Trapper

[Silverius]

What are peoples opinions on this? Is it a good thing to have in your base or is it as worthless as the hovel? I've personally never seen it working yet, though maybe I was just not looking.

[Catalyc]

Trappers are a great choice when you need to defend your base, a trapper can easly do half of the job for a dragoon when theres a bsuit attack, just like basilisks. Personally, I think the best spots for trappers aren't directly above doors and such, but in lips that are further into the base, theres a very good spot in the box room in niveus. Will see if i can get a shot later.

[Silverius]

Hmm, would have thought they'd be rather ineffective at bsuits as they can still shoot them.

Btw, do trappers only fire straight down or are they more flexible?

[b0rsuk]

I've seen it work only once, but it was amazing and killed 3 battlesuits. It was on atcs, in the middle room. Granger moved part of base there - an egg or two, possibly overmind, two acid tubes and a trapper above door. The trapper was placed in such way that it wasn't visible until you got under it.
A battlesuit entered, and completely stopped. He tried to backpedal, but couldn't. He rotated and tried to go away, but couldn't. All the time a two pipes were pouring acid on him, a granger spitting and dretch bitting his ankles. He melted.
Two next battlesuits died the same way. One of them realized what's going on and started firing on the trapper. Too late.

Description says trapper is effective mostly on ceiling. Place it in bottleneck, where enemy can't see it before it's too late.And where it can't be lucifered from far away, or from around the corner. And trapper needs some backup, tube or two, an egg providing dretches or something. It's not useful on it's own. Highly situational.
By the way, hovel is not useless. It's use is to place it in a bottleneck and use as a free wall. It uses no conscience, so you lose nothing by placing this wall somewhere. It's big, much higher than its model suggests.
Hiding inside a hovel... oh, you romantic.It's asking for trouble, grenade, lucifer.

[Webmaster961]

IMHO, trappers need to be a bit more multidirectional.  I've only seen a trapper work a few times, and most players consider them to be a waste of conscience.  I usually don't build them, considering they usually grenade/lucifer the trappers to pieces.  Now, I have discovered that hive + trapper = super death.  I mean, those two in good combo can totally own a battle suit with no problems.

[R1CH]

A well placed trapper can almost single handedly stop an attack. If it's hidden well, it will take several assaults before the humans find out where it is located. However many people do not put them in very good places, often on the floor (!!) where they are completely useless.

[Catalyc]

Indeed. In most alien bases a trapper can be placed in an effective spot for those nasty saw/nade rushers, you just need to find a spot that can't be hit from the entrances without having to go into the trapper range, lips and behind edges on the ceilings seem to work quite well. Best are places where humans don't normally look.

[b0rsuk]

Yes, trappers are good where players don't usually look. And to keep it that way, some kind of distraction is handy. Trappers are smaller than tubes and harder to notice. Their projectiles are small and you can easily miss them. After all, they are very similar to granger spit, so most people ignore the sound.

If your trappers are vulnerable to grenades, you may be doing something wrong. Trappers have so big range you can place them far above, but keep in mind projectile has limited speed and will miss more often if you place it very high. On the other hand, it seems to fire rather often, I think every 1 second or so.
Trapper's range is 400 - for comparison, tesla is 250 and machinegun turret is 300. For example, you can place trapper on ceiling near the glass window, and it will hit the target on the lowest floor every two or three shots, depends how much they move. At least trappers are quite cheap.

I suppose hive can be useful, but for this price, really ? it costs 12 versus 8 of tube. 10 would be more sane.
I simply have problems finding enough conscience to build it. Once I remove something, another granger usually uses up "my" build points.

[Timbo]

There is a good reason you don't get trappers until you get advanced grangers .

[Catalyc]

I think most people don't know that trappers and boosters are s2.