Generally I like having raids happen because it influences how I set up my towns, but something that continues to bother me is the type of micromanaging of my villagers once a raid starts. I’m not entirely sure what a good change would be though, but I’ll try and be concise about what might be nice. So what I see happen a lot is that I need to constantly select villagers and tell them to run to the opposite end of the town from where the raiders are incoming, and if the raid is still happening by the time they get there they will start going back to their task which takes them running straight through the pillaging horde of raiders. Or I’ll sound the town alarm and watch fifty or more villagers start heading out towards the ravening hordes because they need to go chop some trees. This turns into half the raid battle really being me fighting my villagers who keep wanting to leeroy jenkins into the meat grinder. So I think maybe what I’m hoping for is that at some point we can get some kind of easier control over telling them ‘hey, there’s raiders, please stop what you’re doing and wait until it’s over’ or maybe a higher sensitivity to the raiders and whatever triggers them to go into ‘retreat’ mode, maybe? Some kind of prioritizing of ‘raiders are bad, run away’ over ‘must stock the foundry’?
edit: it would also be great if I could remove soldiers from the barracks without it picking the soldiers that are geared up and instead it booted the soldiers who are still missing armor and weapons.
For the Barracks, perhaps a simple check box next to each soldier that if left unchecked, he doesn’t deploy with the group. He stays behind to man the crossbows providing fire from the Barracks or wait until he gets fully equipped. You’d still have to remember to check before you send them out to be sure you haven’t left someone behind who just got his hauberk, but at least you’d have some control.
For the villagers, this has become one of my Bains of the Game: I am raising a town entirely populated by frustrated Kamikaze Wannabes who live to throw themselves at oncoming Raider hordes. I kept track through 15 years of my latest (0.9.0 playtest) game, and unless I micro-managed every villager throughout every raid, I was virtually guaranteed to lose 3 - 10 villagers every time.
Connected with this is the unreliable Raid Warning system. A Raid warning will pop up in the upper left-hand corner, and sometimes the raiders are still off in the darkened corner of the map and do not show up until a month later. Other times the first raiders are already approaching my walls, having apparently stealthily marched past pastures, workcamps, farm fields, and dozens of working stiffs without anyone the wiser. And none of the alerts show the entire raid: raids almost always come from at least 2 different directions, but only one is highlighted by the raid alert unless you click on the warning about 60 - 80 times, and whether the major or the minor part of the raid is shown appears to be utterly random.
This combined with the obliviousness of the townsfolk to raid dangers make it impossible to keep all my townsfolk safe from raids no matter how many towers, walls, gates, barracks, and groups of soldiers I build and deploy. The proposed mounted soldiers among the raiders will make this problem many times worse, and I anticipate, unless something in the townsfolk behavior and Raid Warnings changes, having to wall in half the map to give my peeps time to be moved out of danger.
I’ve read that a few times don’t get me wrong… but I’m wondering what you guys do wrong or what I do right.
So my setup is like that: I have the complete city walled in (at this point double stone wall) except for a few hunters, fishers, mines, wagon shops and work camps. Also towers inside of the walls cobering each other at the outer poont if the attack range. When raid comes I fill up the towers in direction where it comes from. Also I send soldiers outside of the wall.
From the last few raids I only had it once that they broke through with a ram and that just because I didn’t see it. Normally I first focus the rams with my troops and the rest of the raid is easy then. I have 5 barracks (not all of them fully filled up only the one in the center).
When it’s a normal raid - easy… when it’s an army who gives me an ultimatum I fill up tge other barracks, let them collect weapons and send them to the front. Then deny the army’s offer and fight… easy.
The one time they broke through my wall they were ignoring all villigers on their way and went straight towards my town center and gold chambers (these are also walled separately right in the middle of my town, also towers inside there)
And I think I only had like 10 people being killed and tgese even were soldiers. I just let the other people go on do their work. To me it looks like only hunters who attack raiders on their way get killed - all other villagers get ignored. So I don’t get why on your side the villagers get slaughtered. I play on medium difficultly when it comes to raiders… so not easiest but also not hardest. Hope it helps you analyse
Edit: I totally agree with you on easier micromanagement. I come from starcraft and there where much more diverse armies where you have to control parts of them separately and that went really fine. Here in FF it’s a mess. Also agree with Boris… split up the army if one barracks or let some stay in there would be a good start
The two classes of workers that seem to get attacked are Work Camp and Wainwrights. By mid-game I have several Work Camps well outside the city feeding resources from the (relatively rare) Stone and Timber, and invariably at least one of them is in the path of a Raid sooner or later, and Raiders cheerfully shoot down half of the workers before they can run for it.
Wainwrights, unless each is individually moved back into the town, will amble out to the Workcamps/Mines/Quarries, etc despite every Town Center alarm or Raid Warning, and Raiders will almost always attack them. Sometimes that is an advantage, because the raid may split up into groups attacking Wainwrights while other groups attack the walls, making it easy to mop up each group separately, but I always lose most of the Wainwrights I do not manage to manually run back inside the walls.
And note the other thing I’ve noticed: some of the Raid Warnings are 'way too late, after the raiders have already engaged Workcamps or Miners, so that any expedition by soldiers only served to massacre the Raiders, not save the workers.
Once I have stone walls up, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times anybody has gotten through them with or without Rams. However, I do not usually have all of the farm fields, work camps, mines, etc inside those walls, and protecting/saving the workers and wainwrights serving the ‘countryside’ is not helped by the suicidal nature of the workers.
My apologies, I should have specified that my experience is basically all on one Raider setting.
I play Raiders almost exclusively on Pioneer, because I’m not particularly interested in playing yet another Medieval Battle Game. And yes, I have seen both Rams and a force of 200 Raiders trying to hold up my town for ransom on the Pioneer settings.
I will add that the Raiders attacking work camp laborers with bows and crossbows seems to be more prevalent on version 0.9 of the game when I played the playtest version last month. Prior to that, my greatest losses during raids were to Hunters that refused to stand back and shoot and instead charged into the middle of large groups of Raiders and the continuously-oblivious Wainwrights.
No need for apologies mate.
I haven’t played the new version yet, my experience is all on the previous version. But will do a new city when I moved my household in one month. And I will look for the described circumstances because it interests me as well now