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Peasants & Their Structures

The peasants are responsible for building all of your basic fortifications.  You'll be relying on them to construct your primary defenses against incoming enemy sappers.

Peasants can construct the following buildings:

Guard Tower

Your primary defensive structures, guard towers have a low cost and good range. They don't do a huge amount of damage, so you'll generally want to build several of them.

Blast Tower

The blast towers' high damage and incredible range make it an excellent sniper tower, picking off sappers in a large area. The blast tower can take out a sapper in one hit unless it has some sort of protection, and it will be difficult for your opponents to protect sappers everywhere that you can fire. However, their slow firing rate means that their damage output over time is rather low for their cost, and unless these are your first line of defense and spaced well apart, they tend to waste a lot of firepower killing nearly-dead sappers or all firing at the same target.

Spell Shooter

The Spell Shooter has slightly lower range and less damage for its cost than the Guard Tower, but because it attacks with spells, it is unaffected by the armor of the target. This means that it can continue to function at full effectiveness in the presence of a Fortification Source bolstering the armor of sappers, but it also means that it cannot benefit from one that decreases sappers armor.

Additionally, since it has both higher damage and higher cost than the Guard Tower, it concentrates your firepower into a smaller number of towers. This means that a single casting of Blood Lust does more good on a Spell Shooter than on a Guard Tower, but it also makes them more susceptible to enemy spells like Slow and (if placed close together) Cloud.

Arcane Tower

With the ability to attack three targets at once and a reliable damage output, arcane towers are of rather dubious use in the early part of the game, with less range than the Guard Tower and much higher cost, but they can be worth the investment in the later game when sappers start coming at you more thickly. Remember to put this tower on your front lines where you can be assured that it will get maximum opportunity to fire, as it is only worth its cost if it can reliably attack hit three sappers every time it fires.

Ancient of War

Ancients of War have the same damage output for cost as Guard Towers.  Their higher damage leads to a greater probability of overkilling their target and wasting damage, but since they use a melee attack they are unaffected by Cloud.  The great size and short range of the Ancient of War require that it be placed carefully, but if you discover that your Ancient is in an ineffective position, you can always uproot it and move it elsewhere.  Their size and mobility also makes Ancients of War excellent for redirecting the flow of sappers.

Draining Tower

Draining Towers deal no damage on impact, but their attacks poison the target, causing him to continue to take damage for a good while afterwards. A slow means of dealing damage, Draining Towers don't work well at all as your last line of defense, but they can give very good damage output for their cost if the poison can be given time to reach its full effect. Remember not to mass them, because the poison effects do not stack.

Fortification

Fortifications don't deal any damage, but they're a cheap way to block off an area you don't want the sappers to come through (such as a narrow bottleneck the sappers are using to get right through the center of a large group of enemy towers). Their only advantage apart from their low cost is that they're more durable than other towers, allowing them to survive a couple of hits from sappers before they're ruined.  They aren't strong enough to keep out sappers very long if you completely wall off your circle of power, but they may survive the process of the sappers blowing their way through other towers nearby.

Pavement

Like the Fortification, the pavement deals no damage, but unlike all other structures in your arsenal, pavement doesn't hinder unit movement. It's only function is to prevent someone else from building something else at the same location, allowing you to ensure a navigable path through a region by paving it in advance.