Viking difficulty ramp?

[Xedric]

Alright. I like a challenge. Let's get that out of the way now. I routinely played Civ 5 on diety as Venice. I like a challenge. But this is insane. I don't know how this game calculates viking invasions but I feel like I'm getting roflstomped for not playing the absolutely perfect way. I didn't B-line walls fast enough or I didn't immediately make an army of hundreds, etc.

To explain. I had a pretty nice city going. My best one yet. I started slow, gathered resource, started popping up proper organization and everything to maximize my land. First viking assault happens at around 60 some people. I have two archer towers built and I fend it off with minimal damage. Yay.

I keep going, keep growing. Replace some houses with manors, start getting up my population. I build more pieces of walls here and there, where I can afford it. I can only man 2 quarries at a time and keep up with 2 foresters as well. So my resource gathering isn't light speed, but I can build a wall tile about every other year. A few dragons pop by. I have two more archer towers and I'm dealing with them without my entire city going up in flames.

(Side note. The same archer tower caught flame nine times in one game. Your fire mechanics need serious tuning back. I had to deal with fire more than I did actual threats There is no way they are lighting them selves on fire that much up there.)

Now comes the second viking raid. Only raid number two. Remember that. I'm on year 75 or so and this is only the second raid. I barely have an army let alone anything big. One hero and ten guys. I have maybe 2/3rds of a wall spread around my island. A total of five archer towers now.

THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ VIKING RAID WAS FIVE BOATS OF TROOPS AND AN OGRE!

The battle went as thus: They all dropped on the adjacent island and made for the bridge I had built. I sent my army straight at the ogre. They didn't kill it until it had gotten onto my island, walked through the whole damn thing and was eying one of my archer towers on the other side. By this time, it was being shot at by 3 of them. Ogres either have way too much health or spawn way too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ early on easy mode. Now obviously my army and 3/5 of my archer towers are occupied, leaving the vikings to do their viking best all over my innocent citizens. Needless to say, we didn't come out well.

They absolutely raped me. Up one side and down the other, by the time they left because they were bored, they had burned down half my island including 75% of my housing, all of my joy buildings, and my five wells. THEY BURNED DOWN THE WELLS?!?!?

So I do believe, devs, that you need to work on timing and balancing a little bit. I barely felt like I got anywhere and the fact that this was only the second raid on easy mode is very disheartening. I wasn't playing on hard mode. I figured at worst I would suffer a late death with a good looking city with at least 500 people at the hands of a big fat army after they dug through my walls and ripped me down from my thrown in a magnificent show of bloodlust and rage while I screamed my last and fell upon the viking king's sword.

Instead I died a bug on a metaphorical windshield with a very large frown on my face.

Things to think about in future updates to this quite pleasing and enjoyable game otherwise.

[123]

I'm pretty sure it calculates them on population size. I tested this and didnt get attacked until year 83.

[Chief Spreading Bull]

You have to further compound this with the fact that you have no idea where the Vikings or the Dragon will spawn. So you have no idea where to put your defenses and the bar to build a barracks for a mobile defense is so high at 100 stone that its virtually impossible to have a solid defense.

[Momo]

Last invasion was 23 viking boat and 11 troll Until the whole map was covered in wall :P

[Xedric]

Well I don't have a problem with random location, but please take into account the speed of stone quarrying and wall building to allow for more appropriate raids. You need to get your population to a certain size to manage enough buildings and quarries, but getting to that size causes the raids. Hence you just have to hope they don't happen.

[BigRockWall]

couple points. not saying anyone is right or wrong, just some observations

1) trolls almost always go straight for walls. regardless of size or amount of towers. that being said, instead of trying to build a 10 mile long castle wall early game, build a small fortress 4-6 tiles wide and build around it, rather than building the wall around your city. as your pop expands, expand the fortress

2) a better option than stated above for early game - your best defense is plenty of wells. if you have no walls for ogres to destroy, im not even sure they send any. the humans will just light stuff on fire, which your peasants will usually just put out if you have plenty of wells spread out. the most devastating thing that happens early game is you lose sections of walls. so just dont build any.

3) soldiers need AI. microing even just 1 general, let alone 3, to defend against an opponent with AI is a fools errand. unless the devs change it so that your troops have AI (or for gods sake even just an attack command like starcraft etc) troops are only worth using to defend above mentioned fortress where they can help your towers survive the ogre. kinda. i had a 30 stack attack an ogre against a 2x2 wall section that was 15 tiles high with 2 ballista and 2 archers. lost half the fortress before one ogre died

4) if you surround the entire edge of the map with a pier+1 tile high wall, the vikings cannot land. i even put a couple piers outside the wall. they then sent 1 ship per raid to right where the pier was, and thier 1 ogre died a very quick death to my 20 archer/ballistas that were in range of the pier. this is obviously only LATE game when you can afford to surround the entire map with a wall built on piers. but again, just pointing it out.

[Trambolikus]

The main problem is that, in order to defend yourself against vikig raids properly, you need tons of defenses, wich, even with tall towers, have limited reach, so it its an enormous investment to fortify every side of your city so it stops an attack on its own, because if it doesn't, the rest of the defenses wont prevent your entire city from burning: either you gamble where they are going to attack or you lose. In my two games I have had raids of 7 viking ships by year 40 and 350 pop, and when I managed to recover and almost encircle my town with tier 1 walls, they send 10 ships this time, 3 with ogres, by year 43. Its not only very hard to be ready for the first, but utterly impossible to recover from the last attack. Aside form the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fact that vikings can walk five tiles of ocean or more (not tested) so every side must be walled to prevent massive fires.

[itssirtou]

Yeah, early game you are kinda forced to facetank raids. With your face.

The good news is you don't need your whole wall lined with maximum defensive force. Just a few archer towers sparsed along to keep dragons from sitting still (coverage more than dps), and a thicker line of defenses near where they land. If you're careful you can makesure they all funnel into one wall segment

[Chief Spreading Bull]

More or less we are limited by the overly simplistic nature of the game. The game's combat aspect is hardly finished or balanced by any measure and I am seriously tempted to give it a down vote over that until they actually do a rebalance.

[KDR_11k]

Maybe I've been lucky but so far I've not taken a lot of damage from the early raids even with defenses not doing a whole lot and on Vintar. Most of the burning buildings get extinguished and the troops should be moving much further inland than the orges.

Of course 5 towers for anything more than a tiny hamlet is ridiculously weak. Armies are higher tier than towers (I wait quite a while before getting the chamber of war) so you should rely on towers while you're resource constrained. You can save materials by using only one castle block, it doesn't reduce their range THAT much (about 1 tile per 2 blocks height). Remember that an archer tower only needs two people to staff it, vs 4 people for a ballista and a whole bunch for an army. Those two people in a tower can kill a dozen soldiers in a raid vs 2-3 if they were in an army.

To me it seems like vikings always pick your weakest side to attack from so don't expect to be fine with only one side fortified. Early on just cover your city with tower range (focus on high traffic areas) so you can shoot at any troops moving though while they plunder to reduce their impact.

Also don't space your wells out based on their displayed range, that's only for keeping people happy. When you've got a fire you want a water source within 3-4 squares of the building so place them appropriately.

Oh and on ogres, you get 2 HP for the first block you place on a square and 1 HP for each on top. So if you want to keep an ogre busy build a bunch of 1 high walls instead of high towers. They also lose a lot of time from repositioning after smashing one building. I usually cannot stop them from breaking the first thing they aim for even if it's a pretty large tower but by the second or third they've taken so much time they're either near death or about to return home even if they just hit fairly low walls.

[Time Lord Iroh]

Thats strange, I've been doing fine agaisnt the viking raids on Vintar. What you shoud do first is create quite a small city when starting out, make sure your population doesn't get to hard to control. Then save up to cover that city with walls and towers. Leave your farms and food production outside the walls and place a few towers near them to keep them defended. The first few viking raids shouldn't be hard with the setup I've just told you, It wasn't hard with me so it should be fine with you (when I built my first city, I've got four others now, I built it on an island which is why it was so small). From then on whenever expanding your city first plan out where your building it and build a perimeter wall around the place where your building it and fortify it with towers before adding roads, buildings etc. Just so your wondering, after the first few raids when you've established a proper defence the vikings will come on with massive force eg. 6 ogres and almost 10 longships with vikings and you will have lots of burned buildings and destroyed walls, however you have to just repair evey time that happens until you have thousands of people and every single wall segment has a tower built on it! I have a picture uploaded of the city I've built if you want to have a look at what I did. Hope I helped! Dedalusdanny.

[GreyBeard512]

The Vikings appear to have a rudimentary AI, and attack the weakest side. The take "weakest" as the least defended coast, so early on they always come from the other side of the map.

Generally, don't waste your troops on Ogres. They don't appear to do much damage, and they take lots. Use your troops on their troops. The Ogres will primarily go for your towers anyway. Ballistas are best against Ogres, but mix in some archer towers too.

The best defense against their troops is wells. Lot and lots of wells. They like to set wells on fire, so you need other nearby wells to put them out. If you have enough wells and enough people, most of your buildings will survive the fire.

And they'll kidnap a few of your people. I have not worked out a defense against that. I have noticed that archer towers sort of help, in a very unhelpful way - they shoot the hostages.

I'm on hard (Vintar?) on about year 475 with a population of about 3000. Viking attacks cover about 70% of the coast. No Viking has left the Kingdom alive in a few hundred years, but they still do damage every time. Just rebuild and keep going.

Once you are up to a decent population with decent defenses everywhere, they always attack from a corner and split their forces. With 3 Generals, I can’t cover all four corners. As soon as they show up, I pause, see where they are, and get the Generals moving. The closest two are assigned one per side, and the furthest one goes to whichever side is closer to him. (Or to back up the weaker army if one has been rebuilt yet.) My coastlines are mostly defenses and farmland. My troops attack the ships as they are landing, backed up by nearby towers. Most Ogres die before they can start combat. Once the Ogre is on land and fighting, I send the troops to the next ship and leave the Ogre to the towers. (I lose towers this way.) I micromanage two coasts, keeping the troops even with the lead ships so that they are ready to attack while it is landing. The third army runs down any Viking troops that got past the initial combat at the ship. (If I have a weak Army, they get this task once the other Army has relived them of coast duty.)

[BigRockWall]

dont waste your stone on towers at all. just kee your pop below 500, expo to all the stone on the map, and focus on surrounding the edge of the map with piers. unwalled piers. vikings will come. they will set things on fire. who cares. every raid u might haveto rebuild 1-3 buildings. once the map is surrounded in piers, put a 1 tile high wall on all the piers. no more vikings

[The Onyx Tiger]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1101728031
Year 161 for me and they're starting to send 5-6 boats with 1 ogre. I've never had a problem with Vikings throughout this play.

EDIT:
Need I mind you this is my second game. First was a test on Casual. This, too, is Easy. So on my first go on Easy after about an hour or two of Casual I got this far and have had no issues. When being attacked you need good micromanagement skills.

Eg.
Unman all your towers until you're attacked, try to keep a good amount of idle people in case of attack, build up your treasury, and only man your towers when being attacked. Saves you money, time, and happiness based on taxes. I've also had to close my quarries many times due to lack of workers due to many issues involving Vikings and a surplus of stone. Same with logs and charcoal. Best you can do is micromanage.

EDIT 2:
I don't even have any heroes or an army. Just walls and towers. :P I have a Chamber of War but have yet to try it out. I have yet to build a barracks too.

[(Insert name here)]

so i was just playing kingdoms/castles and i was playing on hard mode and i was doing good
but then i had a raid and there where 3 soilder ships and since i had only two towers so they
set fire to all my farms and then they all burnt down and all my food was GONE so im ashamed
becuase on easy mode i was year 400 and i had about 1000 and i even build a town on a PEIR

[GreyBeard512]

Originally posted by GoodGamer26:

so i was just playing kingdoms/castles and i was playing on hard mode and i was doing good
but then i had a raid and there where 3 soilder ships and since i had only two towers so they
set fire to all my farms and then they all burnt down and all my food was GONE so im ashamed
becuase on easy mode i was year 400 and i had about 1000 and i even build a town on a PEIR

Wells. You need more wells.