- Real Raids, whose participants had as an objective stealing anything that was easy to carry away. They are not going to come with battering rams and ladders and trebuchets, but they are going to make off with the carts and wagons, and use them to haul away loot, like the contents of any storage facility they can get to - and what they cannot carry away, they will set fire to (arson, as has been noted by many historians, is a constant component of raiding parties).
- Pillaging armies. The term ‘army’ can be pretty deceptive here. The “Great Army” of Vikings that ravaged Anglo-Saxon England and was written about in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has been estimated by modern historians at about 300 men total! These guys, though, will hold the town for ransom, and arrive with armor, good weapons, and can make ladders and simple hand-carried rams on the spot. They will attack gates and walls, and if they get in they will not only steal everything not nailed down (and pry up the nailed down parts) but also massacre a large percentage of the population.
It’s kind of ironic saying raids are sort of “deus ex machina” and keep coming regardless of what you do but then references Anglo-Saxon England where they just kept getting hit with raids for centuries, no matter what they did…
A lot of these suggestions that draw inspiration from history face a couple problems, one being that, I’m sure the people of those time periods did not find Viking raids to be fun. While we can leverage history for relatable ideas, which captivate people’s imaginations and can lead to fun gameplay, too closely emulating historical reality can be decidedly not fun. Would it be fun to have to withdraw your population into a walled stronghold repeatedly while all your outlying crops and buildings were looted or burned, only to have to keep rebuilding them over and over? I think it is fine to have some danger of that, where it happens on a limited scale occasionally but if raiders just went nuts looting and destroying all your unprotected buildings constantly, it would certainly get old fast. It would also make people feel even more compelled to wall in everything.
There are also a lot of weird design considerations that arise from the way time is simulated. Game time has to pass at a rate that keeps things interesting and allows your town to develop at a pace that is engaging. However, villagers, raiders, soldiers, etc, can only move so fast before it starts to look ridiculous. A day in-game is 5 seconds, so your villagers can actually take “days” to reach work places. Likewise, even once raiders are on the outskirts of a large city, it can be several days just to walk to the town-center assuming there’s no walls. At the same time, raids can’t take too long, or it would overly impede the player’s ability to grow crops and their town could wind up starving to death even if they successfully repelled a raid. There’s just a lot of dynamics like this, which complicate how these things can work.
The thing is though, we do currently have these types of raids. Normal raiders are just looking for loot and will try to get at your storehouses, trading post and treasury or other buildings, grab what they can, then take off when they’ve collected enough loot to be satisfied. We limit what they are likely to take though because having them ransack every house, market, root cellar, etc, that isn’t protected would create too many targets to effectively defend and could be crippling, setting your town up for starvation.
Invading armies typically ask for a bribe and, if it isn’t paid, they will focus more on destruction and trying to kill your town-center.
Provide some relationship between what happens in a ‘raid’ and future Raids. As in, a raid loses over 90% of the raiders, and it will be a longer time before someone else tries raiding that town. As in, several raids in a row get hammered with 90%+ casualties, and your town gets a reputation as a Safe Place and attracts more Immigrants, and, perhaps, you get a several-year respite from raids of any kind. As in, buy off a raiding force, and the next raid will possibly arrive a bit earlier, asking, of course, for even more.
I’ve thought about this and it sounds cool on the surface but the problem is, it just reinforces success / failure. If you wipe 90% of a raid, then you obviously have great defenses and probably are a more skilled player - now the game gets easier for you?.. That reduces the challenge for people who are already doing well / probably want more difficulty.
On the flip side, if someone gets caught unprepared or just isn’t as strong of a player, not only have they likely suffered casualties, loss of equipment / gold and economic damage, setting them back, but the next raid will be larger as a result? How is that good for players who are already struggling?
- Revise the walls. Make damage from all hand weapons about 1/4 as effective as now against all stone walls/towers, but only 1/2 as effective against wooden palisades or Gates or all kinds. A double stone wall then, with any amount of defensive fire, would protect against most Raids, not requiring the ridiculously wide stone mazes we construct now - but you would need extra defense around gates, like more Towers or extra walls/multiple gates. But to compensate:
All stone walls and towers require twice as much stone to build.
So, people complain about raiders hacking though walls and we definitely get that it is unrealistic, however, it is an abstraction that exists in many strategy games because it is necessary since fully simulating all the ways attackers breaches walls in real-life history is just not technically feasible.
Raiders do already focus their attacks on gates, which are weaker than walls but they will choose to attack walls if the defenses covering gates are too formidable. By making walls much better, we would just further reinforce tower-defense gameplay where you lead raiders through a twisting series of gates to get slaughtered by towers. Making walls and towers cost twice as much won’t compensate for this because raiders being much more focused on gates will make it much easier to ensure they attack where you want them to. Beyond that, players will just inevitably complain that there isn’t enough stone / its too hard to build all the crazy walls and gates they feel they need. Could try a more minor adjustment though and see if that has any positive effect…
As illustrated in some of my recent posts and posts by others, it is totally feasible to defend a town on vanquisher using soldiers and minimal walling. However, it is more challenging and requires a higher level of experience and micro-management ability, where you need to outfit soldiers with the best gear possible at any given point, you need to set up advantageous engagements at choke-points / try to achieve a concave around strung-out raider forces that are streaming in and selectively pull back soldiers who begin to take too much damage.
It is too much though to expect new / more casual players to do all of that. For that reason, I think it is beneficial to allow for the sort of wall and tower defenses that often occur, especially on lower difficulties.
What we perhaps need to is add in some additional raider siege engines on higher difficulties but also provide additional military options for defenders, such as cavalry (that can run around attackers to take out siege) and different classes of soldiers, to make defense more feasible without walling and also more interesting.
It seems like it is a natural inclination of people though to go for walls and attempt to wall everything in, so, at some point, as a designer, I have to wonder, how hard should I be trying to push players toward a different type of play style vs. just letting people do what they seem to want to do?
). 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.
