Reading a War: Why Attacks 3-Star (or Don't)
How to read Town Hall matchup, attack efficiency, and the real decisive factor behind a war's result.
Stars decide first, destruction is the tiebreaker
A war's result comes down to total stars first — whichever clan earned more stars across all its attacks wins, full stop. Destruction percentage only matters when both clans end the war tied on stars; in that case, whichever side has the higher average destruction takes it. A clan can out-destroy its opponent overall and still lose, if the other side simply earned more stars.
That's why a close-looking war (similar destruction on both sides) can still have a clear, undramatic winner — the stars were never actually close, even if the bases looked similarly wrecked.
Town Hall matchup sets the ceiling
Average Town Hall level across a clan's roster is the single biggest predictor of how a war tends to go — a clan attacking down in Town Hall level has an easier path to 3-stars than one attacking up. It's not destiny (a well-built base and a bad attack can flip this), but it's the first thing worth checking when a war result looks surprising.
This site's War Matches pages show the real average TH for both sides on every tracked war, so you can see the matchup context instead of just the final score.
Attack efficiency: not every attack needs to be used
A clan that uses fewer than its full allotment of attacks isn't necessarily playing badly — missed or unused attacks matter, but so does whether the attacks that *were* thrown actually converted into stars. A clan that used every attack for a combined 60% star efficiency did worse than one that used most of its attacks at 90% efficiency, even though the second clan technically "used fewer attacks."
The most useful single number here is stars earned versus the maximum possible (3 per member) — it normalizes for team size and tells you how clean the war actually was, not just who showed up.
What this site tracks — and what it doesn't
Every war this site tracks captures real Town Hall levels, real stars, and real destruction percentage per attack, straight from the Clash of Clans API while the war is live or shortly after. What it deliberately doesn't do is guess at troop or spell composition per attack — Supercell's API never exposes that, for any war, for anyone, so any site claiming to know "what army they used" in a specific past attack is not working from real data.