The 13th and final sneak peek is here and officially introduces the Eagle Artillery. Supercell did not actually reveal any stats but instead just provided a video of the Eagle Artillery in action. The following is what could be gleaned from that video:
- It has an almost unlimited range covering practically the entire newly enlarged game board. However, like a mortar it has a dead zone (but much larger: 7 tiles from its centre).
- It appears to do single target damage rather than splash damage.
- Once it locks onto a target, it will stay locked even if the target moves (unlike mortars which find a target's location and fire to that location irrespective of whether the target moves away).
- It activates when enough troops are deployed (it seems more than 125 or so housing spaces of troops are required to trigger it).
- Its preferred target is the largest troop, ground or air, on the battlefield that is in its target zone. If there are multiple large troops with the same housing space (e.g. several golems), it looks like it will attack the first one deployed.
- It gives significant warning (via 2 to 4 seconds of flashes) before firing providing the attacker plenty of time to activate their Grand Warden's ability and protect the troops.
- It has a slow fire rate giving an attacker significant time to reach and destroy it before it has fired too many times.
- It fires flaming artillery bursts vertically into the air that go off screen before falling down onto the target.
- Although it deals out significant damage, the amount of damage seems to have been greatly reduced from the initial teaser video released in September where it appeared to almost completely destroy a max Golem in a single shot. In the latest video it appears to take two or three shots to kill a max dragon meaning it does between 1,000 to 1,500 hit-points of damage per shot which is roughly what a max inferno tower on single mode does when locked onto a target for 3 to 4 seconds.
- It can be upgraded to level 2.
Supercell stated back in September that it wanted to promote the two-phase attack style. This new defensive tower helps to do that by providing motivation to launch a small initial kill squad to penetrate the core and destroy the Eagle Artillery before it can be activated by deploying a full army. It will be interesting to see with all the new defenses available at TH11, what kind of strategies develop.
One thing is for certain, with all the extra defenses TH11 bases will be very difficult to 3-star (as if TH10's weren't already difficult enough). Conversely, a maxed TH11 army with the new Grand Warden backing it, will make quick work of 3-starring TH9s and good attackers will have a lot more success 3-starring even maxed TH10s. But for a vast majority of players in the game who are actually TH8 and lower, many changes being introduced in this update are largely irrelevant.
The release date for this update has been tentatively scheduled by Supercell for Thursday (December 10th) but could be pushed back further. Everything announced in the 13 sneak peeks could also be tweaked between now and final release, but be sure to bring your town hall inside your base before the 10th or risk losing a massive amount of trophies very quickly... all the active trophy pushers are going to be hunting immediately after the update for bases that left their TH out.