Tower (Barbarian)/1.03

Barbarian
Barbarian towers aren't the best in the game, but they're certainly not the worst. They possess great hit points but quite a poor offensive attack, as well as costing a considerable amount of stone. However, the Barbarian race acquire free gold upon destroying an enemy building and the race has little use for stone outside of buildings. This makes it easy for them to manage the cost of building their towers.

The real downfall for their towers is the poor piercing attack. Not only is 25 damage poor for a tower, but the attack type cannot be changed within the Barbarian race due to their only missile unit that can garrison towers also possessing a piercing attack. This means that piercing resistant units that would sponge the tower's attacks at the start of the game can still sponge those attacks right through to the end. However, there is still use of upgrading the towers with Barbarians, for they change the missile fired to their own spears. This will give the towers the exact same traits the Barbarian infantry would have - the Carry Through and even the Ignore Missile Resistance (when researched). This allows the towers to overcome some common tower-counter units that do not have a special resistance to piercing attacks, such as Dwarf Runners and Husks. In addition to that, the Carry Through trait batting off the incredible range the tower has can be incredibly lethal - skewing many enemy infantry with only a single attack.

Unfortunately, garrisoning the standard Barbarian infantry for this "lethal" attack also comes with a horrible side affect - missiles with the Carry Through trait always fail to hit units at point-blank range and causes the following Carry Through hits to also miss. This means that once an enemy unit has made melee contact with a garrisoned tower, then the tower becomes offensively useless! As such, you'll either need to wall your towers in to keep melee units away from them (although fliers will be unaffected by this) or place non-garrisoned towers ahead of them, drawing enemy units towards them first. Regardless of what you do, you'll probably end up un-garrisoning your Barbarians at some point.

Overall, the Barbarians' towers are capable of dealing immense damage when upgraded, but can be easily exploited through piercing resistant units and fast melee units that can even render the towers useless. This makes for a large need of support and management for the towers to be effective.