Alternatives to double/triple walls?

Farthest Frontier Ideas and Feedback
5

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.

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6

@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.

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7

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.

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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.

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9

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.

It does work.

10

As I said before

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11

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

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12

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 :joy:

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.

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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.

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14

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.

15

Serpintine.

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.

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Alternately, I propose that walls when doubled become crenelated with a walkable path on top for repelling invaders.

When tripled, they should become hoarded with protected battlements.

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16

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.

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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.

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18

How many barracks / towers did you have?
I find it impossible to get a positive income with all the defense expenses.

19

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

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I’m giving it another go. Let’s see how I manage :slight_smile:
BTW, how did you get the 1.5K residents? I thought there was a cap on 1K

21

Nope, in v0.9.0

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22

Awesome! TY for the info :slight_smile:

23

I fear we will just having people eventually saying that they need 3 layers of the “better walls,” if we add that and complaining how its unrealistic that raiders can still eventually hack their way through (which is sort of an abstraction since we can’t currently simulate them scaling the walls with ladders and also, the whole idea that you can wall in enough cropland to feed a town is not really realistic either :man_shrugging:). Anyway, suffice to say, its an abstraction… walls though were originally just meant to give you time to move soldiers into position to intercept raiders / create more favorable points of engagement, where raiders had to fight through a choke point. Over time, we’ve increased wall armor and hp, as well as providing a lot more stone on maps to cater to people who seem to enjoy walling the crap out of their towns and turning it into a tower-defense game. I mean, hey, if people like that, I’m not against allowing things to be played in different ways.

However, I feel like, at some point, if walls are too powerful, it creates boring gameplay, where there is no dynamic player response needed - just continually mining stone and repairing walls. So for that reason, I am hesitant to keep going further down this path. I think at some point, soldiers should be needed to defeat larger invasions.

Whether or not soldiers are currently up to the talk of defending a 1k+ pop town, remains to be seen. We did test this quite a bit internally in the past and raiders have been nerfed a couple times since then, so it seems like it should be possible.

Anyway, I’m in the process of re-testing combat and trying to work my way up to a 1k+ pop town. Naturally, being a masochist, I have decided to try and do this on vanquisher with minimal wall use, no towers and on Arid Highlands map, which has made it slow going due to difficulty scaling food production on the infertile terrain. So far though I’m a bit over 500 and have been having success just using soldiers with only a palisade wall / fortified gates around my trade post, treasury and storehouse. Getting the right relics definitely helps. Whether that will continue to work as I get to 1k… only time will tell.

Combat is also not considered finished - we plan to change the way barracks and soldier recruitment works, to allow for different types of soldiers and even cavalry, which should spice things up. Also will do a pass at some point to try to make combat control better.

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24

Crenelations, Hoarding, The City of Constantinople, and the Great Wall of China have all entered the chat.
None of them are amused.

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