raider defense strategies

[Alfred_likethebutler]

so in love with this game but i have had my ass kicked by year 30-50 causing many frustrating restarts lol. I think the mistake I keep making is I keep walling too large of an area at the beginning. with a large area to cover to build my walls not only did i handicap my settlement on wood thereby slowing my advancement but I also made it so that I would have to heavily invest into multiple towers before my settlement could handle it financially.

this slowed my development and made it impossible to afford advancements and buildings as well as sapping my manpower. this also mad fighting raiders harder as they would often spread out at different points that stretched my defense thin.

I hope my mistakes give some help to new players, do you guys have any other strategies or methods?

[rodburns]

Top priority should be to protect your vault, trading post, town center and storage buildings - they will go after gold first, and then anything of value in storage after that (weapons, armor, food). So wall those off as early as possible, then slowly expand your walls over time, as more money and resources are available. Then concentrate your towers around that area and you shouldn't need as many towers. If you don't have your housing walled off, when raiders come, ring the town center bell and *most* of your residents should take shelter - not all of them do it, but you'll cut down on casualties that way

Remember, you can put two people in a tower, so that doubles the firepower. If you can upgrade them to crossbows, even better, but crossbows can get pricey.

If the raiders always come from the same general direction (depending on your map size/layout), you can build a road out to where they come from. They will follow that road on their way in - just line it with some towers to pick them off as they run by

[Matthew]

In addition to only walling off your storage/post early, you can place walled towers within housing districts. 1 tower surrounded by pallisade walls and a gate. It takes up a 3x3 spot, the same as a house. So later you can always just move it and put a house in its place. Or keep it there long term.

The benefits of this compared to trying to protect your entire outer ring:

1. Easier to overlap towers so they protect each other. 4 towers within a market radius covering each other compared to how many towers you would need further out while also covering each other.

2. Villagers should hide in their homes, so they are still protected.

3. Towers within a market radius get taxed, like a home. Which means tier 1 towers only cost 4 gold instead of 5.

4. Far less resources/time needed to wall off single towers compared to trying to encircle your entire village.

Eventually you do want to push your defenses further out and add more walls. Mostly to gain some time. Otherwise larger numbers of raiders rush into your city too quickly.

When your tax income gets high enough, you can place some scout towers out really far and keep them unmanned. It will cost 5 gold monthly per, but 2 or 3 well placed towers, especially in directions they keep coming from, will give you a very early warning to keep everyone safe and moved where they need to be.

(You can actually use other buildings for the same, but less sight and honestly 15 gold per month is nothing when you are smithing your own gold ingots)

[SgtScum]

As others have stated if you concentrate your defenses on the key infrastructure and accept that you might lose a few homes and other odd buildings you can easily tank the largest raids and rebuild afterwards.

[grazr]

I wouldn't even say you need walls at the start. structures have enough durability that 2 towers by your storage is enough to clear up raiders for several years before they break into anything.

There are a couple mechanics you want to exploit to deal with raiders.

Raiders love roads and gates so you can bait raiders into kill zones. Concentrate towers at gates and inside your city so they cover a lot of your important bits. Don't bother trying to "hold the walls". Most of your towers wont get any action there and will only cover half as much of your city centre if the raiders make it inside (which they will if you don't consolidate your defences).

Towers get a damage bonus based on distance/elevation to what they're shooting. So it actually pays to not set your towers by the walls. You can increase your tower DPS by about 30-50% by having the towers set into your town where they can just about shoot over the gates (which also helps cover more of your town should the raiders actually break in).

The most i've managed to get is +18 damage on top of the base (10?).

Once the city starts demanding more sophisticated items and growing and needing more supplies i typically spread out in each compass direction. A single road each way and set up resource outposts there. I noticed raiders will always hit these first, so you can get away with concentrating towers at these small outposts. I have a city of ~450 that has a lake on one flank and 3 outposts in each direction. Raiders never even get to my city now. They hit one of these 3 outposts and get decimated by concentrated archer fire. I now have a barracks at 2 of the 3 outposts which was mainly because when raids start hitting 80-90 raiders, your archers tend to run out of arrows and need to resupply, but there's no real effective way of keeping a local supply of arrows that isn't totally OTT.