Walls?

[Traveler]

Is it worth building wood walls? Is it worth upgrading to stone; or should I just consentrait on building units?

[Gloweye]

It's definitely better if you expect/want to be prepared for any sort of attack. Couple of archers in there, and you can hold off most attacks.

Stone Walls also expand the Domain Radius by one, so it can also be build just to gain access to some treasure site.

[AnemoneMeer]

Walls are amazing. Utterly amazing. Wood walls especially, since their barricade does triple duty. Stalls enemies, blocks ranged attacks, and lets you murder melee enemies who attack the gates.

[aclyte]

Stone walls have more durable gates -> it takes 1 more turn for enemy to crush it - makes a difference when u have enough archers. Plus, stone wall are much harder to crush using wall crushing units like trolls or bettles.

The point in wall crushing units are simple - when u attack gates, u catch flanking fire from the walls, but when u crush wall, u're not flanked and most of the archers gets range/vision penalty)

[Aleksei.Volchok]

1 or 2 scouts can hope to kill archer standing in a city without walls. With walls archers can defeat weak unbalanced armies like this.

[Ninjara]

I always wall all cities with stone walls to maximize the domain I can get.

Like others have said, they're very much worth it for the safety, especially if there's plenty of random independents around.
And if you happen to have Earth magic, Regenerate Walls can be a very useful spell if your city defenders are outmatched.
I've had Civic Guards take down Archon Titans and Dwarf Crossbowmen beat a bunch of Warbreed because they've been unable to break through the regenerating walls.

[Faust]

If you have archers and the enemy lacks fliers then walls are a lifesaver.

[AnemoneMeer]

To add to the pony's statement, regenerate walls also makes gates literally indestructable, and forces wall crushing, since the gate can only be attacked from a single tile, and will regenerate between the attack completion, and the next move, making a city literally unassailable with just wood walls and a spell.

[Kyun]

Also stonewalls give +1 city radius.
And Anemone has written an awesome guide about "the humble builder". Basically you can buy a builder, then build a wooden fort with it, then upgrade the wooden fort to a stone fort and then found a city in this fort. this will give the city +1city radius from the beginning and the stone walls.
This is overall much cheaper and also faster than building the walls after you built the city.

[AnemoneMeer]

The wood walls are equivalent cost. The stone walls are a very slight cost hike. The savings you get are well in the hundreds of production units however, so if you think a pittance of gold is worth several hundreds of units of production, it's worth it. And it's instantly worth it if you do it on a goldmine.

[Faust]

You can do that?! Sounds like an exploit.

[sikbok]

No, founding cities in forts and the fact that you get walls are by design.

The fact that you do not have to wait for them to build are balanced out by the time it takes for the builder to get to the desired locations and the time it takes to construct and upgrade a fort.

There are advantages to this way of doing things this way, but I've not seen anyone use this in a way that can be called an exploit.

[Morphic]

Originally posted by sikbok:

No, founding cities in forts and the fact that you get walls are by design.

The fact that you do not have to wait for them to build are balanced out by the time it takes for the builder to get to the desired locations and the time it takes to construct and upgrade a fort.

... I feel so stupid now lol. I had no idea you could build a city inside a Fort and gain the walls the Fort has. That's really cool and an awesome mechanic. It should really help a player like me since I almost always grab a Builder right away and construct roads and watchtowers and the occasional Fort.

[Stardustfire]

it was already that way in AoW2 with the difference that a fort there sponsors at once Stonewalls, with no need to upgrade the fort before.

[GeminiEclipse]

Wait you can found cities in forts? I don't think I've made a fort in ages. It's quite the wonder...

[Johnny 5]

I love walls, High Elf druid hunters/longbowmen will murder anything coming up to them.
Add regenerate walls, from earth minor,
Druids Thorn Hedge Walls, twisting roots(half walk distance), and possibly poison domain(for the lose 2 def/res) and you have a huge advantage.