I throw here few thoughts i had today about the village defense and villagers stuff.
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- Round and square towers. Just to have some variation to fit better in case of diagonal-wall system.
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- Diagonal walls.
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- Walls with door on one side, so units can go on there and hide or shoot animals, riders. Walls should connect towers, barracks and other defensive type buildings. Then can build some castle-like stuff. Walls should have many upgrades. Basically, you can add a layer of stone each year to the wall if have the material. So with 100 years maybe 5 upgrades and i have very nice strong wall that takes some serious hits and can have 5 soldiers on them.
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- All villagers can hide into any nearby building - including wall sections if there are free slots. There should be more hiding-space in buildings than there are worker slots. So maybe 5 villagers can hide into guard tower while only 2 can be shooting.
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- Guard towers should have some weapons stored there, so in case of raid any nearby villager can go in there and start shooting. Of course if more skilled trained villager comes there, it takes the job over and has higher attack.
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- Barracks work as training camps and basic housing/shelter. Villagers can go train there while nothing to do, get shelter, eat and so on. Maybe combine all together the functions of hunter cabin, temporary shelter, guard tower and barracks. So the level 1 would be a simple hunter cabin with one shooter slot so if hunter in there, then can also shoot animals safely. Level 2 would be 2 people/shooters + 2 training/hiding slots. With more upgrades the house would get bigger with more people, hunting areas, storage space, weapons etc. Villagers who have no specific full-time job, should always try to go get some military training automatically in there. Later these villagers with some skill should not just run away from bears by default, but use weapon and defensive skill instead. All villagers should have different military skill level based on their training and experience.
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A bit off topic, but alternative route where villagers can train themselves into - religion, spiritism. This way, they would develop more character, culture, happiness, morale. Of course villagers can develop both directions if they had the time for it and depending if i have more hunter-soldier buildings or shrine-church type of stuff.
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- Raiders should try to climb the wall instead of destroying it - especially stone walls.
With these changes i would imagine a gameplay like this: early i build 2…4 hunters cabins that work as simple shelter, housing and hunter cabin. Later can choose if upgrade into living-house direction or with barracks-guard-tower-hunter option. I connect a basic wall between 2 hunter cabins and upgrade them into military/hunting direction because this side are more animals. Other side cabins i upgrade into living houses with family life stuff. Then after some years i upgrade these even further and can have 6 hunters/soldiers in there with 12 training slots, so the other free villagers also get some self defense skill. After few upgrades this would look more like a serious defense - higher walls and stuff.