The Enigmatic Small Bomb – a TH9 Lifesaver?

For as long as I have played the game, I can recall being disappointed with the small bomb.  I can almost remember logging in to watch my first defense replay after I built my first bomb and cleverly placed it, eager with anticipation of watching the apocalyptic damage it would surely wreak upon the unwary attacker.  We’ve all been there; you know how that story ends.  So it has been that throughout my clashing tenure I’ve just stuck them around the base, without any good idea as to where they would be most effective.  A long time ago I saw someone cluster them all together at TH8 to make a second, albeit weaker, DGB-style threat.  I did that, and watched with baited breath during the first hog attack that stumbled upon it.  The hogs barely noticed.   My next big idea was to sprinkle them around in the base to wear down wiz during GoWiPes – I don’t think I killed a single one.  Then I moved them outside of my home village where archers might snipe at my collectors – alas, they wouldn’t even kill archers.  Eventually, I gave them very little thought apart from just spreading them around.

Furthermore, I watch a lot of war footage and analysis on YouTube, and subscribe to all the popular guru channels.  I can’t think of a single instance where I have ever heard one of them even mention a small bomb.  I’ve never heard Hulk remark that any attack was “totally wrecked by that small bomb,” or seen Gadi scribbling a red circle on a war base cautioning us to be careful for the possibility of a small bomb.  Now, I’m not saying that nobody’s figured out how to best use the small bomb – I’m just saying I haven’t ever heard about it.

But, like a good clasher, I upgraded them anyway.  I’ve recently finished by legos and I’ve got my heroes to 20/20, so I’ve started working on upgrading my defenses to max TH9.  I started with the traps, and recently I’ve been working my way up to a full set of level 6 small bombs.  This morning, staring at it, I resented the 1.5 million gold I was about to spend.  I thought to myself, “this pathetic thing won’t even kill an archer,” and confirmed it by looking in the barracks.  Yep, the bomb does 42 damage and the archer – notoriously frail – has 44 HP.  On the verge of forgetting about the small bomb until TH10, I decided to look through the barracks one last time and see if it could kill anything.  Clicking on the wall breaker, I stumbled on a pleasant surprise – at TH9 a max small bomb will kill a TH9 max wall breaker!  A light came on in my head: I can use these to buffer wall breaks.

It won’t work prior to TH9, unless the attacker has failed to upgrade his troops.  But if both wall breakers and small bombs are maxed, the small bomb wins head-to-head at TH9.  Let’s take a closer look:

From the chart you can see that at TH9, for the first time, you have the opportunity to take down a wall breaker 1v1 with a small bomb.  This is important, by my thinking.  It may be true that in earlier TH you could have doubled up bombs to try to ruin a wall breaker attack, but that leaves you defending only three potential breach points.  The advantage shifts considerably with having six opportunities to foil a breach.  And very often, especially in a war attack, if you can prevent the wall break you can send the attack into an irrecoverable death spiral.

So my new tactic is to identify the side of my base I am most often/likely hit from, and seed small bombs between buildings and near the corner wall segments that I know the enemy WB is going to target.  Next, the small bomb detonates about 1.5 seconds after it is activated, so I’m going to make sure the bomb is one tile off the wall.  The small bomb has a 3 tile radius, so this will still kill the wall breaker as he stops at the wall, and should do so before he/they detonate.  Here is an example:

Even in this example, I can see a spot for improvement.  I need to move that elixir collector next to the gold mine and defend the protruding corner with the small bomb.

I’m quite happy to have finally found something useful to do with the small bombs, and now feel better about the three million gold I’ve spent maxing them for TH9.  Just at this TH level, the small bomb gains a critical advantage over one of the games most vexing units: fragile and erratic, but ever necessary – the wall breaker.  I’m looking forward to seeing this small trap potentially have a big impact in my coming war defenses. ~CM

Here is a video on the topic