I disagree, great towers are by far the best defense options. If you had only moats enemy will just send waves of swordsmen to dig them up and save their precious catapults

Killing pits should kill one man and disappear afterwards like in stronghold crusader

Believe me, they are far more effective currently than they would be if what you propose was implemented.

I was watching a video, and when a peasant walked over a killing pit, he died. Dru wrote a peasant has 4 HP, this would mean;

Killing pit base damage = 4 = Peasant base HP
Using cards (x1.5, x2, x3) damage = 6, 8, 12.

Peasant/Archer Full HP: 8
Swordsmen Full HP: 24
Pikemen Full HP: 39

So (with no troops/keep firing on attackers) it would take two killing pits to kill an attacking peasant, or two pits to kill a swordsman using a x3 card.

A few ideas:

1. I agree with karaliuzudikas (that one pit should kill one unit). If you were to place them instead of the traditional design with towers, you could easily kill a 500 man army with no troops defending. Also, it would make sense to build them from wood.

Ofcourse, people would see this as overpowered, but it would only take a few peasant armies to clear it. However you could limit them so people don't build castles only from killing pits.

Then with the cards, they could be changed to make building them cheaper. they might cost 300 wood, then using a 3x card would make them cost only 100 each.

2. Changing them so they do the same damage, but with an added effect. This new effect would "paralyse" an enemy unit. If a wooden/iron spike went through your abdomen, you wouldn't be going anywhere fast.

So, enemy walks over pit, does some damage but they can't move anywhere and slowly "bleed out".

Those are not hp... they are seconds

The base HP for Peasant is accurate. I have reports of my keep shooting peasants, they take 4 hits from arrows. Assuming all arrows do the same damage, Peasants therefore have 4 HP.

If anyone wants to attack me on the USA2 server with an Archer, Pikemen, and Swordsmen (seperate attacks) then we can see for good how many arrows they take.

Maybe for peasants but the rest are seconds, so we can't judge killing pits effectiveness on other troops

No, the amount of arrows they can take;

Peasant 4
Archer 4
Pikeman 16
Swordsman 12

however if you have a peasant with 10% extra hp it will take 5 arrows. So lets say a peasant has 100 hp and with research it is 110, that means arrows will do 25 damage. So a killing pit does 4 arrows worth of damage initially.
(edit: I said 100 before. could be 1, 10, 100 or 200 hp, it still equals 4 arrows damage)

"Let's say" is not proof... a peasant can very well have 200hp and arrows might do 50 damage...