Thank you for sharing resnullius.
I choose a side where im going to attack from.
On that side I drop the 2-3 horses, I spread em out, for example 1 each corner and 1 in the middle of the side, then behind them i drop all my warriors in a big line (covering the whole side), and then behind a line with the archers, maybe dropping some more archers on the side the forest defenders are coming from, since those can be a pain starting the attack.
The idea of dropping everything in a line is that they stay in a line kind of formation throughout the whole fight, so they usually don't bunch up and take the cat. dmg as a bunch. Imagine a scanner line going slowly through the paper it's scanning, it's kind of what u see with this strategy most of the times.. the scanner line being your army, and the paper the poor guys base
.
If I see that there is a vulnerable catapult outside the walls, or something like that, I save up some warriors and drop em directly to it once the rest of the army gets near it, but not before, this way they have more chance of surviving with their fellow warriors close to them. If you didn't save any soldiers, maybe drop the alliance troops.
I take elephants and/or horseman on my merc camp. I use this when I find tough bases or big whales, but it's not very often.
If you find your soldiers bunching up use a heal tactic, those can help a lot.
With this "line" strategy you don't use the rally very often, since disrupting the line formation can be more harmful than killing the specific building you targeted.
But it is useful sometimes for getting quicker to that last couple of defences, or if your soldiers drop formation, u can sometimes rally them back away from harms way, so together they start marching again towards the rest of the base, and this usually makes em gain the line formation again.
It will all be clearer once you start trying it out, I don't know if I'm explaining myself very well here ^^
Hope it helps.
Cheers!