Introduction

With the introduction of Advanced Traps, I like to share my thoughts on Traps in general. Central question: is it worth the effort in research and building to focus on maximizing your traps?

How do Traps Work

If we compare individual Traps to their Troop counterparts, the traps are in many ways double the troops. They have twice as much attack, defense and health, but also cost twice as many resources and take twice as long to build. One thing that is very different is the power, for troops the power is 2 for tier 1, 8 for tier 2, 24 for tier 3 and 36 for tier 4, for traps the power is 2 for tier 1, 3 for tier 2, 4 for tier 3 and 5 for tier 4. Besides that Traps are stuck to your Wall, so they cannot join you on attacks. Also (at this moment) there is no way yet to salvage traps, so once destroyed they are gone and have to be rebuilt from scratch.

There is no Trap Queue restriction similar to a Troop Queue, so you can train as many of them at the same time as your wall capacity and resource availability allow. This makes it relatively cheap to each time you start a new batch of Trap Training to respecify your commander skill points to maximize Trap Training Speed.

The role of Traps in a battle is different from Troops. Although the game maker does not give out the details of the combat engine it is a general believe that Traps absorb a portion of the damage keeping this away from Troops. The portion absorbed is related to the relative amount of traps and troops, e.g. if you have 125k traps and 125k troops, 50% of the incoming damage will be absorbed by traps.

Why Use Traps Instead of Extra Troops?

Not many players seem to ask this question, but I think everyone should. Its not just the resources and speed ups for building the traps, but the research trees as well. If you decide not to use this at all, there are a lot of speed ups and resources you can use in other ways, like building troops or research that strengthens your troops.

Major drawbacks for traps are the maximum of 125k and that there is no trap salvaging. Besides that a major drawback of splitting your efforts in both troops and traps is that you cannot boost both to a maximum with your commander skill points and commander gear. Probably you will have 1M+ troops quite soon and you will choose to boost your troops rather than your relatively small amount of traps.

You should be aware that if you are a small player and you do not shield 24/7, your wall traps will likely easily be destroyed by a solo attack from a strong player. Sure you likely kill a few more of the attacking troops, but it is still frustrating to see all wall traps disappear.

If you are a large player, have several millions of troops, you should ask yourself whether 125k wall traps is going to make a difference or whether you might be better off having another 250k troops.

Above is not to say traps are useless. One good usage is to early on build a wall full of Sand Bags. These are very cheap to build and still have the benefit that they absorb part of the damage of incoming attacks.

If you decide to build higher tier traps and you are not very strong, you should be very careful about taking hits.

If you are a turtle or trap account having a full wall of trap is good from the perspective of having relatively large strength for low power. For example a full wall of 125k tier 3 traps if 500k power, while 250k tier 3 troops is 6m power. Without boosts the strength is comparable.

Conclusion

Think twice before starting to focus on traps. Do you ever plan to take hits in a way traps might make a significant difference in either the damage you do or your defense? For many players this is likely not the case and you could better focus your resources and speed ups in other areas, for example training more troops.

Contributed by: GamesGuide on May 3, 2016