I had been playing this well over one year, with a bit of money and a lot of time and attention i maxed out on TH8 and slowly progressing through TH9: honestly, if not for my clan mates, i would have quit the game.
Getting to TH8 from TH7 is a huge step, especially with upgrading the walls and the King, and now when i am at TH9, although the walls are a bit easier with the exiler upgrade option, the rest of the building upgrades are not at all easy.
Two sides to the upgrade problems: cost, and the amount of farming needed to pay for that cost.
The way it works with farming is that when you attack someone of the lower TH, you get less of their holdings. Although you will get more by attacking someone with higher TH, when they hit you back you will lost (likely) more than you jad farmed from them in the first place. So what i do, is to upgrades the defenses before saving up seriously to upgrade more expensive things such as troops.
The cost is another thing that bugs me, you can save up to about 8m gold at TH8, and when someone attack you they can get at most 20% of your loot. on a good day i can get about 200k per strike, that means, if you don't get smart with selection of target, you will easily lost a lot more then you can farm once you got to say 4m.
Not only farming is repetitive, there isn't too much varieties with base design. The thing is, there are actually a handfull of design that make sense at each TH. Things are a bit more interesting at lower TH, with weaker defense building and less wall, but once you hit TH8, it is very easy to cover the entire base will all those buildings.
(more tomorrow)
