Additional thoughts on minions and farming
I spent a bit of time farming with them over the weekend. This may be nothing new for many of you, but it may be some food for thought:
The obvious pros of devoting a portion of your farming army population cap to minions (1) are a faster total train time, (2) portion of your army now ignoring walls and (3) immunity of those troops to ground defenses. The statistical differences compared with archers are pretty minimal and look like a wash to me, given that you pick up a little dps but lose a little health when normalized for population.
But there are a few cons:
The first is the air bombs which as I’ve posted previously are an overly hard counter to minions. Their range is huge and they one-shot even max level minions. While not all bases carry bombs, it’s a significant gamble with a costly troop.
You add dps to the defense. Obviously with an all ground army, air defense has no role. It has been subtracted from the total dps of the base defense. When you divert a portion of your army’s pop cap to an air troop, you return that dps*. The reason air armies work despite returning this dps is because (1) total base dps is concentrated in air defenses for all-air armies, and it’s often easy to saturate them and (2) you’re now subtracting ground-only defenses from total base defense. The saturation issue is significant as it relates to air bombs in particular. With a max pop air army, there’s a nontrivial chance you could saturate the bombs and have minions left over, but with only a portion of a farming army devoted to air, there’s a much higher chance that the air bombs will wipe those troops out with capacity left over.
In summary, by splitting your army between air and ground troops, you’re arguably getting the worst of both worlds, dealing with total base defense dps for both ground and air troops and being unable to saturate either by virtue of splitting your army.
I can speculate that there may be a role for minions in mid-level trophy armies behind dragons or balloons. But those obviously aren’t farming armies. We’ll wait to see if the trophy/league update makes armies like that more valuable.
* It’s not quite this simple, as you’re potentially also removing some dps from mortars. Splash defenses don’t have a “fixed” dps. Their dps can obviously spike wildly depending on how troops are clumped. So, a more accurate description would be to add air defenses and bombs to total base defenses, while subtracting a factor for less mortar dps dealt via splash given fewer total ground troops. Also, given that air defenses deal damage in large, slow, blows, much of the damage is lost to overkill. So against an army in which minions are the only air troop, only a portion of air defense is added back. A level one air defense deals 80 damage per one second which equals one kill per second. So one way to think about it is that any air defense higher than level one is lost against minions.
