Hog Attack Planning (Tips for TH8)

I am sometimes asked to help someone plan clan war attacks, and most of the time I find myself helping TH8 players.  After we put a plan together, I am often asked, “How did you come up with that?”  With dragon attacks, it’s usually a pretty straightforward answer.  E.g. “Find the broadside, draw a line between the ADs.  Now look at the clan castle and draw a line with a line intersecting the midsection of the broadside line.  This should be the center of your dragon attack….” etc.

On hog attacks, the answer is rarely so simple.  And normally, even when I try to explain (in chat for instance), it falls short.  This is because planning a good hog attack requires thinking about a base with a far deeper level of complexity than dragons, or even GoWiPe.  To illustrate, I thought I would go through, in detail, the steps I normally use in assessing a base for a hog attack.  Although it looks like a lot of detail and planning, the more often you do it the quicker and more intuitive the process will become.

Step 1 involves identifying the critical liabilities (i.e. DGBs) and intermediate liabilities (GBs, springs) in the base.  At this step I also make my best guess on teslas,  because they will affect pathing.  In images 1.1. and 1.2 below, I have shown my scouting on two TH8 bases that are candidates for hogrider attacks.  First I identify DGB threat locations.  Then I look at potential GB locations and spring traps.  Last, I contemplate where the teslas are most likely to be.  There is no rule on this, but in general people do like symmetrical tesla placement and tend to favor teslas near the core.  I look for 3 spots in rough symmetry as my first guess, but it’s very dependent on the base.  Usually, in identifying the likely tesla spots you can get an indication of where the GBs or DGBs are.  After I have made my guess on teslas, I highlight my final, best guess on the DGB.

A sample base scouted for traps and liabilities.

Another example of a base with identified traps and liabilities.

Step 2 involves getting an idea about defense and pathing density, and accounting for the Barbarian King.  After a while, you will get a sense of it without doing a spider diagram, but in the beginning I think it’s best to use a screenshot of the base and a drawing program to show the paths between each defense within reasonable distance from each other.  Once you are done, you will see some areas of the web that are dense (have lots of nodes and shorter links) and some areas that are less so.  To complete this analysis, I usually circle the defenses that are going to cause problems for hogs during their attack.  These are basically all the defenses excluding the mortars, air defense, and air sweeper.  This will give you an even more complete picture of where all the dense liabilities are in the base for your hogs, as illustrated in image 2.1 below.

An example of a spider diagram.

Finally, I want to know how the Barbarian King is going to affect my risk on the base, because he will follow hogs around within his range.  Once I have identified his range, I stand back and look at the base again.  I highlight the areas that are particularly dangerous because there is a high concentration of defenses, and/or the Barbarian King is present, as illustrated in image 2.2.

A spider diagram with other critical areas identified.

Now I have enough information to start thinking about my attack plan.  I ask myself, “what can I do with shaping attacks to reduce some of the big trap risks, or other high risk areas?”  I find it helpful to divide the base into slices depending on where the real risks are, and think about whether I can use multiple shaping attacks to reduce my risks in each wedge.  If the base is relatively homogenous and symmetrical without any areas of particularly high risk, I might not divide the base.  But in many cases, the most likely DGB threat will be in one area, the area of high defense concentration in another, and the Barb King in a third area.  I try to think about how I can account for the risks and reduce them as much as possible.  Here are the kinds of thoughts I normally have along these lines:
1. “Can my CC kill team get to and kill that Barbarian King?”
2. “If I add a golem to my KH team and CC kill team, can they drive in and defuse that likely DGB?”
3. “Can I send scout hogs, barb scouts, or wall breaker scouts in to defuse significant GB liabilities I can’t otherwise avoid?”
4. “How many heals should I use in this area to keep the hogs alive, and where should I drop them?”

These are just examples.  In truth, you cannot catalog the full list of questions possible during this process of analyzing risks and devising mitigation plans.  But with experience and practice, you will become better at learning what to look for.  Remember: you only have 3 minutes and 200 troop space, so you need to deal with the major risks, and trust your hogs and heals to overcome the rest.  I have given an example in the image 3.1 below.

Now that I know how I am going to handle the major risks, I start off by identifying which part of the base I expect to have destroyed before the hogs are launched.  It’s important to get this out of the way because the buildings eliminated here must be factored into your thoughts on pathing with the base.  Once I’ve blocked that off, and keeping the spider diagram in mind, I think about how I can path hogs such that they flow efficiently through the base.  There are no hard an fast rules for this.  You will just have to try several things out and see what works.  I have given an example in image 3.2 below of what I think the KH1 can accomplish, along with the pathing for two hog groups.

As you imagine your hogs pathing, for each pack you put on the field draw a line between each drop point and the first defense.  So each hog pack will have one segment of it’s path done.  Next, look at where each of your packs will go on its second segment and draw that piece for each segment.  If these were chessmen, you would move each one square before you moved the first one again.  In this way, you will get an idea of how they will actually flow across the base.  For my own style, I use different colors for different hog packs, and then use another color when two packs again converge.  I have illustrated my pathing example in image 3.2.

Including KH1 plan and pathing.

Now I have a final plan, and I can look at it in its entirety and ask myself that critical question, “Ok Mustard, do you really think this is going to work?  Have I overcomplicated this attack?  Can I get all of this done inside of three minutes?”  I sometimes will break it down into a rough timeline for how I think the attack will go down.  As an example:
00:00-00:10 : Get full CC pull
00:10-00:45 : Complete the TDCK
00:45-01:25 : Launch KH1 and have the critical structures for hog pathing destroyed; deploy hog scouts if applicable
01:25-02:00 : Hog attacks launch until defenses are destroyed
02:00-03:00 : Clean up
Now, this may be ambitious.  But the good thing is even if I fall behind early, having an extra minute of clean up will help me avoid getting killed by the clock.  I have illustrated by final plan in image 4 below.

Finally, I have to see if I can put an army together to accomplish the plan.

Finally, with shaping attacks, etc., if you get too ambitious you can easily have so many ideas that you can’t get enough troops in your army camps to accomplish your mission.  Every shaping attack must have absolute economy as its guiding principle.  A few rules that every player should live by:

1. If you are going to TDCK, then devote enough resources to the task to get the pull.  Do not naively think you are going to pull the full CC with a single barbarian, or even a single hogrider.  Whatever the shaping attack, ensure that you have the troops to accomplish the mission because failing on an early shaping attack can doom your overall attack to failure.
2. If you want your KH# to drive into the base, you must funnel them in.  This involves using troops (normally wiz) to reduce lateral targets to that your KH team is drawn into the base – similar to the cut concept with dragons.  You will want a few wiz to accompany your king and your golem.  If it’s at all possible, it’s great to have the surviving troops from your CC kill file in and join this attack as it happens.
3. If there are builder huts in the corners, give some real thought to having 1 or 2 archers held aside to prevent yourself from suffering the heart-rending 99% two-star.
4. Don’t panic!  If your hogs don’t go immediately where you thought they would, give it a second before you panic-heal half the base.  Sometimes these pathing variations come back together and aren’t too far off your original plan.  Sometimes, they wind up even better than you planned.  So whatever the case, don’t panic.  If you’ve planned well, you will have more room for error than you think.
5. When do you heal?  We mentioned areas where there is a significant GB liability, high density of defenses, or the Barbarian King is chasing them around.  Aside from these pearls, it’s always good to heal hogs around wizard towers, whose splash damage accrues to the whole pack.

Keeping all this in mind, build your army phase by phase.  Work from the beginning, leaving your main hog army as the last thing you fill in having given all the previous phases the troops they require.  If you have fewer than 24 hogs left for your main attack, most of the time you should consider something else.

I hope this helps.  Happy hogging and let me know if you have experiences with this planning process and how it works out for you.  ~CM