An Econ teacher analyzes the various uses for gems for various play style options.
Whether you are F2P, Gold Pass, or a Big Spender, it is important to be economical with your gems. In this guide, we will explore all of the different ways that you can spend gems,and how well they will serve various sets of player personal priorities.
TL;DR: Training potions for enough loot to keep your workers and lab busy at all times.
Idle lab = -5.22 per hour (or more!).Idle worker = -5.28 gems per hour (or more!).
Save the rest for lab books at TH13 (and one day, TH14); or, if your builders fell behind your lab, builder pot for timers under 7.3 days and books of building for anything longer than that, except book of heroes which should be used instead of potions starting at timers over 4 days.
All told, over the course of a 4 year account maxing lifespan, ?terrible gem spending? would only save you about a week and a half instead of ?perfect gem spending? which will save you about 4 months. That is for F2P. Those who purchase gems with real money will save even more from proper spending.
Table of contents:i. Preface: The resource economy of Clash of Clansii. Base rates for gemmingiii. Base rates for boostsiv. Buying Magic Itemsv. Selling Magic Itemsvi. Builder Base Considerationsvii. Conclusions
i. Preface: The Resource Economy of Clash of Clans
First and foremost, a gigantic thank you to all the contributors at the Clash of Clans Wiki for making this guide possible! I have relied upon their work for years now to optimize my own game play, and I have relied upon them far more to write this guide to share that optimization with you. It is by standing upon the shoulders of many others that I am able to get such a panoramic view.
An examination of the in-game economy:
There are four resources in this game, ranked by scarcity:1. Time, time, time, time, time!2. Dark Elixir3. Gold4. Elixir5. League Medals? (I would call these a currency rather than a resource)
- With time, Collectors produce the other three resources.
It will only take 3000 days or so to collect enough resources to build everything, and another 2000 days for walls.
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2. With time and training camps, elixir and dark elixir can be converted into more dark elixir, elixir, and gold.
Very high rate of profit possible.
-3. Time and elixir or dark elixir invested in upgrades can improve your attacks, increasing the rate at which time and elixir can generate returns through farming, which of course takes time.
4. Time and gold can improve your defenses, reducing the rate at which you lose resources to other players over time, and increasing loot from events like war, also limited by time.
5. Over time, you can acquire league medals. I will not go into much detail about league medals in this guide, because they cannot be purchased with gems and players get such variable amounts of them and spend them variably.
Here?s my guide on spending league medals.
Every single thing in the game that you can buy, you could also acquire through input of enough time, either active or passive. You can reduce the amount of time you need to input dramatically if you:- Keep at least 3.45 builders busy at all times- Keep lab busy at all times- Loot and manage loot efficiently- Take advantage of time-sensitive bonuses- Spend gems efficiently (As this guide is about to describe!)- Prioritize hero upgrades over other defenses- Purchase a gold pass
Whereas you can input more player time to acquire as much loot as you please, you are limited to 6 builders and one lab no matter how often you log in. Remember: the limiting resource in this game is lab time, followed by worker time!
I?ve been playing for a long time. I should have kept these builders more active; I could be maxed out by now.
IMPORTANT NOTE: all of the following numbers are reduced by a proportion approaching 20% if you apply the Gold Pass savings.
There are 5216 days of builder upgrades of which over 1000 days are focused into the first three hero upgrades. There are up to six builders, so those build times can be divided by as much as 6 times if those builders are kept busy at all times.
There are only 1509 days of research upgrades, and you only need a few things maxed out to have a fully powered attack. The offensive gains from unlocking more variety of attacks are much more marginal.
There is only one research lab, but 3.45 times as many builder days as lab days of work to do. This means that if you average more than hours of 3.45 builders working for every hour of lab work, you will hit research as the account maxing limit. If you average fewer than 3.45 builder hours for each hour of lab time, you would hit build time as the account maxing limit.
As an added wrinkle, the upgrade times are heavily focused into the King, Queen, and Warden, so if you aren?t careful, you?ll end up with only 3 builders working at the end, and the rest with nothing to do.
As for resources, you will need a grand total of:3.2 billion gold for defense upgrades1.65 billion elixir offense upgrades3.83 billion of either for wall upgrades32 million Dark Elixir for heroes and offense upgrades5216 builder days1509 research days
And as an FYI, here?s what you need to cap out each TH level:
Compiled with data from: https://clashofclans.fandom.com/wiki/Cumulative_Costs/Home_Village
Only 25% of this game is played TH1?TH10. The other 75% occurs from TH11-TH13.
Yes, there are over 1 year of research upgrades available at TH12.
You can just use collectors to build a maxed out TH7 pretty quickly, actually.
ii. Base Rates for Gem Spending
Gem spending rates are variable, with deep discounts for bulk purchases. If you are curious about how many gems something will cost you, check out this awesome tool!
In the creation of this section, I built upon the work of this ancient guide.
Gemming resources:
This is not quite as straightforward as you might expect. It works very similarly to the progressive income taxation system in most countries, except that it would be called ?regressive? instead.
Basically, the marginal rate you pay per resource gets better the more you buy at a time, with thresholds for better deals starting at 1,000; 10,000; 100,000; and 1,000,000 resources at a time. The deals get MUCH better as you scale up.
You don?t get the marginal rate, because your rate is a weighted average of all the marginal rates you paid on the way. The best rate you can get, from 0 to 18 million loot, has an average loot of about 3500 per gem.
As you can see, it is crazy to buy tiny amounts of loot. You?re getting robbed!
Ultimately, the worst way to buy loot costs 35 times more than the best way. For the rest of this guide, I will define the ?base rate? for buying loot at the best possible total average rate of about 3500 loot per gem.
If you could buy infinity at a time, you could get an average rate of 37.5; at 300k, you?ll get to about 36.
If you buy DE one at a time for one gem each, it would cost you 300,000 gems to buy 300,000 dark elixir! What? You didn?t need a calculator for that? Still, the implications are pretty major.
Similarly to gold and elixir, I will define the base rate for gemming dark elixir to be 36 DE per gem.
Gemming Timers:
This follows a similar system of increasing bargains the more you buy in bulk. The thresholds for better discounts are at 1 minute, 1 hour, and 1 day.
It is roughly 10 times more expensive per minute to skip timers under 1 hour than timers over 1 week.
Deciding on a ?base gem rate? for skipping timers, it?s much harder, because unlike resources, you can?t buy like a whole bank of time and apply it to a bunch of timers. You are limited to buying as much time as the upgrade takes.
Because most upgrades do not take 18 days ? in fact most at max don?t even take 18 days ? we will use a much lower timer. I will use the rate for 7 days as the baseline, because there are so many upgrades that take exactly 7 days, (thanks, heroes!). It isn?t too much difference: about 10 minutes instead of 11 minutes skipped per gem spent, or 143 gems per day skipped.
And now, just for fun, let?s calculate how much it would cost you to buy an account all the way from brand new to maxed out TH13 by purchasing all of the loot and assuming (generously) that your timer skips average the cost of the 1 week rate.
8.68 billion elixir/gold = 2,478,381 gems = $17,70232.25 million dark elixir = 895,778 gems = $6,398 5216 builder days = 745,888 gems = $5,3271509 research days = 215,787 gems = $1,541
Grand Total: $30,970
P.S. Remember, you can play the game yourself for the loot, so for somebody who actually enjoys the game, the price is really more like $6,800 if they only skip every builder/lab timer and earn all their loot.
iii. Gemming Boosts:
In addition to buying flat resources or flat time reductions, you can also use gems to boost your buildings to reduce their timers proportionately. This is true for everything with a timer except the builder hut and the lab ? the two that happen to be the limiting factors for advancing in the game.
We will start with collectors.
Okay, so assuming perfect use of the collector boost, which would require that you not be raided for 24 hours and never let collectors reach full storage capacity, these are the values you get from the collector boost.
Recall that the theoretically best possible rate for purchasing flat loot is 3600 per gem. Even a TH4 is able to get a much better use of gems from collectors than a TH13 with max storages gets from gemming resources flat!
At TH13, collector boosts provide about 3.4 times more loot than flat bonuses.
Moving right along to dark elixir, we see that even a TH7 using a boost will get about twice as much from boosting the drills as the best deal a TH13 could get buying is straight. The best rate 84 is about 2.4 times better than the flat rate.
Boosting Your Army Production:
First, the simple part. Recall that timers cost exponentially more to skip if they are under 1 hour. Well, that?s very often the limit for building an army! It is uniquely expensive to gem an army ready.
The boosts that are available cost a flat amount and reduce build times by 75% for one hour. So, the more armies you build during that hour, the more utility you get out of the boost.
Hero boost: 5 gems per hero, up to 20Spell boost: 10 gemsBarracks boost: 30 gemsWorkshop: 30 gems
You can also boost selectively. I might boost only troops and archer queen for goblin spam.
The break-even is when the cost of gemming an army is equal to (cumulative cost of boosts) vs (Cost of gemming all armies you need)
It is possible that gemming a single army, especially a partially complete army, will be cheaper than purchasing all of the various boosts. However, two armies will almost always cost more than the boosts. The discount is actually better the faster the armies build, too. The more armies you can deploy, the higher above x4 value you can squeeze from those boosts.
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How valuable are armies? They are not directly useful for advancing your base, but they are pretty much the only way you will ever get enough loot to keep your builders busy, which is how you advance your base.
Having an army quickly can earn you loot in the following ways:
- You can do a series of normal raids rapidly in a row.
- You can get in the limited number of attacks before a time-sensitive thing ends. (War, CWL, Legend League, Clan Games, Season Rewards, etc.)
You can make 12 of these guys per minute for 60 minutes with a boost.
Spending Gems On Armies vs. On Resources
And now, before we move into the magic item section, where all the real value purchases are, let?s just take a moment to compare the value of purchasing army boosts instead of purchasing resources.
90 gems is not actually a lot, in terms of resources. That will buy you either 315k of gold or elixir, or 3240 dark elixir.
90 gems of maximum collector boosts is either 1.1 million gold or elixir, or 7560 dark elixir.
If you just look for a while, you can easily find this kind of loot in one single attack.
In short, you would have to be exceptionally terrible at raiding *and* unwilling to sacrifice trophies in order for boosting barracks not to be a better use of gems than boosting collectors.
By far, the best way to acquire resources rapidly with gems is to boost your army production instead and use troops to raid for resources. How much better will it be? Probably 10-30+ times more, depending on the player and their strategy.
iv. Magic Items
I am missing, like, Everything.
At last, we are through the baseline calculations! Believe me, it took me longer to do them and present them nicely than it took you to read them. We can now talk about what you actually should be spending your gems on.
There are three main categories of magic items that you can buy with gems: Those that reduce timers, those that generate resources, and builder base items. If you play a lot, you only want timer reduction. If you don?t play a lot, you only want resources. Builder base is not worth the gem investment.
Magic Timer Reduction Items:
The most important thing to understand about magic timer reduction is that it provides almost no benefit if you leave your upgraders idle after you skip their timers.
So, when you consider the value of these items, recognize that this is only applicable to players who always have enough loot available to get the next upgrade going afterward.
Specifically, based on research potion prices, if you leave the lab idle after skipping a timer, it reduces the value of the reduction by about 5.22 gems for every hour you leave it idle afterward.
Similarly, based on builder potion prices, if you leave a worker idle after skipping a timer, it reduces the value of the reduction by about 5.28 gems for every hour you leave each builder idle afterward.
If you leave things idle very often, then you should probably consider spending gems on loot-making magic items instead.
Research potion, 120: This reduces the timer of an ongoing upgrade by a flat 23 hours over a 1 hour period (so it looks like it reduces a full day!).
23 hours / 120 gems = 11.50 minutes per gemRecall that the normal rate of timer skipping is asymptotic to 11.33 per gem, and anyway caps out at 11.00 per gem for an 18 day timer.
So, if your timer is substantially longer than 1 day, the research potion?s value is extremely marginal, but always at least very slightly better than gemming the timer directly. For timers under 1 day, it is dramatically better than gemming.
Builder potion, 285: This reduces the time of up to 6 ongoing timers by a flat rate of 9 hours over a 1 hour period (so it looks like it reduces 10 hours!).
With all 6 builders working, this is only a value of 11.37 per gem spent. Once again, an 18 day timer skipped would produce a value of 11.00 per gem spent, so the builder potion is only barely better than the best base rate. However, for skipping very short timers, the builder potion is dramatically better than gemming directly.
The Books
The books have a fixed cost, but variable benefit based on the length of timer you are skipping. Thus, each has a timer threshold at which it becomes superior to standard gem skips or potions.
Books outstrip gemming at 6 day timers and potions at 7 day timers, and get better and better. Potions are always at least a little cheaper than gemming.
Visualized/conceptualized differently
As you can see, builder potion and research potion have pretty good value compared to gems at very low timers, As you get toward 7 days, the discounts from magic items get pretty low, but then books start increasing in value and never stop increasing.
Thus, the longer you can save up your gems to buy books for the longest upgrades, the more value you will get from those gems. (Except for the idle worker problem mentioned at the start of this section!)
A few additional notes:
Books of Fighting or Spells, 925: Upgrading attacks increases the rate at which you can collect loot and special event bonuses, which, depending how often you play, may decrease the length of time you typically leave your builders idle. However, after you have one type of attack maxed out, additional upgrades only very marginally increase your ability to loot successfully.
Also recall that lab time is the limiting factor in a perfectly managed account, so these two items, purchased in the end game, are definitely the best for account maxing. Account maxers, save up for these at TH13 (except first buy enough training potions to keep your upgraders busy all the time).
Book of Building, 925: Upgrading defenses reduces the rate at which you lose loot to raids, and improves your ability to gain loot from wars in a way that is way too complicated to calculate, but is always going to be marginal. Also increases your odds for personal glory in war and clan ladder! There is no loot bonus for personal glory, but most players consider this to be worth it anyway.
Also, your builders need to put in 3.45 hours for every 1 hour the lab puts in, or else they become the limiting factor instead. If you have left your workers idle a lot of the time compared to your lab, then this book will become your ticket to faster account maximization instead, although it reduces total build time (5200) by less than lab books reduce total lab time (1500), so you really want to avoid this situation. Keep your builders busy!
Book of Heroes, 500: This book provides a special case for several reasons. Most obviously, it only costs 500 gems instead of 825.
Also, hero upgrades cripple your offense while they are ongoing, reducing the potential for you to win loot in wars, clan war league, regular raids, and everything else.
And, finally, about 20% of all builder time is focused into heroes, so if you don?t prioritize them early, you could end up with only 3 things to work on at the end of your maximization process. Books of heroes help mitigate that concern.
Finally, unlike almost everything else, hero upgrades cap out at 8 days and most of them take exactly 7 days.
Hero books at the late game are the obvious best choice.
One peculiarity to consider here is that the builder potion gives 54 hours spread over 6 upgrades. Since there are only 4 heroes, you can only get a maximum of x4 boost on your hero hours specifically, which is the more expensive dark blue line. If you only upgrade 2 heroes at a time, double the height of the blue line. 1 hero alone, and it?s x4 higher! Builder potions are much worse for hero rushing.
If you don?t care between hero hours and regular hours, you can use the cheaper light blue line.
Book of Everything: You cannot buy these.
Magic Resource Items:
The value of these items is difficult to explain. On the one hand, they are absolutely useless, because you could just play the game to get enough loot to upgrade things. Your own, real-life personal time is the limiting factor for acquiring loot! So, for people with very limited real-life time to invest in this game, these items will be worth more than timer reduction items.
For those who are easily able to dedicate one hour a day to boosted raiding, these items are all worthless, except for the training potion, which is far and away the absolute best value in the game.
Runes of Gold and Elixir, 1500: These items are extremely expensive. They are so expensive that you are actually better off buying the base rate of collector boosts instead! (Assuming you log in enough to actually get the loot.)
On the other hand, for every hour you leave an upgrader idle, you lose about 5 gems of value per hour. So, if a rune will save you a lot of hours of idle upgraders, then it is worth extra 5 gems per hour of idle time reduced. Of course, training potions can be used to get loot instead, and each rune costs the same as 60 training potions.
Runes are garbage. Standard collector boost prices are cheaper!
This illustration of the same thing is a little easier to see just how much better standard boosts are than rune prices. Come one, Supercell, drop those rune prices!
Rune of Dark Elixir, 3000: Dark elixir is, in many ways, the limiting factor of the game, because it can be very difficult to collect. If you don?t have a lot of time to invest into playing the game, you will probably need this more than anything else (because you?ll give up on walls).
8333 gems?! That is 333 training potions!! Think you can fill storage with 333 hours of boosted army production?
Only at TH13 if you are going from ~0 to 300,000 is it finally worth it to use a rune instead of standard boosts.
I just want to point out again, 3000 gems for a dark elixir run could instead be 120 training potions. 120 hours of boosted army production should easily be enough to fill your storage many times over even if you are terrible at attacking! If you have any time at all to play this game, do not buy runes. Buy training potions.
Resource Potion, 115: Some among you may have been wondering, looking at the graphs above, how come resource potion isn?t included? The answer is that resource potion spreads its value over three different types of resource, so a direct comparison of costs is difficult. It gets a special set of graphs.
Regular boosts are cheaper than potion until TH7. Potion is cheaper than regular DE boost alone starting TH11.
It?s impossible for me to tell you the value of the above graph to you. If you wanted just gold or just elixir, resource potions are a bad value. If you wanted DE, then they are a good value. If you wanted some combination of all three, then they are a great value! It really depends on what you are looking for.
However, remember that you could have gotten 4 training potions instead, with 15 gems to spare! Can you loot at least 1 million gold and elixir and 10k DE in 4 hours of boosted army production? (Of course you can!) So, get training potions instead.
Wall Rings, 500: Each wall ring is worth 1 million gold or elixir. How does that stack up against the other production items? We will count resource potion here without even showing the benefits to DE production.
Wall rings ? and all of these ? are lame. Training potions only!!
Training potion, 25: As I keep talking about throughout this entire section, there is nothing that comes anywhere close to the value of training potions.
Boosting all of your stuff normally costs Costs 40?90 gems, depending on how much you?ve got unlocked. The training potion does it all for just 25 gems!
The value of that boosted army production really depends on you, the player, but could easily be worth millions. Easily x10 the value of most other magic items.
v. Should I Ever Sell Magic Items?
You need to sell five 10 gem items or one 50 gem item to pay for 2 training potions.
If you are able to leverage those training potions into significantly more use of your builders or lab, then it is possible that you could actually max out your account faster this way.
It is never worth it to try to turn other things into each other, because the conversion rate is so low. Training potion is just 10x better than everything else, so even selling the others at a 90% loss to buy more training potions might be worth it, if you have real-life time to use them.
Training potion + Super Goblins? Could be worth 50 gems.
Obviously, there are storage limits for magic items, so if you have a free one you can?t claim, but you can?t benefit from using one, selling would be beneficial.
Power potion and hero potion are also not necessarily useful at all, other than fun and glory. Maybe they could win you a war! That might be worth the 10 gems of expected value gain.
iv. Builder Base Considerations:
Is it worth it to spend gems to rush the builder base to get the 6th builder in the home base sooner?
Easy part of the answer: Not if you already waste a lot of builder time with idle workers. Also not if you don?t keep your lab busy.
Hard part of the answer:
In order to calculate this, we will need to find the ?break even? point for investing gems into the builder base, where having a 6th builder X days early for the price of Y gems is the same value as purchasing X days of timer reduction for Y gems.
We will use the rate from before of 5.28 gems per hour that a builder is idle as the value of a 6th builder. There are also resource management implications for 6th builders that make them even more useful than they might instantly appear, and builder potion synergy, and improved very long run speed wall-maxing-optimization, but those are extremely variable by player, and so I will just sidestep all that other than this note that the estimates I am about to give understate the value of a 6th builder, perhaps a lot depending on your priorities.
So, anyway, this gives us a value for the 6th builder at 127 gems per day. If a builder base magic item will get you toward O.T.T.O. faster than a rate of 127 gems per day of reduction, it is profitable to do so in terms of gems.
Now, 127 gems is worth about 5 hours of timer reduction or 45,000 loot directly, neither of which is anywhere near a day?s worth of builder time in gems.
Clock tower is 4.5 hours of timer reduction and some loot for 75 gems. Remember, loot is more limited in Builder Base, so that?s not nothing? but still it won?t approach a whole 127 gems per day.
The runes look way, way overpriced. Didn?t bother calculating.
So the long and the short answers are: no, it does not help to spend gems to rush builder 6. You should buy books instead if you have enough loot.
Meanwhile, if an upgrade takes more than 7.3 days, it would be beneficial to use a book to rush it to get the last builder, which I believe amounts to ?none of the time.? Anyway, all this is assuming you don?t want to focus more on lab time (which most will, for account maxing), in which case the 6th builder is kind of moot. 4 builders is already more than enough to match the lab time. Buy books with gems instead.
Warning: If you put off upgrading your gem mine to rush O.T.T.O., you must subtract the extra value of gems you missed out on from the value of your new worker! OTTO is worth a lot more than the gem mine per day, but it takes a lot more to get it. I would do the gem mine first.
vii. How many gems can a player expect to get for free, and how much can they actually reduce their time to max their account by spending those well?
1 obstacle every 8 hours. Average obstacle worth of 2 gems, = 6 gems per day1 gem box per week = 3.6 gems per dayGem mine = 4.8 per day0 to 20-150 per clan games = 0.67 to 5 gems per day. Let?s say, uh, average 60 gems per game, which would be 2 per day. Sound about right? No? Adjust it to what you think is right and use that number. It really depends what bonus second item you choose.
14.4 per day, plus potential clan games rewards puts it to 16.4 per day. That?s about 500 gems a month, or 6000 gems per year. Also, 656 every 40 days.
Why care about every 40 days? Because the magic items in the trader shop go through a 40 day cycle. Every 40 days, you will see the following items:
https://clashofclans.fandom.com/wiki/Daily_Discounts
If you buy all 17 training potions in each cycle, that is 425 gems. This would leave you with a 40 day surplus of 231 gems plus whatever special events and personal quest one-time bonuses you receive. That would be a yearly surplus of 2079.
For a broader scope, supposing you have saved up all your gems for 3 years and finally reach TH13. These are important numbers; it takes 3 years to cap out TH12 without magic items or gems. So, how many magic items will you be able to purchase in the year that you are there?
Per year: 6000 without training potions or 2080 with them.Achievements: 14000Builder huts: -4,000Random event bonuses: ???
Thus, when you cap out TH12 after 3 years, you could easily have 30,000 gems saved up entirely free-to-play! More if you prioritize gems over magic items in clan games and sell things instead of using them, to buy back at x10 price later. That would make sense if the timers increased x10 in length, which they do not, starting at 2 days per timer.
There are nine 40 day cycles in a year, so during the year at TH13 you could get 36 books of building, 27 books of fighting, 27 books of spells, and 36 books of heroes. You would run out of lab upgrades to use all of those, but that all comes out to 101,250 gems!
In short, you have no reason to worry about running out of things to buy at the end. But, suppose you somehow run out of things to buy? TH14 will be released probably 1 year from the time TH13 was released, as per Supercell?s official projected timeline for new releases.
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One final question: how much can you really reduce your time to maxing out your account with good gem spending? Well, as we discussed, we are probably talking about 30,000 gems.
That could be 32 books. We will look at the longest 32 timers and see by what proportion you could possibly reduce your time maxing out.
There are 16 lab upgrades at TH13 that each take at least 15 hours. There are far more than 16 upgrades at TH13 that take 14 days or longer.
Each 40 days, you could get 6 lab books. There are only 285 days of research at TH13, so after 40 days and 6 books (90 days), you would be down to 150 days. One more 40-day cycle of 6 books, and you?re down to 20 days. So, 100 days of lab time instead of 270.
This would cost 12 books, which leaves you with 18,900 gems. Each 40 day cycle, you can get 4 books of building and 4 books of heroes, which will reduce your build time by about 102 hours each cycle.
There are 1341 hours of building at TH13. You have 6 builders, so that gets cut down by 240 for every 40 day period (if you keep them busy!). Thus, after one 40 day cycle, you could reduce build time by 342 instead of 240, with enough gems to do this for three cycles. Ultimately, this will mean finishing buildings in 160 days instead of 225.
Oops. 160 days for builders and 100 days for the lab? We should convert some. The rate for converting is you give up 6 days of lab reduction for every 1 day of builder time reduction (because there are 6 builders!) Therefore, reducing the builder time by 9 more days would cost 54 more research days (~3 books). So, you would end up with about 150 days total for TH13 instead of 285 days. That comes out to about four months.
*Edit based on criticism from readers: It is also important to recognize that these limits can be further affected by the use of hammers. Use the same formula: each lab hammer reduces lab time by the amount it states; each builder hammer reduces build time by 1/6th of the amount it states. Balance appropriately! (One day I may write a guide exploring this more fully.)
If you spend your gems perfectly and ignore hammer effects, therefore, you can expect to shave about 4 months off of your account maxing time. Now, the books are about three times better than the best base rates of timer reduction, which are about four times better than the worst rates for timer reductions, which means that if you spent your gems very poorly, you would get about 1/12 or less the value.
Thus, ?terrible gem spending? would only save you about a week and a half instead of ?perfect gem spending? which will save you about 4 months. This is out of a grand total of 3?4 years. So, you might save about 8% time with good gem use. A gold pass throughout the entire thing will save you 20%-40% for highly active players, much much more than 40% for more casual players.
The more gems you buy, the more you can reduce the time of the game. $250 will save you about 8% of the game, if applied perfectly. Returns diminish the more is invested.
3 years of gold pass would cost you $180 and would save you 20?40% of time at least. Plus you get cool skins. Do not buy gems if you do not have a gold pass!
(I would just not buy gems? You can buy a maxed-out TH13 on the underground market for about $500)
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viii. Conclusions
Phew! Wow! This guide was a lot more than I expected it to be, honestly. It is no wonder there is so much confusion surrounding this topic! The opportunity costs and ratios are very difficult to determine without the proper background and training.
I hope you enjoyed this deep exploration of the economics of gem spending in Clash of Clans! I really poured my heart into it.
If you are interested in reading more of my analysis and theory with respect to this game, check out and follow Mr. Way?s School of Clash! Thanks for taking the time to read this article; I hope to find you at the final paragraph of my next, as well!
