Clash of Clans is popular because it’s built to be simple enough for kids to play, with minimal yet consistent time requirements that leave you checking in on your village frequently. It’s fun, , especially when you get friends together to join a clan and start wars as a group.

While most elements of the game are fairly straighforward, there’s a couple of things you need to know if you want to quickly climb the ranks and prove that you are the best among your friends. With that in mind, we’ve assembled a couple of tips that will give you an edge over your opponents no matter what level you are currently at.

Build as many resource collectors and storage units as possible

Clash of Clans is a resource-based strategy game, and like all good resource-based strategy games you need to quickly establish as many resource collectors as possible in order to get anywhere. Building an army and attacking other villages is a ton of fun, but every minute you spend waiting for resources is a minute you’re not burning someone’s village to the ground, so focus on resource collection first and do it right.

Make sure you build the maximum number of Gold and Elixir collectors allowed by your Town Hall, and level those collectors up as frequently as possible. The same goes for your resource storage collectors, especially if you want to level up your Town Hall quickly. You need to be able to store resources in vast quantities to afford Town Hall upgrades, and especially in the early stages of the game this is very important.

Know your resource cycles

Your Gold and Elixir are produced at a constant, predictable rate. To optimize the number of times you are checking in on your clan, take a look at the information tab for your resource generators. You’ll see the rate that each system produces Gold or Elixir, and the total amount of that resource each system can hold before you need to dump that resource into their storage containers. It’s quick math, just divide the rate per hour by the total and the answer is how many hours you have until that collector is full.

If your resource collectors are all the same level, you can even set alarms on your phone to remind you to check every couple of hours. This ensures you aren’t losing time where your collectors are full, and you’ll be able to grow your village much faster.

Don’t let your opponent spawn inside your village

Leveling up your Town Hall gives you access to a whole new range of things, and that almost always means it’s time to build yourself a bigger base. If you’ve decided to build your walls out bigger than you need so there’s room for expansion inside your village, you’ve probably noticed that the enemy will sometimes spawn inside your base and start wreaking havok. Fixing this is easy, as you just move the walls or fill in the space behind the walls, but it’s important to remember that any gap inside your village will leave an opening for your opponent to exploit.

To create a zero-gap base, move any building and pay attention to the white space that appears when you set the building down. As long as there are no gaps in that white space inside your base, your opponent will have to spawn from the outside and fight in to get to your village. This is also why you see people put buildings outside of their walls, as it increases the distance the enemy soldier has to travel in order to reach the base and leaves those soldiers open to be weakened by your defenses.