There was a period a few months ago where some Jungle Wars players at Kongregate were experimenting with cross shaped village defenses. I'm now noticing swastika (hooked cross) shapes; yesterday, I saw two on an attacking run and today a third has been brought to my notice.
Here's a very clean example. I couldn't fit the whole view in my screenshot, just the top half:
Click to enlarge. Notice the designer, Zukar, has created "empty lanes" that lead to "kill zones" where weapons are concentrated. Each lane has a weapons tower at the opening. These are designed to hurt or slow down the attacking mob but lack enough mutual support to do their job.
In my recent attack, I tried to use bombers to break through the wall rather than have my army enter the lane at the opening. I assumed booby traps were there.
Surprise #1: the design causes bombers to enter the lane - they refuse to attack the outer wall, heading instead down the lane for the inner wall near the totem. Most of mine were killed; my golem had to break the inner wall.
Surprise #2: There are not enough traps to cover this much real estate inside the lanes. I was expecting traps to eat up my bombers but the traps were scattered widely in the four lanes and had little effect.
Notice the center of the design has a clan headquarters to help defend but no firing towers. The defensive towers are outside the farthest wall. The designer wanted me to enter the arm of the swastika and take hits from the outside towers while my army ran toward the center.
Instead, my gorillas and dinos ran around the edge of the village destroying buildings outside the walls before entering the walls. Since they target weapons platforms first, they cleaned up the equipment that was watching over the lanes. Once dinos and gorillas entered the lanes, defensive firepower was too weak to prevent a win.
Here is a variation on the swastika design from MasterKeys. I have not attacked this one yet:
Again, click to enlarge. Here, instead of a simple, straight lane, the attacker will enter a zigzag with many twists and turns where concentrated firepower awaits. The design may reduce time problems for the attacker, who has all these bunched targets, but the bunching may increase lethal fire.
I assume that here bombers will again refuse to attack outer walls and run into the openings. Nevertheless, I would want my bombers to try to target the corners at 1 o'clock, 4 o'clock, 8 o'clock and 9 o'clock. (Not that it would make much difference because the attackers would have to clear out all the inner wall buildings anyway.)
It looks like the boobytraps may be sitting at the openings and at the zigzag turns. Interesting. This is one where high level troops may be be needed to power through the maze.
