War Weight: What It Is and What It Is Not
Mechanics
Updated: 18 September 2026 · By the Goblins Farm team
War weight is the informal name for how war matchmaking evaluates your village. It generated years of folklore, elaborate spreadsheets and a whole culture of engineered bases. Most of that folklore was already out of date when it was written, and almost none of it is worth your time now.
What it actually is
When a clan searches for a war, matchmaking evaluates the participating rosters and looks for an opposing clan of comparable strength. It considers what each village has built and upgraded, offensive assets as well as defensive ones. That evaluation is what players call war weight. Supercell has never published the formula and has changed it repeatedly.
The important part, and the part that overturns most of the old folklore: offence counts. In early versions of the game, matchmaking leaned heavily on defensive buildings, which created a well-known exploit.
Engineered bases, and why they died
The exploit was the engineered or anti-3-star account: a village that deliberately skipped defensive upgrades while maxing offence, so it would be weighted low, placed near the bottom of the war map, and could then attack far above its apparent level. A clan full of these could consistently out-punch its matchups.
Supercell addressed this over several years by giving offensive assets real weight in matchmaking and by adjusting how war maps are ordered. The result is that engineering now mostly produces the opposite of what it was designed to produce: a village that is weighted according to its strong offence and matched accordingly, but that defends like a much lower Town Hall, so it hands out easy stars all war.
You will still meet players insisting otherwise, generally quoting advice that was accurate around a decade ago.
What clans should actually do
Three pieces of advice that survive every matchmaking change:
- Build balanced villages. A village whose offence and defence roughly match its Town Hall matches fairly and performs where it is placed. This is the whole answer.
- Manage the roster, not the weight. The lever a clan genuinely controls is who participates. Fielding fifteen committed attackers beats fielding thirty of whom half forget.
- Stop worrying about the number. Time spent modelling war weight is time not spent upgrading heroes, and hero levels win wars.
A note on the folklore. Much of the war weight content online, including detailed per-building weight tables, dates from an era with a different formula. Treat any specific number you find as historical unless it is very recent and sourced.
Frequently asked
Does upgrading defences make my war matchups harder?
It contributes, but so does upgrading your army, heroes and laboratory, because modern war matchmaking weighs offensive assets as well as defensive ones. Deliberately skipping defences no longer buys you an easy matchup; it just makes you easier to three-star.
Do engineered bases still work?
Not in the way they were designed to. Once offensive assets started counting toward matchmaking, an account with maxed offence and neglected defence gets weighted for its offence and then loses defences all war. The strategy is a relic of a much older version of the game.
Do trophies affect war matchmaking?
No. War matchmaking evaluates the participating rosters' assets and ignores trophies entirely, which is why trophy dropping has no effect on the wars your clan is matched into.
Keep reading
Goblins Farm is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or specifically approved by Supercell. Clash of Clans is a trademark of Supercell Oy. This material is unofficial fan content produced under Supercell's Fan Content Policy. Game values change with every update; always verify in-game before committing an upgrade.