Land mines

[plush forum]

Sometimes as a smaller nation it can be very difficult to repel a larger nation. While defence posts normally act as slowdown for an enemies movement, it does nothing to prevent or punish the assault.

Mines would resolve this. Either through a separate building or by upgrading a defence post, the mine would be able to more effectively repel attackers. One an invading army claims that land the mine is on, it would detonate destroying some of the attackers infantry and also destroy the land. This could be placed on the front to dissuade attacks and also on coasts to prevent naval invasions. The naval force would be destroyed.

This could also lead to advanced strategy where a weaker force is sent in to trigger the mine before a larger force is sent to engage.

As a balance feature, perhaps after a certain time has passed the mine detonates to prevent super turtling

[azure plover]

it does nothing to prevent or punish the assault.
Untrue. More troops die.

[placid zealot]

It is an io game, big players are supposed to be more powerful

[eager drum]

I like the idea. Not that many troops die from defense posts. Defense posts are generally kinda weak.

[eager drum]

Wow instead of 10 troops dying, 50 died!

[azure plover]

Yeah, now scale it up to the thousands.

"Wow instead of 10k troops dying, 50k died!"

The issue with defence posts is that they cause the attack to be super slow, so any losses that are caused by the defence post just easily get regenerated by the attacker because if you're regenerating 2k troops a second, but your attack in to a defense post is moving so slowly that only 1k of the attackers are dying every second, then it makes defence posts effectively meaningless and sometimes even benefit the attacker.

Personally I would like to see a before/after of two exactly the same scenarios, where a defence post doesn't affect speed, only troop losses.