Lag is the number one cause of all the freezes, weird anomalies and what are assumed to be most glitches and bugs (though there are still plenty of those around and continually being created) and that are directly costing the players troop losses, missing troops, wasted boosts, lost rewards, coin and endless hours of wasted time.
Plarium ALONE is directly responsible for the lag and all detrimental lag related issues and problems the players are encountering and by Plarium's OWN recent admission.
If we discount those players with an older system and/or a slow internet internet, the lag is still there and real for everyone else. But it does not effect all players equally on the same or differing servers and so it most often goes unreported because there is nothing the payers can do about it and as no one in "Support" will listen anyway.
Some players will never notice or just dismiss the occasional lag issues and problems they encounter as just coincedence and/or non-app/game related. Ex: a member who normally never experiences any lag issues or problems went to raid a city for resources, sending their troos and galleys and only to find they had raided one of their own sieges. Others may experience it and to various degress at only peak play/login times (like at reset or during the coa conflict). And for those like others and myself it is a constant 24/7 problem and especially during peak play hours where it is not even worth logging in unless you enjoy having to clear you cache and refresh every 1-5 minutes as something always fails to work or update correctly, the game freezes, the app/game just shuts down to where you cannot trust anything you are seeing or doing in the game nor any results.
Which server you are on does matter. The farther you are geographically from your servers location and depending upon what direction your connection takes/hops (North, South, East or West) to and from the servers effects the amount of lag and lag caused issues and problems you will encounter from none at all to a nightmare. Like real estate, its part location, location, location which is unavoidable.
However, and by again Plariums own recent admission, Plarium has purposely created the lag and all the issues and problems it induces and causes by all the many "improvements" Plarium has made in adding new units, new items and new missions and events (that no one ever asked for) and including ALL the additional processing and graphics demands and strains these "improvements" place upon the servers, the app/game, our systems and our connections.