually break at TH11 and above. The rushed accounts that stall permanently are not the ones that skipped Cannons — they are the ones that arrived at TH11 with a level 10 Barbarian King and a laboratory three levels behind.
A workable rule: rush buildings, never rush the laboratory, and never stop a hero upgrade you could have started. Then slow down properly at TH11, where the maths changes.
Walls, and why they feel impossible
Walls are the largest single resource sink in Clash and the one that most reliably demoralises new players. The useful reframe is that walls are not a project to finish — they are what you spend surplus resources on when your builders are all busy and your storages are full. Treated that way they progress steadily and painlessly.
Do not spend gems on walls, do not save loot for walls at the expense of a builder standing idle, and do not upgrade all of them evenly. Upgrade the compartment around your Town Hall and storages first; the outer ring can lag several levels behind without changing how your base actually defends.
Common early-game mistakes
- Letting the laboratory idle while focusing on builders. It is a separate timer and it is the one that follows you upward.
- Spending gems on anything other than builders until you have all five.
- Upgrading walls evenly across the whole base instead of protecting the core first.
- Skipping hero upgrades because the King is "only" a small part of the army at TH7. Hero levels are the hardest thing to catch up on later.
- Staying at a low Town Hall to "max" it. Below TH9 the loot penalty for staying is larger than the benefit of maxing.
What unlocks at each level
Town Hall 6 costs 500K gold to build.
| Building | Count | Max level |
|---|---|---|
| Air SweeperNew | 1 | 2 |
| Giant BombNew | 1 | 2 |
| Air Defense | 2+1 | 4 |
| Archer Tower | 3 | 7 |
| Army Camp | 3 | 6 |
| Barracks | 1 | 8 |
| Cannon | 3 | 7 |
| Clan Castle | 1 | 3 |
| Elixir Collector | 6+1 | 10 |
| Elixir Storage | 2 | 10 |
| Gold Mine | 6+1 | 10 |
| Gold Storage | 2 | 10 |
| Laboratory | 1 | 4 |
| Mortar | 2+1 | 4 |
| Spell Factory | 1 | 2 |
| Spring Trap | 4+2 | 1 |
| Wall | 125+25 | 6 |
| Wizard Tower | 2+1 | 3 |