A mini-guide to building effective anti-archer defences

This is absolute trash.


Neither is this any good.


This defence might work against third-rate archers like Radioactive or Punk123, but no, this one won’t deter good archers.


After seeing countless badly made anti-archer defences being made on Bunnie’s Elantris CTF map, I decided to write a short guide on how to build constructs that do keep archers out of your base.

1. Protruding traps
The most important thing to keep in mind is that archers need momentum and hence “vertical space” to sling themselves over buildings and walls. Denying them that space is key.


As you can see, when slinging upwards, the grapple hook also pulls the archer towards the wall.


This can be used to your advantage when building solid anti-archer defences. Construct a lower part that sticks out, fill it with spikes and then construct a more inward upper part that also contains spikes. See image for clarification:


How effective is it?

2nd showcase:

(but seriously please don’t construct a building like the one shown here, it’s incredibly wasteful in resources)
The important thing is to NOT build any wood platforms on top of these, since that will only allow the archer to grapple onto it. The obvious disadvantage is of course that this trap takes quite some time and resources to set up. One bomb arrow is usually enough to disable it. However, that is one bomb arrow that cannot be used on your base (when archers come from below). Still, for land-based defences, there are much better solutions.

2. The long wood platform
This is a low-cost solution that works perfectly against trash archers but only slows down good archers for a few seconds.


This is how you circumvent it:

Or, failing that:


It’s cheap, granted, but don’t expect it to work 100% of the time. Still, it adds an additional obstacle to would-be grapple invaders and if you station an archer bot there, no one will pass through.

3. Cheap wood walls
This is by far the best land-based, anti-archer defence that is both effective and dirt-cheap.

This is very hard to get across:


Yes, it dies to a single fire arrow or a few knight slashes. But those extra seconds are all you need, especially if you set this up deep inside your territory. It holds off knights for a few seconds and halts or at least wounds archers. This trap can also be placed atop of buildings:
The only downside to this, of course, is when your team mates also manage to get themselves killed and then blame you for griefing and vote kick you. But then again, KAG wouldn’t be KAG without such things happening.

Cheers

 

<reserved for idk>

 

Hey im better than Radioactive!

 

The 3rd version is easily bypassable by both archers and knights as long as you know some weird game mechanics (Don't instantly start wallclimbing; get close to the wall, jump up without holding A or D, and then only start wallclimbing when you're "inside" the spikes)


@Edit: expected gif to be better quality but whatever

For any versions of these traps to actually be good you'd need to put in more materials which is just a waste. 3 spikes equals 90 stone which at this point could be better used as another layer to your main tower/mid tower. Anti-archer defences are hardly ever effective on normal maps and are generally not good and should not be built (maybe only on island maps, but there are only a few).

 

I agree most "traps" are really cost-ineffective save for on island maps, but I guess that doesn't matter as much in pub matches as it does in clan wars.
I also wonder if an alternative version of trap #3 could potentially circumvent this bug? Or at least hold the enemy up a bit longer.

e.g. would this tweaked trap work?

 

Thing is, at this point you're only blocking knights from going over that wall, because archers can easily bypass it due to the building's height - they can just grapple and only novice archers would kill themselves on these spikes. Skilled archers can probably avoid damage most of the time, while worse ones will just lose 0.5 a heart which isn't really worth it



So for that amount of materials used (90-100 stone, 80 wood), this is much easier to build, has backwall (easier to repair), and you can keep expanding on a building like this, while it achieves pretty much the same goal as the version with spikes



^ and there's no wooden blocks that can be easily destroyed by a knight now, like in spike version

it's not a bug btw

 

Pretty solid guide. You're correct on a lot of fronts, like how Archer needs space and momentum to actually go anywhere.

I personally could grapple over any of those constructions, however. Archer has a lot of mobility tools and creating a building that can stop every archer is extremely difficult, it took people a lot of time to start developing a meta against me back in the day.

One thing that you guys seem to fixate too much on is resource cost. I respect the brutal efficiency and objective sense that our new meta has, but I don't believe in building temporary stuff that I could pick apart in a second.

Every building should have multiple points of failure. It does not take long or much to construct such a building, I can post examples somewhere another time.