Nope, in v0.9.0
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Awesome! TY for the info 
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 
). 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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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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The behavior of the raiders is also not realistic, but there is nothing you can do about it. On the contrary, you are testing the defense of a city based on the protection of only 2 buildings.
An example of unrealism: on the field there are 1000+ collected crops ready for transportation to the cellar. There are 1000+ provisions in the cellar. In 400+ hours in the game, raiders have never tried to steal 1000+ food from me from the fields/cellar, but at the same time there have been attempts to steal 200 food from the market more than once.
I guessed that protecting 2-3 buildings would be effective in protecting the entire city and also decided to check it out. I usually play the plains map on medium difficulty. But this time I decided, like you, to start on a dry map, and of high difficulty. Initially it was a little unusual, but then it became quite easy to defend ourselves. Raiders do not provide any difficulty. The whole difficulty lies in the growth of the city because of the map. Constant lack of food and lack of clay.
Using the tactic of defending 3 buildings, the raiders became boring for me… They are too predictable, attacking only 3 buildings in the city. I also placed a trading post and a treasury with the main building, thus usually the residents help me defend.
Your defense is effective because you have gathered all your soldiers in one place, who can SHOOT! For example, you have 24 soldiers in one place, and each of them can fire at a target. Beginners, not knowing about the features of raiders, will try to protect the entire city at once. This means that newcomers will have 24 soldiers distributed on 4 sides north/south/east/west or 6 soldiers each. Suppose one of the sides is attacked, this means that 6 soldiers are shooting, and another 18 are standing and waiting for a break in the wall. Because they can’t shoot through the wall. 6 soldiers are unlikely to cause significant damage, so the losses after the breakthrough will be large.
What options do beginners have:
- Hire more soldiers? But this is not always possible, there is no gold or there are no free inhabitants.
- Build double/triple walls… Thus giving more time to 6 soldiers to kill more enemies.
It doesn’t matter how many soldiers you have, only those who are in the barracks near the wall can shoot. Even if there are free places in the barracks, they still won’t be able to get there to help repel the attack…
PS, if you add a couple of better ones to the defense tactics of 3 buildings, then the game against raiders will become really boring…
- Wall the entire city.
- Cover with a wall not only the treasury/warehouse, but also the barracks around it.
Thus, we will be able to hire soldiers exactly at the moment when we receive notification of the attack. While the raiders are breaking down the main wall, the soldiers will have time to get weapons and take a place in the barracks to protect the treasury
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The behavior of the raiders is also not realistic, but there is nothing you can do about it.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, its a game and we are limited in our pursuit of realism not only by technical challenges but also by what makes for fun gameplay.
Having raiders frequently destroy large numbers of buildings would quickly become frustrating and make people feel even more like it was a necessity to wall in every single building.
Your defense is effective because you have gathered all your soldiers in one place, who can SHOOT! For example, you have 24 soldiers in one place, and each of them can fire at a target.
Once raider types with shields show up and, especially if they have rams, just shooting arrows is not enough. I usually deploy all my soldiers and get them into melee range, ideally in a choke point, where they can’t get overwhelmed.
Some types of raiders, which occur later on in the game, will be more aggressive about destroying buildings though and not just go right for the storehouse, treasury, trading post and town center, so you can end up with a lot of buildings destroyed if you don’t respond with soldiers but these types of attacks are less frequent, due to the concern of frustration if buildings are getting destroyed too often.
Thus, we will be able to hire soldiers exactly at the moment when we receive notification of the attack. While the raiders are breaking down the main wall, the soldiers will have time to get weapons and take a place in the barracks to protect the treasury
New soldiers take a while to collect weapons and armor. The health bonus they receive as soldiers also takes a while to fill in, so they will be at reduced health if they are fresh recruits when they have to go into battle.
We’ve also talked about adding veterancy bonus for soldiers based on being in combat, which they would lose if de-activated.
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- 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?
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The ram usually moves well ahead of the attacking raiders. Therefore, I withdraw some of the soldiers from behind the wall in order to quickly destroy it and retreat behind the wall. Raiders with shields don’t provide much of a threat when you’ve killed off the rest of the raiders with your bow. It is necessary to take the soldiers out of the barracks and order them to fight in close combat. Sometimes raiders with shields don’t even have to fight; they retreat on their own due to the failure of the attack)
Yes, Soldiers need time. That’s why we need another wall around the city. Also, the treasury/warehouse and barracks should be nearby so that the soldiers spend a minimum amount of time getting weapons. And the fact that they will not have a full reserve of health is not important. Because they will sit in the barracks and shoot at the enemies while they try to tear down the walls near the treasury/barracks
It might be better to make sure that raiders steal from buildings without causing damage to the building. Only barracks, towers, walls and a few others were destroyed.
One of my toughest fights yet on my most recent town, which has no towers and only a palisade around strorehouses, trader and treasury. Was an “invading army” type, so used the deadline to wait for a trader and grab a couple extra sets of plate armor, then marched out to meet them, to minimize town damage. Lost 8 soldiers and then invaders who snuck by killed a number of villagers along the road into town before I caught up with them. All in all, not bad, although the beginning of the fight looked kind of scary.
The game as it stands now (with the current playtest) has a nice balance between Defense and Attack.
The town haas several different strategies that can be successfully pursued based on player inclination and map: wall everything if you can, wall part and use Terraforming or water to cover part of the perimeter, wall just the ‘important stuff’. Place towers in fortified enclosures or behind walls to attrit anything approaching, place towers well away from the walls to attrit casual raids and larger forces on their way in, use ‘mazes’ to lengthen the time tower and troops can shoot, etc., etc.
I started by complaining of the lack of historical look and realism of walls and defenses, but then I’m a professional historian - it’s what I do. I have come to appreciate the fine balance of the current system, though, so that I worry now more about future additions (catapults, cavalry) upsetting the balance more than I do the system as it stands.
One suggestion I would make that I think would make a huge difference to the enjoyment of new players, would be a comprehensive Combat and Town Defense Guide to accompany the game on release. The idea of a Core Defense of walls/towers only around 3 - 4 important buildings, or the use of mazes, terraforming and water to help defend the town are not obvious at first, and the learning curves (especially on higher difficulties) can be really painful given that it can lead to the decimation of a town you’ve spent hours building.
Worry about adding cavalry and catapults because it will break the balance? But there is no balance here… Soldiers are tied to a specific barracks, thus they cannot fire from another barracks even if it is free. The attack of the raiders exclusively on 3 buildings is unbalanced both in game and historical terms. Now protecting 3 buildings is only gaining popularity. But let’s imagine that we transfer all the knowledge that we have about protection to these 3 buildings. We’ll put them near the city, surround them with triple walls, dig a ditch, and make a labyrinth. We will get effective protection that raiders cannot penetrate, and we won’t even have to do anything. Also, this protection will be much cheaper in terms of resources, unlike protection around the entire city. This leaves only one strategy in the game. Construction of a fortified “castle”. Moreover, historically this would be true if the raiders plundered the adjacent lands. Thus causing economic losses. But this is not the case, so this strategy has no disadvantages. Is it balanced? No. Therefore, adding new types of units will not break what is already broken. Perhaps, on the contrary, it will be able to add new tactics to the game. It’s hard to come up with tactics when you only have soldiers.
PS the raiders look crazy when they try again and again to break through to the protected treasury xD
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I’m sorry, but your post proves the opposite of what you are asserting.
The raiders do stupid things, like ignoring loot laying around for the taking (fields of food, for starters) but in turn your soldiers are intrinsically limited by tying each unit to a single barracks, and not even allowing you to divide the barracks groups. Is it realistic? Don’t get me started - I’ve been a military historian for over 30 years, I could go on for hours.
But FF was never intended to be a Medieval Battle Game. If it were, it should have started with such now-missing mechanics as Leadership, Tactics, differing Troop Types (archers, spearmen, knights, etc - which, to be sure, they have hinted are coming), and Morale just for starters. All those are largely absent from the game as it stands, as are the farmers as a militia force, which was pretty much standard among European medieval states (the Fyrd in Anglo-Saxon England, the Ban in France). so the game is not set up to model anything resembling a real battle game or specifically a medieval battle game.
Reducing the entire defense problem to a few key buildings: yes, that is unbalanced as the game now stands. Will it be unbalanced when invading catapults can hammer the entire ‘defended’ complex? Beat’s me, but I suspect catapults will require some new responses that may be not be compatible with a single small fortress in the middle of town.
And, to be honest, I am suspicious of the Keep Defense: in my experience the raiders will attack numerous storage facilities as well as Markets where resources are stored, so that even if the Town Center, Vault, Trading Post, etc are heavily defended, even impregnable behind a game version of the Krak des Chevalliers, you can lose a lot of infrastructure and goods in the rest of the town if you make no other response at all.
That, by the way, makes the Keep Defense into a Castle, a refuge from raiders, which is pretty much how castles started in Europe, as a response to Magyar and Viking raiders and more local thugs and bases from which defending troops could muster and counter-attack. IF then, the raiders start applying themselves more whole-heartedly to slaughtering villagers and taking away anything portable, a simple extension of the current Town Center Alarm in which the villagers (all who can make it) shelter in the Town Center behind walls while troops and towers fend off the raid is a pretty accurate depiction of a Medieval raid and response even without such battle game fundamentals as Morale, Leadership, and small-unit Tactics.
They could try to provide all the details required for a semi-accurate Medieval Battle Game. But, at least for me, that would detract and distract from the game as a Medieval Town Builder. At this point, I also suspect that programming in Morale behavior for all the soldiers, as well as some tactical behavior for everyone and Leadership (and Leaders, which would be the first hint of Hierarchy in the game’s population) wold be a major undertaking, and therefore a distraction for the game development from everything else planned and/or projected
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English is not my main language, Google translator helps me. Perhaps you misunderstood me. But when I read your answer, it seems to me that you don’t understand yourself.
In your first post you state that the game is well balanced and adding new units could upset this:
In my answer I repeatedly wrote that the game has problems with balance:
And all the examples I wrote about show the weakness of the balance. Tying soldiers to barracks reduces the number of effective strategies for defending isolated points. Relevant when protecting the entire city and when raiders attack from 2 sides. Defense of 3 buildings is too unbalanced. The minimum amount of resources for the construction of protection, while we have maximum protection efficiency. It is also easier to understand. It is easier to protect 3 buildings than the entire city. With other strategies, you can also build cities of 1500+, but the amount of resources spent will be much higher. All this can be reduced to one imbalan strategy.
Therefore, I don’t understand why my post proves the opposite of my asserting. At the same time, you yourself agree with me that such protection is unbalanced:
I’ll try to answer based on my gaming experience, as well as the experience of moderators/developers
Raiders actually attack 3-4 buildings in the game. Trading post, treasury, main building, storehouse. Sometimes the market is attacked, but only if the raiders’ path runs through the market. Moreover, after robbing the market, they completed their raid and left. Sometimes they ignored the market and continued to go to the treasury. I don’t remember my cellar or warehouse where logs were stored being robbed. This experience is based on 400+ hours of playing and testing this strategy. The moderator is also testing this strategy on a high difficulty + dry map. Here are the buildings he protects:
PS I don’t quite understand why you constantly write that you are a historian. We are on a gaming forum. Yes, knowledge of history will help convey the atmosphere of the game. But when we talk about balance, knowledge of history is no longer so valuable. But knowledge in game development or experience in playing urban planning simulators, in my opinion, will be more valuable.
This leaves only one strategy in the game. Construction of a fortified “castle”.
Huh? Is constructing a fortified castle to protect your gold / most valuable goods not historical?
It terms of gameplay, it also seems preferable to give the raids some primary targets they will try to get to vs. the player having to predict where they might go and having them just attack the nearest buildings and totally trash your town, forcing people to constantly rebuild everything even when they successfully defeat the raiders but just don’t make it to the point of attack in time.
Even historically speaking, the vikings didn’t typically show up and completely destroy Saxon towns, they tended to try to occupy them. They definitely didn’t show up outside a walled city and start trying to harvest crops from fields instead of attempting to get inside and plunder gold / precious goods.
But yeah, either way, as Boris says, we’re not trying to make a highly accurate historical battle simulation. We want it to be pseudo historical but ultimately, it is a game and its focus is more on town-building and economy than warfare. We are continuing work on warfare, adding new features, units and controls, so I think there is much that can and will be done to improve it but I don’t know that it will ever be super realistic - the goal is more to make it a fun addition to the core town-building gameplay.
That said, I have increased the chance for raiders to attack / loot other buildings and not be so fixated on getting at the vault / trade post / storehouse… but I don’t think it will be desirable to have too much of that, for the aforementioned reason of it becoming annoying / pushing people more toward having to always wall in everything.
Ultimately, it is difficult to balance well for everyone since player skill / experiences ranges quite a bit, even for people playing on Vanquisher. As soon you figured out a consistently successful strategy to defend your town, the challenge may seem “too easy” while if we were to make it more difficulty, for other people, it would seem impossible or overly burdensome.
It’s a weird thing with game difficulty where, you have people who just assume, based on their experience with other games, that they should be able to play on the highest difficulty and then, if they have too tough a time, will complain and leave negative reviews instead of just turning down the difficulty. Maybe we can get around this in the future by adding a “impossible” difficulty level lol…
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If the attackers had a significant superiority of forces, they could capture the castle. But if the advantage was minimal, why should they kill themselves against the castle walls? They could also take the castle under siege. Sieges could last for years, but what did the besiegers eat? Didn’t they plunder the surrounding villages?
This is a good gaming solution, but it is not intuitive for players. How should the player understand about this mechanic? Based on the experience of other games, in most cases every building is attacked. Historically, it’s also 50/50, raiders can rob the entire city, or only part of it. After 300+ hours in the game, I guessed that raiders had priorities when looting, but I was still sure that raiders could rob any building. For example - a cellar/warehouse. And only by reading the forum I learned that raiders have no priority, they ignore 90% of the buildings in the game. Including ignoring the cellar/warehouse. Perhaps my experience was influenced by the fact that breakthroughs in my defense did not occur so often. Therefore, I could not often observe which buildings were more susceptible to attack.
The game provides little information about the raiders’ attack. No, there is no information in what year the raiders will attack. At least receiving notification information in the same year of the attack, and not after the fact. From which side will there be water? You have to press the attack button many times. What targets/buildings did the raids choose to attack? Moreover, they could change from attack to attack.
I think the solution to this is pretty simple, which means another upgrade tier for defensive structures.
Walls become tier 3 fortified walls (double wall with battlements and maybe machicolations, can be temporarily manned by citizens with an alarm bell like the town center, triple or more HP to stone walls, immune to infantry and rams), optional moats. Stone towers become fortress towers (2x2 footprint) with additional long range siege weaponry and 4-6 guard positions.
Gates become fortified gatehouses (3x3 or 3x2 footprint) which are manned, have reinforced gates, maybe even draw bridges if combined with moats, and can pour oil on rams and attackers to set them ablaze.
One siege weaponry is implemented by the devs, rams will be relegated to only attack gates, since stone walls should be more or less impervious to them.
Of course we’ll also need a proper castle building as the ultimate defensive structure/treasury. With appropriate building costs and staffing requirements.
In short: better solutions are easily implemented once the devs get to it. I’m certain it’s all planned out already.
Rams should only work on gates, not walls. Nobody in history knocked down a stone wall with a battering ram. That’s not what they’re for. If they are going to be able to bash down anything with a ram, then we should be able to build moats that they can’t cross, anywhere there’s not a road or other placed object. That way we can at least funnel them to certain defensible points.
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