User:SyntheticSystems/sandbox

Clash of Clans is a 2012 strategy video game developed and published by Finnish game developer Supercell. Set in a fantasy-themed persistent world, the game was initially released on the Apple App Store in August 2012 and later released on the Google Play Store in October 2013.

The gameplay revolves around players take control of a medieval village, expanding the village using resources accrued by attacking other villages or producing them at their own village. Players can conjoin to create clans and share resources. As players advance through the game, additional villages are unlocked and the player can unlock better troops to attack other villages with. Since its initial release in 2012, Clash of Clans has received numerous free updates, adding additional game content.

Clash of Clans received generally positive reviews from critics upon its release. The game's popularity and financial success resulted in an ensuing franchise and subsequent spin-off games set in the game's universe. The first, Clash Royale, was released in 2016. Three other games, Clash Quest, Clash Minis, and Clash Heroes, were announced in April 2021.

Gameplay
In Clash of Clans, players manage a village, form communities known as clans, train troops, and attack other players to earn resources. There are four main currencies or resources in the game: gold, elixir, dark elixir, and gems. Gold and elixir can be used to build and upgrade defenses and traps that protect the player's village from other players' attacks and to build and upgrade buildings, while dark elixir can be used towards a stronger subset of troops known as "heroes". Gems can be used to speed up the creation of new buildings or upgrade existing ones, and can be acquired for real world money. Attacks are rated on a three-star scale and have a maximum timed length of three minutes.

The game also features a pseudo-single-player campaign in which the player can attack a series of fortified goblin villages and earn gold, elixir (and dark elixir in higher levels).

Buildings
To earn and store gold and elixir, players must build gold mines and gold storages and elixir collectors and elixir storages. Elixir is used to carry out research in the laboratory to upgrade troops, and to build and upgrade certain buildings, mostly pertaining to buildings used in attacking another player's base. Gold is used to build defensive buildings and to upgrade the town hall, which allows access to more buildings and higher levels for existing buildings. At Town Hall 7, dark elixir becomes available; this type of elixir is used to train and upgrade dark elixir troops, heroes such as the Barbarian King, and starting at Town Hall 8, create dark spells. To earn and store dark elixir, players must build dark elixir drills and dark elixir storages. At Town Hall 9, Archer Queen becomes available.

The Eagle Artillery is a defensive building first available at Town Hall 11. Town Hall 11 also provides access to a new hero - The Grand Warden, who requires elixir to be born and upgraded unlike the other heroes. At Town Hall 12, a defense called the Giga Tesla is installed on the Town Hall, when upgraded to Town Hall 13 the Giga Inferno replaces the Giga Tesla. Town Hall 13 also unlocks the Scattershot building and the Royal Champion hero. Town Hall 14 unlocks the Pet House, a building used to assign pets to heroes, and the ability for Builder's Huts to be upgraded to level 4, turning them into attack structures.

Town Hall 15 unlocks 2 defenses, which are Monolith and Spell Tower. The Monolith deals a high damage per second and adds an extra damage percentage to the troop being targeted. The Spell Tower, which has 3 types of spells that you can choose as you upgrade have different powers to boost the area or against the troops.

There are a number of buildings available to the player to defend their village, including cannons, mortars, bombs, teslas, traps, archer towers, wizard towers, inferno towers, eagle artilleries, scattershots, Monolith, and Spell Tower. Players can also build walls, which can be upgraded further as a player's town hall level increases.

Builder Base
On May 22, 2017, Supercell released the new "Builder Base" game mode to the game. It allows players to sail to a new island and create a new village with a different set of buildings.

Development, release
Clash of Clans was developed by Supercell, the company behind other popular mobile games like Hay Day and Brawl Stars . The game took six months to develop with the gameplay changing little over the course of development. According to Supercell's Lasse Louhento the development team encountered no major hurdles during this time. Inspiration for the game included the games Backyard Monsters and Travian with the art style being influenced by old Super NES and arcade games. Initially the art style was more cartoon based but this was changed as the team worried it would alienate the more hardcore segment of their audience. Throughout most of development the game was multiplayer-only focused however after focus testing, Supercell went back and added a single-player mode. The game was released for iOS platforms on August 2, 2012, and on Google Play for Android on October 7, 2013.

In February 2015, Supercell released their Clash of Clans Super Bowl XLIX commercial, featuring Liam Neeson parodying his character from Taken. On February 2, Business Insider reported the ad as the fifth most watched Super Bowl ad, though on February 6, VentureBeat reported the ad was the most viewed of those that appeared on the Super Bowl. YouTube users later voted the advertisement the second best Super Bowl ad, behind Nissan's "With Dad" ad.

On September 23, 2015, Taiwanese singers JJ Lin and Jimmy Lin released the game's theme song "全面开战" ("Fight on All Fronts" in English), which was sung in Mandarin.

Critical reception
Clash of Clans has received generally positive reviews. The iOS version holds an aggregate score of 74 out of 100 on Metacritic, and 80% on GameRankings.

Gamezebo's Leif Johnson was impressed, scoring the game 4.5 out of 5. Although he felt the gameplay was heavily skewed to encourage the player to purchase gems, he praised the addition of a single-player campaign. He concluded that "Clash of Clans is a simple game, but that's more of a strength than a weakness. It's simple enough to provide quick, painless matches on an iPhone in an idle moment, and there are enough different units to choose from in the battle mode to make playing against other players endlessly rewarding. Best of all, the option to fight against NPC goblins gives Clash of Clans a small edge over similar strategy games that rely almost entirely on player-versus-player combat."

Pocket Gamer's Peter Willington was equally impressed, scoring the game 9 out of 10 and giving it a "Gold Award". Reviewing the game several months after it was released for iOS devices, Willington praised the game for requiring real strategy to play. He wrote that the gameplay was built on the progression of "requiring more and more sophisticated units, asking you to strategise and really think about which elements you should focus on building within your camp." He concluded that "Clash of Clans is a superb game, freemium or otherwise, with more nuance than most give it credit for. That's why it's passed the test of time since its launch and still has an active community devotedly constructing elaborate fortresses in the hope of becoming invincible."

148App's Rob Rich scored the game 3.5 out of 5, writing "It's great to play an online freemium game that doesn't shy away from the single-player experience but also offers up some honest-to-goodness direct interaction, which is a very rare combination these days. It probably won't warm the hearts of any haters out there, but it does give genre fans something with a bit more action and strategy than they might be used to." Tom's Guide enjoyed the player interaction.

Modojo's John Bedford scored the game 3 out of 5. He was critical of freemium gaming in general, writing "The novelty hasn't just worn off this particular style of greedy gaming, it's shriveled up and condensed itself into an infinitely dense singularity of self-loathing." Of the game itself, he concluded, "This is a game that follows in the footsteps of no small number of titles that have made feverish demands on our wallets in exchange for just a slightly thicker slice of the gameplay. It's possible you have an unending appetite for these micromanagement titles, in which case we recommend getting heartily stuck into Supercell's latest game. While Clash of Clans brings something new to accompany its competent but unexceptional empire gameplay, for most of us it'll be a case of too little, too late."

Commercial reception
Clash of Clans became an App Store top 5 download between December 2012 and May 2013, and this success has been described as helping to usher in a new era in single-player gaming on mobile devices.

In 2013, Clash of Clans was the third-highest game in revenue generated on the App Store and number one on Google Play.

In February 2014 it was reported that the game was generating $654,000 in daily revenue for Supercell.

In 2015, the game was the top grossing app on both the App Store and Google Play, with an estimated revenue of 1.5 million dollars per day.

It was the fourth most installed app in the App Store and the seventh most installed app in the Play Store, where it had amassed 500 million downloads by 2018.

As of 2018, Clash of Clans has generated more revenue than any other app on the App Store, having brought in a revenue of over $6.4 billion since its launch.

As of 2020, Clash of Clans remains in the top 50 grossing apps in both the Play Store and App Store, more than eight years following its release in 2012.