Anti Electro Dragon bases: the geometry that beats the chain

Electro Dragon spam is the most reliable low effort attack in the game, which is why every war has at least three of them. It does not need a funnel, it does not need a Queen charge, and it forgives a lot of mistakes. What it does need is buildings close together, and that is where you get to do something about it.

What the chain actually does

An Electro Dragon's attack bounces from its target to nearby buildings, losing damage at each jump. The bounce goes to whatever is closest and in range. That is the entire mechanic, and it is what makes the army efficient: one attack that hits four buildings is worth four attacks.

Which means the counter is not more damage. It is making each bounce land on something that does not matter.

What an anti Electro layout does differently

Defences are never adjacent. The important buildings, Infernos, Scattershots, Eagle, Monolith, are placed with something disposable between them. This is the core of the design and it is visible at a glance once you know to look.

Junk buildings are placed on purpose. Collectors, mines, army camps and the Builder Hut are not filler; they are chain absorbers. A layout that packs all its collectors into one corner has given away the tool it needed.

Air defences sit apart, not in a cluster. Three air defences within one compartment die to one attack path. Spread across three compartments they each have to be dealt with separately, which costs the attacker time and spells.

Seeking mines are aimed, not scattered. They should sit on the lane the tank will fly down toward an air defence. A seeking mine on the outer edge fires at the first thing that crosses it, which is usually a pet or a scout balloon, and then it is gone.

The air sweeper faces the likely entry. One sweeper pointed at the side attackers actually enter from is worth more than two pointed at nothing.

Anti Electro is not the same as anti air

These get used interchangeably and they are different problems.

A base can be genuinely strong against air and still fall to electro spam, because it packed its defences tightly for compartment reasons. The two goals pull against each other slightly, which is why layouts get built for one or the other rather than both.

Checking a layout yourself

You can judge this in about fifteen seconds without knowing anything else about the base.

1. 1Find the two most important defences on the map.
2. 2Ask what is directly between them.
3. 3If the answer is "nothing" or "another defence", the chain links them.
4. 4Repeat for the air defences.

That is most of it. The rest is whether the seeking mines are on flight lanes and whether the sweeper faces the open side.

Where this stops helping

Spacing buys you a lot against a mediocre electro attack. Against a good one with the right spell timing it buys you a slower three star rather than no three star, and that is still worth having in a war decided on percentage.

What it cannot do is compensate for defence levels. An Electro Dragon army walks through underlevelled air defences regardless of how cleverly they are spaced, because the chain being inefficient does not matter when each individual hit is already enough.

Short version

The chain jumps to whatever is nearest, so put something worthless nearest. Never place two real defences beside each other, spread the air defences across compartments, aim the seeking mines at flight lanes rather than scattering them, and point the sweeper at the side people actually attack from. Then check your defence levels, because geometry does not fix those.