What is the most cost efficient snare?

[Ravingdork]

If time was no object, and I wanted to set up as many damaging snares as possible on a prepared battleground, what is the most cost efficient to damage snare available?

[yellowpete]

Unless you have Snarecrafter, it's going to depend on the save modifiers of the creatures you expect to step into them.

If you have Snarecrafter, it's the Spike Snare (on top of what you get for free in max-level damaging snares). Though if time really is no object at all, Snarecrafter can set up unlimited snares of any kind anyway.

[Captain Morgan]

Doesn't this depend entirely on your level? You can't make items above your level, and generally you want to use the highest level snare available because it will do the most damage.

[yellowpete]

It's not quite as straightforward, because the highest level snare will also be the most expensive (with cost rising exponentially per level).
My intuition is that for pure damage/cost efficiency, you probably want the lowest level snare that the foes will still just about get a regular failure on a 1 on. Of course you might run into space problems with that strategy, unless you take the omission of the topic in the snare rules to mean that you can stack any amount of them into a square.

[Squiggit]

Cost scales much faster than damage does, so if you only value cost efficiency (and have snarecrafter), the level 1 spike snare wins at 3 damage per gold.

Contrast with the level 16 omnidirectional spear which does .0045 damage per gold, because it does 7.5 times more damage but costs 500 times more.