1. That's your problem. Some people don't experience it. I think using 1.12 if you aren't already would solve it, though.
2. Lag is inevitable if you send tons of magma cubes and there is a lot of commotion going on. If you don't want lag, you should play more defensively.
3. Stop using your sword to kill enemies before armageddon. The castle guards will destroy them.
1) Already playing on 1.12.2; this happens ALWAYS, also before the 1.11, when tower was introduced
2) I know... But it's frustrating
3) Having a squad of people spamming with sword/bows and not placing towers doesn't help. We just spent all our money to 2 waves of 12 pigmans toghether with 2 waves of 6x witches to get their castle, and we both blue and red were attacking each other. But I cannot win it because
"I need to load the damn terrain". And the idea is simply: touch enemy's castle, then concentrate only on defence: if possible, win immedialty.
Oh yeah let me and my team just send 12 blazes and 12 whither skeletons and a lot of other OP mobs.
No of course nobody is going to hit 'em, the guards will destroy them, right?
Yeah, destroy 'em all ahahah. Sword it's actually helping A LOT slowing down monsters, especially during horde. I you have no enough defences (yeah, blazes, watching at you) you can always slow down everything and speed up the enemy's horde. I hate fighting with sword, but I must do it at start, if you want to quickly get exp and more coins per second. I love when everyone it's just dying at start due to TNTs bombing and soccers litellary crushing the enemy. Sometimes you just can't achinve that, because someone placed his "overpowered 1 LVL tnts" and has no a great idea to upgrade it even at the second level!
BUG:
If the tower reaches the path choise (up or down upgrade), and you can't upgrade it 'cos it isn't your tower, simply press shift and left-click it. It will randomly choose a path for you, even if it's not your tower. Then, upgrade your random path normally.
It doesn't work always, but here's the evidence: