Raiders & Walls

Farthest Frontier Ideas and Feedback
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Hi!

I played many maps half a year back with v0.8.1a. Now, with v0.9.0a, after only two maps, the city defending with the endless waves felt imbalanced. Something broke the fun I had with it:

On Vanquisher, I had an ideal setup with only two sides to defend. Three battering rams came and melted my 6-square-thick walls in under two minutes like butter.

That didn’t feel right.

What’s the point of stone walls if raiders are barely slowed by them? It felt like cheating, on the raider’s side. It killed the endless-waves format and the fun for me in an instant. No more summer after summer of improving and defending since walls are now useless.

A few changes I’d love to see, either as options or maybe as a moddable playstyle:

  1. Multiple-square-thick walls are clunky and bulky. Triple their health/resource cost and make them almost immune against battering rams. A thick stone wall should be more than enough to provide safety for a town. Rams should only work against gates. Their damage seems way off. Let rams only attack walls if players stack gates like crazy, as the eventual last resort.

And do not let rams stack on each other but block their square. Let the replacement rams stay behind and wait until the first one is broken (like Medival Total War 2 did).

As the third wall tier, offer an upgraded two-squares-thick wall, forming the final city enclosure that looks fancier and more impressive.

If walls are useless, the whole cardhouse crumbles and there is no more building and defending for years and years–which is my favorite way to play the game. I loved 0.8.1a actually way more in the long-term from the defending aspect.

I know there’s probably a loud minority of fans screaming that the game is too easy on Vanquisher. Making walls useless though feels not like a satisfying solution to me.

I understand the agent limit and subsequent raider lag but ranged-immune raiders (crossbows are armor-piercing) and rams that force one to go beyond one’s walls feel not like a satisfying solution. It defeats the purpose of tower defense. Behind stone walls, I’m sitting on the high ground. It should feel like that. Attackers are at a great disadvantage against a fortified city.

Charging outside with unautonomous (aka dumb) soldiers is just frustrating. The selection square doesn’t select ALL units (no blue square appears on all), I don’t have unit cards that can be given stances (like RTS games do), and the soldiers behave not at their optimum in combat (to state it mildly).

A small side note on: ALARM BELL / TOWERS / CITY ATMOSPHERE

The income budget and micromanagement (and lack) of villagers make us play the ON/OFF game with towers. That’s not a fun mini-game!

How about a

  1. VILLAGER PRIORITY SYSTEM and
  2. enough time to gear up and scamper to the towers/citywalls?

Activating the alarm bell in the town center should place guard duty as priority one for villagers. A loud and fuller ringing should cast the entire town into an ominous uprising. The price for that feat is a lack of production from missed work.

Villagers should scamper like a poked ant hill, rushing to gear up or hide in their houses. Don’t leave villages walking around like nothing is happening when the city is besieged. Normal city life should come to a standstill. No one should leave the city walls.

If the villagers act scared, the player might feel the same excitement!

Tiny tweaks that annoyed me every past playthrough:

  • Hunters should not need micro-management with boars and wolves. They should handle themselves and one-shot their prey. Bears could be even more dangerous and require player management to spice things up (and only provide the ‘being attacked’ warning there).

  • When guards on foot get charged, they often do not even get one arrow loose. That’s extremely frustrating to watch. Guards should come with one arrow loaded into combat; while their second shot might be up to chance. They also should not stop their aimed shot at 1/3 of the distance. That’s when you’ll hit a straight-charging enemy perfectly!

  • When guards are on duty, they should not be intoxicated or do anything else. They get paid good gold for a reason and dereliction of duties carried very uncomfortable punishments in the past. Let the workers bring food to them. The good townspeople trust them with their lives!

Balance-wise, I always felt that there were just not quite enough villagers, if you played with raiders.

With a guard rooster, you just can’t craft enough shoes, or clothing, or have enough workers. It’s not really an option since you need guards.

Unfortunately, then the rest suffer. It would feel great to reach that equilibrium IF, through a few playthroughs, someone could learn that level of perfection and allow players to master that. Currently, the broken trader stuffs that hole of lack of resources, if one has to defend.

I hope you’ll fix the rams<>walls conundrum because currently, I don’t feel the urge to play the game again, unlike in 0.8.1a.

Cheers!

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Your town is not supposed to be an impenetrable fortress. Raider catapults will make that point even more strongly in the future. Walls are there to slow raiders down enough for your defense (towers and soldiers) to manage the incoming forces. We don’t play with triple, or even double, walls during our own tests.

Vanquisher is intended to be challenging and to require use of all available resources to survive. This means a sizable standing army and efficient use of towers.

A future update will give you new troop options and some additional controls for dispatching them, but fundamentally the gameplay is going to involve you rallying your forces where they are needed, which is how it works now.

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I understand the point of Vanquisher as a challenging level in the Combat portion of the game.
But be careful that you offer real alternatives to the gamer.

I have no intention of ever playing Vanquisher difficulty, because I am completely dis-interested in playing a Medievalish Battle Game - I’ve played them in miniatures, board games and computer games off and on many times before and have no more interest. I suspect there are other gamers who prefer the City Builder to the Combat aspect of FF. The smart move is to appeal to as many different types of players as your game can legitimately.

That means, though, that Pioneer and Trailblazer have to be substantially different from Vanquisher - and each other.
So when, as has happened a couple of times, I get Battering Rams rumbling forward in Pioneer, I feel like the game has stopped giving me real options and forcing me to play the Battle Game - which leads me to stop playing the game, because Life’s Too Short to be forced into a pastime you don’t enjoy.

I suggest, then, that with the new military/Raider options incoming, their appearance be carefully differentiated. Mounted Troops, Catapults, Battering Rams, should all be Highly Dangerous to a town no matter what it’s defenses, since catapults and battering rams were specifically designed to take down defense. Leave them at Vanquisher or only on Late Game Trailblazer attacks (the machines shouldn’t be accompanying a small raiding force anyway, since they had to mostly be built on the spot or nearby by Specialists). Mounted Troops could be part of any size raid, but I suggest to give more options, that they only appear on Pioneer after the gamer starts acquiring his own horses/mounted troops.

Just suggestions, but I’d really like to see a meaningful distinction maintained between Pioneer, Trailblazer and Vanquisher in the combat systems and expectations.

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You know you can just choose Pacifist mode in the Advanced Settings if you don’t want to fight raiders and dealt with predators?

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Why not an option to have predators and no raiders?

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Well aware of that. What I want, though, is a graduated set of conditions in which I can choose not only Nothing or All, but How Much/Many Predators and Raiders I want to put up with.

Right now, even on Predator Pioneer settings, I can generate maps with 4 - 6 Boar and Wolf spawn points visible just in the area of the Starting Position. That means, from the beginning, there are more Predators on the map than I have villagers, which doesn’t seem like a low-level setting - especially when there are two more settings supposedly more challenging above that.

Likewise (although, to be fair, I suspect they may have been glitches rather than features) having both Battering Rams and 200+ groups of Raiders show up on Pioneer Setting makes me wonder Where Do We Go From Here? Raiders can be better armed and armored, but with Battering Rams on Pioneer I either have to play with a major military commitment or play to fail, because no passive defense will save my town.

That leaves me with only the option to play on Pacifist with Zero military/defense play, and 0 Predators. I want something in between Zero and Battering Ram, and think it is better game design to have a distinct difference among the various difficulty settings: Pioneer should require some commitment but not huge, Trailblazer should require you to defend against Rams and better and larger raiding groups, Vanquisher should be Full Commitment, with Rams, Catapults, Mounted Troops, armored and equipped with steel weapons, hand grenades, etc.

The gamers that like combat should have their preferred level of combat, those that want no or minimal should have theirs. Without distinct differences among the difficulty levels, having the levels is a waste of time.

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Oh the option to choose. Been asked for several times. Whether we’ll get that option … :woman_shrugging:

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I don’t play Vanquisher so this may not apply, but I use five layers of walls with distance between them and inner perimiter walls combined with a system (5) barracks and towers. This seems to confuse the raiders as to which way to attack. The gold and most presious items are stored at the centre of this. This makes every battle a retreating battle but 250+ raiders usually retreat before getting to the goodies at the core of the defence, rams or not. This is the only tactic I have found to be meaningfull with current functionality. But again, I don’t play Vanquisher so it might not apply.

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I support that option!!!

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If FF stirs towards an RTS-like army vs. army (and not tower defense), the game suffers from a lack of command-and-control for the player, compared to pure RTS games which were optimized by design for this.

What I’m hoping to enjoy one day (with mods or without) in future FF versions, is an endless tower defender with city building behind one’s walls. There’s nothing wrong with army vs. army, it’s just not that enjoyable since FF isn’t specialized.

SIEGES
Like a good escalation, the current sieges could offer more stages. It’s going too fast past the breach and sword clashing. A battle within the walls–with soldier vs. soldier–should be the last stage when things get really spicy. Before that, a few attack strategies and counters could play out:

Small raiding parties, 10 soldiers with ladders ↔ one defender towers
Battering ram at the gate ↔ throwing rocks and fire arrows (as a main gate upgrade)
Siege towers (for attackers) ↔ fire arrows upgrade for defender’s towers (with a 5% chance or accumulated shots before a tower or ram catches fire)
With catapults added to the game: attacking catapults ↔ stationary wall catapults as towers

Defending a breach in the wall with soldiers offers currently no advantage to the defender as there’s no collision. A narrow space is highly advantageous. That’s why a few can hold off many. Leaving a reinforced position would be suicidal if you’re outnumbered. It’s rarely a winning move to charge out from one’s castle (and try to stop a battering ram).

With no collision between the agents–I’m sure the CPU won’t mind–how about a pile of rubble on the ground that slows the raiders’ speed considerably or only allows two or three lines of raiders to enter simultaneously?

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