Raids on Settlements

[Sin Archbishop of Vainglory]

had red rocket up and running with only dogmeat there and alot of my loot n ♥♥♥♥, said it was being attacked so i walked all the way there since im on survival and when i get there, there was a raider who stole my minigun from the very begining and was mowing down dogmeat with another raider who stole 2 of my fusion cores. I didnt know that they actually can take ♥♥♥♥ from the settlement. Placed about 8 heavy turrents now

[Dinger]

that what settle,, raids are about ...

stuff goes missing

[Kvinden]

These annoying raids are why I don't build settlements anymore.
If you just claim the settlement for yourself and don't put any settler it is never attacked.
The heavy turrets (or any defense) are useless, they are just here to be destroyed if you don't come fast enough.

Even with 240 defense, settlers armed to the teeth and a concrete wall completely enclosing the area if you don't run each time you must "defend" your generators get destroyed. It becomes quickly boring.

[Ilja]

There is a small base change for raids, which is increased by the amounts of excess food and water in your Workshop.

Game only calculates 100 points for defense in to attack chance and victory calculation. That calculation actually favors settlers, so I rarely ever bother to run, if one of my settlements happens to get attacked. They do not get attacked very often, because I do not store excess resources to settlement Workshops.

Walls are completely useless in the calculation, though practical with on site events. There is no sense to try and block the settlement off entirely with them. Attackers will end up teleporting through, if they can't find path in. Some groups - like the Institute - will usually teleport in anyway. Some settlements - like Abernathy Farm - have annoying general spawn point in the middle of settlement area. Best use for walls is to protect soft targets and narrow down enemy approach space. They are usually more useful within the settlement than covering their borders.

What comes to generators: they might not be damaged by the attack. It is possible that infiltrator exploded them. Your own turrets can also create damage to crops and generators. This is especially true, if you are using ones with exploding ammunition. Positioning turrets and missiles is important in this matter. Walls are also more useful in protecting targets like these than actually fending off attackers.

My whole game is about 95% of settlement building and management. Raids are not really a problem, if you keep these in mind. I only end up running back to settlement under attack, if I happen to be just nearby, or if they lost the raid.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Victor Saltzpyre:

had red rocket up and running with only dogmeat there and alot of my loot n ♥♥♥♥, said it was being attacked so i walked all the way there since im on survival and when i get there, there was a raider who stole my minigun from the very begining and was mowing down dogmeat with another raider who stole 2 of my fusion cores. I didnt know that they actually can take ♥♥♥♥ from the settlement. Placed about 8 heavy turrents now

When they get into combat, settlers, raiders, and similar NPCs will grab any nearby weapons and ammunition they think they need (and will try to use power armour frames if they have armour pieces on them and fusion cores are available). I think they may avoid items owned by other NPCs, but they don't avoid taking the items you store, since the game never usually marks items as belonging to you; they're considered neutral and unowned.

If I remember correctly, a failed defense (without you showing up to help) can also result in stocks of food or water being taken if they were stored in the settlement's workshop. I generally make sure to defend everything, so I haven't really experienced this myself.

Originally posted by Ilja:

What comes to generators: they might not be damaged by the attack. It is possible that infiltrator exploded them. Your own turrets can also create damage to crops and generators. This is especially true, if you are using ones with exploding ammunition. Positioning turrets and missiles is important in this matter. Walls are also more useful in protecting targets like this than actually fending off attackers.

From what I understand of it, if you turn up for the defense, only objects that actually get hit by attacks are damaged (and appropriate walls can help to shield them).

If you allow the settlement to defend itself without you, it can suffer damage to random resources (power, food, and water items), regardless of how well they might be protected from stray attacks, since the game spares your computer the effort of actually loading and simultating the attack and just makes a random approximation of damage to the settlement..

[Ilja]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

If you allow the settlement to defend itself without you, it can suffer damage to random resources (power, food, and water items), regardless of how well they might be protected from stray attacks, since the game spares your computer the effort of actually loading and simultating the attack and just makes a random approximation of damage to the settlement..

Yes, this is true. Walls do not have any practical meaning during the raid where player is absent.

[watchdog79]

I find those attacks in the middle of my exploration of some indoor locations so annoying, that I decided to switch them off with a mod.

I am using this: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/11317

[Sin Archbishop of Vainglory]

good thing i take fusion cores out of power armor or i might have not been able to retrieve the frame unless i snuck up and shot the core out but even then most of the time they dont get out fast enough and die to the mininuke explosion from the core while still in the frame

[Ilja]

Originally posted by Victor Saltzpyre:

good thing i take fusion cores out of power armor or i might have not been able to retrieve the frame unless i snuck up and shot the core out but even then most of the time they dont get out fast enough and die to the mininuke explosion from the core while still in the frame

With console:
- Select character RefID
- callfunction "actor.switchtopowerarmor"

I usually remember to remove NCs from PA, but sometimes settlers might carry them. This usually happens, if Automatron attack happened and settlers - for some reason - decided to pick NCs from the ground.

[Bobby]

All my settlements are like Fort Knox. I put my generators in concrete bunker walls and put missile launchers, heavy machine gun turrets all around on raised parapets aiming out from the walls . The only things that get in are mutant dogs (dead) , the rest are piled up outside when I return it's mountains of weapons,ammo, clothes for scrap. I've been building them for years -as long as the game has been out- and adding to them. It's fun. Red rocket and drive in are my most heavily defended and occupied settlements. You can mine the whole perimeter as well. You don't need build mode to do that so you can extend it by meters.

[Chispon]

Defending settlements on Survival can be a pain, specially if you are in The glowing sea and a Far Harbor settlement is under attack...

[Bobby]

^ very,very true.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

If you allow the settlement to defend itself without you, it can suffer damage to random resources (power, food, and water items), regardless of how well they might be protected from stray attacks, since the game spares your computer the effort of actually loading and simultating the attack and just makes a random approximation of damage to the settlement..

Only if the settlement loses the defense roll. If they win nothing is damaged.

Also the only items raiders "steal" if the settlement loses is scrap. NPCs taking things out of storage containers is a different issue, and is why you should never store your ammo/cores in a container. If there's no ammo for a weapon then NPCs wont try to take that weapon out of a container.

Generators being destroyed is a seperate issue. The vault tec nuclear generators are bugged and randomly explode after you fast travel to a settlement with them. It's not related to raids, but it's easy to assume it is. Same deal with the fixed giant water treatment machine inside the vault area. After an actual failed raid things are usually damaged, but not broken, and they are usually fixed before you even return to see them damaged.

Originally posted by Ilja:

Game only calculates 100 points for defense in to attack chance and victory calculation.

It caps out at 100 safety for determining attack frequency, but that doesn't apply to the actual defense chance which uses the entire uncapped defense value. The base attack value caps out at 100, but there's another roll on top of that which caps out at 150, so the highest attack value is a random roll between 100-150. If you have over 150 defense then the settlement should win every time.

Something to note is the game never even notifies players about many raids. It's bugged and a lot of raid types have no notification applied to them (like animal attacks), so they always autoresolve. The significance of attacks is a lot lower than people realize, even if your settlement loses it's generally harmless and they nearly instantly auto repair everything with the scrap they gather so you don't even know it ever happened. There's no reason to get frustrated over the system.

I use this mod to adjust the mechanics a bit though:
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/27465

It adds notification of animal raids and allows more of them to happen without cages, and fixes some of the raider spawn points so they don't spawn in the middle of your base. That's pretty much all it does by default. It has a bunch of menu options though which allow you to tweak the raid frequency and give you more time to respond to raids or disable some enemy types. I really like defending my settlements from raids, I like seeing my defenses in action or getting an extra bit of hectic combat in. I don't like dropping what I'm doing to go defend though, so I use that mod to set the raid respond time to the max value which is like 8000 hours or something so I can ignore the raid messages and then next time I visit the settlement I deal with the attack.

[Ilja]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Originally posted by Ilja:

Game only calculates 100 points for defense in to attack chance and victory calculation.

It caps out at 100 safety for determining attack frequency, but that doesn't apply to the actual defense chance which uses the entire uncapped defense value. The base attack value caps out at 100, but there's another roll on top of that which caps out at 50, so the highest attack value is a random roll between 100-150. If you have over 150 defense then the settlement should win every time.

That is not actually correct, though close.

Highest values are 200, for both attackers and defenders. Game only calculates 100 for both and gives 1-100 roll for both on top of that.

Base chance to loose/win would be 50/50 in that case. If settlement total score is 150+ then their chance of victory is doubled, giving them 25/75 change to loose/win against attack.

[Astasia]

Ya, I missed the second part of the code for that. Though it's worth noting it's only excess food and water production that increases the attack value, not the food and water stored in the workshop. A 30 pop settlement with 30 food production, 30 water production, and 70 defense, will have a 0% chance to fail an autoresolve. Every extra point of food or water production increases the chance for a fail up to a point.

I found this thread which breaks it down more easily and posted the bits I missed from the actual attack function:

https://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?/topic/4549-settlemet-raids-not-exactly-a-bug-but/

[Ilja]

Removing exces food and water is indeed the best way to resolve the problem with attacks.

I now have a bit of a problem with that, becasue I am playing with Sim Settlements. Calculating resources isn't as easy with it than with vanilla game.

Though, it does get easy to rework food/water situation, once settlements have developed.