Ladders: A better trap then a spike pit?

I played a game today where the enemy team lined up the front of their wall with a three tile tall column of ladders that blanketed the field. I looked at it and said "wuh da fuh?" Seeing as I haven't played in a while it seemed a very unconventional build for me. I was completely used to: a wall and then under the wall a large spike pit. (Which I have to admit has many flaws and is very resource consuming). All of my doubts changed as soon as I, a knight at the time, walked upon this blanket of ladders. The ladders slowed my movement to a snails pace, they stop bombs(you cant pick up any velocity at all), they provided archers with slower moving targets, and stop your teammates from dying from fall damage. Sufficed to say I find that building a blanket of ladders in front of your giant wall is much more effective then a spike pit.

P.S. Since college started I have been away and three updates happened out of nowhere... so if this has been around for awhile, I apologize for the noob post :P

 

I've started building spike pits with ladder bridges across them, then put an archer spot above. Your team can easily move across the pit, but a fully charged arrow will drop an enemy straight into the spikes. As long as someone is watching over the pit, it is far more effective than draw bridges.

 

My last match we were constantly being harrased by douchey Knights so I built a drawbridge over a 6 deep hole under our castle that was being destroyed, suffice to say we won again :D

 

Well what i see is that ladders can be utilized as a tile to slow down and inhibit enemy movement. While drawbridges redirect enemy movement.

 

This is quite clever! I never thought of using ladders' slowing ability for such a purpose...

 

I know right? My mind was blown

 

This is really smart. It really highlights the fact that stuff like killing is secondary to map control, stalling/pushing. I think it would be interesting to do an in depth quantitative study of the stalling power of various terrain modifications...

Unless that sounds really nerdy.

 

If you dropped 10 ladders every time you spawned as a builder and suicide ran through enemies...

You might actually be doing more good than mining.

 

It does sound about as nerdy as "metagame" and "strategy". Which is very.

A analysis of matches would indeed be helpful in establishing a good strategy. Then again how would you track the required information? You can't record a match AFAIK and there's just too much you'd be missing if you'd do it visually.

A stat-tracking system would be great. Especially seeing as the game is far from finished and will require a lot of tweaking.

 

I totally do this whenever I can lol

 

Also, put ladder/nets around round tent's flag. It will slowdown anyone who tries to grab it.

 

In going along with terraforming, how do you think different shaped blocks would work? I don't mean circles and hexagons and pentagons and shit, simply diagonally shaped blocks/little triangles. Depending on how steep of an incline a builder makes on one side, the opposing team would not be able to run up it, they would just slide down. Now, turn this around and they could also be sliding into traps and whatnot. What are your thoughts?

 

I think it's funny when an enemy knight will follow you as a builder down an inescapable canyon, and then spend many minutes trying to get out of the canyon rather than F+E suiciding. Worst case spawn time is what, 12 seconds? It effectively takes a knight and whatever damage they could do out of the action for minutes at a time.... It's amazing to me how many people seem to play without thinking about that. Enough so that I was using it as a viable strategy last night...

 

No, depends on the serverconfig. I had 30s respawntime on one server once. (It was 8vs2)

 

Fair enough. But in the probably 100 or so games I've played at this point, I've never seen more than 12.

 

And many of y'all are thinking you can just keep on hopping on top of the wall of ladders to avoid the slowdown. Well archers knock back with fully charged shots will push the enemy deeper into the ladder netting making their advance practically a crawl.

 

I find this game to be more like a tug-of-war/tower defense game with constant waves of units being pushed against eachother where you can build different types of traps to hurt or slow down the enemy or whatever. Now this is a good tactic but you cant say its better then spike traps or vice versa, spike pits just physically do a good amount of damage to enemies while ladder blankets like this can slow them down making them easier targets. With the two combined you have a slowing trap that you can snipe enemies towards a spike pit. I hope that we can find more combinations of things like this in later updates :D

 

I know that the title could be misleading, yet I tried my best for this topic to be a "food for thought" type of thing, that was directed to a fickle audience then something that should actually be answered. I tried to make the title in such a way that it piqued people's curiosity when they read it. However my purpose was not necessarily to compare the traps, albeit that is what it initially seems like, but to raise awareness that ladder walls can be an economic, and viable option as a "structure that impedes" or as a "trap." :)

 

this brought me on an idea to stop skybridges efficiency.
put a 2~3 height long ladder on ur roof(on both edges).
then connect them with ladders= bombs still explode but dont dam blocks.