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