a great way to save your hour-to-build fort from greifers and nasty enemy grenades is pillars. if you have a sniping tower and holding it up is only a single wall it'll fall(once the wall is destoryed). with pillars the griefer/enemy would have to destroy all the pillars before it falls.

I've had a structure that spanned literally an entire grid square, with all kinds of supports, and it was destroyed in less than a minute by one person.

No amount of supports will stop griefing.

Maybe griefers on your team will get to destroy it, but it's harder for the opposite team.

True, but not impossible. Most times if you've got a nice intel tower going, if it's big enough, the enemy will simply tunnel up from under it and take the intel from there.

yeah, not indestructible, but still tougher.

Overbuilding it allows for the enemy to tunnel up in the middle of it and steal your intel right under your nose.

What about this tactic for a protective structure:
You clear an big area around the intel all the way to sea level with the exception of a lot of 2 block high pillars(kind of like tank traps). This way the enemy can not dig to your intel, you can cover the intel from above and at the same time the 2 block high pillars will have to be traversed and should slow down the enemy.

A way to make a good spider tower with the current block destruction:

First the initial intel tower center should be pretty thin,no more then 3x2 even lower if they are multiple people working on it.

At a about 6-10 blocks high you start to thicken the core as much as you can,this is where the pillars will connect.

The 4 main pilllars should be build in all 4 directions and be build like a wall with its thickness locked at 2 with additional supports to the pillars in every direction

The connections are as well wall like but you can also make webbing affect,just remember that rifles and termites are your enemy, the web affect can be use to thicken the wall since if there is a termite,you will see it in the gaps

From the center to one of the main pillar additional smaller pillars may be build along the way,but the first one should be built some space away from the center because..

After some support has been laid remove the thin center pillar and let it stand on supports as well as level the terrain below so as to see where the foolish diggers come from.

An maintenance stairway along a pillar that is exposed preferably in all directions can be built as well as sniper posts on the connections.

Always have a engineer defending the Intel,otherwise what you have build up till now is pointless

http://i.imgur.com/MrUMf.png

Problem is that if opposite team won't be able to take your building down the normal way, sooner or later they'll switch team, grief as your team mates and switch back. It happens all the time to me.

spider things make me lol, theyre ussually so out there i just build a 1x1xX tower and just hop up there to get intel

Heres a few pics of a tower i made recently.

https://picasaweb.google.com/107536748300240967058/MyPictures#5616997014351570194

https://picasaweb.google.com/107536748300240967058/MyPictures#5616997086634784914

The bright coloured column directly supports the intel so it is easy to see if its been tampered with.

@szuwar if you look at my other post "Where griefers come from" it explains that the mechanic to switch teams should be taken out

PinkDozer in your design is easy for termites to get in
Pillars should have no more then 2 blocks thickness,that way you can see irregularity in the pillars, take out the center pillar for the same reason.

Chipou spider towers are there to give us time so we ca KILL YOU,its specifically an anti digging strategy,where in digging you get the intel hidden while with spider towers you are exposed or slowed.

Szuwar KILL THEM

Thing is a large spider tower(that spans a quarter of the map) is pretty hard to destroy by griefers.

I was ducking it with a griefer once for like 10min back then where there was no team kill available,however my stupid team didn't manage to kick him so it fell
With adequate protection and the ability to teamkill as well as a good spider tower
I would guess we could keep it for a long time,although rifle damage kinda hurts its nothing that good engineering wont fix.
Add to that some team switching fix along the way,and it will become a viable strategy for many games.

take it from a part time griefer,

The most annoying structure I find to grief is one that is completely soild, long (sweaty, throbbing,etc), has a bunch of hard to reach far out supports, it's just big in general with several rooms connected to the building.

Of course this doesn't stop me from finishing because usually I alone can grief a whole server to near ground level (pinpoint, lol) in about 4 minutes, 30 seconds to a decent sized structure at a speed of 4.5 (shorter at 7+ but I can get autokicked). With me and a couple of hacker bros, we can take down anything and everything in less than a minute (a team of 3 or 4). I am completely cereal and I've done it before.

1x1 pillars are easy to destroy quickly, but harder to hit at faster speeds. Easy to kill regardless. Anything larger (2x2, 10x10) makes it much easier to grief because i can just run around but it may take a little bit longer so that's you're best bet. But when I'm just coming in at 9+ blocks destroyed every second it's kinda hard to stop me.

So basically something is going to be greifed despite its size, idc how big it is. How i said to build makes it a tid bit more annoying to grief.

/facepalm

<3