I’ve been playing FF for a while now and have grown several towns to over 1000 pop on medium raider difficulty and want to move up to vanquisher difficulty (I’ve been playing on medium settings for wildlife and easy settings for disease and starting resources so far).
I usually start of well with the first few raids but as the town gets bigger, everything gets spread out more, raider size grows and half my town gets destroyed. My valuable resources are generally safe cause I focus my defences there. It’s mostly the residential area’s and some lower value storage and a few industry buildings that get obliterated. So I’m looking for tips and tricks you employ to minimize losses from raids especially in the mid game as I’m confident if I can keep growing I’ll end up with a solid late game defence plan.
I think the main Issue I currently have is that the town grows to be quite spacious which means I can’t really defend all sides as that would require too many soldiers/towers which then become spread to thin and then get destroyed 1 by 1.
So how any idea’s on how to deal with this??
p.s. just to confirm raider size and equipment is based on the population of the town and the towncentre tier right?
Starting to build a perimeter wall, bit by bit, starting with the closest to your Town Centre etc, will begin to control how raiders approach. I don’t add towers until after the perimeter is complete around existing and some future housing areas will be, so basically around where my 3rd Market area goes.
You will then get to observe where a decent portion of the raiders start to attack to get through, which informs you where to start building the perimeter towers when you have the resources, gold, and villagers for the walls (2 walls thick on at least the bit exposed to the outside), towers, and upgrades.
I haven’t been able to check if the more recent hotfix change that allowed upgrading the Barracks allows you to recruit all the military units, but if it does, then Heavy Cavalry are your friend. After using them to destroy Catapults, have them start attacking raiders that decide to rampage through your residential areas.
Storage and industry buildings may have to take an L, but I have noticed that the most likely ones to be destroyed are the ones near where raiders decide is their direction of attack. If it’s a storage building near your perimeter destroyed by only a few raiders, a Tower build early can peel them off (would need 2 layers of wall all around if the full perimeter isn’t up).
Towers are a bit underwhelming passed the first stages of the game, the best solution I have before being able to have horsemens and heavy cavalry is to invest in a fortified casern with 8-10 archers in it. I try to wall my city center, the critical storages and my first market and have them covered with the maximum overlaping firepower.
Hunters are nice to cheese the raids a bit, you can get some raiders off your walls by kiting them with 2-3 hunters, this can buy you a bit of time.
For towers, always surround them with walls, and a double gate. If you can, try to get the most altitude bonus possible for them. Oh, and buy crossbows ASAP, they can really make the differnce, especially early game.
Thanks for the replies. I noticed the heavy cavalry seems to be kinda OP atm.
It kinda feels like the town is somewhat growing to fast (too many people coming in) which in turn attracts larger raids before I have the economy to hire more soldiers to keep up. So I was kinda thinking about a strategy to grow more slowly allowing me more time to manufacture armor and weapons to properly equip my soldiers and give me more time to build walls and set up proper defensive positions.
Also so far I have been focusing on getting barracks’ over towers because they seems more effective. But I’m not sure if this is still viable when playing on vanquisher. Anyone has any experience with forgoing towers (almost) entirely and just building barracks’
Current game I have a double stone wall with one weak point, all the raids concentrate on this point. I ignore the suburbs, as do the raiders. No horses, they’re crap. One barrack next to Town Centre, near the weak point. It’s a slaughter.
Yeah once I get to my final set up i’m confident I can take whatever they throw at me. It’s more getting there before I have any walls or only partial walls and before I can produce heavy weapons and armor that I feel vulnerable to the raids
An additional benefit to the fort over towers is the transfer mechanic. If I could transfer guards easily between towers, I would likely keep towers up. However, currently that is not possible without relying on RNG laborer selection opting to select the furthest villagers to fill guard role’s when needed. If I could transfer existing, equipped guards between towers, as I can forts with soldiers, it would help balance towers as they are slightly less gold in maintenance (5g for 2 guards vs 8g).
To your OP, I don’t really use towers at all for now besides at outposts (labor camps/mines etc) or looks. Early game, the town center is sufficient for me (I only play vanquisher). As soon as I can, I build a fort, and just have a few archers on hand for handle things (it go too annoying having to find my hunters, so 3-4 archers early was a nice convenience change, ie bear/boars etc). As my town develops, I start placing forts around the perimeter, as I used to do with towers. The forts are all empty, and have no maintenance cost. Overtime, I add more archers to my initial fort, and transfer them as needed to the forts in the direction of a raider attack.
One tip that helped a previous run for me was making stone walls before stone roads. Anyways, I usually don’t bother melee units until I can equip the heavy weapons and armor. As your town grows, its really not super expensive to build empty forts on the perimeter, and wall them in (no need to wall the entire town yet. When a raid occurs, transfer your existing soldier to the forts in the raids path. The key is that the soldier don’t need to reequip themselves, they just garrison and defend, which isn’t as realistic or reliable with towers.
As far as I can tell, towers really suck compared to forts. They cost 5g regardless if anyone is in it (0g if off), have slightly additional range than a fort, can only hold 2 archers (wish that would bump to 4-6 with the upgrade, but nope). Compared to forts, that have no maintenance cost, can hold 12-24 units etc. It seems soldiers get magic bows and arrows in forts (not sure if that is the same for towers) where arrow counts don’t seem to decrease in forts and infantry can shoot arrows despite not having any bows in their inventory.
So, I forgot to mention that you can kinda cheese with towers. They provide a huge vision radius even when turned off (so no maintenance cost). It has the benefit of looking kool, and feeling like you claimed that territory while at the same time pushing raider pop distance (needs confirmation) to outside the tower vision unless already at the edge of the map. Further, it delays sections of raider attacks as parts of the raider groups will split off to attack the empty towers (from pretty far off as well),
This tower is providing all this vision. It is manned, so has a maint cost, but it would provide the same vision without it being on. Its pretty easy to dart the map with empty towers and have constant vision of it for no cost but the tower build cost. It just gets annoying having to rebuild any that raiders wasted time attacking.
If my towers are ‘on’ but without guards then they still run up monthly fees. I use unmanned Hunter Shacks to the same effect, cheap to build, provide decent visual coverage beyond the hunting area, and don’t cost a cent. Additional benefit, raiders ignore them. What I might try is an unmanned tower which I switch on only during suspected raid years.
I use a combination of towers and forts. The towers are very useful because their fire draws the raiders to them. They move to attack the tower, if you plan it well then they get attacked by another tower, or come in arrow range of a fort and you can take them out easily.
Upgraded towers with guards with crossbows do a lot more damage though, so they stay a bit relevant in the later game.
I often use lakes as part of my surroundings to connect to walls, you don’t have to defend the lake parts, can be a lot of “free” defended ground.
