It’s very costly to keep all towers garrisoned all the time, so this is my idea to help with that. Create a new building “guard barracks” which will hold up to about 10-12 guards and each guard will cost the same as what it costs to man the highest level guard tower in the town.
These guards will automatically man any empty towers (where production is toggled off) when raiders or predators come into range. Place guard barracks convenient to towers where attacks frequently occur. You can still toggle on production to keep guards permanently in a tower if desired.
Of course if you have a small number of towers this provides no benefit, it’s just as easy to keep them manned all the time. But when you have lots of towers defending a large area then this could help a lot to reduce costs and provide targeted defense as needed.
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Something Would be nice yes, turning towers off and on for unnecessary gold consumption is stupid 
I would rather thier be techs to vastly cut guard wages, they aint soldiers 
Or just have thier wages cut anyway.
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Agreed. The thing I don’t get is when you add the first guard, there’s a monthly cost but then it’s buy-one-get-one-free for the second guard. Then there’s the amount - tower guards are just archers, so why would they cost up to 16 per month when an archer in a fort is just 4 ingots?
It’s as if they decided there had to be a cost but couldn’t decide if it’s a maintenance cost or payment for the guard and in the end it’s actually neither. If it’s for maintenance, whether the tower is on or off shouldn’t matter. If it’s to pay the guards, then when there’s 2 in the tower it should cost twice as much. But then why does the cost increase depending on the level? No matter the level they’re the same guards doing the same job, right? Either way there’s no logic to it.
You pay for the second guard?
If you’re putting towers around your city, then you will have to have advanced far enough to have enough spare stone for the wall, and at that point you should be making heaps of gold from multiple Pubs, Gold-only Foundries, and filling houses up with Spices with all the tons of spare Trading Center gold.
No, I meant you don’t pay for the second guard … it’s free. The monthly cost for a tower is the same when you add the second guard.
Yeah that’s exactly what I mean. Have always paid for the second guard. Are you making the mistake of expecting the Expenditures tab to update before the next month has passed?
Seems I had it wrong … this is something I didn’t notice before. The cost is zero when the tower is off. When you activate it, the monthly cost applies regardless of how many guards there are, even if there are none. So the cost seems to be for the tower itself, not based on the guards. What makes it confusing is the line item in the gold report calls it “Guard Training”. Check this out:
Tower shut off, cost is zero:
Tower on, no guards, cost is 16:
Same cost of 16 with 1 or 2 guards:
What this means is, as long as you can afford the weapons and have extra people to man the towers, there’s no other extra gold needed to add the second guard.
Ok I just loaded up the game and tried both removing a 2nd guard from an upgraded tower, then adding one to an unupgraded one. Both had no change in the Guard Training expense.
Weird, I’m pretty sure it used to charge per guard.
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This is a pain if you are trying to only staff a lot of Towers during raids and save money/labour the rest of the time. You cannot of course just go to the Professions page and with a couple of key strokes remove all guards and costs. You can if you turn off the auto fill thing remove the guards but you are still paying for them.
No you have to visit each Tower and switch them off that way which can be a bit tedious
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What makes it worse is if you keep your towers empty and plan to staff them when a raid happens, of course the random laborers tagged to be guards will be all over the town far far away. Then all those guards have to scramble to find weapons before they can go to the tower. By that time the raiders are probably working on dismantling the gates and maybe the tower too.
The best solution is to simply make the towers affordable so they can be kept manned all the time. Considering you will need many towers for them to be useful, a reasonable cost per month is 1 ingot for a base lookout tower, 2 for the watch tower, and 4 for a battlement tower. I would be OK with paying these amounts for each guard.
And… why does it take 15 stone to build a lookout tower when it is clearly all wood?
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+1 for a guard station building, make them have a working area and let them patrol around the city to keep the peace by breaking up bar fights for example or fight wild animals and as soon as you sound the bell when raiders come they hustle to man the defenses. I don’t like the idea of having people permanently stuck in the towers.
From my research historically guard towers were constantly manned, in order to spot approaching enemies. So I don’t have a problem with that if it wasn’t so bleeping expensive to do so. If they don’t want to lower the cost, I think the guard stations is the next best thing.
