I disagree, if you are patient and know what you are doing it doesn't take much to make big profits on raids. My current army costs ~60k elixir and takes about 20-30 minutes tops to make, and its very rare to not double that in return + make over 100k in gold on each raid (200k+ each isnt uncommon either even with this cheap/fast army). You can easily screw yourself and get in a position where people are stealing more from you than you can raid, but you either lower your trophy count and face people at your level or spend your stored loot on upgrades.
I do an all archers raid strat with a 99.3% success rate and an 92% destruction rate (averaged on 373 raids) You can make profits on said raids, but it is so miniscule in the grand scheme of things that it is not worth it. And this is the biggest hook this game has, making you think you are making progress without realizing that you are throwing away your most important resource, time.
Here's the breakdown of my strat, which is one of the most efficient available at TH Lv 6 through Lv9 and that very few people use.
Assuming you have 4 lv8 barracks and 3 lv6 army camps, which are huge resource and time sinks by themselves. Also assume you have a good guild that constantly feeds you good wallbreaker (this is not hard to achieve)
-200 archers take 20.833 minutes to complete.
-If you have to build your own wall breakers it takes 22.233 minutes to complete.
-It takes 32k elixir for said archers. A couple hundred elixir less if you build your WB
-On Avg it takes 22 searches to find a decent raid.(Decent raid been at least 100k of each resource and 50 dark elixir)
-That adds a cost of 12.76k G on the searches and on avg and 3.66 min of searching time
-Add to that the use of one spell that can go from 20k elixir to 27k elixir at this level (TH8)
-Archers strat is a pretty quick strat if you know your placements, on avg it take 2.36 min for the match to be over.
You just spent, at least, 26.853 min for a gain of 48k elixir gain 87.24k gold and 50 dark elixir.
Now consider that a single upgrade at this level, of most buildings, go upwards of 1.25 million resources, research updward 2.25 million resources and dark elixir upgrades 10k and up (Not considering wall upgrades that are 200k gold each and you have 225 available). There is just no way, that you'll make a significant dent using the combat mechanic that they introduce early on to hook you into the game. It completely flies out the window. Unless you are willing to throw away the oh so important resource of time, that arguably you could use on much better games or other things.
How do you continue to progress? You upgrade all your resource collectors, log in every 6~8 hrs (for literally 20 seconds) or so to collect and wait for the 3~5 days upgrades to finish to set up the new upgrades. Rinse and repeat. Or you could get super magnificent best value offer and pay real money for gems that will help you speed everything up. You cant go wrong with that, after all, time is money right?
edit:I forgot to add, this is not taking into consideration that you leave your TH outside of the village so you can trigger the shield that avoids your village to get raided at only a cost of 1k gold and 1k elixir and a few trophies. That way you dont have massive losses on raids against you.
