Defenses + raider camps

[k2sheeler]

I came back to the game after a year+ away and was excited to see a lot of new features. I think the switch to raider camps nearby is smart - it adds some building challenge and strategy to the combat vs just waiting for surprise ambushes.

However, I think the balance is way off in the early game. I’m playing on the middle mode, and there are three raider camps near by village all with two guard towers. I have tried sending 12 soldiers armed mostly with swords and shields and they’ve all been slaughtered by the 6 guys at camp with clubs and the archers in the towers. It’s extremely expensive, both resources/gold and labor, to have that many guards in the early game, so for it to still not be enough to clear even one camp is crazy. I also was waiting a long time to upgrade my guard tower to stone, thinking the additional range would let me fire on one of the camp towers and take it out before sending in my soldiers. I was really disappointed that the “extra” range from a very expensive (again, by early game standards) upgrade was minimal. I still couldn’t get an advantage on this camp.

I’d much prefer if the camps had a variety of challenge levels and scaled somewhat with where the user is at in the game.

I’d also like a feature where you can create forbidden zones so your laborers don’t wander too close to camps or wolf dens. I am now spending most of my gameplay babysitting the area around this one camp because laborers keep trying to fix my wall there or pick up the bodies of workers I didn’t babysit…

Summary: I like the raider camps idea, but they need to be more manageable and scale with the game, and there needs to be greater value for the resource investment a player makes into their defense upgrades.

[Boris_Gonagan]

Just a note: I play on the lowest level for raiders, and the camps on my maps are about half 2 and half 1 tower each, so there is a bit of ‘balancing’ to the camps, just not enough. If you get a camp near your initial location (like, right outside your initial vision distance) the early game becomes a militant nightmare even on Pioneer settings, because hunters are not enough to take out even a one tower camp until they get some kind of armor/protection against the tower fire. That means a steady drain of villagers from small raids or from wandering too near the camp towers.

I agree, we need to be able to set some kind of forbidden or exclusion zone to keep the villagers from suiciding. Perhaps a simple building of a fence that you can mark the area beyond it as No Go - that makes it necessary for the gamer to put some effort into it instead of such a Zone being a “Ignore the camps at will” for the early game.