I know why people do this, especially on Vanquisher difficulty, but does anyone else find it kind of sad that we have to? I’d like the game to be more balanced when it comes to the strength of walls. We should be disincentivized to build such excess, with more options for dealing with raiders before they breach. Also, sorry, but stacked walls are aesthetically hideous.
If the devs don’t want to make walls stronger so that we don’t have to build three layers of them, then perhaps they can include defensive alternatives to help prevent them falling so fast: allow us to build moats, or toss burning oil at them over the walls, etc and so forth.
I also want to call attention to this older post for its amazing ideas for how raids, armies and walls could work. Devs, please take note for post-release revisions, I’d love to play the game with more in-depth wall and defensive mechanics.
On Vanquisher we need at least double walls, especially triple gates…and they are all ugly as hell.
I think that walls should upgrade over lvl2 and implements moats with additional hitpoints and defenses. Also we absolutely need ways to deal with rams other than sendig out soldiers outnumbered 10:1 to intercept and kill rams before they make short work of walls.
A really simple solution: why can’t we have fire arrows? I heard that cavalry is coming but fire arrows would really be useful and obvious in a city defense scenario…
Completely agree with this. As the game progresses, raids keep getting larger (or are the numbers tied to the amount of villagers you have?) so you have to keep increasing the amount of wall layers to keep people out. It feels wrong, it looks bad and it’s impractical. I really hope they bring new ideas when it comes to raids, right now it feels very basic, not enough thought has been put into it.
100% Agree… In my current settlement witch is now a large city I currently must have 5 ( FIVE ) stacked wall layer, that’s a nasty beefy large wall… really, something must be done to address this, we should have better walls with each city level upgrade.
The alternative is soldiers. Zantai and myself have both made 1000 pop cities with only 1 layer of walls, where the defense is primarily soldiers. One time a while back I made a fairly large city with no walls, other than immediately around the trading post and storehouses, just using soldiers for defense.
I haven’t gotten that far recently but raiders have only been nerfed since then, so seems like it should still be quite possible, especially with new relics that grant military bonuses.
Maybe ill have to do a no-wall challenge and see how it works out now.
Use of soldiers should also improve in the coming months as we add in more military options and improve controls.
@medierra I understand what you said, but I have a pretty large city with 4 lv2 barracks stacked with soldiers + some towers, I have a pretty large percentage of population in military but still … one wall layer is a no go for me.
At least you should give players the “Option” to have better walls, it’s up to the player to pick the path it wants to defend the city … if we want better walls we build, if we want more military power we go from there… it’s a question of possibilities and choices, not giving us the “option” of higher level walls is the same as giving us less options, and I think a game like this should grant as much options as possible for the player to decide where it wants to go.
Surely it should be soldiers and…? What’s clear is that a lot of people feel a need for multiple layers of walls, regardless of how many soldiers they have. There’s something in the game’s design forcing people to make that choice. Maybe we’re just not playing the game right but like brunocerq has said, more options would be better. My vote goes to interesting functional ways to reinforce our wall defenses, as well as improvements in military. I’m looking forward to seeing your updates on this.
I hope you will also look at the older topic I linked, because the ideas there made me genuinely excited for what raids could be.
I just "finished " a no-wall 1000 pop settlement, Alpine Valleys, medium difficulty, medium map size.
Well, I didn’t have walls around my city, but I did have 6 barracks including 4 of them to cover the outside of the city which were themselves protected by a stone wall.
→ This is very do-able against regular raids without casualties. The direction of the raid would be covered by a specific barrack, which you can reinforce by placing the flags of 2 other barracks nearby, and the foot soldiers would attack the raiders while they’d be busy trying to breach into the attacked barrack’s stone wall.
→ When it comes to invading armies, I would either pay the tribute (if < 3k gold) or take the challenge, which in the second option leaves a lot of time to gather and organize my 6 barracks to counter the offensive.
In the end, the lakes and mountains help to define the strategic points to place your barracks. Also, paying attention the the rhythm of the raids is very helpful. They usually happened every third year, so I wouldn’t activate most of my barracks until that year came.
My method has not been mentioned yet so I’ll pitch in:
I chose settlement locations with natural barriers: Lakes, Ponds and Mountains to create choke points.
While tedious and frustrating at times, I then use raising and lowering terrain to make steep hills/cliffs or to make impassible mountains and lake shores in other parts of my settlement territory with farms, barns, orchards outside these barriers.
Combining carefully planned settlements from the start with natural barriers in lieu of artificially raised/lowered areas results in Raiders having less choice due to impassible or at a minimum: less desirable paths for them to take that enables you to front those remaining choke points with barracks and towers to stave off most end-game raids.
Your method could be seen in the community screenshots. Its problem is that it is very difficult both to implement and to master, especially for beginners. And it is not suitable for all cards. I play on open maps without hills or lakes. For convenient construction of large cities. On maps like this I’ll have to spend too much time terroforming
I honestly can never get this to work like I intend - how do you raise and lower terrain without mods? My attempts just end up flatting everything and creating even more entry points through my defenses
Regarding walls - I actually sort of like the aesthetic of double walls; I usually do this with quad gates (one sticking out on each side). Triple walls get uglier, and by the time we get to quad/quint walls, which I have absolutely done on some maps, it gets a bit silly.
I wouldn’t mind a tier 3 wall upgrade, although I suspect what really then happens is that that’s when the catapults and other things come out that balance it out. Strategic placement of castles and towers is always going to be important.
I’ll be honest with you: It’s frustrating as hell to learn how to do, but when you get it you want to celebrate with a beer lol.
Where I started:
Better than where I started:
Now, some tricks:
Terraforming is tricky at first, but understand it this way: It’s an average of the tiles you selected to terraform.
Your first click, your starting spot, will be the baseline for all other tiles you chose to select.
If you want to go from a high to a low spot, you need to select more high tiles than low so it will average the high to the low resulting in your higher area dropping a small amount to “average” the plane of height.
If you go from a low to a high spot, you need to select more low tiles than high so it will average the low to the high, resulting in your baseline for all the other tiles being lower than the highest and thus significantly reducing the plane of height.
Repeating either of these will continue to raise or to lower the land without technically averaging it.
Terraforming a single strip to the edge of a body of water will 8/10 times force the land height to drop to the water level.
Doing this causes an extreme depression in said “strip” you terraformed. We all do this at least once before realizing we can use it to our advantage to LOWER a certain area followed by RAISING an area away from the water to give us the desired effect.
Identify your high spots you want to keep and “level” from the start of that high spot outward until you have a surface area more consistent with the high than the low. THEN you can select more than just a 1x4 or 1x8 strip like a 9x9 to average the height to make it usable for buildings.
The videos will help visualize it more. Again, it’s not for everyone, it’s a PAIN to do, but it does in fact work.
While I appreciate the info, I’m not into the idea of having to terraform citadels and walls out of the landscape in order to avoid triple stack walls. It’s not my playstyle, though I’m sure many do find it fun.
Leave the AI a way in and it will send most of the Raiders along the open path.
Road from the wild leads in from upper left, direct to gates where the first 90 degree angles meet.
Gates allow friendlies a quick path in, but when closed, the road in is a winding path that takes the enemy back and forth across multiple fields of fire, from all directions.
Open path leads them back left, then a u-turn right, then up, then u-turn down, then back left, another u-turn right, up, and then down and in.
Here, breaking through most of the walls that surround the towers to attack them does not allow access to the town the way a normal breakthrough would.
Some do attack the walls, but most try to follow the road, an open path that leads in, taking withering fire from all sides while doing so.
Plenty of room for more towers and archers as raid size increase.
It’s so amazing how differently people play the same games. I would never build such a labyrinth in my towns! But power to you, for figuring out how to make that work to keep raiders at back.
I would reduce the number of lines in the labyrinth from 5 to 3, and also place the towers in two barracks. 12 towers of 2 people each is 2 barracks of 12 each. The rear towers start shooting late, and the barracks have increased the accuracy of fire. If the main attack comes from the other side, soldiers from one barracks can be sent to help defend. You can’t do that with towers.
There is an artifact that reduces the cost of maintaining soldiers by 30%. I also had a city with 1500+ residents and 200 soldiers, the monthly income was +100, without an artifact to reduce maintenance. This was enough to repel attacks at an average difficulty level
